Mark Axelrod

Poetics of Melancholia and Misogyny in August Strindberg and The Father

Though Strindberg seemed to suffer with his misogyny for the better part of his life, he found outlets for it in his plays, most notably in Miss Julie. Katharine Rogers states there are a variety of cultural reasons for the phenomenon: (1) rejection of or guilt about sex; (2) a reaction against the idealization with which men have glorified women; (3) patriarchal feeling, the wish to keep women subject to men (Moi, 26). Of these notions about misogyny, point two is more in line with the notion of melancholia and misogyny as cooperative components in a psychological matrix. It is this notion that this chapter addresses.

The Poetics of Stagecraft and Dialogue in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard

The first act is extremely important since it creates a structural, schematic, and thematic foundation for the entire play. Throughout the first act, we discover the characters are delineated through recurrent themes in dialogue and peculiarities of individual speech and gesture. Unlike reading fiction, readers are limited to what can happen on stage through what is said (directly or indirectly, that is through direct discourse or indirect discourse), what is acted, and, of course, what is staged. Through the dialogue, Chekhov clearly presents a play with a social theme though under the guise of a rather pedestrian situation. Dialogue sketches character and exchanges themes. In brief, the dialogue engages in a way that not only advances character, but propels the plot forward.

A Poetics Introduction, Mostly

Like the notion of “postmodernism,” there’s a kind of enigma to the notion of “poetics.” Forms often undermine the Aristotelian notion of fair game, fair play, of what Leonard Orr writes of as “Aristotelian novels” versus “non-Aristotelian” ones; of a seemingly corporeal harmony for Socrates. Just as we are left pondering Brian McHale’s question “whose postmodernism is it anyway?” when he writes “we can discriminate among constructions of postmodernism, none of them any less ‘true’ or less fictional than the others, since all of them are finally fictions. To work on the notion of a poetics is to work on a disputational system of erecting monomyths in order to destroy them.”

The Poetics of Dramatic Prose in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

It wasn’t by accident that Turgenev and Flaubert were “pen pals.” For Turgenev, the germ of the story was never plot. It was the representation of certain persons. The individual was most important and Turgenev made a dossier for each of his characters. Turgenev’s story consists of the motions of a group of selected characters that are not the result of a preconceived action, but as a consequence of the qualities of the actors. But Turgenev, like Flaubert, was a master of organizational structure and before he began dealing with his characters he was very concerned in their environment and how that environment affected characters’ personalities and their behavior. This essay addresses both of those issues.

The Architectonics of Poetic Prose in Camus’s The Stranger

It has been stated that The Stranger embodies the experience of the Absurd while the Myth of Sisyphus provides its rationale; that is, the novel tends to invigorate the philosophy. This coalescence of philosophical “meaning” and “structure” in The Stranger has been manipulated until it has become a unified and tightly-constructed literary text. I’m using the term architectonics in the manner of discussing the literary and artistic structure in Camus’s novel especially in the way he writes his prose in conjunction with specific themes (e.g. death). The essay is a close reading of the manner in which Camus paces the novel and the manner in which he selects the words he uses.

The Psychoanalytic Poetics of Weltschmerz in Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Times

In order to understand the general significance of the term Weltschmerz, it must be understood that the constitution of the term, that is, its literal meaning of “world woe,” has a variety of interpretations, such as despair, defeat, and melancholia, each of which are subjectively related to the individual experiencing the emotion. Moreover, these expressions are not causative factors contributing to Weltschmerz, but, to the contrary, are symptomatic expressions of Weltschmerz. What causative agent(s) predispose(s) an individual to emote these representative expressions of Weltschmerz, and what, then, is Weltschmerz for that particular individual? For Lermontov, Weltschmerz meant melancholia; but before an analysis of melancholia in relation to Lermontov’s work can be explored, the psychological constitution of melancholia, as well as its psychogenic origins, will be discussed.

The Poetics of Reading in Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a writer’s novel to write and a reader’s challenge to read. And that challenge begins even before one actually starts to read the novel as a novel in the manner in which most novels are read. The reader is presented with a “table of contents” which, on the face of it, appears fairly innocuous; however, in fact, it isn’t just a table of contents, but the actual beginning of the novel. The essay focuses on the relationship between how this particular novel is written and how the composition of the novel affects its reading thus challenging the reader to dismiss any preconceived notions of what constitutes a “novel” and to approach the text on its own terms.

The Poetics of the Quest in Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”

Allegedly, Chekhov was once asked why he preferred writing short stories and plays to novels. His answer was that he was too interested in new beginnings and new endings. What is unique about his “Lady with the Dog” is that it very much is an amalgamation of both short story and play. Structurally, the story is very much like a stage play with a clear five-act structure and accompanying dialogue and is very much like a short story with its singleness of effect, active detail, and epiphany. What makes it also unique is the fact that Chekhov was a master of the “open ending” and this story is an excellent example of how he problematizes the “dilemma” of the closed ending.

“Pale Whore, Pale Writer”: Is There Punishment for the Crime?

What appears to be one of the more essential problems with Dostoyevsky’s poetics in Crime and Punishment deals, simply, with his occasional lapse into often using the wrong word at the wrong time. Beyond the mystery plot and the occasional melodramatic sentimentalism, Dostoyevsky’s insouciant approach to the art of novel-writing could justify Nabokov’s limp encomium that Dostoyevsky is on the periphery of masterful Russian prose and failed contrivances exist. The major flaw here is his over-use (and general misuse) of the word “pale” which appears oftentimes within the same paragraph and would lead one to ask the question: Why? The essay explores the “why” by addressing Dostoyevsky’s penchant for making his female protagonists to constantly go pale.

The Virgin and the Gipsy: D.H. Lawrence’s Paean to Misogyny

This novel was, of course, Lawrence’s last work and, arguably, his worst. Written only six years after Women in Love, not only the stylistics but also the content is similar. Lawrence may have “revised” portions of the text prior to publication had he lived, but the majority of the text is filled with a rhetoric of misogyny and anti-Semitism that is stunning in its audacity. The essay deals not only with that language, but also with how he homogenizes both anti-Semitism and misogyny in one character, namely, Mrs. Fawcett, the “Jewess.” It interrogates those aspects and speculates on why Lawrence would have written so vitriolically about all of his female characters and how those female characters have, by virtue of being female, victimized his male characters.