scholarly journals A Rhetorical Approach to the Literary Essay: Pedagogical Implications

2016 ◽  
pp. 199
Author(s):  
Margarita Esther Sánchez Cuervo
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Rhetorical Figures ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Composition Classes ◽  
Short Essay

The teaching of the literary essay is usually ignored in many universities due to its probing and inconclusive form which has not favoured the existence of models of analysis. However, the argumentative nature of this discourse can be examined through a reading that allows the recognition of some rhetorical operations like the invention of arguments (inuentio), their arrangement (dispositio) and expressive manifestation (elocutio). This article proposes a model of analysis following this rhetorical approach. In particular, I apply this analysis to a short essay by Virginia Woolf, ‘Royalty’. Woolf has been considered a major writer of the twentieth century. Although the style of her novels has been extensively researched from diverse perspectives, the style of her essays has not received much critical attention. Throughout my study, I indicate how the recognition and interpretation of arguments and rhetorical figures can help to define the style of this essay. Furthermore, I provide some guidelines for the identification and further interpretation of these rhetorical elements. Both the analysis and the guidelines can be useful in the literature and composition classes.

Henry James's Capricciosa: Christina Light in Roderick Hudson and The Princess Casamassima

PMLA ◽  
1960 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. E. Grenander
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Train Of Thought ◽  
Special Case

In recent years, critical attention has focussed increasingly on The Princess Casamassima, Henry James's novel of the international revolutionary movement seething beneath the surface of society. The sad wisdom of the mid-twentieth century no longer finds incredible the plot earlier critics dismissed as footling melodrama; and with a recognition of its probability, students of James have undertaken a re-examination of the whole novel. Oddly enough, however, little attention has been paid to its reliance on Roderick Hudson, where the Princess Casamassima first appears. The one significant exception has been a short essay by Louise Bogan, though Christina's complexity and interest have attracted other writers. Yet Roderick Hudson deserves study for its own merits; and, as Miss Bogan has pointed out, the character of the Princess is difficult to interpret unless one also remembers her as Christina Light. It is not true, as Miss Bogan asserts (p. 472), that Christina is “the only figure [James] ever ‘revived’ and carried from one book to another,” for not only do Madame Grandoni and the Prince Casamassima share her transposition; the sculptor Gloriani, who makes his debut in Roderick Hudson, reappears in The Ambassadors. But it is true, as Cargill more accurately points out (p. 108), that “Christina is the only major [italics mine] character that James ever revived from an earlier work,” for he questioned the wisdom of indulging wholesale the writer's “revivalist impulse” to “go on with a character.” Hence Christina Light must have struck him as a very special case. He tells us that he felt, “toward the end of ‘Roderick,‘ that the Princess Casamassima had been launched, that, wound-up with the right silver key, she would go on a certain time by the motion communicated” (AN, p. 18). In the Preface to The Princess Casamassima he continues this train of thought: Christina Light, “extremely disponible” and knowing herself “striking, in the earlier connexion,… couldn't resign herself not to strike again” (AN, pp. 73, 74).

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Fiona Cox ◽  
Elena Theodorakopoulos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Simone Weil ◽  
Vera Brittain ◽  
Claude Cahun

The first half of this introduction provides some context for the variety of women’s responses to the Homeric epics discussed in the volume by tracing the origins of these responses back to earlier authors including Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, and Claude Cahun. It also discusses the paucity of critical attention paid to women’s receptions of Homer, and demonstrates how much is to be gained by rereading the Iliad and the Odyssey through the work of women writers since the early twentieth century. The second half offers an overview of the approaches and figures selected for discussion, women as diverse as Simone Weil and Kate Tempest, as Francisca Aguirre and Barbara Köhler, working in a variety of genres and radically altering the landscape of classical reception.

‘The well-known, old, but still unbeaten track’: Women Poets and Irish Periodical Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Mulhall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Irish Women ◽  
Under Construction

While neglected Irish male poets of the mid century have seen some recuperation in recent decades, the work of Irish women poets still languishes in obscurity. A growing body of scholarship has identified the need to bring critical attention to bear on this substantial body of work. In this essay I explore the positioning of Irish women poets in mid-century periodical culture, to flesh out the ways in which the terms of this ‘forgetting’ are already established within the overwhelmingly masculinist homosocial suppositions and idioms that characterized contemporary debates about the proper lineage and aesthetic norms for the national literary culture that was then under construction. Within the terms set by those debates, the woman writer was caught in the double bind that afflicted any woman wishing to engage in a public, politicized forum in post-revolutionary Ireland. While women poets engage in sporadic or oblique terms with such literary and cultural debates, more often their voices are absent from these dominant discourses – the logic of this absence has continued in the occlusion of these women poets from the national poetic canon.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Physics ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Drawing on Gillian Beer’s suggestion that literature and science ‘share the moment’s discourse’, the Introduction sets out the approach adopted across this study as a whole as one which will combine, but also distinguish between, the two standard approaches within the field of literature and science: direct influence and the zeitgeist. Rejecting the previous critical focus on 1919 in studies of Albert Einstein’s cultural impact in favour of 1905, it argues for a more precise engagement with the scientific ideas, as well as a clearer acknowledgement of similar ideas across a broader range of disciplines in the early twentieth century. It also highlights Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence as particularly apt literary figures for such a study, given their complicated individual relationships with the science of their day, relationships which combine a dislike of science in general with more positive responses to the new physics.

