Visionary Power Research Articles

Claude McKay’s Lonely Planet: The Sonnet Sequence and the Global City

Claude McKay’s Lonely Planet: The Sonnet Sequence and the Global City Walt Hunter (bio) The poetic sequence “Cities” (1934) is a peculiar kind of guide to Claude McKay’s forced exile from the United States and Jamaica. From Fez to Cadiz, Barcelona’s Barrio Chino to Harlem’s Lenox Avenue, “Cities” charts the wayward course of McKay’s obligatory internationalism, as the itinerant sonneteer witnesses the “embattled workers’ day” in Saint Petersburg on May 1, 1923 and the consolidation of Nazi power in Berlin in 1934. “Cities” transforms the modernist “unreal city” of isolation, in which, as Eliot writes, “each man fixe[s] his eyes before his feet,” into the riotous city of a revolutionary crowd, where McKay finds “man drawing near to man in close commune.” As a kind of sequel to McKay’s volumes of Jamaican dialect poems in 1911–12 and to Harlem Shadows in 1922, the “Cities” cycle extends and complicates McKay’s earlier work with the ballad and the sonnet. In this essay, I look first at the way McKay channels a visionary power through the sonnet’s monumental architecture. Then I move outward into the sequence as a whole to explore some ways of thinking about the poems as a linked set of cityscapes. Ultimately, I suggest that the poetic organization of “Cities” constructs an exemplary form of political organization, in which the collaborative efforts of marginalized individuals transform the space of the city through their creative activities. The long period of McKay’s “vagabond internationalism”—to use Brent Hayes Edwards’s term—produced not only a series of well-known novels (Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom) but also some less widely read experiments in poetry. While McKay’s earlier [End Page 208] sonnets form a loose affiliation of poems, “Cities” is quite clearly conceived as a coherent sequence. What did the sonnet sequence offer to McKay as he attempted to capture the lives of those in cities in the decades between the wars? “Cities” certainly departs in some obvious ways from the tradition of sonnet sequences. Unlike most of Petrarch’s Canzoniere or Shakespeare’s sonnets, McKay’s poems are titled for, and situated in, determinate places. They take on the dimension of space as well as time. In McKay’s sequence, the fractured temporality in Petrarch, Sidney, Spenser, Wroth, or Donne shifts axes and becomes a series of loosely connected places. But the order of “Cities” does not match up with the route McKay actually traveled. The “Cities” sequence is carefully composed and McKay’s actual stops are rearranged. While McKay himself begins in New York, travels through Paris and Marseille, and ends up in North Africa, “Cities” starts in Barcelona, moves through Tangier, Fez, Marrakesh, Tetuan, Xauen, and Cadiz, heads east to Berlin and Moscow, and finishes in the metropole: Paris, London, and New York. The decision to reverse the itinerary reflects McKay’s understanding of the sonnet sequence as an engine for dynamically transforming the space of the city into a series of interconnected “squares” for the political organization of a crowd. McKay draws attention away from the city’s stone reality and towards its potency, its spontaneous reconstitution as a space for play, dance, and magic. In her work on global cities, Saskia Sassen writes, “The street is a space where new forms of the social and the political can be made, rather than a space for enacting ritualized routines.” This understanding of the city street as a place for play and improvisation helps to explain why McKay begins the sonnet sequence with Andalusia instead of Eastern Europe. The Teutonic facades of 1934 Berlin, with their “ruthless Nordic style” and “massive grandeur,” serve as foils for the mosaics of Spain and North Africa. The power to organize the cities in a sequence comes from the visionary energy McKay locates in the masses gathering outdoors and [End Page 209] taking over the streets. McKay’s poems from the “Cities” sequence capture more than a shared vulnerability; they throb with a shared ecstasy that brings people together. “Barcelona” provides one example of how the sonnet form expands to represent the experience of the crowd in the streets...

