random quotes from my academic reading
Jul. 19th, 2003 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThese are sentences that amused me or made me think outside the narrow context of the argument of the dissertation.
Paranoia in an emperor sooner or later verifies itself.
--Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. p. 15.
Left to its own mercy, the human race is its own damnation.
--Ibid., p. 58.
This play [Richard III] dramatizes the butt-end of civil war, the dregs of history in its demonic phase, the desperate way the old world ends within the frame of the Tudor myth; and melancholy--the dregs or faex of black bile--is one semiotic term in the language of last things--the most calamitous of the four humors; associated with cold, dry winter, the most severe of the four seasons; with old age, the most discontented of the four ages; with earth, the grossest of the four elements; and with cold, dry Saturn, the planetary god of death and dung, whom iconographers depict as a savage king, enthroned, devouring a living child.
-- Peggy Endel, "Profane Icon: The Throne Scene of Shakespeare's Richard III." Comparative Drama 20:2 (Summer 1986) p. 121.
It [Hamlet] is the play of the uncanny, the play in which the Heimlich and the Unheimlich are opposite and identical, the play that demonstrates that you can't go home again. Why? Because you are home--and home is not what you have always and belatedly (from unhome) fantasized it to be.
--Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York: Routledge, 1987. p. 157
All flesh, the device [Gloriana's skull] implies, merely masks the truth of bone.
--Arthur Lindley, "Abattoir and Costello: Carnival, The Revenger's Tragedy and the Mental Landscape of Revenge." AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 98 (Nov. 2002) p. 50.
Inevitably, of course, carnival implies its opposite and requires its Lenten containment. Bakhtin alone imagines that you can have one without the other, but carnival practice denies this. Summer lords die--that is what they are there for, in the long run. Revengers just die faster.
--Ibid., p. 50-51.
There is no ghost in the play because--aside from the allusion to Elizabeth encoded in Gloriana's name--there is no indication that the landscape of Vindice's world ever looked much different from what it does now. The virtuous past never died because it never lived. Uncommonly among revenge tragedy villains, the Duke is not a usurper. He is the real, fraudulent thing, and no one in the play can remember what came before him.
--Ibid., p. 52-53.
In both nature and hell death is a persistent condition.
--Scott McMillin. "The Figure of Silence in The Spanish Tragedy." ELH 39:1 (1972) p. 41.
Anything in a text can be made to "mean" by an ingenious reader ... But giving meaning is not the same as finding it or construing it.
--Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. p. 49. [I may have quoted this before, but I don't care. I'm quoting it again.]
Events have a predictive value in fiction that they do not have in life.
--Ibid., p. 118.
Superstition can perhaps be defined as the application of literary rules of configuration to reality.
--Ibid., p. 118.
The best readers--at least among college students--tend to be those who were the most voracious readers as children; I am not sure that training them, as we do in high school AP classes and in college, to read not widely, but too well--that is, encouraging them to substitute intensive for extensive reading--is an unmitigated blessing.
--Ibid., p. 231.
Freud notices that he is overlapping phenomenological barriers in 'boldly assuming' that myths operate like dreams--but he does not apologise for the much bolder assumption that plays operate like myths, in spite of working under a thousand culturally specific constraints, beginning with words and rhythms and ending with actors and theatrical licensing. As so often with psychoanalytic interpretations, we are left with a 'truth' that operates under such special circumstances, and requires us to ignore so many more obvious truths on the way, that we can hardly find our way back to the text after we have grasped it.
--Felicity Rosslyn, "Villainy, Virtue and Projection." Cambridge Quarterly 30:1 (2001), p. 2.
Liminality may be the scene of disease, despair, death, suicide, the breakdown without compensatory replacement of normative, well-defined social ties and bonds. It may be anomie, alienation, angst, the three fatal alpha sisters of many modern myths.
--Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982. p. 46.
... a subjective sense of control is difficult to attain, due to the multiplicity of stimuli and cultural tasks--especially, I would hold, in industrial societies, with their complex social and technical division of labor. But in the ritualized limits of a game or the writing of a poem, a man or woman may cope, if they rise to the occasion with skill and tact.
