Silvae Morales (1492)

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul White
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Moral Themes ◽  
Literary Techniques

This chapter provides a close reading of Badius’s commentary methods in an early work, the Silvae morales (1492). This is a compilation of twelve books of poetry excerpts grouped around various moral themes and accompanied by a substantial commentary. Badius’s focus was primarily on the Latin classics (the moral epigrams of pseudo­Virgil, the Odes and Epistles of Horace, the Annales of Ennius, and the satires of Juvenal and Persius); but the later books also contain works by fifteenth­century humanist authors (Mantuan’s Contra poetas, Sulpizio’s Carmen iuvenile) and some of the mainstays of the medieval grammar curriculum (Cato’s distichs and the Parabolae of Alain de Lille). The chapter focuses in particular on the literary techniques Badius used to situate his text within certain traditions, and on his manipulation of ‘silva’ symbolism throughout the work to guide the reader’s encounter with the text.

scholarly journals Wordplay, mindplay: Fan fiction and postclassical narratology

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veerle Van Steenhuyse
Keyword(s):  
Jane Austen ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Fan Fiction ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Postclassical Narratology ◽  
Literary Techniques

Recent narrative theories on story worlds, or the worlds evoked by narratives, call attention to the process of fan reading and the role which the canon plays in that process. This paper posits that such theories can help us understand literary techniques that make a difference on the level of the reading experience that is implied by fan fiction texts. This is illustrated with a close reading of Naguabo's "The Mother of All Marriage Proposals," a Jane Austen fic.

Frederick Douglass and Scotland, 1846

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Pettinger
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Main Part ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Literary Techniques

Frederick Douglass (1818–95) was not the only fugitive from American slavery to visit Scotland before the Civil War, but he was the best known and his impact was far-reaching. In 1846 his stunning oratory drew enthusiastic crowds from Ayr to Aberdeen who came to hear him promote his new autobiography and deliver the abolitionist message. Although the main part of the book is framed by accounts of the racist discrimination Douglass faced on both his outward and return sea voyages, it does not offer a chronological narrative of his speaking engagements in Scotland. Rather, each of the three central chapters focus on a different set of encounters with notable Scots in order to demonstrate the vital role they played in the transformation of Douglass from a subordinate envoy of a white-run abolitionist society to an independent antislavery campaigner in his own right. In particular, they prompted far-reaching changes in his styles of speaking and writing, in his choice of heroes and how he identified with them, and in the new fervour with which he attempted to control the way he was represented verbally and pictorially. Situated at the intersection of biography, history and literature, it applies literary techniques of close reading to materials normally treated as historical documents, such as letters and newspaper reports, in order to draw out the subtleties of Douglass's changing attitudes, ideas and affiliations.

scholarly journals L’écoute musicale et ses enjeux dans Conversations avec le maître de Cécile Wajsbrot

Neophilologus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annelies Schulte Nordholt
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Verbal Expression ◽  
Musical Listening ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Techniques

Abstract Conversations avec le maître, the first volume of a series called ‘Haute mer’, is a novel about the experience of listening to music. Through conversations between a composer and an anonymous young woman, it conveys crucial aspects of musical listening and of its verbal expression. This article examines the functioning of dialogue between the two characters; moreover, it studies the relationship between creation and reception, as expressed in the novel. It also examines what is at stake in this dialogue: the power of art in its relation to reality, to History. How may music become the echo of contemporary catastrophes? The article offers a close reading of the novel’s descriptions of listening to music: what literary techniques enable the author to put it into words?

