Literatura científica selecionada sobre o tema "Joseph – Criticism and interpretation; Joyce"

The article considers the first experience of interpretation and criticism of the Kantian doctrine of knowledge on the part of neo-scholastic thinkers in 1st half of the 19th century. It is shown that the transition from confessional polemics, which hadn’t philosophical in­terpretation, to the presentation and analysis of Kantian epistemology in Cesare Baldinotti’s treatise “Tentaminum metaphysicorum” (1817), when scholar takes an under­standing of Kantianism as radical skepticism. At the same time, he left unanswered ques­tions about what type of traditional concepts Kantianism refers, and how it can be de­scribed in the language of scholasticism. The first problem was solved by the Italian thinker Gaetano Sanseverino, who tried to correlate Kantianism with models traditionally opposed to scholasticism (like averroism). The second problem was solved by Jaime Balmes and Joseph Kleutgen, who outlined the boundaries of the compromise between scholasticism and Kantianism, trying to describe Criticism in terms of Thomism and show possible intersection points between these doctrines. As a result of these efforts, it becomes clear that the mechanical transfer of solutions developed in medieval scholas­ticism to the problems of modern European philosophy is not a successful polemic strat­egy. It was necessary to update the scholastic philosophy in a modern European context, which was subsequently carried out by Matteo Liberatore and the Neo-Thomists who fol­lowed him.

This paper proceeds from the concurrent interpretation of two distinct, apparently unrelated disciplinary contexts, at the crossroads of the positivism of archaeology and the imaginary world of literature. The character of the reciprocal relationship between megalithism in Neolithic Portugal and the writings of the twentieth-century author, James Joyce, is transfigured through the introduction of a third element of interpretation, a deeply paradoxical current of Jewish thought, with messianic dimensions, antithetical to the forces of mythic reconciliation present in Joyce’s fiction and in archaeological conceptions of ‘symbolic systems’ in antiquity, which tend to erase the innumerable singulars of experience. Applying a cryptotheologically-inflected exegesis immanent to the materials of text and archaeology in the light of their respective orientation to the same astral phenomenon, I seek to generate insights unanticipated within interpretations restricted to the disciplinary boundaries, theories and methodologies of archaeology and literary criticism as discrete entities. Within allegorised readings of archaeology and an archaeologicised reading of Joyce’s texts I bring into play non-synchronous elements which both disrupt the idealised harmonies of social and religious conformity and illuminate hitherto unseen connections between diverse, seemingly incommensurable contexts, beyond the discursive conventions of detached objectivity, without relinquishing irreduceible remnants to a totalising synthesis.

ABSTRACT In a recent essay, Carolyn Abbate argues for a ““drastic”” rather than ““gnostic”” conception of music and would want to see musicology's efforts redirected accordingly. In the wake of the 1985 call by Joseph Kerman urging musicologists to shift their attention from ““positivism”” and ““formalism”” to ““criticism”” or ““hermeneutics””——that is, to musicology centered on interpretation——Abbate issues a call for a new disciplinary revolution, one that would shift our attention from works to performances and thus undo what she perceives as the fatal weakness in Kerman's position. When we ignore the actually made and experienced sounding event in favor of the disembodied abstraction that is the work, we bypass the sensuous, audible, immediate experience (the ““drastic””) and put in its place the intellectual, supra-audible, mediated (that is, interpreted) meaning (the ““gnostic””) and thus avoid what is of real value in music——the experience, the powerful physical and spiritual impact it may have on us. While I am in fundamental sympathy with Abbate's arguments and aims, I believe that the opposition between the real performance and the imaginary work——the former the object of immediate, sensuous experience, the latter the vehicle of mediated (that is, interpreted, ““hermeneutic””) intellectual meaning——on which her argument rests is overdrawn: The hermeneutic element cannot be wholly banished from the arena of performance; there is no such thing as pure experience, uncontaminated by interpretation.

This paper aims to delineate changes in the approach to music analysis over the last decades of the nineteenth century and to examine different possibilities in analysing works which have a characteristic that virtually excludes the use of traditional methods. The starting point is Joseph Kerman's criticism of music analysis, formulated in the 1980s, which - together with successive discussions - reflects a tendency towards abandoning the excessively academic and formalizing approach to analysis, moving from an attempt at an objective analysis of a work towards an interpretation that also focuses on the listener. Since the mid-twentieth century, electroacoustic music has been one of the areas where the use of traditional analysis was inconvenient. Since electroacoustic music began to lose its exclusive, academic character in the 1990s in relation with the development of computer technologies, the question of its interpretation and finding suitable listener strategies has kept coming to the fore. This paper shows the possibilities of approach to this music in relation to its specificities. The last part of the paper focuses on a specific example from one fringe genre: noise music, specifically the subgenre japanoise. In its peak period in the 1990s, this sound production was probably the furthest away from what is usually associated with the term music. Based on an analysis of a selected composition, the inadequacy of the traditional approach and certain alternatives to grasping such music will be demonstrated. The very end of the paper features some current results which relate to, or result from, the study's conclusions.