Hubristic Start‐up Founders – The Neglected Bright and Inevitable Dark Manifestations of Hubristic Leadership in New Venture Creation Processes

AbstractThe hubris tradition of research has been criticized for limiting its scope by associating hubris predominantly with detrimental leadership behaviours. To counteract this bias, we provide a more nuanced exploration of hubris and consider both beneficial and detrimental manifestations of hubris in start‐up founders’ leadership behaviours. Our analysis, based on qualitative data from expert interviews and two case studies, indicates that, whilst hubristic start‐up founders are likely to fail overall, they also excel in creating and communicating visionary scenarios, steering employees through critical situations, and extracting commitment from third parties. These under‐researched ‘bright’ manifestations of hubris allow start‐up founders to lead their venture towards a stage, in which their visionary power and resilience become crucial prerequisites for economic progress. Our findings extend knowledge on hubristic leadership, offer new directions for the hubris tradition of research, and open up avenues for future research with a more balanced view of hubris.

The Charisma of ‘The Second Coming’

First published in 1920, W. B. Yeats's apocalyptic poem, 'The Second Coming', is a contender for the most famous poem of the twentieth century. It is surely the most quoted. Celebrated books by Chinua Achebe and Joan Didion are but the most well-known examples of its titular appeal, which extends to travel books, social commentary, science fiction and fantasy. Journalists and political analysts have frequently declared some 'centre' or other ‘cannot hold’, that some allegedly hate-filled horde is filled with ‘passionate intensity’. The poem seems enduring, resonant and relevant, including in an age of supposed post-truth and twitter mobs. Readers have long been struck by the poem's compelling visionary power. It braids together familiarity and vagueness, creating a tremendously effective counterpoint between certainty and bewilderment, hubris and humility. Its careful abstraction allows its lines to be recycled easily; but its cultural aura provides the motive to do so. This essay will try to account for its charisma, mindful of the literary economy in which it succeeded. It will look closely at the poem's language, including some of the decisions Yeats made at the editing stage, at its early appearance in The Dial and Yeats's collection, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). It will also consider its cultural afterlives, where the falcon most certainly flew out of earshot of the falconer.

The Charisma of ‘The Second Coming’

First published in 1920, W. B. Yeats's apocalyptic poem, 'The Second Coming', is a contender for the most famous poem of the twentieth century. It is surely the most quoted. Celebrated books by Chinua Achebe and Joan Didion are but the most well-known examples of its titular appeal, which extends to travel books, social commentary, science fiction and fantasy. Journalists and political analysts have frequently declared some 'centre' or other ‘cannot hold’, that some allegedly hate-filled horde is filled with ‘passionate intensity’. The poem seems enduring, resonant and relevant, including in an age of supposed post-truth and twitter mobs. Readers have long been struck by the poem's compelling visionary power. It braids together familiarity and vagueness, creating a tremendously effective counterpoint between certainty and bewilderment, hubris and humility. Its careful abstraction allows its lines to be recycled easily; but its cultural aura provides the motive to do so. This essay will try to account for its charisma, mindful of the literary economy in which it succeeded. It will look closely at the poem's language, including some of the decisions Yeats made at the editing stage, at its early appearance in The Dial and Yeats's collection, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). It will also consider its cultural afterlives, where the falcon most certainly flew out of earshot of the falconer.