--Ibid., p. 57.
In all major cultural process, from ritual to theatre and the novel, of any complexity of meaning, there are both "sequence and secrets"--to quote Kermode again--"secrets" are those non-sequential bits of creative indeterminacy which get into, and apparently seem to foul up all coherent protocols, scripts, texts, whatsoever little hints of the abyss of subjunctivity, that break in and out like Exu and threaten the measured movement towards climax on cultural terms.
--Ibid., p. 77-78.
... it is the experience of anthropologists that there are grave dangers in the initiatory processes.
--Ibid., p. 120.
Fresh from his recent victory over Hamlet, T. S. Eliot challenged Titus Andronicus. He must have found the play unworthy of critical combat, since he merely pronounced it to be "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written," and left it to die from the blow.
--David Wilbern, "Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus." English Literary Renaissance 8:2 (Spring 1978) p. 159.
Paranoia in an emperor sooner or later verifies itself.
--Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. p. 15.
Left to its own mercy, the human race is its own damnation.
--Ibid., p. 58.
This play [Richard III] dramatizes the butt-end of civil war, the dregs of history in its demonic phase, the desperate way the old world ends within the frame of the Tudor myth; and melancholy--the dregs or faex of black bile--is one semiotic term in the language of last things--the most calamitous of the four humors; associated with cold, dry winter, the most severe of the four seasons; with old age, the most discontented of the four ages; with earth, the grossest of the four elements; and with cold, dry Saturn, the planetary god of death and dung, whom iconographers depict as a savage king, enthroned, devouring a living child.
-- Peggy Endel, "Profane Icon: The Throne Scene of Shakespeare's Richard III." Comparative Drama 20:2 (Summer 1986) p. 121.
It [Hamlet] is the play of the uncanny, the play in which the Heimlich and the Unheimlich are opposite and identical, the play that demonstrates that you can't go home again. Why? Because you are home--and home is not what you have always and belatedly (from unhome) fantasized it to be.
--Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York: Routledge, 1987. p. 157
All flesh, the device [Gloriana's skull] implies, merely masks the truth of bone.
--Arthur Lindley, "Abattoir and Costello: Carnival, The Revenger's Tragedy and the Mental Landscape of Revenge." AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 98 (Nov. 2002) p. 50.
Inevitably, of course, carnival implies its opposite and requires its Lenten containment. Bakhtin alone imagines that you can have one without the other, but carnival practice denies this. Summer lords die--that is what they are there for, in the long run. Revengers just die faster.
--Ibid., p. 50-51.
There is no ghost in the play because--aside from the allusion to Elizabeth encoded in Gloriana's name--there is no indication that the landscape of Vindice's world ever looked much different from what it does now. The virtuous past never died because it never lived. Uncommonly among revenge tragedy villains, the Duke is not a usurper. He is the real, fraudulent thing, and no one in the play can remember what came before him.
--Ibid., p. 52-53.
In both nature and hell death is a persistent condition.
--Scott McMillin. "The Figure of Silence in The Spanish Tragedy." ELH 39:1 (1972) p. 41.
Anything in a text can be made to "mean" by an ingenious reader ... But giving meaning is not the same as finding it or construing it.
--Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. p. 49. [I may have quoted this before, but I don't care. I'm quoting it again.]
Events have a predictive value in fiction that they do not have in life.
--Ibid., p. 118.
Superstition can perhaps be defined as the application of literary rules of configuration to reality.
--Ibid., p. 118.
The best readers--at least among college students--tend to be those who were the most voracious readers as children; I am not sure that training them, as we do in high school AP classes and in college, to read not widely, but too well--that is, encouraging them to substitute intensive for extensive reading--is an unmitigated blessing.
--Ibid., p. 231.
