Author: Ian Balfour Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804745062 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
The Romantic era in England and Germany saw a sudden renewal of prophetic modes of writing. Biblical prophecy and, to a lesser extent, classical oracle again became viable models for poetry and even for journalistic prose. Notably, this development arose out of the new-found freedom of biblical interpretation that began in the mid-eighteenth century, as the Bible was increasingly seen to be a literary and mythical text. Taking Walter Benjamin’s thinking about history as a point of departure, the author shows how the model for Romantic prophecy emerges less as a prediction of the future than as a call to change in the present, even as it quotes, at key turns, texts from the past. After surveying developments in eighteenth-century biblical hermeneutics, as well as the numerous instances of prophetic eruption in Romantic poetry, the book culminates in close readings of works by Blake, Hölderlin, and Coleridge. Each of these writers interpreted the Bible in strong, variously radical and conservative ways, and each reworked prophetic texts in often startling fashion. The author’s reading of Blake focuses on the complex temporal and rhetorical dynamics at work in a prophetic tradition, with attention paid to the key mediating figure of Milton. The chapter on Hölderlin investigates the truth-claim of poetry and the consequences of Hölderlin’s insight into the necessarily figural character of poetry. The analysis of Coleridge correlates his theory of allegory and symbol with his theory and practice of political writing, which often relies on mobilizing prophetic authority. Together, the readings force us to reexamine the claims and practices of Romantic poets and thinkers and their ideas and ideologies, not without engendering some allegorical resonance with issues in our own time.
Author: Joshua Wilner Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801877164 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
What "internalization" means for writers and critics of Romanticism, including Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin, and Sedgwick Winner of the American Conference on Romanticism's Jean Pierre Barricelli Book Prize "Although defining Romanticism is a standing problem for literary history, some notion of internalization at the level of cultural tradition has recurrently been proposed as the solution to that problem . . . In this debate the notion of internalization tends to be handled . . . as a known quantity, whereas I am arguing that the notion itself remains obscure and thus that the problem of internalization and the problem of Romanticism may indeed, with respect to the discourse of literary history, be closely intertwined"—from Feeding on Infinity Notions of "internalization" play an important role in many contemporary fields of discourse, including literary history and theory, psychoanalysis, ideological critique, and learning theory in the social sciences. Indeed, the term "internalization" is pervasive and seems to answer a shared need of expression to such an extent that it is one of those technical words that has found its way into everyday use. But the meaning of this term and the continuities and discontinuities at work in its varied deployment have, for the most part, gone unanalyzed. In Feeding on Infinity, Joshua Wilner explores the power and limits of the discourse of internalization through the close reading of a variety of texts drawn from the Romantic tradition, a tradition which is both source for and oftentimes object of this discourse. Through the study of writers including Rousseau, Wordsworth, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Freud, Benjamin, and Sedgwick, he seeks to deepen our understanding of the problem of internalization, while situating its more or less explicit emergence as a problem in relation to the history of, in Gertrude Stein's phrase, "patriarchal poetics." Through patient attention to the transformations of rhetorical structures of representation and address performed by these works and to the frequent condensation of these transformations in figures of eating and drinking, Feeding on Infinity makes available to inquiry a surprisingly rich and largely unexplored network of connections within the "long" Romantic tradition. At the same time, it forges new links between deconstructive reading practices, psychoanalysis, and recent work in gender studies.
Author: Walter J. Ong Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801466326 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 363
Book Description
This collection of essays by Walter J. Ong focuses on the complex and dynamic relationship between verbal performance and cultural evolution. By studying the history of rhetoric and related arts from classical antiquity through the age of romanticism to the modern period, Ong both illuminates the past and helps explain late-twentieth-century modes of expression. Elegantly written and wide ranging, Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology traces the evolution of devices used to store, retrieve, and communicate knowledge. Ong discusses diverse topics including memory as art, associationist critical theory, the close relationship between romanticism and technology, and the popular culture of the 1970s. This book also contains essays about Tudor writings in English on rhetoric and literary theory, the study of Latin as a Renaissance puberty rite, Ramism in the classroom and in commerce, Jonathan Swift's notion of the mind, and John Stuart Mill's politics.