The Poetics of Susceptibility: Wordsworth and Ecological Thought

The Poetics of Susceptibility: Wordsworth and Ecological Thought Amelia Klein (bio) Although wordsworth was heralded early on as a poet of nature, there is a long tradition of looking askance at his engagement with the natural world, indeed of questioning whether his poetry actually says anything about nature at all. Reviewing The Excursion in 1814, William Hazlitt implies that, whatever its purported subject may be, Wordsworth’s poetry is always in truth about Wordsworth himself. “There is, in fact, in Mr. Wordsworth’s mind,” writes Hazlitt, a repugnance to admit any thing that tells for itself, without the interpretation of the poet,—a fastidious antipathy to immediate effect,—a systematic unwillingness to share the palm with his subject.1 Despite Wordsworth’s own affirmation, in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, that “I have tried always to look steadily at my subject,”2 he is, according to Hazlitt, constantly getting in his subject’s way, constantly displacing “immediate effect” into “interpretation”—as if it were always quite clear where one ends and the other begins. He gives us not the thing itself, but only his ideas about it. This image of a narcissistic Wordsworth, unwilling “to share the palm with his subject” and interested in nothing so much as his own mind, has proven extraordinarily tenacious. An entire critical heritage has taken Hazlitt’s position, a position reinforced by Keats when he spoke in a letter of “the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,”3 a characterization that would come to be, as Paul Fry observes, “the singlemost tyrannical [End Page 105] notion governing preconceptions about Wordsworth to this day.”4 The result has been a persistent and exaggerated emphasis on self, and mind, and consciousness in Wordsworth’s poetry, while his real sensitivity to nature has been obscured. Throughout this critical history, the charge of egotism or subjectivism has been closely allied with the idea that Wordsworth is preeminently a poet guilty of what John Ruskin termed the pathetic fallacy. Not only does he impose his interpretation on things that would otherwise tell for themselves, as Hazlitt gripes; he habitually misperceives things to begin with by projecting his own thoughts and feelings onto them. Ruskin defined the pathetic fallacy as that “state of mind” which produces “a falseness in all our impressions of external things.”5 The pathetic fallacy projects inner, subjective experience where it doesn’t belong, onto what Ruskin calls “pure physical nature”—which he describes as “mere cold corporealness” and as “dead enough in itself.”6 The implication is that we know with certainty what nature is (purely physical, inert) and isn’t (animated, expressive). Wherever we find a description of nature as charged with emotion, as somehow moving or even speaking to the perceiver, what is being described is not really nature at all, but only the person looking at it—not “immediate effect,” in Hazlitt’s terms, not a “thing that tells for itself,” but “interpretation.” According to Ruskin, poets who fall prey to the pathetic fallacy—chief among them Wordsworth—are “in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them.”7 They can’t see straight, can’t see what is really there, and therefore can’t describe it accurately. Drawing a parallel between a poetics that saturates the natural world with private feelings and an idealist philosophy that holds “it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only what they are to us,”8 Ruskin like Hazlitt casts Wordsworth as a poet who makes the outer world a reflex of personal affect, an emblem of the self, rather than offering materially accurate images of things themselves. Critics of quite different stripes have agreed that Wordsworth’s descriptions of nature are not to be trusted. They disagree as to whether, or to what degree, his disingenuous engagement with nature—and his body of work as a whole—is to be censured or applauded. Among the positive readings are Geoffrey Hartman’s classic analysis of Wordsworth as a poet of [End Page 106] transcendent, “essentially apocalyptic” imagination,9 who repeatedly turns and returns to nature to shield himself from his own visionary power and...

The Visionary Power of Chicana Girls in Virginia Grise’s blu

The Visionary Power of Chicana Girls in Virginia Grise’s blu

Piaroa Shamanic Ethics and Ethos: Living by the Law and the Good Life of Tranquillity

The Amazonian cosmos is a battlefield where beauty is possible but violent chaos rules. As a result, the Piaroa world is characterised by an ongoing battle between shamans who uphold, on behalf of all Piaroa, the ideal of ethical living, and forces of chaos and destruction, epitomised by malevolent spirits (mari) and dangerous sorcerers. This essay draws on ethnographic research involving shamanic apprenticeship conducted between 1999 and 2002 to explore the ethics of Piaroa shamanic practice. Given the ambivalent nature of the Amazonian shaman as healer and sorcerer, what constitutes ethical shamanic practice? How is good defined relative to the potential for social and self-harm? I argue that the Piaroa notions of ‘living by the law’ and ‘the good life of tranquillity’ amount to a theory of shamanic ethics and an ethos in the sense of a culturally entrained system of moral and emotional sensibilities. This ethos turns on the importance of guiding pro-social, cooperative and peaceful behaviour in the context of a cosmos marked by violent chaos. Shamanic ethics also pivots around the ever-present possibility that visionary power dissolves into self- and social destruction. Ethical shamanic practice is contingent on shamans turning their own mastery of the social ecology of emotions into a communitarian reality.

Mowa przejęta nicością: retoryczne postawy wobec Nietzscheańskiego żywiołu nicości w poetyce Wallace’a Stevensa i Jarosława Marka Rymkiewicza