Within the conception of the Sochi Linguistic & Rhetorical School the paper discusses the diglossia of the Soviet discourse employed in the former USSR, distinguishes official and personal registers as well as shows their difference drawing on Joseph Stalin’s speech of 31 January 1944 to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks concerning Alexander Dovzhenko’s screenplay “Ukraine in Flames” and in the writer’s diaries. The comparison reveals a few specific linguistic rhetorical features of cognitive communicative type ontologically characteristic of the Soviet linguistic personality’s communicative cognitive activity in a totalitarian state. The cognitive features of Stalin’s individual discourse representing the official register and his system of argumentation rest on the significative component of linguistic units, arguments from literature to illustrate the postulates and dogmas of Marxist-Leninist doctrine forming the foundation of the Soviet discourse. It is also found that the official register represented by Stalin’s speech is characterized by the following features: 1) repetition; 2) sarcastic remarks; 3) dramatic mutually exclusive contrast of mental spaces (“our own, true in the last resort” and destructed, represented by the opponent’s discourse); 4) rigidly adversarial characteristic of the alternative linguistic rhetorical worldview; 5) appeal to the Soviet collective linguistic personality’s opinion; 6) ideological translation from one subdiscourse into the other, from personal register into the official one; 7) biased retelling of the discourse regarded as anti-Soviet; 8) appeal to the facts lacking in the discourse under criticism; 9) “ideological editing” taking on the form of peremptory lecturing with consequences threatening the liberty of the person under criticism. The personal register of the Soviet Ukrainian writer Dovzhenko is characterized by a broad interpretation of reality devoid of the “Marxist-Leninist blinds” and a more objective interpretation of the world due to a bigger ratio of denotative references (“evidential arguments” like “I say” and “I heard” etc) and communicative cognitive activity relative to two axiological hierarchies: national and Christian, i.e. the dominance of human values over class morality. It is proved that Dovzhenko’s screenplay was criticized within Stalin’s official register for its deviation from the cognitive schemas and the model of the Soviet discourse, for the focus on Ukraine and its citizens rather than on class struggle.

The focus of the article is on current discussions on the heuristic significance of the "soft power" concept, examines the socio-political and philosophical foundations of the phenomenon, and states the de-Americanization of the soft power discourse and the related changes in the behavior of the new "soft power" actors.The theoretical basis of the article is the conceptual interpretation of the concept of "power" proposed by Joseph Nye as an alternative to Realistic and Neo-Realistic models of power relations in modern world politics. Nye singled out coercion, influence and attractiveness as equivalent dimensions of force.The research methodology is based on formal-logical and content-logical methods.The research procedure first of all is built around the typology of criticism of "soft power" as a concept and the prospects for its overcoming.In the analysis of the results, it is noted that Nye in the concept of "soft power" had verified the accents of modern socio-philosophical and political-philosophical approaches in relation to the power-discourse of international relations. It is predicted that the theoretical comprehension of the "soft power" will develop, as its use by states will continue. First, it concerns "rising forces" (such as China and India).In conclusion, it is emphasized that the ability of the state to compete globally in three areas (economic growth, military technological development and value-cultural impact) allows us to talk about it in terms of full power, which is impossible without resorting to the complex phenomenon of "soft power", questions of national identity in a new way and to the non-material grounds of the state.

I provide a close analysis of truth and freedom in Heidegger’s work of the Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie). The work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling is shown to play a decisive role in this key text of Heidegger’s, leading him to an understanding of the self in terms of freedom, community, culture, and history that carries important implications for political philosophy In attempting to uncover a thoughtful and elucidating interpretation of the Beiträge zur Philosophie, one of the most promising portions of Heidegger’s canon to which one can turn for assistance in developing a reading is to the lecture courses of the surrounding period as they provide strong indications of Heidegger’s textual sources of the time, and one of the most often overlooked sources for studying the Beiträge is Heidegger’s 1936 lecture, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom..2 William J. Richardson’s work has familiarly encouraged us to think of Heidegger’s thought in two markedly differing periods separated by a turn, a helpful and insightful approach to which Heidegger studies remains indebted, though this story will not entirely be my own preferred take on Heidegger’s work in the present project. These investigations are nonetheless indebted to Richardson in arguing that one can arrive at a better understanding of the relationship between the early and the late material such as to elucidate the Beiträge by drawing on his finding of a Kantian thematic in the early work, an interpretive move which is also well backed by Reiner Schürmann’s work.3 My proposal in this project is that bearing this in mind, the late Heideggerian corpus, particularly the Beiträge, can be understood through the lens of German Idealism and its relationship to a criticism of Kantian thought. By problematizing certain key elements of Heidegger’s late thought that are drawn from F. W. J. Schelling and establishing a hermeneutic between these concepts and Schelling’s writings, I will use a reading of Schelling to help us begin to understand the Beiträge as a somewhat fractured continuation and completion of the study of being that was earlier carried out primarily through an analytic of Dasein. Heidegger imports crucial concepts from Idealism and applies his method of destructive philosophical appropriation to develop his own notions of the history of being, the event of appropriation, and community, revolving around what I argue is a very original appropriation of Schellingian concepts of freedom, ground, and jointure in the Beiträge.

The aim of this paper is to examine Cioran’s interpretation of Maistre’sreactionary thought. Cioran judges the philosophical work of De Maistre as a usefulinstrument to investigate the Twentieth century ideological debate on Revolution,with specific reference to the issue of the engagement of philosophers in politics.Through the analysis of Maistre’s criticism of revolutionary thought at the time ofthe Enlightenment, Cioran proposes an insightful deconstruction of the ideologicaldichotomy between Reaction and Revolution. Indeed, the paper will show thatCioran’s understanding of De Maistre implies both a radical criticism of Sartre’sexistentialism and an original interpretation of Schmitt’s Political Theology.

