John Clare's Horizons Kovesi, S.
Essays in criticism,
10/2013, Letnik:
63, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Kovesi talks about John Clare, who seems more present than ever in contemporary literary culture. His imperishable poems can be traced in the opening pages of Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, ...through to George Monbiot's recent assertion that British environmetalism begins with Clare, which he followed with a call for England to copy Scotland's Burns Night with a Clare Day' to celebrate English rural life. Clare's autobiographical voice may be heard, refracted, by the magic and visionary anarchism of Alan Moore in his Voice of the Fire.
Milâttan Önce 180’de Kutsal Kitabın ilk tercümesi olarak karşımıza çıkan Septuagint ile başlayan Kutsal Kitap tercümeleri günümüzde de hâlen devam eden, Hıristiyanlık tarihi açısından önemli ...çalışmalardır. Reform öncesinde de birçok dile tercümesi yapılan Kutsal Kitabın özellikle Reform ve sonrasında Batı dillerine tercümesi hız kazanmıştır. Katolik Kilisesi’nin Latince dışında başka dillere tercümesine izin vermediği dönemde Kutsal Kitabın tercümeleri âdeta durma noktasına gelmiştir. Katolik Kilisesi tarafından tercüme yapanlara yönelik baskı ve şiddet tercüme faaliyetlerini olumsuz etkilemiştir. Reform ile birlikte Kutsal Kitap tercümelerinin artması önemli bir gelişme olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Yapılan tercümelerde farklı metotlar kullanılmış olsa da Reformcuların ortak amacı Kutsal Kitabı halka ulaştırmak ve onların kendi dillerinde Kutsal Kitabı okuyup anlamasıydı. Katolik Kilisesi bu durumdan rahatsız olmuş ve Kutsal Kitabın tercümelerini yasaklayan bir tutum benimsemiştir. Trent Konsili’nde alınan kararlar neticesinde Kutsal Kitabın tercümelerini ve Reformcuların eserlerini yasaklayan Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Yasaklı Kitaplar Dizini) yayımlanmıştır. Bu yasaklar dizinine rağmen Kutsal Kitap tercümeleri yapılmıştır. 1966’da ise bu uygulama tamamen kaldırılmıştır.
La Jetée at Fifty-Two Cioffi, Frank L
Raritan,
01/2015, Letnik:
34, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
It has now been over 50 years since Chris Marker made La Jetee -- his only "fictional film," which was a short, avant-garde science-fiction piece told almost entirely in still pictures. It includes ...only a single, tiny moment of action: a woman, played by Helene Chatelain, blinks her eye. Yet despite being in grainY black-and-white and of brief duration, the film, sometimes referred to as a "photo roman" or a "featurette," has made an enormous impact. Here, Cioffi explains the film's affective impact.
