Tito Dorčić as a Forerunner of the Ironic Mode

According to Northrop Frye, 20th-century literature is marked by characters whose intelligence and capabilities are lesser than those of the average human. Typical such figures are the protagonists of Kafka’s and Beckett’s works, who lack even the most basic information regarding their own position – due to which the reader has the sense of looking down on scenes of bondage, frustration or absurdity. Vjenceslav Novak’s Tito Dorčić, from the eponymous novel, is a forerunner of this type of character. He is trapped by his own predisposition and social environment and becomes unhappy in the "better life" imposed on him by his father. He is utterly unsuccessful in his career as well as in his family life. 20th-century interpreters found the cause of Tito’s state, or the source for such a character, in Darwinist theories supposedly praised by the novel’s author; a more recent critic emphasises the psychoanalytic motifs. Both theories unconsciously bear witness to the reduced power of the action of the protagonist. The novel’s final scene, in which Tito Dorčić’s left leg is stuck in a crevice whilst the upper part of his body immersed in the sea is a metaphor of his entire life. The scapegoat mechanism, as proposed by René Girard, also explains the events in Tito Dorčić’s life: the social crisis is seemingly only slightly present, yet Tito is depicted as a person holding a position in the judicial administration which, because of his low intelligence, immorality and lack of cultural refinement, he does not deserve. He commits mistakes in his prosecutor’s work and is punished because an innocent person has been hanged. Tito had previously been marked by the collapse of his marriage. Eventually, he loses his job, falls into madness, which might also be an act of selfpunishment, and at the end, he dies. The text, or the narrator, kills him, in the last step in the long procedure of attacking the protagonist.

The Modern Major Remodelling of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas

Following the success of The Gondoliers (1889), Gilbert wrote to Sullivan: ‘It gives one the chance of shining right through the twentieth century.’ However, while this prophecy was largely fulfilled, clouds of cultural disapproval have darkened over the Savoy operas since the start of the present century, especially with regard to the mockery of women's education at the heart of Princess Ida (1884) and, most pointedly, the demeaning and ostensibly racist depiction of the Japanese in The Mikado (1885). On the other hand, the largely overlooked Utopia, Limited (1893) has experienced a boom in productions over the last decade, seemingly due to its subject matter, which, as one recent critic put it, make it ‘an anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist comic opera’. He also argues that, while some of the traditional performance practices associated with The Mikado ought to be re-evaluated, recent objections to the spirit of the opera as a whole are not entirely justified, and that a re-evaluation of the validity of some (but not all) of the performance practices traditionally associated with The Mikado is both just and timely. Alan Fischler is a Professor of English at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. He is the author of Modified Rapture: Comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy Operas (University of Virginia Press, 1991) and ‘Drama’ in the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (2014), among many other articles on Gilbert and nineteenth-century theatre.

The Politics of a Good Picture: Race, Class, and Form in Jeff Wall's Mimic

Mimic (1982) is an early and much discussed picture by the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, with the discussion centering largely on two topics: its subject matter and its setting (fig. 1). The subject is racism, and in this regard Mimic is “characteristic,” as Wall's best critic, Michael Fried, has observed, “of Wall's engagement in his art of the 1980s with social issues” (Why 235). Subsequently, as Fried also notes, “Wall has tended to distance himself from the overtly political concerns that are front and center in works like Mimic” (64). Indeed, in recent interviews Wall has insisted on this distance, remarking, for example, that “[t]wenty-five years ago I thought subject matter had some significance in itself” and going on to say that “Mimic was about racism in some way, about hostile gestures between races, but I'm glad the picture itself is good and it doesn't need that to be successful. Now I try to eliminate any additional subject matter—those things are for other people, they're not my problem” (Denes). His point here is not exactly that Mimic isn't antiracist—actually, its antiracism is so obvious and uncontroversial that a recent critic, Régis Michel, has complained that it “verges on political correctness” (63). The idea is rather that the success of the picture—the fact that it's a “good” picture—has nothing to do with those politics. Which leaves open the question of whether the picture's success has nothing to do with any politics or nothing to do with the particular politics of antiracism. In other words, is the picture's success independent of politics as such? Or is there a politics of the good picture?

Postmodern More

Thomas More is often called a “humanist,” and rightly so if the word has its usual meaning in scholarship on the Renaissance. “Humanist” has by now acquired so many different and contradictory meanings, however, that it needs to be applied carefully to the likes of More. Many postmodernists tend to use the word, pejoratively, to mean someone who believes in an autonomous self, the stability of words, reason, and the possibility of determinable meanings. Without quite arguing that More was a postmodernist avant la lettre, this essay suggests that he was not a “humanist” who stalks the pages of much recent postmodernist theory and that in fact even while remaining a devout Catholic and sensible lawyer he was quite as aware as any recent critic of the slipperiness of human selves and human language. It is time that literary critics tightened up their definition of “humanist,” especially when writing about the Renaissance.

