Style articles from December 2001

Style archives from December 2001

Reading in the dark: cognitivism, Film Theory, and radical interpretation.
December 22, 2001... The growing cachet of film studies has been accompanied, as in all emerging disciplines, by a certain amount of institutional anxiety. As Noel Carroll points out in his book Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (1988), among the...

Fabula and fictionality in narrative theory.
December 22, 2001... The distinction between fabula and sujet is, according to various commonsensical definitions, the distinction between what happens in a narrative and how it is told; narrative theory, however, has struggled to reconcile common sense with...

Toward a cognitive theory of literary character: the dynamics of mental-model construction.
December 22, 2001... Miss Bronte was struck by the force or peculiarity of the character of some one she knew; she studied it, and analyzed it with subtle power; and having traced it to its germ, she took that germ as the nucleus of an imaginary character, and...

Litcrit or litlit?
December 22, 2001... 1. New Criticism or New Fraud? In 1965, Raymond Picard launched a scathing attack on what the French were then calling New Criticism, but would later be known as structuralism. Picard's initial assault, the book New Criticism or New...

"Measure for Measure": chiasmus, justice, and mercy.
December 22, 2001... 1. Chiasmus, Antimetabole, Commutatio, Permutatio, Counterchange Ye haue a figure which takes a couple of words to play with in a verse, and by making them to chaunge and shift one into others place they do very pretily exchange and shift...

Burlesque dreams: American amusement, autobiography, and Henry Miller.
December 22, 2001... We wait that writhing pool, her pearls collapsed, --All but her belly buried in the floor; And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat! We flee her spasm through a fleshless door. [...] Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh, O...

"What music lies in the cold print": Larkin's experimental metric.
December 22, 2001... "When I read Larkin first in 1956, he made other styles obsolete. He was an innovator." (Robert Lowell, qtd. in Larkin, Collected Poems dustjacket) It is perhaps because "Larkin's attitude to [...] experimentation in the arts was well...

Reading the Past: Literature and History. (Book Review).(Review)
December 22, 2001... Tamsin Spargo, ed. Reading the Past: Literature and History. New York: Palgrave, 2000. xii + 200 pp. $65.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. Reading the Past, capably edited by Tamsin Spargo, appears in Palgrave's handsome and handy new series of...