This essay compares the poetic philosophies of Wallace Stevens and Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz, Stevens’s first Polish translator. In the first part, I trace a deep affinity in the way both poets engage with the Nietzschean-Dionysiac element in language. The Nietzschean dynamism creates a rich conceptual background against which it is possible to understand the process of poetic language merging with nothingness. Both Stevens’s and Rymkiewicz’s early poems are reactions to such conceptual environment: Stevens’s Harmonium and Rymkiewicz’s Co to jest drozd present a way of engaging with nothingness in which the absence of logos becomes a source of the poems’ figurative power. As they attain this power, the poems arrive at a form of self-consciousness. I trace this affinity through the deconstructive figure of catachresis, as it has been applied to Stevens by his deconstructive critic J. Hillis Miller. In the second part, I change the method. Here, I show how the later poetries of Stevens and Rymkiewicz can be approached by replacing Miller’s deconstructive catachresis, with Harold Bloom’s metalepsis. This Bloomian reading allows me to identify a vital difference between the later phases in the two poets. Discussing Stevens’s “Auroras of Autumn” next to Rymkiewicz’s Do widzenia Gawrony, I show how Rymkiewicz diverts sharply from his American Romantic/Modernist counterpart in the way his poetry reads Nietzsche’s trope of the eternal recurrence of the same. For Stevens, this concept is realized in the form of metalepsis, which, as Bloom shows, is a figure allowing the poem to retain its figurative capability while steering its course away from any notion of essence or necessity. In contrast, for Rymkiewicz, the eternal recurrence of the same paves way to an essentialist understanding, and affirmation, of human history as eternal cycle of creation-destruction, a cycle presided over by a mixture of pain, cruelty, and ecstasy. Consequently, I argue that while Stevens’s late poetry remains faithful to figurativeness as the poem’s self-reliance – that is, the poem’s refusal to join forces with any sort of concept or process conceived of as independent from the poem’s re-descriptive capability – Rymkiewicz’s late poems find their visionary power in precisely such joining of forces.

The Re-enchantment of Surrealism: Remedios Varo’s Visionary Artists

The visionary prowess of the artist was established, in both the visual and verbal arts, by the Symbolists in fin-de-siècle France. This article asserts a continuity between the avowed spiritual dimension of their work and the visionary power of surrealist art asserted—despite strong resistance from the centre—by a group of renegade surrealists in the 1920s and beyond. To do so, it explores the representations of artists that Spanish-born Mexican painter Remedios Varo (1908–1963) depicts in her work, demonstrating how they might be better understood when analysed in relation to Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s (1866?–1949) esoteric aesthetics. In doing so, it reveals a neglected, postsecular trajectory in the history of Surrealism.

“Our teachers and the limits of cognition”: Dietzgen and the challenge of McLaren’s epistemology

In Peter McLaren’s words “We need a philosophically grounded alternative to capitalism”, but what does such a philosophical grounding look like? Need it be shared? The philosophical basis for practice was not shared by Lenin and Bogdanov, for example, and yet both retained the ability to work together in the Bolshevik party. There’s a profound difference between god-building, and god-seeking. Socialists have strong traditions of both. Peter McLaren’s recent work fits into the latter category. I will engage with this project, because I think Peter’s position, whilst honourable, lacks the visionary power of the former. And to these I would like to add a third position, one which seeks to extend to all of the material universe and to all living things a sacred character, but without any requirement for categories such as god. There are of course many mystic traditions which espouse something similar, but relatively few socialists have developed politically this position, as espoused by the tanner-philosopher Josef Dietzgen (though there are certainly close links between Dietzgenism and god-building). My argument for raising such seemingly arcane concerns, is rather similar to that of Lenin whose immersion in philosophy in writing Materialism and Empirio-Criticism primarily met the political requirements of the day. Amidst ubiquitous talk of the Anthropocene, and a sudden rise in interest in Bogdanov on the Marxist left, now is the moment to look to the prospect of taking up a Bogdanovite project, not to build a new god, but to re-sacralise nature. In this paper, I begin to mobilise an unlikely alliance around this vision: not only Dietzgen, but deep ecologists and even Jiddu Krishnamurti assist in exploring the limitations of McLaren’s position.

New Thieme Research Awards: Call for Pacesetting Contributions to Drug Research.

Drug Research celebrates its 65 th birthday this year demonstrating both the visionary power of the founder, [name], and the scientific success of myriads of authors, several editors and 2 publishers. No doubt, innovative pace in drug development and, thus, pharmacotherapy has steadily increased, and major breakthroughs – though not evenly distributed across all therapeutic areas – can be witnessed at a growing rate.