Kierkegaard and the Self-Conscious Literary Tradition: An Interpretation of the Ludic Aspects of Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship from a Literary-Historical Perspective

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julio Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Present Contribution ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Literary Techniques ◽  
Metaphysical Principle ◽  
The Way

AbstractKierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship is characterized by a profusion of literary techniques that belong to the tradition of the ludic or selfconscious novel (the fiction that makes its fictionality manifest). In the present contribution the self-conscious literary plays carried out by Kierkegaard will be interpreted from the perspective of the philosophy of the subject, since both the self-conscious novel and Kierkegaard’s production can be related to this philosophical tradition. The article is organized as follows: first appears a very brief sketch of the way in which self-conscious literature and the philosophy of the subject are related. After this, follows a commentary on the notion of individuality in On the Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard’s dissertation is read as a work in the tradition of the philosophy of the subject that, at the same time, surpasses the idea of subjectivity as metaphysical principle. Finally, a close reading of Either/Or intends to show how Kierkegaard develops his ideas about subjectivity in a literary frame-that of the self-conscious novel

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.

‘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.

On the Primacy of Matter: Neoplatonism Right-Side Up

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Tritten
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
After Effect ◽  
The One

This chapter provides a close reading of Schelling’s early commentary on Plato’s Timaeus and then contrasts this reading with Neoplatonism’s, particularly Proclus’, understanding of this same text. While Neoplatonism views being according to a hierarchy of degradation or descent, with matter at the bottom, Schelling affirms that being potentiates itself into higher and greater degrees of order such that matter is not the last but the first. He is able to do this, however, only by rejecting the Platonic notion of participation. For Schelling, the participating acquires an independence from the participated so that an effect can be greater than its cause and, moreover, the effect exerts a retroactive after effect on the cause. The identity of a cause or antecedent is only constituted in and through its consequents. If matter is said to process from the One, then matter, in turn, is the consequent condition of the identity of the One as one rather than as many.

Transformation and Education in GDR Youth Literature: A Script Theory Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Jean E. Conacher
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Script Theory ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Youth Literature

Youth literature within the German Democratic Republic (GDR) officially enjoyed equal status with adult literature, with authors often writing for both audiences. Such parity of esteem pre-supposed that youth literature would also adopt the cultural–political frameworks designed to nurture the establishment of socialism on German soil. In their quest to forge a legitimate national literature capable of transforming the population, politicians and writers drew repeatedly upon the cultural heritage of Weimar classicism and the Bildungsroman, Humboldtian educational traditions and Soviet-inspired models of socialist realism. Adopting a script theory approach inspired by Jean Matter Mandler, this article explores how directive cultural policies lead to the emergence of multiple scripts which inform the nature and narrative of individual works. Three broad ideological scripts within GDR youth literature are identified which underpin four distinct narrative scripts employed by individual writers to support, challenge and ultimately subvert the primacy of the Bildungsroman genre. A close reading of works by Strittmatter, Pludra, Görlich, Tetzner and Saalmann reveals further how conceptual blending with classical and fairy-tale scripts is exploited to legitimise and at times mask critique of transformation and education inside and outside the classroom and to offer young protagonists a voice often denied their readers.

Patrick Kavanagh and the Authentic ‘Dispensation’: Rereading the Role of Narrator in The Great Hunger

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Kilcoyne
Keyword(s):  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Peasant Farmer ◽  
Nineteen Forties ◽  
Death Knell

This essay posits a challenge to the continued reading of The Great Hunger (1942) as a realist depiction of the Irish small-farming class in the nineteen forties. The widespread critical acceptance of the poem as a socio-historical ‘documentary’ both relies upon and propagates an outmoded notion of authenticity based upon the implicit fallacy that Kavanagh's body of work designates a quintessence of Irishness in contradistinction to his Revivalist predecessors. In 1959 Kavanagh referred to this delusion as constituting his ‘dispensation’, for indeed it did provide a poetic niche for the young poet. Kavanagh's acknowledgement of this dispensation came with his rejection of all prescriptive literary symbols. While this iconoclasm is widely recognised in his later career, the relevance of The Great Hunger to this question continues to be overlooked. In fact, this poem contains his strongest dialectic upon the use of symbols – such as the peasant farmer – in designating an authentic national literature. The close reading of The Great Hunger offered here explores the poem's central deconstruction of ruralism and authenticity. The final ‘apocalypse of clay’ is the poem's collapse under the stress of its own deconstructed symbolism; the final scream sounds the death knell to Kavanagh's adherence to his authentic dispensation.

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