Edward Said, who is a key intellectual figure in the theory and interpretation of western European colonization and decolonization, sees criticism as personal engagement and a matter of character and not simply scholarship. He is highly influential in the fields of colonialism, postcolonialism, representation and interpretation. Of the many influences Said in turn has undergone, those in French deserve specific exploration. This article explores some of these influences, but it also looks at some of Said’s own representations of French and French-speaking culture. To this end I will examine how Said in some of his key works addresses, among other things, the role of the intellectual, Orientalism, colonialism, and literary theory. My approach is chronological. I will first turn to the role the French-speaking world plays in Said’s first published book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966), and then to a couple of Said’s most celebrated works: Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993).

IntroductionThis paper argues that the industrial contexts of re-imagining, or transforming, literary icons deploy the promotional strategies that are associated with what are usually seen as lesser, or purely commercial, genres. Promotional paratexts (Genette Paratexts; Gray; Hills) reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. This interpretation leverages Matt Hills’ argument that certain kinds of “quality” screened drama are discursively framed as possessing the cultural capital associated with auterist cinema, despite their participation in the marketing logics of media franchising (Johnson). Adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon proposes that when audiences receive literary adaptations, their pleasure inheres in a mixture of “repetition and difference”, “familiarity and novelty” (114). The difference can take many forms, but may be framed as guaranteed by the “distinction”, or—in Bourdieu’s terms—the cultural capital, of talented individuals and companies. Gerard Genette (Palimpsests) argued that “proximations” or updatings of classic literature involve acknowledging historical shifts in ideological norms as well as aesthetic techniques and tastes. When literary brands are made over using different media, there are economic lures to participation in currently fashionable technologies, as well as current political values. Linda Hutcheon also underlines the pragmatic constraints on the re-imagining of literary brands. “Expensive collaborative art forms” (87) such as films and large stage productions look for safe bets, seeking properties that have the potential to increase the audience for their franchise. Thus the marketplace influences both production and the experience of audiences. While this paper does not attempt a thoroughgoing analysis of audience reception appropriate to a fan studies approach, it borrows concepts from Matt Hills’s theorisation of marketing communication associated with screen “makeovers”. It shows that literary fiction and cinematic texts associated with celebrated authors or auteurist producer-directors share branding discourses characteristic of contemporary consumer culture. Strategies include marketing “reveals” of transformed content (Hills 319). Transformed content is presented not only as demonstrating originality and novelty; these promotional paratexts also perform displays of cultural capital on the part of production teams or of auteurist creatives (321). Case Study 1: Steven Spielberg, The Adventures of Tintin (2011) The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is itself an adaptation of a literary brand that reimagines earlier transmedia genres. According to Spielberg’s biographer, the Tintin series of bandes dessinée (comics or graphic novels) by Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), has affinities with “boys’ adventure yarns” referencing and paying homage to the “silent filmmaking and the movie serials of the 1930s and ‘40s” (McBride 530). The three comics adapted by Spielberg belong to the more escapist and less “political” phase of Hergé’s career (531). As a fast-paced action movie, building to a dramatic and spectacular closure, the major plot lines of Spielberg’s film centre on Tintin’s search for clues to the secret of a model ship he buys at a street market. Teaming up with an alcoholic sea captain, Tintin solves the mystery while bullying Captain Haddock into regaining his sobriety, his family seat, and his eagerness to partner in further heroic adventures. Spielberg’s industry stature allowed him the autonomy to combine the commercial motivations of contemporary “tentpole” cinema adaptations with aspirations towards personal reputation as an auteurist director. Many of the promotional paratexts associated with the film stress the aesthetic distinction of the director’s practice alongside the blockbuster spectacle of an action film. Reinventing the Literary Brand as FranchiseComic books constitute the “mother lode of franchises” (Balio 26) in a industry that has become increasingly global and risk-adverse (see also Burke). The fan base for comic book movies is substantial and studios pre-promote their investments at events such as the four-day Comic-Con festival held annually in San Diego (Balio 26). Described as “tentpole” films, these adaptations—often of superhero genres—are considered conservative investments by the Hollywood studios because they “constitute media events; […] lend themselves to promotional tie-ins”; are “easy sells in world markets and […] have the ability to spin off sequels to create a franchise” (Balio 26). However, Spielberg chose to adapt a brand little known in the primary market (the US), thus lacking the huge fan-based to which pre-release promotional paratexts might normally be targeted. While this might seem a risky undertaking, it does reflect “changed industry realities” that seek to leverage important international markets (McBride 531). As a producer Spielberg pursued his own strategies to minimise economic risk while allowing him creative choices. This facilitated the pursuit of professional reputation alongside commercial success. The dual release of both War Horse and Tintin exemplify the director-producer’s career practice of bracketing an “entertainment” film with a “more serious work” (McBride 530). The Adventures of Tintin was promoted largely as technical tour de force and spectacle. Conversely War Horse—also adapted from a children’s text—was conceived as a heritage/nostalgia film, marked with the attention to period detail and lyric cinematography of what Matt Hills describes as “aestheticized fiction”. Nevertheless, promotional paratexts stress the discourse of auteurist transformation even in the case of the designedly more commercial Tintin film, as I discuss further below. These pre-release promotions emphasise Spielberg’s “painterly” directorial hand, as well as the professional partnership with Peter Jackson that enabled cutting edge innovation in animation. As McBride explains, the “dual release of the two films in the US was an unusual marketing move” seemingly designed to “showcase Spielberg’s artistic versatility” (McBride 530).Promotional Paratexts and Pre-Recruitment of FansAs Jonathan Gray and Jason Mittell have explained, marketing paratexts predate screen adaptations (Gray; Mittell). As part of the commercial logic of franchise development, selective release of information about a literary brand’s transformation are designed to bring fans of the “original,” or of genre communities such as fantasy or comics audiences, on board with the adaptation. Analysing Steven Moffat’s revelations about the process of adapting and creating a modern TV series from Conan Doyle’s canon (Sherlock), Matt Hills draws attention to the focus on the literary, rather than the many screen reinventions. Moffat’s focus on his childhood passion for the Holmes stories thus grounds the team’s adaptation in a period prior to any “knowledge of rival adaptations […] and any detailed awareness of canon” (326). Spielberg (unlike Jackson) denied any such childhood affective investment, claiming to have been unaware of the similarities between Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the Tintin series until alerted by a French reviewer of Raiders (McBride 530). In discussing the paradoxical fidelity of his and Jackson’s reimagining of Tintin, Spielberg performed homage to the literary brand while emphasising the aesthetic limitations within the canon of prior adaptations:‘We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film’, Spielberg explained during preproduction, ‘and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul that goes far beyond anything we’ve been able to create with computer-animated characters.’ (McBride 531)In these “reveals”, the discourse positions Spielberg and Jackson as both fans and auteurs, demonstrating affective investment in Hergé’s concepts and world-building while displaying the ingenuity of the partners as cinematic innovators.The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentAccording to Hills, “quality TV drama” no less than “makeover TV,” is subject to branding practices such as the “reveal” of innovations attributed to creative professionals. Marketing paratexts discursively frame the “professional and creative distinction” of the teams that share and expand the narrative universe of the show’s screen or literary precursors (319–20). Distinction here refers to the cultural capital of the creative teams, as well as to the essential differences between what adaptation theorists refer to as the “hypotext” (source/original) and “hypertext” (adaptation) (Genette Paratexts; Hutcheon). The adaptation’s individualism is fore-grounded, as are the rights of creative teams to inherit, transform, and add richness to the textual universe of the precursor texts. Spielberg denied the “anxiety of influence” (Bloom) linking Tintin and Raiders, though he is reported to have enthusiastically acknowledged the similarities once alerted to them. Nevertheless, Spielberg first optioned Hergé’s series only two years later (1983). Paratexts “reveal” Hergé’s passing of the mantle from author to director, quoting his: “ ‘Yes, I think this guy can make this film. Of course it will not be my Tintin, but it can be a great Tintin’” (McBride 531).Promotional reveals in preproduction show both Spielberg and Jackson performing mutually admiring displays of distinction. Much of this is focused on the choice of motion capture animation, involving attachment of motion sensors to an actor’s body during performance, permitting mapping of realistic motion onto the animated figure. While Spielberg paid tribute to Jackson’s industry pre-eminence in this technical field, the discourse also underlines Spielberg’s own status as auteur. He claimed that Tintin allowed him to feel more like a painter than any prior film. Jackson also underlines the theme of direct imaginative control:The process of operating the small motion-capture virtual camera […] enabled Spielberg to return to the simplicity and fluidity of his 8mm amateur films […] [The small motion-capture camera] enabled Spielberg to put himself literally in the spaces occupied by the actors […] He could walk around with them […] and improvise movements for a film Jackson said they decided should have a handheld feel as much as possible […] All the production was from the imagination right to the computer. (McBride 532)Along with cinematic innovation, pre-release promotions thus rehearse the imaginative pre-eminence of Spielberg’s vision, alongside Jackson and his WETA company’s fantasy credentials, their reputation for meticulous detail, and their innovation in the use of performance capture in live-action features. This rehearsal of professional capital showcases the difference and superiority of The Adventures of Tintin to previous animated adaptations.Case Study 2: Andrew Motion: Silver, Return to Treasure Island (2012)At first glance, literary fiction would seem to be a far-cry from the commercial logics of tentpole cinema. The