Reynolds was always the soul of these dinner parties he was the most good natured fellow I ever met with his face was the three in one of fun wit and punning personified he woud punch you with his ...puns very keenly without ever hurting your feelings for if you lookd in his face you coud not be offended and you might retort as you pleasd nothing coud put him out of humour either with himself or others if all his jokes and puns and witticisms were written down which were utterd at 2 or 3 of these dinner partys they woud make one of the best Joe Millers that have ever passd under that title he sits as a earless listner at table looking on with quick knaping sort of eye that turns towards you as quik as lightning when he has a pun joke or story to give you they are never made up or studied they are flashes of the moment and mosdy happy he is a slim sort of make som thing as you may conscieve of an unpretending sort of fashionable fellow without the desire of being one he has a plump round face a nose somthing puggish and a forehead that betrays more of fun then poetry his teeth are always looking through a laugh that sits as easy on his unpuckerd lips as if he as borne laughing he is a man of genius and if his talents was properly applied he woud do something I verily believe that he might win the favours of fame with a pun but be as it will wether she is inclind to smile or frown upon him he is quite at home wi content the present is all with him he carrys none of the Author about him an hearty laugh which there is no resisting at his jokes and puns seems to be more reccompence then he expected and he seems startld into wonder by it and muses a moment as if he turnd the joke over agen in his mind to find the 'merry thought' which made the laughter they drop as it were spontaneously from his mouth and turn again upon him before he has had time to consider wether they are good or bad he sits in a sort of supprise till another joke drops and makes him himself again . . . he has written a great deal in Magazines and periodicals of all names and distinctions and he is an author of no mean pretentions as to quantity tho he has never acknowledged any with his name he wrote die Poem called the Naiad in imitations of die old scotch ballad called die Mermaid of Galloway The Remains of Peter Corcoran The Garden of Florence and a mock Parody on Peter Bell all full of wit and real Poetry with a good share of affectation and somthing near akin to bombast He is one of the best fellows living and ought to be a Poet of die first order himself is his only hinderance at present Lord Byron was his first patron and corrected a poem and praised it which has not been published (Clare, By Himself 140-41). ...The Village Minstrel was not reviewed in the London, because Taylor rejected Allan Cunningham's review. Since the satire is the contemporary scene, the range inclusively broad, the style and critical position moderate (even if mockanger dominates on occasion), it lacks the ethical punch of better-known Romantic satires. ...Hessey boldly took his collaborators' advice, and strength from their confidence, and published. Because Reynolds was a playwright and critic of the London stage, an approving response to "The Literary Police Office" appeared in The Mirror of the Stage in the same month it was published.
Lindsey Eckert, “‘I’ll be bound’: John Clare’s ‘Don Juan,’ Literary Annuals, and the Commodification of Authorship” (pp. 427–454)
From 1826 to 1844, at least forty-seven of John Clare’s poems ...appeared in British literary annuals. Though these poems represent his most commercial work, Clare’s engagement with the annuals has remained largely neglected by scholars. This essay addresses this gap, and the intervention I make is twofold. First, I argue for the centrality of the literary annuals to Clare’s authorial career. Second, I suggest that Clare’s simultaneous dependence on and disdain for the annuals is essential to interpreting his invectives in “Don Juan” (composed 1841) against “poet whores” and the bad taste of female readers. I argue that annuals shaped Clare’s understanding of commerciality and, by extension, his asylum poem “Don Juan.” My focus sheds new light on our understanding of Clare’s authorship and his interactions with the literary marketplace.
Three Poems Nelms, Ben F
English journal,
05/2013, Letnik:
102, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
There's where all the others are, John Clare, Edward Jenner, Sarah Nelms, St. Sophia, Lady Godiva, Perseus, holding hands, dancing in a ring, basking in the sun above the nimbostratus, cirrus, ...cumulus, all iridescence, a host of solar angels, singing, "Holy, holy, holy," ascending and descending on ladders invisible, afire. If only I could have played the piano, or enrolled in a private school, or done gymnastics, or raised rabbits- or if I had only known that one day I'd (of course, I couldn't) live every moment for the moment: foxglove and gallardia, Chopin's Fantasy- Impromptu in C sharp minor, a monarch butterfly, her breathing across the room, Lynchburg lemonade, Fall Creek Falls, Sunday's crossword, our rat terrier, half moon on a cloudy night, Wendell Berry, one leaf falling, then another . .
There are millions of maps like the one Wislawa Szymborska describes. But in this essay I'll be looking at another kind: geographical information systems, which do get stirred when people engage with ...them. Arrayed on screens, the surfaces of these interactive maps are designed to get unsettled. There's electricity and constant data-accrual agitating them, letting them change with context and consultation. They are still accounts of space, these new kinds of maps, but they do not stay still. They alter from moment to moment, tracking time, showing - albeit mainly at the somewhat occluded level of metadata - a record of everyone who visits them, who gets folded into them.
