Style articles from March 1995

Style archives from March 1995

Representing other voices: rhetorical perspective in Elizabeth Bishop.
March 22, 1995... Mikhail Bakhtin, in his discussion of "Types of Prose Discourse," denies that his theory of voice has much to say about poetry. "Poetic speech in the narrow sense," he writes, "requires a uniformity of all discourses, their reduction to a...

Romantic, radical, and ridiculous: Faulkner's hero as an oxymoron. (author William Faulkner)
March 22, 1995... INTRODUCTION "Until quite recently," argues John V. Knapp, "the construct in various theories and literary criticism known as character has been neglected in literary studies" (349). It seems, however, that since the publication of the...

Narrative after deconstruction: structure and the negative poetics of William Burroughs's 'Cities of the Red Night.'
March 22, 1995... William Burroughs's recent writing poses problems for critics. Traditionally Burroughs is known for a negative poetics that assaults the word and all continuity for the sake of breaking down social controls.(1) His recent writing attempts to...

Edna St. Vincent Millay's gendered language and form: "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree."
March 22, 1995... Although part of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Harp-Weaver (1924),(1) Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree" was regarded by many critics as inferior and still tends to receive less attention than Millay's other sonnet...

Words of one's own: some evidence against men's use of language as a tool of domination.
March 22, 1995... A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as...

Nonfictional narrative in Freud's 'Dora': history, scripted history, conscripted history. (psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud)
March 22, 1995... I have formed in my own mind the following reconstruction of the scene. It is no longer a question of simply saying what was done -- the sexual act -- and how it was done; but of reconstructing, in and around the act, the ...

Bilingual style in Nabokov's autobiography. (writer Vladimir Nabokov)
March 22, 1995... Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that "the best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style" (Strong Opinions 154-55). In Nabokov's own case that story has two versions, Russian and English, and...

Translator's introduction to Jean Rousset's "Toward a Reading of Forms."
March 22, 1995... Jean Rousset (1910- ) is a critic of major importance whose writings have remained largely untranslated and otherwise little known in English, a good example of the uneven reception of European criticism in English-speaking countries. By...

Toward a reading of forms.
March 22, 1995... 1 Does this book need an extended justification? Nothing would seem more natural than its purpose: to grasp meanings by way of forms; to discriminate patterns and significant features; to reveal those unedited knots, fissures, and...

Reading Theory: An Introduction to Lacan, Derrida and Kristeva.
March 22, 1995... The title accurately describes this book. In his preface, Michael Payne declares his intention to examine Lacan's, Derrida's and Kristeva's rhetorical strategies. But he does not mean a formal, systematic study according to the classical...

From Language to Literature: Motivation in the Linguistic and Poetic Codes.
March 22, 1995... If semiotics is located "at the intersection of nature and culture," as Thomas Sebeok has observed (86), the precise point of that intersection is here under debate. The dualism of nature versus culture in language has a long history,...

The Poetics of Personification.
March 22, 1995... Figures disfigure. From one perspective, this is a truism of style coterminous with Western thought itself That, of course, is the notion from within which style is understood as deviation from or, less forebodingly, as variation on, some norm...

The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts.
March 22, 1995... A generation or so ago the academic trained by New Critics, in order to keep up, would take a crash course in critical theory. In subsequent years more and more "isms" would be absorbed. Today "neocolonial literature," "multiculturalism,"...