Energy saving in a 5G separation architecture under different power model assumptions

In this paper, a framework is developed to study the impact of different power model assumptions on energy saving in a 5G separation architecture comprising high power Base Stations (BSs) responsible for coverage, and low power, small cell BSs handling data transmission. Starting with a linear power model function, the achievable energy saving are derived over short timescales by operating small cell BSs in low power states rather than higher power states (termed Low Power State Saving (LPSS) gains) for single and multiple BS scenarios. It is shown how energy saving varies with different power model assumptions over long timescales in accordance with short timescale LPSS. Simulation results show that energy saving in the separation architecture varies across the six power models examined as a function of model-specific significant LPSS state changes. Furthermore, it is shown that if the architecture is based on existing small cell BSs modelled by state-of-the-art (SotA) power models, energy saving will be mainly dependent on sleep state operation. Whereas, if it is based on future BSs modelled by visionary power models, both sleep and idle state operations provide energy saving gains. Moreover, with future BSs, energy saving of up to 42% is achievable when idle state overhead is considered, while a higher saving is possible otherwise.

Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and the Modernist Literary Character: Rethinking the Subject through the Everyday

The last decade has seen veritable resurgence of theme of in philosophical and critical debates. While for decades preference had been accorded to either active forces of will and desire or contingency and abruptness of Event, thinkers have recently come back to from different paths and perspectives (Bennett et al.; Sparrow and Hutchinson; Carlisle). The polarization of attention around theme of almost seems to mirror veritable explosion of discourse on which took place about two centuries ago. Even though philosophical reflection on can be traced at least as far back as Aristotle it was at end of eighteenth century and in early nineteenth century that theme of habit, as asserted in entry habitude of Encyclopedie Philosophique Universelle, became a new philosophical as an effect of the refusal of innate ideas; sensualist project deriving modes of understanding from experience (generally exterior experience); refusal, finally, of Hume's category of causality and its reduction to pure habit (1108; my translation). In France, was an extremely popular theme among spiritualist or proto-spiritualist philosophers such as Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, who considered it bridge between spirit and matter. In Germany, Hegel tackled problem of in The Philosophy of Right, making it basis of custom on which true ethical life is grounded. In Italy, reprehensible antisocial habits fell under magnifying glass of Turin positivist school and became pivotal part of Lombroso's analysis of criminal mind. In English speaking world, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) was probably most original contributor to debate on in second part of nineteenth century. He used notion of to challenge Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, conceiving as channel through which unconscious memory can be passed down from one generation to next, preserved in experience of species and its determination to evolve into more complex forms (see Willey). Samuel Butler's theories have been widely disregarded among professional philosophers, because of his idiosyncratic and counter-intuitive use of notion of and due to fact that his arguments have often been seen as amateurish. Nonetheless, several leading twentieth-century thinkers, such as Gregory Bateson and Gilles Deleuze, have repeatedly extolled visionary power of Butler's ideas and admitted their debts towards them. Moreover, Butler's theories of were influential among several modernist writers, such as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Valery Larbaud, and E. M. Forster and they contributed both to these authors' understanding of crisis of modern subjectivity and to their attention for representation of habitual behavior and everyday. In this paper I intend to demonstrate how Butler's theory of habit--in particular as it is presented in his seminal work Life and Habit--once it is disentangled from anti-Darwinian debates on theory of evolution from which it first emerged, can offer considerable contribution to contemporary philosophical debate and allow better understanding of history of idea of at turn of century. Moreover, I intend to show how import of these ideas was promptly acknowledge by several modernist writers, who turned to Butler in an effort to investigate habitual side of life through their characters. In doing so, they were moved by belief that modern ethos, as well as modern idea of subjectivity, could find their proper mode of expression precisely in that previously neglected dimension of life. Butler's theory of stems from heated late nineteenth-century debate concerning Darwinism and theory of evolution. Charles Darwin's On Origin of Species (Willey 70 and ff.) had pivotal influence on Butler's life and thought, determining his abandonment of Christian faith and his conversion to agnosticism. …

Artistic Weakness: A Thematic Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s St Mawr

Abstract. D. H. Lawrence’s St Mawr (1925) is known as a modernist example of an open-ended and inconclusive work of art. The novella is abound with ideological dualities such as nature vs. civilization; man vs. woman, and body vs. spirit that stem from and make the core of the writer’s personal, philosophical and political beliefs. This article argues that the open-endedness of the novella is more a sign of Lawrence’s artistic weakness at handling an overload of symbols and ideas rather than a modernist element enriching the novella with different layers of meaning open to different interpretations. It is argued that, approaching the end, the reader feels that he is entrapped within a complex web of ideas for which Lawrence’s attempt to reach a resolution proves futile. Lawrence’s artistic weakness shows itself in his uncertainty regarding a resolution for the complicated dualities and mysterious symbols he introduces in his novella. St Mawr , accordingly, seems an unfinished work overloaded with philosophical ideas rather than a multi-layered text created by the visionary power of the imagination.

