scholarly journals Philia and neikos in Keats’s 'Song of four faeries'

Literator ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-120
Author(s):  
A.C. Swanepoel
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Natural Processes ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Element Theory

Despite the fact that Keats’s “Song of four faeries” received very little critical attention, the poem raises interesting issues regarding the creative and destructive forces in nature. The poem presents a conversation between the four elemental faeries about union and separation. Using Empedocles’ four-element theory of creation and change in nature as framework, this article explores through close reading how the form and content of the poem mirror creative and destructive natural processes. It concludes that both Empedocles’ concepts “philia” (the creative force), and “neikos” (the destructive force), feature in both form and content, but that “philia” is more prevalent in the form, whereas “neikos” is expressed mostly in the content of the poem. Furthermore, the natural changes presented in the poem suggest themselves in the form of the poem before they become evident in its content.

‘Swerving as I swerve’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Fugitive Empathy

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Sarah Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Rainy Season ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Critical Attention

This chapter excavates the structures of empathy and indirection in Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, and considers the productive tensions between them. It begins with an analysis of the three prose poems collected under the title ‘Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics’ (1967), that have been subject to scant critical attention to date. The essay undertakes a close reading of the missed connections, glancing blows and altered trajectories of the denizens of the Rainy Season poems, exploring concepts of transitivity and intra-species empathy in the poems’ ecological framing. Bishop’s manifest sympathy for nature’s ‘radical misfits’ is set within a broader account of her poetics, drawing on recent phenomenological interventions into literary criticism.

scholarly journals Medical Dehumanisation in Sylvia Plath's Late Poems

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edit Gálla
Keyword(s):  
Medical Practitioner ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Medical Encounter ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Violent Conflicts

The denial of the humanness of certain individuals or groups has long been a source of violent conflicts, atrocities, and exploitation. It was only recently, however, that the more subtle and implicit forms of dehumanisation attracted critical attention. In certain social contexts, any individual can be subjected to treatment that negates his or her human qualities.The medical encounter can be identified as a situation in which the individual often feels deprived of human qualities. Medical dehumanisation is often alluded to in Sylvia Plath’s late poems, but it is explicitly foregrounded in “Tulips” and “The Surgeon at 2a.m.” While the first poem depicts the process of dehumanisation from the perspective of the patient complicit in her objectification, the second conveys the dehumanising attitudes of the medical practitioner. Through the close reading of these poems, this paper argues that medical dehumanisation turns individuals, not into machines which can never completely lose their functionality, but into functionless, inert matter.

From “German Wolfhounds” to “Ordinary People”

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 65-89
Author(s):  
Or Rogovin
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
National Character ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
James Phelan

Abstract The image of the perpetrator in Israeli Holocaust fiction changed fundamentally in the mid-1980s: from one-dimensional Nazi beasts, typical of earlier Israeli writing, to humanized individuals, whose vulnerability and multidimensionality may blur the divide between victims and victimizers. This development, which corresponds to similar patterns in other literatures (e.g., George Steiner’s Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.; Jonathan Littell’s Kindly Ones) has received relatively little critical attention, and it is discussed here through a close reading of major Israeli works of fiction—Ka-Tzetnik’s Salamandra, David Grossman’s See Under: Love, A. B. Yehoshua’s Mr. Mani—as well as more minor texts. Using theoretical work in narrative (E. M. Forster, James Phelan) and imagology (Manfred Beller and Joep Leerssen on German national character), this article formulates the recent shift in modes of perpetrator characterization in terms of its poetics and its place in Israel’s literary history.

Is There No Gomorrah?

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-302
Author(s):  
Brandy Daniels ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Identity Studies ◽  
Ethical Approach ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Narrative Performance ◽  
Christian Practices

Ecclesial practices have long served as a resource in and for Christian ethical scholarship; drawing on both the postliberal tradition and critical identity studies, a number of contemporary theologians and ethicists have turned to ecclesial practices as a liberative resource for marginalized identities and oppressed communities. Through a close reading of two contemporary examples of this ethical approach, this essay outlines and critically examines how Christian identity, belonging, and practice function discursively, subsuming difference into religious sameness, in ways that perpetuate the systemic and social injustices they aim to address and combat. Drawing on recent critiques of the theo-ethical turns to practice by Katie Grimes and Lauren Winner, and on feminist philosopher Lynne Huffer’s ethics of narrative performance, this essay proposes a more critical attention to difference for and within ethical turns to Christian practices, and begins to outline potential paths forward.

Jazz, dementia, and moments of meeting

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
Kate White
Keyword(s):  
Personal Account ◽  
Dementia Diagnosis ◽  
Emotional Connection ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Family Living

Playful jazz improvisations and singing continue in creating the gift of emotional connection in a family living with Alzheimer’s. Sharing their poignant reflections provides a personal account of the centrality of music in reaching each other at a feeling level throughout the course of their lives. The recognition of music as a powerful and creative force for all of us, particularly when there is a dementia diagnosis, is explored.

DANGEROUS GEOLOGICAL (NATURAL) PROCESSES IN THE AREA OF DERBENT (cause and investigation)

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 90-99
Author(s):  
Idrisov I.A. ◽  
◽  
Suleymanov V.K. ◽  
Cherkashin V.I. ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Processes

Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

Comparing Comparisons: Political Implications of Different Notions of Difference

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Glenn Odom
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
David Damrosch ◽  
Location Point

With the rise of the American world literature movement, questions surrounding the politics of comparative practice have become an object of critical attention. Taking China, Japan and the West as examples, the substantially different ideas of what comparison ought to do – as exhibited in comparative literary and cultural studies in each location – point to three distinct notions of the possible interactions between a given nation and the rest of the world. These contrasting ideas can be used to reread political debates over concrete juridical matters, thereby highlighting possible resolutions. This work follows the calls of Ming Xie and David Damrosch for a contextualization of different comparative practices around the globe.

‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Woolf, Deleuze and Difference

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
To The Lighthouse

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

Resonance in Dhvani Aesthetics and the Deleuzian Logic of Sensation

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Time Image

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.

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