The Ancient Prehistory of Modern Adults

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Hilda Doolittle ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter considers some of the ways in which the association between childhood and antiquity has been conceptualized and elaborated in works for adults, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century. Memories of formative encounters by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and the poet and novelist H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) set the stage for a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis, the scholarly theories of Jane Harrison, and the works of James Joyce, H.D., Mary Butts, Naomi Mitchison, and Virginia Woolf. The practice of archaeology and the knowledge of Greek emerge as key elements in distinctly gendered visions of the relationship between modern lives and the classical past.

Modernist Dante

2021 ◽  
pp. 633-650
Author(s):  
Daniela Caselli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
First Century ◽  
Djuna Barnes ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces a history of Dante’s reception in anglophone literature between the 1870s and the 1950s. It acknowledges his importance in Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, but engages more closely with Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, and Virginia Woolf. It shows that the modernist Dante that emerges from these authors’ work is both a formal and political one: recruited as an anti-authoritarian voice from the past and seen anew from feminist and queer perspectives, this is not a twenty-first century Dante forced against his will to virtue-signal, however; on the contrary, this is a Dante anachronistically familiar with key ‘vices’ of twentieth-century authors, readers and commentators. Focusing on sullenness, resistance, and fatigue, the chapter argues for a new understanding of modernist experiments with Dante’s political and formal complexity that refuse to use him as a ‘code or a weapon […] to crush someone’, as Dorothy Richardson put it.

scholarly journals Inside the Box: Photography and the Portfolio Format

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Molly Kalkstein
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Limited Edition

Photography portfolios—published sets of loose photographs housed in a folder or box—have been produced continuously since at least the 1850s, but have rarely received serious critical attention as a distinct format. This thesis focuses on mid-twentieth-century limited edition portfolios and argues that they were informed by, and have contributed to, developments in photography more broadly. It provides a historical survey of the photography portfolio; considers its material, expressive, and commercial qualities, particularly in comparison to the photography book; and presents five case studies comprising eight portfolios produced between 1940 and 1972: Paul Strand’s Photographs of Mexico (1940) and The Mexican Portfolio (1967); Ansel Adams’s Portfolio One (1948); Berenice Abbott’s 20 Photographs by Eugène Atget 1856–1927 (1956); Lee Friedlander and Jim Dine’s Photographs & Etchings (1969); and Les Krims’s The Deerslayers, The Little People of America 1971, and The Incredible Case of the Stack O’Wheats Murders (1972).

scholarly journals Virginia Woolf: Between writing and disease

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josep Ballester-Roca ◽  
Noelia Ibarra
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Literary Legacy

The authors offer an analysis of mental illness in the work of a key twentieth century author: Virginia Woolf. A critical review of her literary legacy allows us to get closer to what might be one of the most intense literary portrayals of illness and its metaphors and, at the same time, to the representations, euphemisms, silences, and monsters depicted in the chapters of her life and in the unique voice of an essential author.

The Ecology of English Time

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-178
Author(s):  
Beryl Pong
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
World War ◽  
Alternative Account ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
Four Quartets ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Second World

At a time when the English landscape was mobilized—both materially and in the cultural imagination—for fighting the Second World War, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot fashioned their most ‘English’ works, Between the Acts (1941) and Four Quartets (1935–42) respectively. Building on extant scholarship surrounding the writers’ temporal and environmental concerns, Chapter 6 provides an alternative account of the writers’ supposed national insularity as one inflected by pacifist and internationalist motivations. Tracing the study of ecology as it was historically intertwined with cosmopolitical inquiry in the twentieth century, the chapter reveals ways in which the writers’ late modernist works uphold Anglocentric exceptionalism but, also, provide diversified understandings of time and place to convey international belonging.

‘Quivering yet still’: Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry and the Aesthetics of Attention

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-75
Author(s):  
Claudia Tobin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Communication Technologies ◽  
Still Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Physical Presence ◽  
The Relationship

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

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