Freud notices that he is overlapping phenomenological barriers in 'boldly assuming' that myths operate like dreams--but he does not apologise for the much bolder assumption that plays operate like myths, in spite of working under a thousand culturally specific constraints, beginning with words and rhythms and ending with actors and theatrical licensing. As so often with psychoanalytic interpretations, we are left with a 'truth' that operates under such special circumstances, and requires us to ignore so many more obvious truths on the way, that we can hardly find our way back to the text after we have grasped it.
--Felicity Rosslyn, "Villainy, Virtue and Projection." Cambridge Quarterly 30:1 (2001), p. 2.
Liminality may be the scene of disease, despair, death, suicide, the breakdown without compensatory replacement of normative, well-defined social ties and bonds. It may be anomie, alienation, angst, the three fatal alpha sisters of many modern myths.
--Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982. p. 46.
... a subjective sense of control is difficult to attain, due to the multiplicity of stimuli and cultural tasks--especially, I would hold, in industrial societies, with their complex social and technical division of labor. But in the ritualized limits of a game or the writing of a poem, a man or woman may cope, if they rise to the occasion with skill and tact.
--Ibid., p. 57.
In all major cultural process, from ritual to theatre and the novel, of any complexity of meaning, there are both "sequence and secrets"--to quote Kermode again--"secrets" are those non-sequential bits of creative indeterminacy which get into, and apparently seem to foul up all coherent protocols, scripts, texts, whatsoever little hints of the abyss of subjunctivity, that break in and out like Exu and threaten the measured movement towards climax on cultural terms.
--Ibid., p. 77-78.
... it is the experience of anthropologists that there are grave dangers in the initiatory processes.
--Ibid., p. 120.
Fresh from his recent victory over Hamlet, T. S. Eliot challenged Titus Andronicus. He must have found the play unworthy of critical combat, since he merely pronounced it to be "one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written," and left it to die from the blow.
--David Wilbern, "Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus." English Literary Renaissance 8:2 (Spring 1978) p. 159.
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 06:32 pm (UTC)I am so totally going to have three daughters and name them Anomie, Alienation, and Angst.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 07:34 pm (UTC)--Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987, p. 118.
Superstition can perhaps be defined as the application of literary rules of configuration to reality.
--Ibid., p. 118.
I like these two, especially because I find that a great deal of the time -- whether in life or in literature -- it's a tossup between hindsight and prescience at play.
I often write stories and find upon rereading that I laid in a lot of foreshadowing and clues to the eventual ending -- even before I knew it. Now, was I just writing and now, knowing the ending, I'm rereading with that mode of thought applied to the earlier parts of the story, and therefore assigning meaning? (In other words, once I finish the story, am I reading through that filter?) Or did the story (or my brain) always know where it wanted to go, and filled in details accordingly as I blindly wrote my way to the ending?
The romantic in me likes the latter concept, but I wonder.
Sorry to inflict my food for thought re: creative writing on you during dissertation work. Go you, and get that Ph.D.!
And, BTW, belated congrats on the nomination for "Three Letters...". I get LCRW (just upgraded to the chocolate subscription, actually) and thought it was a beautiful story -- especially the way neither of Violet's situations is particularly "best" -- she's torn between two ways of being consumed. Fascinating, ambiguous and made me go off and think and chew on it, which is the mark of a good short story as far as I'm concerned.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-20 05:54 am (UTC)--Gordon Braden, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger's Privilege. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. p. 15.
Too true.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-20 06:43 am (UTC)And don't worry about the cross-pollination of academic and creative thought; it's how my brain operates anyway. (Damn it all,
no subject
Date: 2003-07-20 07:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-20 03:00 pm (UTC)I *like* that. I plan to use it completely out of context. And could you let me know what summer lords Lindley is referring to? I plan to use it in a discussion about killing the Grain God, the John Barleycorn myth. I'm wondering if he is on the same page as I am, with different glasses, so to speak. Or is he referring to human royalty?
I look forward to greeting you as Dr. Truepenny next Wiscon!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-20 03:25 pm (UTC)I have problems with the way he's using Bakhtin, but it's not a bad article.