first work of pure fiction by a former Poet Laureate of Great Britain, updating a children’s classic, Silver: Return to Treasure Island signals itself as an exemplar of quality fiction. Yet the commercial logics of the publishing industry, no less than other media franchises, routinise practices such as author interviews at bookshop visits and festivals, generating paratexts that serve its promotional cycle. Motion’s choice of this classic for adaptation is a step further towards a popular readership than his poetry—or the memoirs, literary criticism, or creative non-fiction (“fabricated” or speculative biographies) (see Mars-Jones)—that constitute his earlier prose output. Treasure Island’s cultural status as boy’s adventure, its exotic setting, its dramatic characters long available in the public domain through earlier screen adaptations, make it a shrewd choice for appropriation in the niche market of literary fiction. Michael Cathcart’s introduction to his ABC Radio National interview with the author hones in on this:Treasure Island is one of those books that you feel as if you’ve read, event if you haven’t. Long John Silver, young Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, Israel Hands […], these are people who stalk our collective unconscious, and they’re back. (Cathcart)Motion agrees with Cathcart that Treasure Island constitutes literary and common cultural heritage. In both interviews I analyse in the discussion here, Motion states that he “absorbed” the book, “almost by osmosis” as a child, yet returned to it with the mature, critical, evaluative appreciation of the young adult and budding poet (Darragh 27). Stevenson’s original is a “bloody good book”; the implication is that it would not otherwise have met the standards of a literary doyen, possessing a deep knowledge of, and affect for, the canon of English literature. Commercial Logic and Cultural UpdatingSilver is an unauthorised sequel—in Genette’s taxonomy, a “continuation”. However, in promotional interviews on the book and broadcast circuit, Motion claimed a kind of license from the practice of Stevenson, a fellow writer. Stevenson himself notes that a significant portion of the “bar silver” remained on the island, leaving room for a sequel to be generated. In Silver, Jim, the son of Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins, and Natty, daughter of Long John Silver and the “woman of colour”, take off to complete and confront the consequences of their parents’ adventures. In interviews, Motion identifies structural gaps in the precursor text that are discursively positioned to demand completion from, in effect, Stevenson’s literary heir: [Stevenson] was a person who was interested in sequels himself, indeed he wrote a sequel to Kidnapped [which is] proof he was interested in these things. (Cathcart)He does leave lots of doors and windows open at the end of Treasure Island […] perhaps most bewitchingly for me, as the Hispaniola sails away, they leave behind three maroons. So what happened to them? (Darragh)These promotional paratexts drop references to Great Expectations, Heart of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, Wild Sargasso Sea, the plays of Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard, the poetry of Auden and John Clare, and Stevenson’s own “self-conscious” sources: Defoe, Marryat. Discursively, they evidence “double coding” (Hills) as both homage for the canon and the literary “brand” of Stevenson’s popular original, while implicated in the commercial logic of the book industry’s marketing practices.Displays of DistinctionMotion’s interview with Sarah Darragh, for the National Association of Teachers of English, performs the role of man of letters; Motion “professes” and embodies the expertise to speak authoritatively on literature, its criticism, and its teaching. Literature in general, and Silver in particular, he claims, is not “just polemic”, that is “not how it works”, but it does has the ability to recruit readers to moral perspectives, to convey “ new ideas[s] of the self.” Silver’s distinction from Treasure Island lies in its ability to position “deep” readers to develop what is often labelled “theory of mind” (Wolf and Barzillai): “what good literature does, whether you know it or not, is to allow you to be someone else for a bit,” giving us “imaginative projection into another person’s experience” (Darragh 29). A discourse of difference and superiority is also associated with the transformed “brand.” Motion is emphatic that Silver is not a children’s book—“I wouldn’t know how to do that” (Darragh 28)—a “lesser” genre in canonical hierarchies. It is a writerly and morally purposeful fiction, “haunted” by greats of the canon and grounded in expertise in philosophical and literary heritage. In addition, he stresses the embedded seriousness of his reinvention: it is “about how to be a modern person and about greed and imperialism” (Darragh 27), as well as a deliberatively transformed artefact:The road to literary damnation is […] paved with bad sequels and prequels, and the reason that they fail […] is that they take the original on at its own game too precisely […] so I thought, casting my mind around those that work [such as] Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead […] or Jean Rhys’ wonderful novel Wide Sargasso Sea which is about the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre […] that if I took a big step away from the original book I would solve this problem of competing with something I was likely to lose in competition with and to create something that was a sort of homage […] towards it, but that stood at a significant distance from it […]. (Cathcart) Motion thus rehearses homage and humility, while implicitly defending the transformative imagination of his “sequel” against the practice of lesser, failed, clonings.Motion’s narrative expansion of Stevenson’s fictional universe is an example of “overwriting continuity” established by his predecessor, and thus allowing him to make “meaningful claims to creative and professional distinction” while demonstrating his own “creative viewpoint” (Hills 320). The novel boldly recapitulates incidental details, settings, and dramatic embedded character-narrations from Treasure Island. Distinctively, though, its opening sequence is a paean to romantic sensibility in the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1799–1850).The Branded Reveal of Transformed ContentSilver’s paratexts discursively construct its transformation and, by implication, improvement, from Stevenson’s original. Motion reveals the sequel’s change of zeitgeist, its ideological complexity and proximity to contemporary environmental and postcolonial values. These are represented through the superior perspective of romanticism and the scientific lens on the natural world:Treasure Island is a pre-Enlightenment story, it is pre-French Revolution, it’s the bad old world […] where people have a different ideas of democracy […] Also […] Jim is beginning to be aware of nature in a new way […] [The romantic poet, John Clare] was publishing in the 1820s but a child in the early 1800s, I rather had him in mind for Jim as somebody who was seeing the world in the same sort of way […] paying attention to the little things in nature, and feeling a sort of kinship with the natural world that we of course want to put an environmental spin on these days, but [at] the beginning of the 1800s was a new and important thing, a romantic preoccupation. (Cathcart)Motion’s allusion to Wild Sargasso Sea discursively appropriates Rhys’s feminist and postcolonial reimagination of Rochester’s creole wife, to validate his portrayal of Long John Silver’s wife, the “woman of colour.” As Christian Moraru has shown, this rewriting of race is part of a book industry trend in contemporary American adaptations of nineteenth-century texts. Interviews position readers of Silver to receive the novel in terms of increased moral complexity, sharing its awareness of the evils of slavery and violence silenced in prior adaptations.Two streams of influence [come] out of Treasure Island […] one is Pirates of the Caribbean and all that jolly jape type stuff, pirates who are essentially comic [or pantomime] characters […] And the other stream, which is the other face of Long John Silver in the original is a real menace […] What we are talking about is Somalia. Piracy is essentially a profoundly serious and repellent thing […]. (Cathcart)Motion’s transformation of Treasure Island, thus, improves on Stevenson by taking some of the menace that is “latent in the original”, yet downplayed by the genre reinvented as “jolly jape” or “gorefest.” In contrast, Silver is “a book about serious things” (Cathcart), about “greed and imperialism” and “how to be a modern person,” ideologically reconstructed as “philosophical history” by a consummate man of letters (Darragh).ConclusionWhen iconic literary brands are reimagined across media, genres and modes, creative professionals frequently need to balance various affective and commercial investments in the precursor text or property. Updatings of classic texts require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the “original.” Producers in risk-averse industries such as screen and publishing media practice a certain pragmatism to ensure that fans’ nostalgia for a popular brand is not too violently scandalised, while taking care to reproduce currently popular technologies and generic conventions in the interest of maximising audience. As my analysis shows, promotional circuits associated with “quality” fiction and cinema mirror the commercial logics associated with less valorised genres. Promotional paratexts reveal transformations of content that position audiences to receive them as creative innovations, superior in many senses to their literary precursors due to the distinctive expertise of creative professionals. Paying lip-service the sophisticated reading practices of contemporary fans of both cinema and literary fiction, their discourse shows the conflicting impulses to homage, critique, originality, and recruitment of audiences.ReferencesBalio, Tino. Hollywood in the New Millennium. London: Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2013.Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987. Burke, Liam. The Comic Book Film Adaptation: Exploring Modern Hollywood's Leading Genre. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2015. Cathcart, Michael (Interviewer). Andrew Motion's Silver: Return to Treasure Island. 2013. Transcript of Radio Interview. Prod. Kate Evans. 26 Jan. 2013. 10 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/booksplus/silver/4293244#transcript›.Darragh, Sarah. "In Conversation with Andrew Motion." NATE Classroom 17 (2012): 27–30.Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1997. ———. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Gray, Jonathan. Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York UP, 2010.Hills, Matt. "Rebranding Dr Who and Reimagining Sherlock: 'Quality' Television as 'Makeover TV Drama'." International Journal of Cultural Studies 18.3 (2015): 317–31.Johnson, Derek. Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. Postmillennial Pop. New York: New York UP, 2013.Mars-Jones, Adam. "A Thin Slice of Cake." The Guardian, 16 Feb. 2003. 5 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/feb/16/andrewmotion.fiction›.McBride, Joseph. Steven Spielberg: A Biography. 3rd ed. London: Faber & Faber, 2012.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York UP, 2015.Moraru, Christian. Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning. Herndon, VA: State U of New York P, 2001. Motion, Andrew. Silver: Return to Treasure Island. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012.Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount/Columbia Pictures, 1981.Wolf, Maryanne, and Mirit Barzillai. "The Importance of Deep Reading." Educational Leadership. March (2009): 32–36.Wordsworth, William. The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem. London: Edward Moxon, 1850.