Author: Paul De Man Publisher: Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
This volume assembles for the first time material written by Paul de Man between 1954 and 1981, including his previously unpublished Gauss Seminar lectures delivered at Princeton in 1967, three papers on romantic and postromantic issues, a commissioned essay on Roland Barthes, and two substantial responses to papers by Frank Kermode and Murray Krieger. Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism represents de Man's reflections on some of the major texts of English, German, and French Romanticism and their reception in twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. The Gauss Seminar lectures in particular convey de Man's consideration of Romanticism as a distinct form of historical consciousness, and illuminate his conviction that this romantic historical consciousness had been a powerful influence on our own development of a historical identity. De Man had planned to use the Gauss lectures as a basis for a major historical study of Romanticism, but the volume was never completed and de Man eventually abandoned the project. Drawn from four decades of de Man's career, these essays reflect the transition in the critic's work from the thematics and vocabulary of "consciousness" and "temporality" characteristic of his work in the 1960s, to the language-oriented concerns and terminology of his later writings.
Author: Craig R. Smith Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1527521141 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 349
Book Description
Relying on the author’s established expertise in rhetorical theory and political communication, this book re-contextualizes Romantic rhetorical theory in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to provide a foundation for a Neo-Romantic rhetorical theory for our own time. In the process, it uses a unique methodology to correct misconceptions about many Romantic writers. The methodology of the early chapters uses a dialectical approach to trace Romanticism and its opposition, the Enlightenment, back through Humanism and its opposition, Scholasticism, to St. Augustine. These chapters include a revisionist analysis of the church’s treatment of Galileo in the course of showing how difficult it was for scientific study to be accepted in the academic world. The study also re-conceptualizes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Edmund Burke as bridge figures to the Romantic Era instead of as Enlightenment figures. This move throws new light on the major artists of the Romantic Era, who are examined in chapters seven and eight. Chapter nine focuses on Percy Bysshe Shelley and his development of the rhetorical poem, and thereby provides a new genre in the Romantic catalogue. Chapter ten uses the foregoing to analyse and reconceptualize the rhetorical theories of Hugh Blair and Thomas De Quincey. The concluding chapter then synthesizes their theories with relevant contemporary rhetorical theories thereby constructing a Neo-Romantic theory for our own time. In the process, this book links the Romantics’ love of nature to the current environmental crisis.
Author: Paul de Man Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1135854963 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 335
Book Description
In Blindness and Insight , de Man examines several critics and finds in their writings a gap between their statements about the nature of literature and the results of their practical criticism. Not only are the critics unaware of this gap, says de Man, but their blindness to it often leads to some of their most valuable insights. The central issue of de Man's work is the rhetorical constitution of the text, and this book, with its new introduction by Wlad Godzich and five additional essays by de Man, is meant to challenge readers to a new appreciation of their chosen task as readers of literature. Included in this new edition are the original essays on Binswanger, Poulet, Lukas, Blanchot, the New Critics, and Derrida's `of Grammatology', as well as five more: `The Rhetoric of Temporality', `The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism', `Heidegger's Exegesis of Holderlin', a review of Bloom's `Anxiety of Influence, and `Literature and Language'.
Author: Sara Emilie Guyer Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804755245 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
Romanticism After Auschwitz reveals how one of the most insistently anti-romantic discourses, post-Holocaust testimony, remains romantic, and proceeds to show how this insight compels a thorough rethinking of romanticism.
Author: Ann Wierda Rowland Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 0521768144 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
Explores how emerging ideas of infancy and childhood gave Romantic writers and readers new ways of understanding history and literature.
Author: Ian Balfour
Author: Paul de Man
Author: Paul de Man
Author: Joshua Wilner
Author: Walter J. Ong
Author: Paul De Man
Author: Craig R. Smith
Author: Paul de Man
Author: Sara Emilie Guyer
Author: Ann Wierda Rowland