Bridging the Gulf, Taking the Risk: an Exploration of "Relationships" in Katherine Mansfield's 'Juliet', 'Brave Love', and 'Prelude'

<p>The introduction of this thesis examines Katherine Mansfield’s belief that elements of a fictional work should be “related”. Passages in her literary reviews, journals, and letters state or imply her conviction that such related elements demonstrate the thinking, exploring author’s control of the text and express the author’s ideas and vision. The introduction also suggests that Mansfield’s actual “relationship” methods (as shown in the examined texts) are typical of modernist practice. The thesis then explores such methods in three of Mansfield’s earlier episodic fictions: ‘Juliet’ (written 1906–1907), ‘Brave Love’ (completed early 1915); and ‘Prelude’ (written 1915 to 1917). Chapter one introduces the “relationship” methods by a reading of the 1907 vignette ‘In the Botanical Gardens’; it then explores the techniques used in ‘Juliet’ and ‘Brave Love’, finding some similarity in the approaches. Chapter two is a section-by-section reading of ‘Prelude’, based on developments of some techniques established in chapter one. The thesis’s primary focus on each work’s ways of relating textual elements continues an approach begun by the New Critics but without their tendency to single out a main character, central symbol, and fixed meaning. Here, the argument recognises critical discussions highlighting the binary and the fluid in Mansfield’s works and the works’ alignment with both expressionism and impressionism. The resulting readings of the three works demonstrate Mansfield’s increasingly skilful techniques of “bridging the gulf” between disparate aspects of experience to achieve the modernist aim of variety and unity. The texts set up standard oppositions (such as conventionality/unconventionality, naivety/cynicism, master/servant, adult/child) and subvert them ironically. Characters on either side are associated with symbols and myths of vulnerability and power to depict how those characters both exercise and are shaped by forces, which may be social, biological, creative, or others more mysterious. These three stories of Mansfield’s adolescence and early adulthood implicitly question (given the pervasiveness of such forces) whether free choice and clear vision are possible, which potentials of identity can be realised, and what is the nature of existence itself. These readings demonstrate the achievement of Mansfield’s own requirements that fiction should be exploratory: the texts appear in the last resort to be philosophical in intent, “adventures of the soul”.</p>

Bridging the Gulf, Taking the Risk: an Exploration of "Relationships" in Katherine Mansfield's 'Juliet', 'Brave Love', and 'Prelude'

<p>The introduction of this thesis examines Katherine Mansfield’s belief that elements of a fictional work should be “related”. Passages in her literary reviews, journals, and letters state or imply her conviction that such related elements demonstrate the thinking, exploring author’s control of the text and express the author’s ideas and vision. The introduction also suggests that Mansfield’s actual “relationship” methods (as shown in the examined texts) are typical of modernist practice. The thesis then explores such methods in three of Mansfield’s earlier episodic fictions: ‘Juliet’ (written 1906–1907), ‘Brave Love’ (completed early 1915); and ‘Prelude’ (written 1915 to 1917). Chapter one introduces the “relationship” methods by a reading of the 1907 vignette ‘In the Botanical Gardens’; it then explores the techniques used in ‘Juliet’ and ‘Brave Love’, finding some similarity in the approaches. Chapter two is a section-by-section reading of ‘Prelude’, based on developments of some techniques established in chapter one. The thesis’s primary focus on each work’s ways of relating textual elements continues an approach begun by the New Critics but without their tendency to single out a main character, central symbol, and fixed meaning. Here, the argument recognises critical discussions highlighting the binary and the fluid in Mansfield’s works and the works’ alignment with both expressionism and impressionism. The resulting readings of the three works demonstrate Mansfield’s increasingly skilful techniques of “bridging the gulf” between disparate aspects of experience to achieve the modernist aim of variety and unity. The texts set up standard oppositions (such as conventionality/unconventionality, naivety/cynicism, master/servant, adult/child) and subvert them ironically. Characters on either side are associated with symbols and myths of vulnerability and power to depict how those characters both exercise and are shaped by forces, which may be social, biological, creative, or others more mysterious. These three stories of Mansfield’s adolescence and early adulthood implicitly question (given the pervasiveness of such forces) whether free choice and clear vision are possible, which potentials of identity can be realised, and what is the nature of existence itself. These readings demonstrate the achievement of Mansfield’s own requirements that fiction should be exploratory: the texts appear in the last resort to be philosophical in intent, “adventures of the soul”.</p>