This thesis is concerned with engaging a critic who has been neglected by his peers in the field of Joyce studies for more than forty years. This critic, Joseph Campbell, is an American scholar more popularly known for his studies in myth. However, he began his intellectual career contributing to a subject that emerged in the early years of the critical reception of Finnegans Wake: that the dream depicted in Joyce???s final masterpiece is dependent on a Dreamer. The neglect Campbell???s work has endured is largely due, this thesis argues, to an inaccurate treatment of his reading of this dream figure. This inaccuracy largely stems from a critic, Clive Hart, who engages with the debate of the Dreamer as an introductory means to demonstrating the ???structural??? theories involved in the Wake. As a minor feature of Hart???s analysis, Campbell???s theory of the Dreamer is identified with another method, one belonging to a fellow American Joycean, Edmund Wilson, a method incongruent with Campbell theories of dream consciousness. Subsequently, Campbell remains an undeveloped scholar within Joyce criticism. To counter Hart???s inaccurate depiction of Campbell, this thesis argues that there is provision in early scholarship to re-evaluate Campbell???s theory of the Dreamer in more developed terms. In this respect, the thesis is divided up into three sections. The first section is a literary review of this early scholarship, demonstrating certain influential strains of thought equivalent to Campbell???s ???metaphoric??? concept of the Dreamer, one that contrasts with the rigid, ???literal??? ideas his work is predominantly identified. The second section examines Campbell???s account in detail and the specific criticism it drew from Hart. Finally, the third section argues that Campbell???s interpretation of the Dreamer is best engaged through an archetypal account of the Dreamer, one that regards the symbols encountered in the Wake through the ???guiding??? features of a mythological concept of the psyche sensitive to the reflexive tendencies of the dream portrayed, Campbell???s ???cosmogonic cycle???.