This dissertation considers nineteenth-century British elegiac poetry for infants and young children, which I call “child elegies,” using a postsecular lens. The child elegy subgenre is not often ...discussed separately in elegy scholarship, and child elegies are often dismissed as cliché due to their repetitive nature. In contrast, elegies that are more “original” and less “cliché” are often lauded, and elegiac scholarship that assumes the secularization thesis tends to value elegies that resist consolation. A postsecular approach to child elegies challenges the secularist assumptions incorporated in much elegiac scholarship from the twentieth century onward, and ritual studies offer a lens for viewing repetition and convention in child elegies in terms of ritual. I argue that seemingly cliché child elegies are performing mourning rituals in keeping with religious, often Protestant, tradition, engaging with pressing concerns about a child’s salvation. I additionally argue that child elegies that resist consolation, or anti-elegies, draw upon similar conceptions of childhood to arrive at strikingly different conclusions about young death. An attention to child elegies, both those that discourage mourning and those that resist consolation, reveals the complex conversations surrounding young death. A postsecular reading of child elegies provides a framework for the fraught, conflicting ways that we memorialize young death to this day.
In the early nineteenth century, the rise of industrialism and the accelerated enclosure of farmable land combined to drive England's rural population into rapidly growing urban centers. London, in ...particular, was ill-equipped to deal with the resulting population boom, and laborers and vagrants were forced into the twisting alleyways and hidden courtyards of the slums, where poorly constructed housing and a lack of sanitation created dangerous living conditions. The newly emerging middle class, anxious about their close proximity to crime and disease, was eager to both see into the hidden slums, and draw their inhabitants out into the light of day. This resulted in two social trends; first, civic establishments like parks and museums were opened to members of the lower classes where, it was hoped, they would observe and emulate the behavior of their “betters” and, in turn, become more readily observable themselves. The second trend was a proliferation of writers, whether social scientists, journalists, novelists, or philanthropists, who entered the slums to observe the circumstances of poverty for themselves. The newspaper articles, sanitation reports, guidebooks, religious tracts, novels, and political cartoons that resulted from these expeditions repeatedly engage in three ways of looking at the lower classes: observation, surveillance, and voyeurism. All this watching, reading, and writing resulted in an extensive body of text in which the middle class constructed an overview of poverty and the poor in London. Since much of this discourse is rooted in a fear-based middle-class imagination rather than firsthand knowledge of the lower classes, it can be said that the sensationalism and scare tactics that appear in many of these texts often reveal more about the writers than their subjects. By reading the negative space of these narratives—that is, reading the lower class as a depiction of what the middle class is not, or as what the middle class fears—we are able to elicit a greater understanding of how middle-class identity is formed, shared, and performed during the early- and mid-nineteenth century.
This project examines a strand in nineteenth-century writing that presents literary character at the intersection between individual difference and social appearance. I focus in this project on ...literary characters who are neither wholly interior, as Romantic characters are often said to be, nor wholly external, as eighteenth-century and Victorian characters are sometimes seen to be. This binary misses a crucial aspect of writing about nineteenth-century character. The characters I study negotiate the difference between interiority and external appearance by becoming distinct in the process of being perceived: their uniqueness becomes visible as they enter into another’s line of sight. So fashioned, these characters demonstrate how the “types” we associate with appearance, and the “particularity” we associate with interiority, are not necessarily opposed. Instead, they challenge this epistemological binary by existing as particular configurations of typical categories that shift in response to how they are seen.Thinking about nineteenth-century characters in these terms supposes that individuals become singular precisely because they enter a circuit of mutual perceptibility. Building upon the political thought of Hannah Arendt, I argue that this circuit is made possible by the “public space of appearance”: the culmination of those categories that condition shared perception. According to Arendt, someone’s individuality—too different, or distinct, to be comprehended otherwise—only appears when it is recast through narrative, or when particularity is translated through shared categories. I further argue that each individual’s perception takes these public categories, breaks them up, and reassembles them as a distinct way of seeing the world. Moreover, this partial viewpoint manages to catch a view of reality that is true on account of this partiality: our singularity frames others so that they, too, appear as singular. In other words, our unique perspectives condition the uniqueness of others. As I read these literary characters, then, they suggest how we as humans can, and should, bring to light each other’s distinctness.These characters challenge our normative modes of thinking about the relationship between identity, appearance, and reality. By inhabiting viewpoints that reassemble type, they reconstitute the public horizons—the assemblies of shared categories—that condition their own appearance. I trace this phenomenological work back to Blake, whose mythical individuals become each other’s worlds, or new ways of seeing. I demonstrate, however, that singular appearance emerges with full force in the wake of Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and specifically in light of the claim that rhetoric and public discussion undergird both personal and political character. My argument then turns to Dickens, whose characters distill most clearly how distinct personality emerges as perceived appearance. The implications of this project are twofold. First, the literary persons I track erode the binary divisions between “particular” and “type,” “flat” and “round,” “internal” and “external” that have governed theories of “character.” Second, such characterization shows how categories of judgment need not transcend individual difference or its perception. Instead, these perceiving subjects challenge us with radical appearances and perspectives that grant the necessity of singularity to sustaining a common but multidimensional world. Chapter 1, “Idiosyncratic Character,” examines how the characters in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend present “thick” appearances. Rethinking the way in which he is identified as an inheritor of Romanticism, I begin with Dickens because this elision of surface and depth supplies a blueprint for the characterization at the heart of this project. Described as “observers,” his characters embody idiosyncratic points-of-view that, because they are shaped by a recognition of social types, paradoxically model a naïve impressionability to the singularity of others. Taking in how they are seen as a part of this perception, they present features whose construction from an external perspective renders them utterly distinct: the public magnification of type as particular.Chapter 2, “Rhetorical Character,” explores how Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet reconfigures “character” as perceived difference. Innovating upon a distinctly Scottish concern with the formative relationship between language and sociopolitical character, while departing from contemporaneous accounts of the relationship between judgment and sympathy, the novel’s protagonists ground evaluation in opposition by construing the other’s point-of-view through combative rhetoric. Their consequent failure to depict each other in a comprehensive manner generates an excess of language that outstrips intent and liberates appearance from normative narratives. Thus painting character in vivid moments of extreme detail, Redgauntlet redefines “judgment” as the delineation rather than subsumption of particularity.Chapter 3, “Dramatic Character,” studies how Blake’s characters perceive and shape singularity. In the mutual performance of each other’s action, Los and Urizen articulate bodily surface in a sequence of frames that renders their features both recognizable and particular, overlarge and minute. In performing the other, each character also captures the viewpoint from which he himself is being seen; this dialogic space of dramatic reconstruction casts Los and Urizen not simply as distinct appearances, but as entire new worlds: horizons that continue to shape each other’s perception. The phenomenological work that these characters take up thus rethinks Blake’s investment in creative “vision” as the seeing and extension of another’s seeing.Chapter 4, “Communal Character,” argues that Robert Burns’s lyric voice instantiates a distance of perspective that, paradoxically, brings phenomena into focus. Attending to the typifying events of his specific community—the occurrences that accompany daily work like ploughing, for example—Burns collapses the axes of social time and space to a point. Rather than scrutinizing appearances as present entities, his speakers are impressed upon by moments that assemble, in unique configurations, the associations that accumulate along the framework of communal tradition. Burns thus continues the characterization studied here by turning it sideways: rather than rearranging typical categories in new pictures, he distills singularity at the level of social narratives.Epilogue: Turning briefly to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that the mutual perception at play in nineteenth-century character proposes a social phenomenology. If to perceive, as Merleau-Ponty argues, is always to be perceived, then these characters demonstrate, first, how social categories of knowledge undergird, rather than mask, appearance, and second, how such perception redraws the horizons bounding actuality. To study this phenomenological aesthetics is to further understand, then, how combatively delineating each other’s differences can contribute to the production of sociopolitical formations that recognize and protect singularity as such.
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