The Rhetoric of Consciousness in Henry James

1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
Sheila Teahan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Rhetorical Situation ◽  
Physical Ground ◽  
Phenomenological Perspective ◽  
Causal Logic

Abstract Although traditionally viewed from a phenomenological perspective, Henry James's compositional device of the center of consciousness can be understood rhetorically as a representational strategy that illustrates the problematics of figurative language and causality. The Jamesian reflector does not simply "re-flect" but crucially intervenes in the causal logic of the texts it claims to focalize. The reflector's relation to the material he or she mediates is one of catachresis, or of "translation," of figurative transfer without a nonfigurative ground. But the rhetorical consequences of this catachrestic mediation cannot be reconciled with James's claims for the center of consciousness as the formal and meta-physical ground of his fictions. James's center of consciousness texts typically reach a representational impasse that thematizes this incompatibility and sacri-fices the central consciousness himself or herself in an allegory of this rhetorical situation. (Literary criticism, rhetorical approach)

Rhetoric and Literary Criticism

2014 ◽  
pp. 340-352
Author(s):  
Rita Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Critical Dimensions ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
Literary Thought ◽  
Scholastic Philosophy ◽  
The Middle Ages

Rhetoric was aimed at textual composition, but literary criticism was also always part of its remit. This chapter surveys the application of rhetorical thought to textual interpretation in the Middle Ages. This process was important for the interpretation of Scripture as well as literary works. The chapter considers the intersections between invention and hermeneutics, the relevance of theories of arrangement to analysis of narrative structure, and how rhetorical theories of genre and style (including figurative language) were transplanted into interpretive contexts. The chapter engages closely with the classical tradition, especially Ciceronian works, in order to demonstrate the value of classical thought for medieval theorists and literary exegetes. It explores the critical dimensions of the preceptive rhetorics of the Middle Ages, and it also considers how scholastic philosophy absorbed the rhetorical tradition and contributed to literary thought. Major medieval authors considered include Augustine, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and Dante.

Tragic form and feeling in theIliad

1982 ◽  
Vol 102 ◽  
pp. 145-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. B. Rutherford
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Literature ◽  
Focus Attention ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
The Way

These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out, and figured with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.Henry James,The Bostonians, ch. xxxixThis paper is intended to contribute to the study of both Homer and Greek tragedy, and more particularly to the study of the influence of the epic upon the later poets. The current revival of interest among English scholars in the poetic qualities of the Homeric poems must be welcomed by all who care for the continuing survival and propagation of classical literature. The renewed emphasis on the validity of literary criticism as applied to presumably oral texts may encourage a more positive appreciation of the subtlety of Homeric narrative techniques, and of the coherent plan which unifies each poem. The aim of this paper is to focus attention on a number of elements in Greek tragedy which are already present in Homer, and especially on the way in which these poets exploit the theme of knowledge—knowledge of one's future, knowledge of one's circumstances, knowledge of oneself. Recent scholarship on tragedy has paid much more attention to literary criticism in general and to poetic irony in particular: these insights can also illuminate the epic. Conversely, the renewed interest in Homer's structural and thematic complexity should also enrich the study of the tragedians, his true heirs.

A Structural Reading of the Chuan in the Wen-yüan ying-hua

1977 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-456
Author(s):  
William H. Nienhauser
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Structural Approach ◽  
Genre Studies ◽  
Diachronic Changes ◽  
Genre Study

Perhaps the first question should be “Why?” Why transport a critical apparatus heavily laden with paradoxical factions and conflicting terminology back a millennium to the Chinese genre known as cbuana? And why a genre study, when so much groundwork is still necessary before Chinese literature can begin to demand for itself a larger consideration in general contemporary literary criticism? To attend to the second query first, genre studies are essential now for two reasons: 1) because genres evolve much more readily than their designations, and 2) because they are so basic to a reader's (and thus a critic's) approach to a work. Misunderstandings of the diachronic changes of what a generic title may include have led to useless critiques, the most notable case being perhaps that of Henry James and Fielding. In reply to the question of why a structural approach, the answer is less definitive.

The Literary Criticism of Henry James.

1982 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Clayton L. Eichelberger ◽  
Sarah B. Daugherty
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James

Henry James at the Ethical Turn

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 366-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Ethical Approaches ◽  
Ethical Thinking

Matthew Flaherty, “Henry James at the Ethical Turn: Vivification and Ironization in The Ambassadors” (pp. 366–393) Taking its cue from recent work by Dorothy J. Hale, this paper begins by exploring the extent to which Levinasian, deconstructive, and Aristotelian critical approaches have associated Henry James’s fiction, and the ethical import of reading literature more broadly, with an array of related values including particularity, impulsiveness, and indeterminacy. Seeking to complicate this characterization of the ethical effects of Jamesian fiction, this paper emphasizes the debt of The Ambassadors (1903) to a form of dialectical narration that privileges an array of antithetical values including abstraction, analysis, and understanding. Attending in particular to the novel’s opposition between Lambert Strether’s imagination and Maria Gostrey’s discrimination, I argue that The Ambassadors uses perspectival relations between characters to clarify and challenge the judgments of its characters and, by extension, its readers. By building dialectical oppositions like these into his novels, James does not disrupt structures of thought with immediate feeling so much as he shapes immediate feelings into structures of thought. The paper makes the case that it is through juxtaposition to characters like Maria that the full significance of Strether’s feeling—that is, the perspective of value that motivates his practice—can be grasped by readers seeking to refine their own ethical thinking. By emphasizing how James’s fiction facilitates thoughts that attend to the whole, rather than just provoking feelings that attend to the particular, the paper seeks to expand both received understandings of James’s fiction and of ethical approaches to literary criticism more broadly.

Empty Houses

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Kurnick
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
James Baldwin ◽  
William Makepeace Thackeray ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Identity ◽  
Private Individual

According to the dominant tradition of literary criticism, the novel is the form par excellence of the private individual. This book challenges this consensus by re-examining the genre's development from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century and exploring what has until now seemed an anomaly—the frustrated theatrical ambitions of major novelists. Offering new interpretations of the careers of William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin—writers known for mapping ever-narrower interior geographies—this book argues that the genre's inward-looking tendency has been misunderstood. Delving into the critical role of the theater in the origins of the novel of interiority, the book reinterprets the novel as a record of dissatisfaction with inwardness and an injunction to rethink human identity in radically collective and social terms. Exploring neglected texts in order to reread canonical ones, the book shows that the theatrical ambitions of major novelists had crucial formal and ideological effects on their masterworks. The book establishes the theatrical genealogy of some of the signal techniques of narrative interiority by investigating a key stretch of each of these novelistic careers. In the process, it illustrates how the novel is marked by a hunger for palpable collectivity, and argues that the genre's discontents have been a shaping force in its evolution. A groundbreaking rereading of the novel, this book provides new ways to consider the novelistic imagination.

3. The James brand

2021 ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Susan L. Mizruchi
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Portrait Of A Lady ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Mind ◽  
International Novels

‘The James brand’ examines how, during the period when he was introducing his brand to an Anglo-American public, Henry James honed his signature subject: plotting the fates of Americans abroad. If James was not the inventor of the international novel, he was certainly one of its most important proponents and developers. The first of James’s international novels, The American (1877), focuses on the mind of a woman; Portrait of a Lady (1881) reveals it to be an ideal register for the deep psychological transformations that became his trademark. James also wrote a major essay on literary criticism during this period, “The Art of Fiction” (1884).

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document