This thesis examines theories of translation which are explicit in the themes and implicit in the rhetorical uses of form in the work of Joyce, with a focus on the French translations of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake produced with his collaboration between 1921 and 1931. Philosophies of translation from Jerome through Benjamin plus work in translation theory by Even-Zohar and Toury inform this study of the ethics both of translating and of being translated in the modernist idiom. In identifying a translation ethic arising out of the modernist aesthetic, the thesis postulates a rhetoric of translation by analogy with Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. To this end, key issues in translation studies are addressed: the critical status of the authorized collaborative translation; accounting in translation for persuasive (versus purely expressive) functions of literary works as text types; translation strategy as a contribution to the debate between essentialism or universal grammar and cultural relativism; the translation imagined as a frame narrative, and the translator as an implied frame narrator of varying invisibility and reliability; and translation as a model of cognitive processes such as reading, understanding, memory, and the growth of consciousness. Via a combination of descriptive, historical, and textual study, this set of topics in translation is shown to explain many thematic and technical preoccupations of Joyce - just as Joyce proves to be an ideal case for descriptive translation studies, not in spite but by virtue of his notional untranslatability. The thesis also seeks to contribute to Joyce studies proper: to an understanding of how Joyce's fiction both does and does not depart from conventions of western narrative; to a portrait of the implied author and undramatized narrator in Ulysses; to an appreciation of translation both broadly and narrowly defined as a recurrent theme in his work; and to a recognition of the influence of Joyce's many contemporary translators and their languages, cultures, and personalities upon his own innovating uses of language and narrative.

