Style articles from March 1997

Style archives from March 1997

Ways of personifying. (personification in literature)
March 22, 1997... Over the centuries, rhetoricians and critics have offered numerous definitions of personification, some inclusive, others restrictive. Since inclusive definitions tend to blur distinctions and restrictive ones to push aside problematic instances...

"Strange things I have in head, that will to hand": echoes of sound and sense in Macbeth. (play by William Shakespeare)
March 22, 1997... Dramatic poetry begins in a sensuous apprehension through the ear. Coburn Freer (8) The renowned pianist Artur Schnabel, when asked what was "great" music, replied that great music is music that is "better than it can be performed." His...

Douglas Hodge reading Keats's Elgin Marbles sonnet. (actor; poet John Keats; poem)
March 22, 1997... This paper is part of a large-scale investigation of the nature of the rhythmical performance of poetry.(1) It uses the computer to analyze delivery instances of verse lines within the theoretical framework of the perception-oriented theory of...

"Terrible simplicity": Emerson's metaleptic style. (19th-century poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson)
March 22, 1997... Emerson's Nature (1836) is electric, the "transparent eyeball" its shocking core.(1) What Longinus writes of sublime oratory is true of Nature's most rhetorically charged passage. The effect of the "eyeball" passage "is not persuasion but...

By whose authority? Point of view in the first chapter of Harold Frederic's 'The Damnation of Theron Ware.'
March 22, 1997... One of the more beguiling aspects of Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware is its power to draw readers into participating in its explorations of authority. In Fritz Oehlschlaeger's view, the novel "discredits" all of the available...

Beyond 'The Brain of Katherine Mansfield': the radical potentials and recuperations of second-person narrative. (book by author Bill Manhire)
March 22, 1997... In the concluding paragraph of a recent special issue in Style on the topic of second-person narrative fiction, Monika Fludernik takes a moment to insist that we acknowledge the complexity and diversity of second-person narration and suggests...

Speaking out: dialogue and the literary unconscious.
March 22, 1997... Freud's concept of the unconscious is the foundation of psychoanalysis, but it is also the primary obstacle to psychoanalytic literary criticism. The originality of Freud's method in The Interpretation of Dreams is to ask patients to free...

Roy Harris and writing without speech. (author)
March 22, 1997... "A language [langue] and its written form [ecriture]," wrote Ferdinand de Saussure in chapter 6 of his Cours de linguistique generale, "constitute two separate systems of signs. The sole reason for the existence of the latter is to represent the...

Signs of Writing.
March 22, 1997... "A language [langue] and its written form [ecriture]," wrote Ferdinand de Saussure in chapter 6 of his Cours de linguistique generale, "constitute two separate systems of signs. The sole reason for the existence of the latter is to represent the...

Hearing the measures. (poetic meter and versification)
March 22, 1997... The poets and the audiences of 1590 and 1600 were in love with the unrhymed pentameters. To us familiar; to them a Newfoundland. They ran riot with the discovery, as an age does when a new creative medium falls to its portion. They heard the beat...

Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction.
March 22, 1997... The poets and the audiences of 1590 and 1600 were in love with the unrhymed pentameters. To us familiar; to them a Newfoundland. They ran riot with the discovery, as an age does when a new creative medium falls to its portion. They heard the beat...

The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth's Metrical Art.
March 22, 1997... The poets and the audiences of 1590 and 1600 were in love with the unrhymed pentameters. To us familiar; to them a Newfoundland. They ran riot with the discovery, as an age does when a new creative medium falls to its portion. They heard the beat...

Rethinking Meter: A New Approach to the Verse Line.
March 22, 1997... The poets and the audiences of 1590 and 1600 were in love with the unrhymed pentameters. To us familiar; to them a Newfoundland. They ran riot with the discovery, as an age does when a new creative medium falls to its portion. They heard the beat...

From Stress to Stress: An Autobiography of English Prosody.
March 22, 1997... The poets and the audiences of 1590 and 1600 were in love with the unrhymed pentameters. To us familiar; to them a Newfoundland. They ran riot with the discovery, as an age does when a new creative medium falls to its portion. They heard the beat...

Thematics: New Approaches.
March 22, 1997... This book assembles papers originally presented (in French) at three symposia devoted to the subject of thematics; the symposia were held in 1984, 1986, and 1988, and the resulting essays appeared initially in Poetique 64 (1985), Communications...

Striking at the Joints: Contemporary Psychology and Literary Criticism.
March 22, 1997... Pointing out that a massive emphasis on psychoanalysis in literary studies has been accompanied by a near-total exclusion of other forms of psychological research, John V. Knapp usefully identifies one of the ways in which the current canon of...

The Subject of Modernism.
March 22, 1997... The Subject of Modernism addresses a problem most academic readers of literature will find familiar: the use of contemporary theoretical approaches to read historical texts - a practice devoted historians have tended to reject out of hand....

A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
March 22, 1997... There is underway a refreshing revision of Victorian literary and cultural studies. This is evidenced by two books in particular, published since the late autumn of 1992. The two, Child-Loving and A Community of One, by James R. Kincaid and...

Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture.
March 22, 1997... There is underway a refreshing revision of Victorian literary and cultural studies. This is evidenced by two books in particular, published since the late autumn of 1992. The two, Child-Loving and A Community of One, by James R. Kincaid and...