‘Fanciful associations’

This article concerns the expression ‘logical phallusies’, imputed to Jacques Derrida by Barry Smith in 1992 in a letter arguing against the proposed award to Derrida of an honorary doctorate at Cambridge. Derrida insisted that this expression appeared nowhere in his oeuvre – it has never been found – and yet it has endured, in discussions of Derrida’s work and general legacy, more than any other aspect of Derrida’s ‘Cambridge Affair’. I address two cases of the expression’s weird stubbornness, arguing that its misattribution to Derrida is a gesture which Derrida’s work guards against and undermines – even deconstructs – in advance. The article sounds a note of caution about the ‘post-theoretical’ practice of assimilating philosophers and theorists to the humanities via the decontextualised appropriation of putatively synecdochic buzzwords.

Romantic Love, Gender Imbalance and Feminist Readings in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea

Even though Iris Murdoch’s novels depict a profoundly patriarchal society, most scholars have generally failed to identify any feminist aspirations in her work. This article aims to reassess her legacy as a writer by analysing from a feminist perspective one of her most acclaimed novels, The Sea, The Sea (1978). The tension between the androcentric approach of a self-deluded male narrator and a female author whose worldview is strongly influenced by her gender results in a feminist critique which is not based on the recovery of a female voice, but on the exploration of patriarchy within the novel and the production of a feminist epistemology derived from a dialogue between Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy.

Whoso List to Find?

Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.

Liturgical Time in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Liturgies are communal in nature, and in the context of the medieval Christian economy of time they are developed and utilised to quantify, consecrate, control, utilise and unify time for the comprehensive end of the welfare of the society, both in the Here and in the Here-after. The liturgy was a social institution, and functioned for anniversaries, holy days, holidays and rituals that were the means of medieval social integrity. In the economy of socio-political and ethical life, the medieval Church linked the sacred to the secular by means of the liturgy. They were used for meditation, as well as a measurement of time, and arguably they were manipulated to parody or satirise the strictly hierarchal estates of the medieval society. Though one of the least liturgical books of his time, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is framed by the liturgical institution of the pilgrimage. Actually a pilgrim travelogue, it depicts the secularisation of liturgy and its appropriation for social control, and paradoxically, a carnivalesque celebration of the reversal of social hierarchy.

Editorial

This general issue of Critical Survey ranges from mediaeval to modern literature and drama.

Fudging the Outcome of Much Ado About Nothing

This article asserts that in Much Ado About Nothing Shakespeare lays open the rottenness within an arbitrary system of government but does not dare carry the plot to its logical conclusion. The responses to events by the dominant nobles, a prince and a count, are not merely foolish and damaging, but, in light of the guidance of, among others, Girolamo Muzio and Baldassare Castiglione, deeply dishonourable. The playmakers, as the most talented team in the realm licensed for performance entertainment, create a historically credible set of characters, but, possibly because they wish to continue to benefit from their protected status and draw their regular customers, do not make explicit any radical questioning of rank and degree. An analysis of Margaret’s role suggests a strategic ambiguity within the jocular ending.

Urban Decay or the Uncanny Return of Dionysus

Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is well-expressive of the poet’s profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley’s poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period.

The Apocalyptic Image of the Beast in William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ and W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’

The monstrous image created by William Blake in ‘The Tyger’ left the world wrapped in an apocalyptic vision that creates an epiphany of unknown Romantic potentials symbolised in ‘The Tyger’. The apocalyptic vision, deeply rooted in Christian religion, develops into an ominous harbinger of the destruction of the modern world portrayed in W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’. The image of the beast marks the difference between two ages, one with strong potentials and the other with fear and resident evil unexplained. I argue that the apocalyptic theory in Christianity has an impact on the development of the image of the beast in both poems, an impact that highlights man’s retreat from Nature into the modern world which may fall apart because of beastly practices.

The Restoration Muslim Tangerines Caliban and Sycorax in Dryden-Davenant’s Adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

This article analyses the filtering of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) in the Restoration drama repertoire, showing the Restoration revision of the Shakespearean stereotypical delineation of the ‘half-moor’ Caliban in the light of Restoration England’s complex relations of admiration and trepidation with regard to the Muslim Moors and Turks. Dryden-Davenant’s The Tempest or The Enchanted Island (1667) complicates the figures of Caliban and Sycorax as Muslim Moorish friends or foes and possible subjects of Charles II’s English Tangier on the Barbary coast. Dryden-Davenant’s The Enchanted Island makes historical parallels and allusions to Charles II’s marriage to the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza and the English possession of Tangier as a part of the marriage dowry.

In Memoriam

It is my sad duty to announce that my dear friend Bryan Loughrey, co-editor of the journal, recently passed away after a short illness. It was Bryan who relaunched Critical Survey in 1987, serving as Editor, General Editor and lately Editor Emeritus. The journal was originally founded by C.B. Cox and A.E. Dyson in 1962 as a sister journal to Critical Quarterly (1958–), which also changed hands in 1987, but went in a different, more theoretical direction, under the editorship of Colin McCabe. Together with Critical Survey, Bryan also assumed responsibility from Cox and Dyson for the ‘Critical Quarterly Conferences’, a long-running series of conferences for UK sixth form students who might be contemplating studying English Literature or related studies at university. This historical background shows Bryan operating in three capacities in which he excelled: as independent scholar, editor and academic manager.