Robert Lowell, the New Critics, and the “Unforgivable Landscape” of Liberalism

This essay argues that Robert Lowell’s poetry demonstrates a critical engagement with the liberal individual that he is not often given credit for. By examining Lowell’s handling of the pathetic fallacy, whereby the external landscape is made to match the mood of the observer, the essay reveals a critique of the historical formation of American individualism, visible in how Lowell connects the literary historical tropes he is employing to the history of American “imperial” violence. This is first shown through a close reading of “Mouth of the Hudson.” The essay connects Lowell’s view to those of his New Critical mentors, such as John Crowe Ransom, for whom the individual of the liberal political order is entwined with the history of Puritan iconoclasm and Romantic views of the poetic subject. It argues that Ransom’s critique parallels those of later critics, such as Marjorie Perloff, David Antin, and Maria Damon, who see Lowell’s poetic self as both solipsistic and symptomatic of an American liberal ideology. Demonstrating that Lowell’s views were formed by a critique of liberal individualism, it then attempts to show how Lowell moved beyond this in his later work, harnessing a depiction of the poetic subject’s individual experience to a critique of individualism itself as manifested in the American political worldview of the Cold War era. It reads “Beyond the Alps” as a demonstration of the way Lowell is able to wed both critique and depiction of individuality together through a self-aware handling of the poetic landscape.

A Critical Controversy: Reader-Response Theoreticians Opposing New Critics

The present study is theoretically oriented proposing to re-read some major tenets of the New Critics and the reader-response critics in an attempt to reconsider the objective theory of the New Critics to test whether it is sufficient in catering for all aspects of a text. It works via the exploration of both protocols set by a number of the major founders of both theories aiming to reveal the oppositions, commonalities as well as undeclared similarities. The critical controversy will thus be brought to light, in a bid to point out the shortcomings of each approach. Throughout this exploration, the study demonstrates that the ontological approach of the New Critics becomes incomplete and doubtful. It proves that the New Critics’ ‘affective fallacy’ has sprouted the postmodern theory of the reader-response criticism where the reader is no longer a passive recipient, but an active agent who fills in the blanks and formulates meanings. Thus, the study concludes by proving that there are some commonalities between the New Critics and the Reader-response adherents highlighting the triumph of the latter in undermining the New Critics’ objectivity. The significance of the study lies in adopting the reader-response approach per se in the re-reading of the New Critics’ doctrines where the researcher comes up with new findings that testifies the crucial role of the reader/researcher in the production of new interpretations. The study concludes with some recommendations for further use.

Terrance Hayes

This chapter presents Terrance Hayes as a contemporary poet who continues to implement and push back against lyric reading as handed down and evolving from the New Critics. It recounts the experiments of Hayes's first book that began with a simple desire to challenge, impress, and piss off the people. It mentions how Hayes's work continues to have the ambivalent self-consciousness that shapes how one writes about one's self. The chapter talks about Hayes's main comic iridescence between expression and something beyond expression. It looks at centrifugal effects of Haye's poetry that seem in excess of a poem's meaning as it affirms a view of both a mind and a lyric as taking in more than their most visible apparent subjects.

A Critical Controversy: Reader-Response Theoreticians Opposing New Critics

The present study is theoretically oriented proposing to re-read some major tenets of the New Critics and the reader-response critics in an attempt to reconsider the objective theory of the New Critics to test whether it is sufficient in catering for all aspects of a text. It works via the exploration of both protocols set by a number of the major founders of both theories aiming to reveal the oppositions, commonalities as well as undeclared similarities. The critical controversy will thus be brought to light, in a bid to point out the shortcomings of each approach. Throughout this exploration, the study demonstrates that the ontological approach of the New Critics becomes incomplete and doubtful. It proves that the New Critics’ ‘affective fallacy’ has sprouted the postmodern theory of the reader-response criticism where the reader is no longer a passive recipient, but an active agent who fills in the blanks and formulates meanings. Thus, the study concludes by proving that there are some commonalities between the New Critics and the Reader-response adherents highlighting the triumph of the latter in undermining the New Critics’ objectivity. The significance of the study lies in adopting the reader-response approach per se in the re-reading of the New Critics’ doctrines where the researcher comes up with new findings that testifies the crucial role of the reader/researcher in the production of new interpretations. The study concludes with some recommendations for further use.

