Introduction–Time for Reading Lynch, Deidre Shauna; Ender, Evelyne
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
10/2018, Letnik:
133, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Watching someone else get lost in a book and become riveted by its words or story is a baffling and estranging experience, one of "an almost primal exclusion". Barred from an unmediated knowledge of ...the content of that response, people are limited to in...ferring that reading is happening. Ali Smith is one of several contemporary fic...tion writers who take an interest in the condi...tions in which (their) readers read now.
The Casket Sonnets, allegedly by Mary, Queen of Scots, were the first original poetic work attributed to a female author to be printed in Scotland. However, the sequence's dubious publication history ...has fostered a critical reluctance to assimilate it fully into the canon of Scottish women's writing. Though feminist literary criticism of the 1990s and early 2.000s realised the productive potential in revisiting the exclusionary boundaries of canonicity, especially Sarah Dunnigan's 'Undoing the Double Tress' (2003), which referenced a specifically early modern Scottish context, the issue of canonicity in Scottish women's writing, particularly the early modern, has lain dormant in recent years. Yet, as a case study, the Casket Sonnets possess the disruptive potential to allow us to reflect on the critical practices of the field as a whole. This article recontextualises the Casket Sonnets amidst comparable printed women's writing of the same period circulated in Scotland: Anne Lock's A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner' (1560) and Elizabeth Melville's Awe GodlieDreame (1603). Comparing the works on their relationship to female authorship and the implicit and explicit politicisation of their content, the article demonstrates the necessity of expanding the boundaries of the canon of early modern Scottish women's writing.
What if historical fiction were understood as a disfiguring of calculus? Or poems enacting the formation and breakdown of community as expositions of irrational numbers? What if, in other words, ...literary texts possessed a kind of mathematical unconscious?
The persistence of the rhetoric of "two cultures," one scientific, the other humanities-based, obscures the porous border and productive relationship that has long existed between literature and mathematics. In eighteenth-century Scottish universities, geometry in particular was considered one of the humanities; anchored in philosophy, it inculcated what we call critical thinking. But challenges to classical geometry within the realm of mathematics obligated Scottish geometers to become more creative in their defense of the traditional discipline; and when literary writers and philosophers incorporated these mathematical problems into their own work, the results were not only ingenious but in some cases pioneering.
Literature After Euclidtells the story of the creative adaptation of geometry in Scotland during and after the long eighteenth century. It argues that diverse attempts in literature and philosophy to explain or even emulate the geometric achievements of Isaac Newton and others resulted in innovations that modify our understanding of descriptive and bardic poetry, the aesthetics of the picturesque, and the historical novel. Matthew Wickman's analyses of these innovations in the work of Walter Scott, Robert Burns, James Thomson, David Hume, Thomas Reid, and other literati change how we perceive the Scottish Enlightenment and the later, modernist ethos that purportedly relegated the "classical" Enlightenment to the dustbin of history. Indeed, the Scottish Enlightenment's geometric imagination changes how we see literary history itself.
From the comfort of an armchair androm the comfort of an armchair and with the aid of this book, the reader can travel to the Breadalbane and Argyll of Duncan Ban Macintyre; the Skye and Raasay of ...Sorley Maclean; and the Caithness and Sutherland of Neil M. Gunn. Photographs, maps and place-names linked to key passages in the texts will immerse readers in the landscapes which songs, poems and tales have described and enlivened over the ages.
Although David Hume never addresses translation at length, he regularly invokes an interlingual movement at decisive moments in his work. Each of this article's three sections addresses a pair of ...such moments. The first argues that translation establishes the association of ideas in A Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. The second analyzes translation as the ground of both the rational and the emotional arguments for God in the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. The third and final section addresses translation as a highly regulated object of criticism in the History of England before turning to the Essays where it launches the search for the standard of taste in all criticism. Because translation thus intervenes not only in Hume's criticism, where one might expect it, but also in his historiography, theology and epistemology, this article concludes by formalizing the interdisciplinary perspective translation opens in Hume's work.
This research counters Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytical analysis of "courtly love" through a reading of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) , drawing on Kristeva's theory of subjectivity. ...Žižek's analysis concludes that the courtly image of the Knight's subservience to his Lady actually masks the reality of male domination. However, his own analysis seems complicit in the same problematic. In assuming the male partner as the subject from whose vantage the relationship is theorized, he strips the woman of any subjectivity or agency by rendering her an absolute object, a radical Otherness, a monster, and an automaton. While Žižek painstakingly represents the male-subject as the victim-agent in being the director of the masochistic performance, the female is rendered a perpetrator-object who, despite enacting the terms of the same contract, is termed an inhuman partner and hence a sadist. This lack of complex theorization of the Lady that renders her absolute evil reinforces conventional representation of femininity as evil. Whereas Žižek's analysis writes the Lady off as a vacuum, Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) provides an interesting alternative for theorizing courtly love from the position of the Lady via the protagonist, Arabella. A suitable framework for understanding Arabella's investment in the conventions of courtly love may be found in Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytical model that allows for reconceiving the Lady in courtly love as a subject. This essay argues that, given her preoedipal maternal severance, Arabella's delusional immersion in romances signifies her proximity to the "semiotic chora." Her preference for the "feminine" form of romance, reflective of the subversive force of the semiotic, represents Arabella's defiance of the rational, masculine, novelistic discourse of the eighteenth-century symbolic.
Jordan talks about the practice of Thomas Carlyle as historian and three unpublished letters. In the preface to the second edition of his Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, the great Victorian ...litterateur Carlyle announced the inclusion of multiple new letters by Cromwell. might just as well be applied to Carlyle himself. The three letters from the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of the University of South Carolina are hitherto unpublished and reveal Carlyle at work on all three of his major histories, The French Revolution, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, and Frederick the Great. Together, they serve as a reminder that Carlyle was no "prophet" or "sage," but was rather, like any other historian, dependent upon his sources, on previous scholarship, and, perhaps above all, on the kindness of strangers.
This article uses a theoretical framework of possible worlds to explore the ways in which Janice Galloway’s novel about grief and depression, The Trick is to Keep Breathing, may elicit emotional ...responses in readers. I give an overview of some of the emotional responses expressed by readers by using online review data, before employing stylistic analysis to demonstrate how emotional effects may be created through the linguistic construction of degrees of possibility. Drawing on Possible Worlds Theory, I demonstrate how readers’ emotional responses may be linked both to the presentation of possibility and to the restriction of possibility. The combination of the empirical methodology utilised here alongside stylistic analysis allows me to harness the capacity of Possible Worlds Theory to cast light on constructions of textual possibility and actuality and to facilitate understanding of some of the mechanisms eliciting readers’ emotions.
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