Inspirational Fictions: Autobiography and Generic Reflexivity in Ovid's Proems

When the first edition of theMetamorphosesappeared in the bookshops of Rome, Ovid had already made a name for himself in the literary circles of the city. His literary début, theAmoves, immediately established his reputation as a poetic Lothario, as it lured his tickled readers into a typically Ovidian world of free-wheeling elegiac love, light-hearted hedonism, and (more or less) adept adultery. Connoisseurs of elegiac poetry could then enjoy hisHeroides, vicariously sharing stirring emotional turmoil with various heroines of history and mythology, who were here given a literary forum for voicing bitter feelings of loss and deprivation and expressing their strong hostility towards the epic way of life. Of more practical application for the Roman lady of the world were his verses on toiletry, theMedicamina Faciei, and once Ovid had discovered his talent for didactic expositionà la mode Ovidienne, he blithely continued in that vein. In perusing the urbane and sophisticated lessons on love which the self-proclaimederotodidaskalospresented in hisArs Amatoria, his (male and female) audience could hone their own amatory skills, while at the same time experiencing true Barthianjouissancein the act of reading a work, which is, as a recent critic put it, ‘a poem about poetry, and sex, and poetry as sex’. And after these extensive sessions in poetic philandering, his readers, having become hopeless and desperate eros-addicts, surely welcomed the thoughtful antidote Ovid offered in the form of the therapeuticRemedia Amoris, a poem written with the expressed purpose of freeing the wretched lover from the baneful shackles of Cupid.

“Yet Many of These Are Askew”: On Imitation, Originality, and Parody in Swinburne's Heptalogia

Algernon Charles Swinburne's Specimens of Modern Poets: The Heptalogia or The Seven Against Sense, a volume of parodic poems published in 1880, is a text that has sparked little modern criticism, and even those few remarks seem to take the volume about as seriously as contemporary critics did, seeing it essentially as a mark of Swinburne's well-known talent for imitation. Andreas Höfele, the most recent critic to mention the work, is perhaps the first to consider the work as more than a literary lark, seeing in it a self-conscious reflection upon the procedures of literary imitation, and upon Swinburne's own artistry. Höfele's valuable but rather general comments lack detailed analysis, and any greater specificity in his article only goes so far as to say that the volume aims its wit at “poetry with a message,” and has particular sport with the more “earnest” of the poets, namely Tennyson and Patmore. Jerome McGann's Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism does mention The Heptalogia in the context of Swinburne's talent for pastiche and imitation — but he places the parody volume outside of Swinburne's primary intentions: “These things [The Heptalogia and his other literary ‘hoaxes and burlesques’] are much, it is true, but they also seem, as it were, the outlying territories of an ideal center within which he would live” (80). This dismissal, on top of lack of attention to The Heptalogia, needs to be remedied, and it is the intention of this essay to do so.

III. Heroides

The question of authenticity still exercises scholars; one recent critic has even reduced the number of genuine Heroides to ten (namely 1—7, 10, 11, and 15). The poems chiefly under suspicion are 9 (Deianira), 15 (Sappho), and 16—21 (the double letters). The most cogent arguments against 9 and 16—21 are the metrical ones, but for the double letters these diminish with the later dating. The Sappho letter (15) has been transmitted separately from the rest of the Heroides; it may be that it was deliberately omitted because of its anomalous (non-mythological) subject-matter when the single and double letters were united into one collection, but there are still some linguistic oddities which need explaining. For the purpose of this discussion I have assumed that all twenty-one of the Heroides are genuine; I have also chosen to discuss the work as a single collection rather than as two separate ones.

Sapiential Structure and Figural Narrative in the Old English ‘Elene’

The Old English Elene has generally been considered Cynewulf's most successful poem; but while critics have admired specific passages in it, they have generally either ignored or patronized the poem as a whole. Thus Kemp Malone writes that in Elene, Cynewulf ‘told his tale simply and clearly as Old English poets go. Here he doubtless owed something to his Latin source ….’ The most recent editor of the text, Gradon, remarks that apart from the descriptions of the battle and the sea voyage, ‘there is little in Elene that can be shown to be original … a glance at Holthausen's composite text shows that, poetic circumlocution apart, there is little not to be found in some version of the Acta Cyriaci.’ One recent critic to deal with Elene, S. B. Greenfield, in his Critical History of Old English Literature, argues for a more sympathetic view of the poem, suggesting that ‘the struggle between good and evil that preoccupied Cynewulf is here [in Elene] presented thematically as a contrast between darkness and light, both on a physical and spiritual level’; he goes on to argue that the central episodes of the poem (i.e. Elene's quest for the cross) have a distinct literary if not necessarily poetic power.’ But Greenfield does not develop these suggestions in detail and it would, I think, be a fair summary of his discussion of the poem to say that where previous critics have been cool, Greenfield is lukewarm.

The “City Man” in The Waste Land: The Geography of Reminiscence

T. S. Eliot composed the first draft of The Waste Land at Margate and in Lausanne during the autumn of 1921, when funds secured through Ezra Pound had enabled him to take a long holiday for rest and recuperation. He sorely needed both, and in fact was under the care of a specialist at Lausanne, for overwork in his double capacity as bank clerk and man of letters had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Though we must allow that he was distressed by postwar chaos and the decay of Europe, themes of a more specific and less elevated nature were certainly among his thoughts. He could hardly escape from the news of the day, which we find reproduced plainly or masked in much of his early work; and he was, in the words of a recent critic, “preoccupied … with the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London”—Lloyd's Bank, where he held a minor post in the foreign exchange department at a starting salary of £120 per annum.

Melville and His Chimney

Despite the large body of Melville criticism, Melville's short stories still await a critical reappraisal. The attention the tales have received—and it is slight in relation to their importance—has frequently been marred by the critic's idée fixe on Melville which causes him to bend the material he works with to fit preconceived notions, or to approach Melville's symbolic art from so oblique an angle that he ignores dramatic and thematic elements central to Melville's perception. “I and My Chimney” is a significant case in point. In miniature this story embodies, among other things, several themes explored in Melville's other works, an implied criticism of America's “infatuate juvenility,” and particularly Melville's recurrent insistence upon what one recent critic has called “an inductive and empirical evaluation of experience.” In fact, “I and My Chimney” may be considered a thoroughgoing symbolic expression of Melville's basic epistemology.