Texas Studies in Literature and Language articles from March 1997

Texas Studies in Literature and Language archives from March 1997

The tautological thinking of historicism.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1997... Hermeneutics and historical interpretation are intertwining activities, for, in a strict sense, hermeneutics asks what are the grounds for textual exegesis, especially of ancient texts whose worldview may be distant from ours. These...

Civility and madness in Robert Frost's "Snow".(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1997... In writing, conversation should be folded many times thick. Thoreau, Correspondence There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations Therefore if I know...

"My real hopes and ambitions": re-reading Elizabeth Bishop's "In Prison".(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1997... In a 1961 Paris Review interview, Robert Lowell complained that the work of poets of his generation, "particularly younger ones," had become "too much something specialized that can't handle much experience. It's become a craft, purely a craft,...

The hitherside of history: tone, knowledge, and spirit in John Ashbery's "The System".(Critical Essay)
March 22, 1997... John Ashbery has described his prose poem, "The System," as a "quasi-dialectical... love story with cosmological overtones." (1) Yet it may be taken as testimony to the difficulty of defining this richly complicated work that even the author's...