Style articles from September 1996

Style archives from September 1996

Imaging social languages in Marvell's 'The Last Instructions.'
September 22, 1996... While the political themes and the painterly genre of Marvell's The Last Instructions to a Painter have been well understood by attentive critics, the question of the poem's style still lingers.(1) I hope to add another dimension to...

Relational reconsiderations: reliability, heterosexuality, and narrative authority in 'Villette.'
September 22, 1996... Contemporary narrative theorists have come far in their understanding of "person" since Wayne C. Booth, in his Afterword to The Rhetoric of Fiction, conceded that this category was - contrary to his earlier claim - "radically underworked" (412)....

The method is unsound: the aesthetic dissonance of colonial justification in Kipling, Conrad, and Greene. (authors Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene)
September 22, 1996... In his 1970 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures published as Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling contends of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: Today it is scarcely possible to read Marlow's celebration of England without irony; to many,...

Translating Caradoc Evans's Welsh English. (Welsh writer)
September 22, 1996... Though the Welsh writer Caradoc Evans has not achieved the same worldwide recognition as his Irish contemporary James Joyce, he is a writer who resembles his more famous counterpart in a number of ways. Like Joyce he wrote a first book about his...

Reader, text, and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' as Lacan's gaze qua object.
September 22, 1996... In her introduction to the 1995 PMLA issue on "Colonialism and the Postcolonial Condition," Linda Hutcheon proposes that in place of a unitary subject, definitions of postcolonial should yield a "'multiplication' of identities . . . and the...

No country to call home: a study of Castillo's 'Mixquiahuala Letters.' (Ana Castillo)
September 22, 1996... I cannot say I am a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor can I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does despite her universal feeling for humanity....

Souls and apples, all in one: Bosnia as the cultural nexus in Nenad Velickovic's 'Konacari.'
September 22, 1996... Maimed bodies and mined villages are obvious casualties of dirty wars. Maimed culture - including crucial frameworks of knowledge - and mined social institutions are not as visible, but they are equally powerful realities and their destruction...

'Watt': logic, insanity, aphasia.
September 22, 1996... The shadow of Holderlin hangs over Samuel Beckett's Watt: the speech of a madman, focus on the Oedipus myth, and direct allusions to the poet. Among the poetry fragments quoted in German in the novel, we find, "von Klippe zu Klippe geworfen/...

Universal Grammar and Narrative Form.
September 22, 1996... Two words in the title of David Herman's book signal it as a maverick on the contemporary critical scene: "universal" and "grammar." (This is offset by "narrative," a hot item on the current market.) "Grammar" attempts to revive the...

Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination.
September 22, 1996... A book about Northrop Frye from a cutting-edge press like Routledge? Well, if nothing else, it has a certain surprise value, like eggs laid by tigers, to borrow a line from Dylan Thomas. Beyond that, however, as Christopher Norris explains in his...

Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism.
September 22, 1996... This collection of ten essays is unified by a generally overt argument that Theodore Dreiser was a writer of such depth and complexity that he transcends exegesis through traditional assumptions about literary Naturalism. At this point, most...

Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford.
September 22, 1996... During Oscar Wilde's prosecution for "acts of gross indecency with another male," the evidence brought against him included several of his own letters, among them a sensuously figured encomium to Lord Alfred Douglas and his "red rose-leaf lips":...