Scenes of Enchantment: Visionary Style in Ben Okri's <em>Dangerous Love</em>

Ben Okri’s novels have been much analyzed as examples of a distinctive postcolonial voice. However, given his widespread recognition, it is time to focus closely on features of his style to understand Okri’s particular narrative skill. I will concentrate on one characteristic feature, his use of three or more brief sentences to evoke a scene, which, for lack of a better term, I call “scenic lists” because it denotes both their scenically evocative power, their brief notational quality, and consequent paratactic-like style—their lack of liaisons between the sentences involved. One example, “The branches of the palm trees swished and swayed. Women chanted their wares. Cars did dangerous turns” (50). In analyzing this feature (which appears elsewhere as well), I will concentrate on Okri’s 1996 novel Dangerous Love, which has received little critical attention, because it centers on artistic vision. Since they constitute a pause in the narrative, creating an epiphanic moment of defamiliarization suggesting the onset of visionary power, and thereby leading toward the protagonist’s inspired painting, scenic lists contribute an incipient narrative enchantment to the text and help to explain Okri’s distinctive visionary style.

Writing from ‘the perilous ridge’: Romanticism and the Invention of Rock Climbing

This essay argues that rock climbing had its genesis in the Romantic period and that there was a powerful synergy between the emergent sport and the era’s literature. It was during the Romantic period that clambering on crags, cliffs and ridges started to become an activity undertaken for its own sake and began to provide a subject for literature, developments which I explore in the essay’s first section through an examination of the travel writing of William Bingley and others. In the second section, I argue that the specific embodied experience of rock climbing was integral to the development of a key Romantic trope, visionary power, an issue I consider through readings of two of the period’s greatest first-hand accounts of rock climbing, Wordsworth’s poetic evocation of his scrambling on Yewdale Crags in The Prelude and Coleridge’s epistolary description of his descent of Broad Stand. In the final section of the essay, I investigate how climbing became a feature of some of the era’s most significant as well as best-selling poems and novels, focusing particularly on Walter Scott’s work to show how his writing transformed the image of the climber, shaped the imagining of the nascent sport, and laid the foundation for the remarkable expansion of rock climbing in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Rossetti: painter & poet

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the most intriguing and flamboyant figure in nineteenth-century British art. He inspired the first Pre-Raphaelite generation of 1849 and the second generation ten years later and both brought about significant changes in British art. His poetry, too, acted as a stimulus to many writers at the end of the century, who saw in his subtle manipulation of the sonnet and the ballad forms ways of giving expression to issues that were peculiar to the that century. Dominant among those issues was that of sexual desire, for Rossetti, more than any other artist in this period, struggled with the contradictions of sexuality. When he died in 1882 people knew of him as the painter of alluring women with exotic names - Lilith, Monna Vanna, Fiammetta - and the writer of subtly erotic verse. He projected onto women his anxieties, his pleasures and his needs. He also mythologized them, so that Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth, Jane Morris and others became for him Beatrice, Guenevere, and Isolde. In doing so he shaped them, he changed the direction of their lives, and in some cases he both made and destroyed them. This richly illustrated book, by tracing the development of Rossetti's painting and poetry in the context of the drama of his life, follows this powerful thread. Sometimes sensual, at others spiritual, Rossetti's mission was to transcend the Manichean division that separated body and soul and, through the visionary power of art, reconcile what he saw as elements fundamental to human experience.

