Style articles from June 1996

Style archives from June 1996

Rhyme, the icons of sound, and the Middle English 'Pearl.'(Rhetoric and Poetics)
June 22, 1996... Since Socrates's dialogue with Cratylus, thinkers about language have rejected mimetic theories of language meaning that dictate a consistent relationship between sounds and verbal sense. While such ideas have continued to appear in various...

Who didn't kill Blake's fly: moral law and the rule of grammar in 'Songs of Experience.' (William Blake)(Rhetoric and Poetics)
June 22, 1996... There is some critical consensus that Blake's "The Fly" has an ironic sting in its tail. A rough sampling of the criticism indicates a large range of such irony: Pagliaro's reading finds a merely conditional "visionary defeat" for the poem's...

Windows of focalization: deconstructing and reconstructing a narratological concept.(Rhetoric and Poetics)
June 22, 1996... In general, focalization theory addresses the options and ranges of orientational restrictions of narrative presentation. Gerard Genette first associated focalization with a "focal character" and the questions who sees? and who perceives?...

Representing experience and reasserting identity: the rhetoric of combat in British literature of World War I.(Rhetoric and Poetics)
June 22, 1996... No matter what theoretical systems or prejudices critics bring to their readings of the literature of the First World War, most inevitably remark upon the military's manipulation of the new recruit during its endeavors to mold him into a...

The art of appropriation: the rhetoric of sexuality in D.H. Lawrence.(Rhetoric and Poetics)
June 22, 1996... In his celebrated essay "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance," Roman Jakobson divides language along two major rhetorical axes: in the metaphoric mode, words substitute for one another on the basis of similarity; in the...

Theories of metamorphosis: from metatrope to textual revision.(Rhetoric and Poetics)
June 22, 1996... The theorization of the literary or artistic representation of metamorphosis is a rather recent phenomenon. The first sustained theoretical conceptualizations, though not yet full-length studies, of literary examples of metamorphosis were...

Writing outside the self: the disembodied narrators of W.S. Merwin.(Rhetoric and Poetics)
June 22, 1996... The search for an original, natural world - or origin - is perhaps the single most distinct topic to be found in the poetry of W. S. Merwin since the The Carrier of Ladders (1970). To achieve the participation in nature that they desire, Merwin's...

The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut.
June 22, 1996... In 1990 Robert Merrill, in his introduction to Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, questioned the position of Vonnegut as a major figure in American literature. At first glance it may seem odd for an editor of a critical work to ask about the very...

The Vonnegut Encyclopedia: An Authorized Compendium.
June 22, 1996... In 1990 Robert Merrill, in his introduction to Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut, questioned the position of Vonnegut as a major figure in American literature. At first glance it may seem odd for an editor of a critical work to ask about the very...

Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture.
June 22, 1996... As moving against the grain nearly always stirs up controversy, Phillip Brian Harper's call for revising conceptions of postmodernism is likewise sure to spark interest and debate. In his first book-length study, Harper takes a look at texts from...

Playing It by Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews.
June 22, 1996... In Playing It by Ear, William Pritchard, Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst and author of Seeing Through Everything: Studies of English Writers, Lives of the Modern Poets (studies of Hardy, Yeats, Robinson, Frost, Pound, Eliot,...

Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time.
June 22, 1996... In Narrative and Freedom, Gary Saul Morson continues his ambitious critical project for redefining the temporal boundaries and ethical dimensions of narratology - a critical inquiry posited previously by the author in the pages of several...