Modern Manuscripts and Drafts

The presence (or absence) of compositional precursors and leftovers raise for critics and editors methodological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic questions: What gets collected and preserved? What does not—for what reasons? How can these materials be interpreted? And to what ends? A draft may refer to written materials that never attain printed form as well as early manuscript compositions and fair copies, typescripts, digital text, scribbles, doodles, leftovers, or other marginalia and extraneous materials that may or may not find their way into archives. The manuscript draft came of age following the invention of printing, although unfinished or working drafts only began to be self-consciously collected with the emergence of the state archive in the late 18th century. The draft is, therefore, intimately connected to the archival, whether the archive is taken as a material site, a discursive structure, or a depository of feeling. Any interpretation of drafts must take into account the limits and limitations of matter including the bare fact of a draft’s material existence or its absence. In the 20th and 21st centuries, there have evolved a diverse network of theoretical approaches to interpreting drafts and compositional materials. Scholars of drafts may ask questions about authorship, materiality, production, technology and media, pedagogy, social norms and conventions, ownership and capital, preservation or destruction, even ethics and ontology. However, these investigations have been most pronounced within four fields: (a) media theory, histories of the book, and historical materialisms that investigate the substance, matter, and means of production of drafts as well as the technological, pedagogical, and social norms that mediate writing, and the cultural/historical specifics of these materials and media; (b) textual editing, which establishes methods that regularize (or complicate) how scholarly editions are produced and related mid-20th century New Bibliography approaches, which illuminated some of the limitations of manuscript-and-edition blind close reading, especially by the New Critics; (c) French genetic criticism in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, which engages with French post-structuralism and psychoanalysis to look at writing as a dynamic and developmental process that has both conscious and unconscious components; and (d) legal scholarship and debates concerning rights to ownership and possession of manuscripts and drafts and their publication, which developed between the 17th and 21st century. These discussions, and their elaboration within national and international legislation, resulted in the invention of copyright, moral rights, and changed understanding of legal rights to privacy and property as well as a division between material and intellectual property, the use and destruction of that property, and the delineation of rights of the dead or the dead’s descendants. The draft manuscript came to be endowed with multiple bodies, both fictive and actual, for which individuals, institutions, corporations, and even nations or the world at large, were granted partial ownership or responsibility. From the late 19th century, the catastrophic legacy of modern warfare and its technologies, including censorship, as well as movements in historical preservation, cultural heritage, and ethics have affected policies regarding ownership and the conservancy of drafts. The emergence of digital and on-line textual production/dissemination/preservation in the late 20th and 21st centuries have broadly transformed the ways that drafts may be attended to and even thought. Drafts must finally be seen to have a complex and intimate relationship to the authorial body and to embodiment, materiality, subjectivity, and writing more generally. Drafts—particularly unread, missing, or destroyed drafts—lie at the border between the dead object and living text. As such, the purposeful destruction of drafts and manuscripts initiates an ontological and ethical crisis that raises questions about the relationship between writing and being, process and product, body and thing.

Depersonalization: Deconstructing Eliot’s Notion in The Waste Land

Through a re-reading and a reassessment of Thomas Stearns Eliot’s (1888–1965) masterpiece The Waste Land (1922), the present paper aims at recycling the poem with new polysemy. By using specific methods of the psychoanalytic approach, this study demonstrates that many details about the text and its context are marginalized if read through the objective protocols of Eliot/the New Critics. Thus, the present paper is devoted to re-reading the text subjectively to deconstruct Eliot's “impersonal theory” in catering efficiently for the author’s presence. The conclusion will prove that the text is highly charged with personal tones, and consequently deviates from his theory of “Depersonalization,” thereby proving an authorial presence.

Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity

“Fantasies of Belonging, Fears of Precarity” considers the politics of late twentieth-century feminist reclamation work in modernist literary studies. Many prolific women artists were doubly left behind, first by the New Critics, and then, several generations later, by feminist scholars who, in their work recovering women artists lost to New Criticism’s masculinist narrative did not find a place for them in what quickly became a narrow, and predictable, feminist canon. This chapter focuses on Amy Lowell and Edith Sitwell, women whose multiple roles as poets, editors, and critics allowed them significant access to power and with it, the opportunity to mentor and support other women. And yet, as the chapter demonstrates, they did not. Despite rich personal relationships with women, neither Sitwell nor Lowell had significant or lasting professional relationships with other women. Their subsequent exclusion from feminist modernist literary criticism perhaps tells us as much about the identifications and interests that drove late twentieth-century feminist recovery work as it does about the inclusion of more now-canonical figures.

Hearing It Right

Chapter 24 presents a genealogy of the impulse toward metrical abstraction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offering a brief survey of approaches to metrical abstraction that have shaped the modern metrical imagination. These approaches take abstract meter as their starting point. It examines the return, in the first half of the twentieth century, to theories that tried to avoid the complications introduced by emphasizing voiced particularities of rhythm; these theories resisted earlier syntheses of meter with music. For the New Critics, at least, the reader is in “a better position” to offer a rhythmically “meaningful” reading if he or she “recognizes the meter.”