In and Out: How Poetry leaves the Book and is better for it

How does art operate today? No longer reproducing the status quo according to an equivalence between form and idea (naturalised in the good human equipped with taste and magnanimity, as opposed to the other bestial and inept sort of person), but by making known the flux, which never ceases to reallocate things from the core of a contentious sensible perpetually frayed and redefined on its margins. (2) Such is the theory of rupture introduced by Jacques Ranciere with his concept of the aesthetic regime of art. (3) Art works on sensibility as free play or natura naturans, rather than on abstract categories which would structure that sensibility a priori, as emanating from a natura naturata. (4) It can do so either directly (being primarily concerned with modes of perception and their physical, material and concrete dimensions) or indirectly (focusing more on symbolism and code, such as the conventions of the story or fable). Affects and precepts are, according to Gilles Deleuze, the two products (as well as the two criteria) of this new aesthetic grammar, radically open and connected to life, rather than meaning. Meanwhile, in literature this programme is complicated by the resolutely iconoclastic nature of the medium. (5) Obliged to exist as a purely abstract sign, lacking any intrinsic relationship to what it denotes, (6) literature cannot rely, a priori, on the many resources of the sensory apparatus. Its language exists in the absence of any necessary association with real things. But in fact, this negative is a positive because what it sanctions, through the tenuous relations that it creates between objects and language, is the intuition that the meaning of the real is as elusive as that of the sign. (7) Ushering in negative association (8) and syntax as a combinatorial game, (9) the absence of any necessary link between words and things thus establishes an order founded on a gap (Lacan's signifying chain, Derrida's differance, Barthes' signifiance, Deieuze's early concept of the empty square). This is a performativity of an unusual kind: it is a dysfunctional machine. But, for precisely this reason, it is capable of figuring what flows and passes between, against or in spite of the consistency of systems and their weightiness, and is likely to offer the new and unforeseen at any given moment. We can try to outbid the halting structurality of language (Oulipo), attack it with chisel (Antonin Artaud) or file (Gh6rasim Luca), or stress the polysemy of self and world that it reveals (realist or dialogic novel), but at its core, this is a question of dialectic; it takes the rule to make the exception. Ranciere sees the ultimate paradox of this game in Flaubert's novels. Liberated from all external standards predetermining the sensible and ways of accounting for it, literary art is defined by its heterogeneity (of genre, theme and style), and its identification is brought about through the very negation of identification. Once the sensorium is disturbed, to represent, grasp or tell in literary terms (or to attribute a sensation to a signifier via a sign) supposes a passage--more or less asymptotic and deliberate--across other arts, as locations of the plurality and heterogeneity of the sensible. Commenting on the famous assertion, style etant a lui tout seul une maniere absolue de voir les choses, (10) Ranciere analyses the visionary power which the sentence must have to distinguish order from disorder as essentially musical: musique des affections et des perceptions deliees, brasses ensemble dans le grand fleuve indifferent de l'Infini. (11) He continues: En faisant basculer Ieconomie du systeme expressif, le style- maniere de voir pen-sait supprimer la contradiction, accorder la subjectivite de Iecriture romanesque l'objectivite de la vision. Seulement, cet accord se risque a chaque phrase dans P6quivalence de la syntaxe narrative et de I'anti-syntaxe contemplative. …

John Dee as a Cultural Hero

John Dee, ‘Queen Elizabeth's conjuror’, as a recent biography has called him, has attracted considerable attention during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries among intellectual historians of the English Renaissance, including historians of science. During the last two decades especially, there has been a steady flow of publications.1 Dee has also featured in a growing body of literary and popular fiction, films, plays, multimedia performances, graphic novels, and operas. The present article reviews a range of this material and demonstrates that, particularly since the 1960s, the figure of Dee has performed a number of different cultural functions, sometimes appearing more as vulnerable human being than magus, but appealing particularly to those artists who, like Derek Jarman, see him as epitomising a dream of transformative and visionary power with close analogies to the way the creative imagination itself works.

Wordsworth's Reception in Germany: Some Unfamiliar Episodes and Contacts, 1798-1849

The progress of Wordsworth's reputation in Germany is here explored through a number of largely unfamiliar meetings between the poet and German writers, principally during his four visits to Germany, but also on other occasions in the Lake District. Wordsworth found the German states too exclusive and condemned much of their recent literature; and under the shadow of the Enlightenment, the poet of The Excursion could hardly have expected a fair hearing in return. But by the 1820s new readers were attracted by his visionary power and sympathetic treatment of the past. Lappenberg and his part in Jacobsen's survey of English romantic literature are discussed, as is the influence of Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Sonnets on Baron Bunsen's liturgical experiments in the Prussian Church and on Ranke's treatment of the medieval papacy. Other encounters throw light on the progress of German translations of Wordsworth.