The opus of Joseph Joubert (1754--1824) was for a long period barely known, due to the fact that it languished unpublished, both during his lifetime and after his death, until the complete version of his Notebooks was brought out in 1938 by Andre Beaunier (reissued in 1994). It was thanks to this new form which his thoughts now took that a completely new Joubert came into view. No longer was he merely a moralist, as portrayed by Sainte-Beuve, whose version held sway for a number of decades, but a diarist as well, i.e., writing his thoughts on a daily basis, in the bourgeois tradition of the books of hours. However, there is something else visible in Joubert's works, for, as Maurice Blanchot put it, "[Joubert's] journal, while it still takes days as its starting point, is not a reflection thereof, but reaches toward something other than them" (Le Livre a venir). Toward what does it reach? On the one hand, one can see, as Georges Poulet does, that Joubert "is not a philosopher, a moralist or an aphorist, but a wonderful poet of light." (Etudes sur le temps humain ). On the other hand, however, Joubert, in a way which is surprising and as yet unexplored, is also a thinker who takes on novelistic thought, that is, the Hegelian world, and thus the world of prose in all of its fullness. If we consider novelistic thought as superimposing essence onto existence in an attempt to discover the former within the latter (which makes the novel the locus, through the experience of weariness, of the question of man's salvation in a world in which religion's possibilities are elusive), this study ventures a survey of the Notebooks, paying particular attention to the forms taken by return in Joubert's thought and then following the uncompleted circles of detour which Jacques Ranciere has called "The Book of Life" (La parole muette). Notebooks also provide one of the first manifestations of what today is known, with all of the contradictions which this entai

In order to explore the range of indirect metafiction as presented in three exemplary novels, this dissertation begins by examining how the assumptions of "realism" on the one hand and "postmodernism" on the other relate to the paradigmatic triad of story-teller, story, and audience. From this context emerges the view that the range of metafiction is determined by how it reveals the processes and nature of fiction according to a spectrum of mediation: that of the writer between his "raw materials" and the text, that of the text between writer and reader, and that of the reader between the text and his interpretation. Indirect metafiction (or "pretend realism") mediates between realism and postmodernism, revealing without breaking the illusions of realism. Each of the next three chapters, after initially placing the key novel within the context of the author's work as a whole, discusses in detail a novel whose metafictional focus is on one of the three mediations. Accordingly, Chapter II focusses on Randolph Stow's The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) and on the way it reveals the mediation of the author by presenting a writer's fiction as a synthesis of his personal and literary experiences. Chapter III notes how M. K. Joseph's A Soldier's Tale (1976) reflects the mediation of the reader by depicting a writer's interpretation and literary redaction of an oral tale. And Chapter IV shows how Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words (1981) demonstrates the mediation of the text by presenting a writer whose text "crystallizes" the illusions of fiction, then undercuts and exposes them. The analyses of the key texts employ both postmodern and traditional critical approaches, demonstrating them to be complementary; by noting the interpenetration of metafictional and traditional import and significance, the analyses also highlight the mediary nature of indirect metafiction. The fifth chapter draws theoretical conclusions from ideas in the practical chapters: from metafictional revelations through the paradigm of mediation comes an "anatomy" of fiction, delineating its elements; from a sense of how the mind "structures" experience through "fictional" representations of both "reality" and fictional texts comes a "physiology," a sense of how fiction works through language. This discussion leads to definitions of realistic, unrealistic, and self-conscious fiction, and of metafiction, both direct and indirect; the dissertation concludes by remarking on the inter-relations of language, "fiction," and "reality."
Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate

Joseph Breitbach began publishing literature in the late twenties. He came to occupy a specific place in the literary period generally called New Objectivity. The goal of this thesis is to define that place more closely. The first chapter analyzes Breitbach's early stories, whose themes are based on the new social reality of his time. The focus is on the organized workers of the far left (the proletarians), as well as the growing class of small clerks known as the petite bourgeoisie. Breitbach, a department store manager, crafted his fictional characters from this milieu and portrayed both their social problems and everyday life from his observations.
The second chapter illustrates a decisive change in Breitbach's emphasis. In the novel Die Wandlung der Susanne Dasseldorf, which unfolds during the Allied occupation following the First World War, he juxtaposes the two fundamental classes, proletariat and bourgeoisie. Breitbach maintains a place among the writers of the New Objectivity for his retrospective of the postwar period as well as his contemporary portrayal of the lower classes.
The thesis also discusses Breitbach's progressive thinking in his treatment of the female character in his novel and the now almost forgotten German-American relations in the occupied region of Coblenz.

