When we think about what it is we do in academic literary studies, we do so taking account of time - the time of the institution in which this disciplinary practice takes place, and the history of ...the discipline itself. Since literary studies engage contemporary issues and how they impact the reader, we must also acknowledge processes and events outside the field. The contributions to this volume engage with the idea of temporality not only in Anglophone literature studies, but in the humanities as a whole. In the first section, the literary contributions show that the humanities owe a debt to the past - new paradigms question and challenge the validity of older ones without necessarily discarding them. The second section shows how the disciplinary archive can be modified and expanded to engage its present condition, while the last deals with what that condition forebodes. Despite the range of perspectives adopted here, all contributions echo the history of the discipline of literary studies itself, its present condition, and the possibilities for its survival in an age in which the relevance of humanities is being disputed.
When we think about what it is we do in academic literary studies, we do so taking account of time - the time of the institution in which this disciplinary practice takes place, and the history of ...the discipline itself. Since literary studies engage contemporary issues and how they impact the reader, we must also acknowledge processes and events outside the field. The contributions to this volume engage with the idea of temporality not only in Anglophone literature studies, but in the humanities as a whole.
VISUALIZING POVERTY IN WORDSWORTH’S POETRY
This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” poems, “Michael”, ...“The Old Cumberland Beggar” and “Resolution and Independence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.
This paper departs from the assumption that Wordsworth’s poetry is highly visual in its quality and it focuses on his three “great period” po-ems, “Michael”, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” and ...“Resolution and In¬dependence” (1798–1805) to show how Wordsworth represents poverty. By taking as its starting point some New Historicist readings of these poems (Simpson, Pfau, Connell, Liu) which highlighted Wordsworth’s blindness to social reality of the poor, it wants to enlarge the scope of historicist readings by introducing the framework of the New Poverty Studies (Korte, Christ). Furthermore, it insists on the assumption that the Romantic need to visualize landscape in the picturesque form becomes an important strategy of “configuring” (Korte) the reality of the poor. In other words, the way in which the poor are represented in Wordsworth’s poetry tells us something about practical engagements with poverty in late eighteenth-century England. Also, Wordsworth’s position of a middle-class observer who builds the tension between the seen and the deliberately unseen aspects of his social surrounding, show us how Wordsworth unconsciously falls under the spell of a larger class-related sensibility and thus fails in his humanitarian project.
This essay takes as its point of departure the idea that we usually experience ourselves in relation to place. The conception of human identity as bound up with the sense of place is not a ...specifically romantic phenomenon. However, in romanticism place acquires a new significance: it is linked through memory to the events experienced by the self. Thus the romantic self is constituted not only through memory understood as a temporal category but also as a spatial category. Such reading of the chosen romantic texts is contrary to the well-established readings, which prioritize the mind of the writer over the material world. However paradoxical it may seem to regard Rousseau and Wordsworth as ‘bodily writers’, acutely aware of the significance of place, Reveries of a Solitary Walker and The Excursion reveal writers aware of man as a physical being and of his capacity to remember through the body. Therefore, through phenomenological readings of the afore-mentioned texts (drawing on Bachelard, Casey, and Malpas) I will explore the relationship between the mind and the place through such concepts as ‘body memory’, localization of memory, and intersubjective memory.
This essay takes as its point of departure the idea that we usually experience ourselves in relation to place. The conception of human identity as bound up with the sense of place is not a ...specifically romantic phenomenon. However, in romanticism place acquires a new significance: it is linked through memory to the events experienced by the self. Thus the romantic self is constituted not only through memory understood as a temporal category but also as a spatial category. Such reading of the chosen romantic texts is contrary to the well-established readings, which prioritize the mind of the writer over the material world. However paradoxical it may seem to regard Rousseau and Wordsworth as ‘bodily writers’, acutely aware of the significance of place, Reveries of a Solitary Walker and The Excursion reveal writers aware of man as a physical being and of his capacity to remember through the body. Therefore, through phenomenological readings of the afore-mentioned texts (drawing on Bachelard, Casey, and Malpas) I will explore the relationship between the mind and the place through such concepts as ‘body memory’, localization of memory, and intersubjective memory.
This volume explores English Studies from the perspective of linguistics and applied linguistics. By examining developments within their selected topics, the authors of these 18 chapters provide a ...broad overview of English Studies as related to their specific points of interest. Topics range from the well-established, such as negation, grammaticalization, and the role of culture in learning English, to those that are currently being revisited or are considered relatively new, such as corpus analysis, English as a lingua franca, and third language acquisition. The chapters reflect a modern approach to linguistic and applied linguistic phenomena, including diachronic and synchronic perspectives, as well as quantitative and qualitative research paradigms. English Studies as practiced at the English Department in Zagreb during the last 80 years, the anniversary of which instigated the invitation of contributions for this collection, are presented here as a vibrant field, characterized by dynamics and complexities that introduce novel ideas, and help us embrace emerging aspects of more established concepts.
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