Shira Wolosky

Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America

Preface: The Claims of Rhetoric * PART I: Modest Claims * Writing Etiquette * Emily Dickinson: Crises of American Identity * Public and Private: Reconsidered * PART II: Claiming the Bible * Slave Spirituals and Black Typology * Womens Bibles * Herman Melville: Fractured Rhetoric in Battle-Pieces * PART III: Poetic Languages * Genteel Poets: Rhetoric North and South * Edgar Allan Poe: Repetition, Women, and Signs * Stephen Crane: American Economies * Santayana and Harvard Formalism * PART IV: Plural Identities * Local-Color Poetry * Crossing Languages in Paul Laurence Dunbar * Emma Lazarus: An American-Jewish Typology * Walt Whitmans Republic of Letters * Postscript: Charting American Trends

Rhetoric or Not: Hymnal Tropes in Emily Dickinson and Isaac Watts

T HE figure of Isaac Watts presides like an ancestral portrait over discussions of Emily Dickinsons verse. As a rule, however, treatments of the relationship between the two writers touch only upon formal concerns. Various commentators have noted that in many instances Dickinson draws upon the meter, rhyme, punctuation, grammar, and images found in Wattss hymns. Moreover, it is generally agreed that Dickinsons stance towards Watts is more or less parodic. Wattss hymns furnish her with a constant occasion for irony, as David Porter writes, arising from her persistent secularity of attitude and language in counterpoint to the devotional schema.2 Dickinsons relation to Watts, however,

The Ethics of Foucauldian Poetics: Women's Selves

Although Foucaults analysis of instituted, disciplined selfhood has found application in many fields, poetry on the whole has been neglected, being often seen as a formal discourse removed from wider cultural issues. American women poets, however, here Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks, offer in their work on the one hand a powerful representation, confrontation, and enactment of the disciplining of womens bodies in modern American culture. On the other, their work challenges Foucaults extreme reduction of the subject to disciplinary function, as he himself attempted to do in his later writing on ethics of the self. Gwendolyn Brooks in particular affirms resources of selfhood not only in resistance against disciplinary social institutions and critique of them, but also in commitment to community and social ties which situate women and become sources of strength, definition, and transformation.

The Lyric, History, and the Avant-Garde: Theorizing Paul Celan

Discussions of lyric tend to bifurcate into, on the one hand, theoretical reflection, in which lyric is defined as a self-referring language artifact, and on the other hand, historical reference, which tends to ignore formal considerations. This article argues against such an opposition between theory and history and argues for a lyric theory that sees poetic language as representing historical experience within the very formal elements and self-consciousness of language that are lyric poetrys distinctive features. Paul Celan offers a paradigmatic illustration of such synthesis.

The Negative Way Negated: Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing

UCKYS SPEECH in Waiting For Godot opens by naming aphasia as a central concern not least through its undoing of articulate discourse as an exercise in scholastic precision. It further situates the problem of aphasia within a context at once ontological and theological. Apathia and athambia, philosophical and theological terms asserting the imperturbability and impassibility of atemporal Being, indeed raise the question of aphasia. They accompany and define the parameters, possibility, perhaps above all the axiology of discourse. Becketts negativity seems one of the few features everyone can affirm of him. Such negativity certainly includes a linguistic nihilism, a negation of language that seems to extend not only to the world which language describes, but to repudiate language itself. Yet Becketts gestures of linguistic negation are not another or mere nihilistic exercise in the repertory of a connoisseur of grimace. Rather, they make visible the fundamental place, and self-contradictory status and value, of language and of negation itself within structures determining our Western metaphysic. Becketts is a work of exposure, displaying an equivocal linguistic axiology: in terms of its place within a general axiology, and within a tradition that must shield from exposure its equivocal place and function. The theological allusions embedded in Luckys incoherence are characteristic of Becketts work, which is studded with innumerable theological references suggesting an erudition difficult to gauge. Some are specific and direct citations of actual disputes or documents, like Watts exchange on the train with the editor of a Catholic

The Magic of Harry Potter

The world of Harry Potter is a world of riddles and secrets, which is to say, one of hidden and then discovered meanings. Magical objects, magical creatures, things that happen, and tasks that are undertaken are all filled with significance beyond what meets the eye. There are coded instructions; hidden corridors and rooms; unseen doorways and houses; secret passwords and passageways; and dreams, visions, and runes to decipher. The very language of the books is filled with codes, puns, and puzzles. In fact, all around in the books there are secret worlds readers at first miss the signs of. The importance of riddles and secrets is hinted in chapter titles such as “The Very Secret Diary,” “Hermione’s Secret,” “The Riddle House,” and “The Secret Riddle.” There is the Unknowable Room and the Chamber of Secrets. Dumbledore, too, it turns out, has secrets in his life: “He learned secrecy,” as his brother, Aberforth, accuses, “at our mother’s knee” (7:28, 562).1 Then there is the villain named Tom Riddle. This name is itself a riddle concealed by another name, one which is also hidden since most fear to pronounce it and, like so many other words and objects in the books, is itself a riddle: Voldemort may mean, in a play on French, “flight-from-death” or perhaps, from German, “will-to-death.” There are even more possible meanings.

Women’s Bibles

In 1895, Elizabeth Cady Stanton compiled a Woman’s Bible, collecting verses and commentary exposing “women’s subordination [as] reiterated times without number from Genesis to Revelations” (II. 8).1 Stanton’s Woman’s Bible was too radical even for the progressive National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, which repudiated it. But it was nonetheless widely read, and stands as a culmination of a century of biblical controversy in religion, scholarship, and politics. Such biblical controversy extends well beyond women’s issues into much of America’s political and cultural life. But Stanton’s feminist understanding of the Bible as an authority implicating political, legal, and social powers particularly illuminates American women’s poetry, in which biblical revision constitutes a distinctive sub-genre. Albeit from a wide variety of religious and ideological positions, many women poets display an acute awareness of the Bible’s power to define models, morals, and social strictures.2

The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre

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The Turns of Time: Memory, Prediction, Prophecy

The Harry Potter books are filled with magical objects: wands and brooms, Portkeys and portraits, potions and plants, Vanishing Cabinets, the Marauder’s Map, Dumbledore’s Deluminator, and Hagrid’s Mokeskin pouch. Each book presents magical objects that are central not only to the plot, but also to the symbolic meanings of that book. Many of these objects involve questions of time: relationships to time, how time works, what it means, and above all how it can or cannot be recovered, predicted, or controlled.

Well-Spotted: Plots and Reversals

The Harry Potter books are deeply plotted. Rowling has said that she laid out her plans at the very start, outlining all the books through the first several years of her work on them.1 The result is complex. Indeed, the events of the books can be said to unfold in two very different, almost opposite directions.2 On the one hand, there is a profound, almost uncanny sense of necessity in the order of events. One event must follow another, each falling into a fixed place. Even seemingly arbitrary or accidental details turn out to have been purposely placed in a chain where one thing causes, or prepares for, another to happen. Rowling plants this necessity firmly in the books, in the many, many details on almost every page, hinting at and connecting to things that will happen later or that came before. As a network of clues and signs, the story takes on the intricacy of woven tapestry. Harry, the books’ ultimate interpreter has, as one of his most defining talents, the ability to put these signs together.