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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
Alison Hickey. Impure Conceits: Rhetoric and Ideology in Wordsworth's "Excursion." Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xii+237. $39.50.
Readers expecting a book about The Excursion to amount to a wearying trudge past a monument of Wordsworth's declining career will be pleasantly surprised by Alison Hickey's Impure Conceits. Hickey takes a refreshingly enthusiastic approach to the poem, finding in its scenes, figures, and dialogues evidence of an ongoing investigation into the construction--and deconstruction--of meaning. In her view, the complexity of The Excursion has been overshadowed by "a specious either-or binarism" that inclines us to choose between competing positions in the poem (7). Wanting an outcome that endorses either private vision or social cooperation, we fault the poem for its ambiguity. Hickey revalues this ambiguity as a strength. Instead of answering questions about how--or whether--individuals are fitted to society, The Excursion "thematizes and problematizes such questions" (7), incorporating them into an investigation of the processes of signification.
According to Hickey, Wordsworth pursues this theme through the deployment of two kinds of rhetoric--persuasive rhetoric, which constructs meaning, and indeterminate rhetoric, which undermines the constructs (13). Each speaker in the dialogue exhibits a dominant rhetorical tendency, though each is also "double," affected by the alternative tendency. In the persuasive mode, the speakers try to build systems of meaning (or ideologies) figured from the landscape that surrounds them. Their systems, however, are always qualified by "impure conceits," the indeterminate, errant, and elusive aspects of rhetoric that sabotage attempts to signify (14-15).
Though Hickey's description of rhetorical conflict has been influenced by deconstruction, her...
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