This is a study of the use of language in Joseph Heller's novels Catch-22, Something Happened, Good as Gold, God Knows and Picture This. Heller's fiction is characterized by self-negating sentences and logic, a repetitive story line and circular structure. Each novel concerns the relationship between people and language, but the relationship invariably is circular and inherently non-progressive. The separation between people and language, analogous to the separation between existence and expression, is the basis for Heller's thematics.
Joseph Heller is a novelist who writes about language. Heller's novels all contain or evoke a common system characterized by self-containment and self-reference. In this system, language and literature are self-referential. It is implicit within Heller's writing that literature is a self-contained, non-progressive system, and consequently, it cannot yield a conclusive resolution. The self-contained system of his novels becomes analogous for literature, language, and finally knowledge. Definitive knowledge, being a derivative of language, is impossible. Eventually, Heller's fiction allows no final resolution because of the inconclusive nature of language itself.

Orientador: Fabio Akcelrud Durão
Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem
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Resumo: O fato de existirem sete traduções do "Dubliners" de James Joyce poderia indicar duas situações diametralmente opostas: de um lado, que é possível já existir uma versão cujo brilho seria capaz de apagar, pelo menos temporariamente, a necessidade de se retraduzir os quinze contos; de outro, que há algo neste livro que resistiu e segue resistindo às mais obstinadas tentativas de tradução. O estudo destas traduções, entretanto, demonstrará que poucas são as divergências nas propostas que as animam, diferindo entre si tão-somente no grau de ousadia com que buscaram recriar o "Dubliners" em português: no geral, todas as sete (quatro brasileiras e três lusitanas) seriam filhas dum mesmo desejo de preservar a camada superficial de sentido a qualquer custo, mesmo que isto implique em apagar algumas das características mais intrigantes da prosa joyceana (a saber, a possibilidade de usos verbais dos personagens inadvertidamente despontarem na voz do narrador, as experiências coloquiais que abundam em qualquer dos contos [desvios da norma culta, expressões que não conhecem registro nos principais dicionários da língua, giros lexicais de sentido obscuro, peculiaridades do inglês falado na Irlanda, falas vazias de significação ou demasiado vagas, etc.] e as repetições que criam uma teia de sentidos dentro da obra). Pensando nisto e munido de um conhecimento minucioso tanto do texto inglês quanto do das versões em nosso idioma, empreendi uma nova tentativa de tradução do "Dubliners", tradução de viés acadêmico por vir acompanhada de notas e de um arcabouço teórico sólido, mas que não coloca em segundo plano a necessidade de se recriar a instigância do original irlandês. No que toca à obra joyceana, o crítico Hugh Kenner será uma das pedras de toque do projeto, enquanto que, no tocante à teoria da tradução, Walter Benjamin servirá como iluminador de caminhos. A versão castelhana de Guillermo Cabrera Infante, o genial escritor cubano e um admirador de Joyce, será um modelo de possibilidades criativas: não temos uma versão que se lhe equipare, uma versão que se proponha a criar uma obra rigorosa e de fato literária. Eis o desafio a que me proponho nesta dissertação
Abstract: The fact that there are seven translations of James Joyce's "Dubliners" could indicate two diametrically opposite situations: on the one hand, that it is possible that the splendour of one of these versions would be able to suppress, temporarily at least, the need for another translation; on the other, that there is something in this book that resisted and keeps resisting to the most obstinate attempts of translation. However, the analysis of these translations will show that there are few differences between their proposals: in general terms, all them ( four Brazilians and three Lusitanians) descended from the same desire of preserving at any cost the superficial layer of sense, even when it deletes some of his most intriguing characteristics (as some idioms of the characters appearing in the narrator's voice, or the numerous coloquial experiences, or the repetitions that create a web of signifiers inside the work). With that in mind and provided with a thorough knowledge of the English text as well as of the Portuguese translations, I undertake another attempt to translate it, an academic attempt with plenty of notes and a solid framework but bringing also to foreground the necessity of recreating a literary work, a work that deserves to be called literature. Hugh Kenner will be the touchstone regarding the Joycean criticism, while Walter Benjamin will illuminate new paths in translation studies. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the bright Cuban writer and an admirer of Joyce, was my model of creative possibilities: we do not have a version as good as this one. This is my challenge with this dissertation
Mestrado
Teoria e Critica Literaria
Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

Thesis (MA)-- Stellenbosch University, 2004.
Full text to be digitised and attached to bibliographic record.
ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The following thesis develops a theory of parody as a multifunctional practice in relation to selected works of Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Tom Stoppard. The study discusses parody as a mode of generic engineering (rather than a genre itself) with ideological ramifications. Based on an understanding of literary and non-literary genres as social institutions, this thesis describes the practice of parody as one of engineering generic or discursive incongruity with a particular cultural purpose in mind. In refiguring generic conventions, the parodist simultaneously reworks their implicit ideological premises. Parody hence comes to serve as a means of negotiating with "the world" through generic modification, and the notions of parodic social agency and cultural work are consequently central to this thesis. Focusing on The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest respectively, Chapters Two and Three discuss Wilde's use of parody, and especially parodic "word-masks", for subverting the aesthetic and social conventions of Victorian England, and covertly propagating a gay subculture through parodic injokes. Word-masks - central to Wildean parody - entail the duplicitous use of an object text / genre as a cover under which a parodist hides other meanings. If Wildean parody might be described as claiming a covert agency, Joycean parody must, in contrast, be acknowledged as expressing deep-seated political ambivalence. Chapters Four and Five of this thesis discuss Joyce's Ulysses with specific reference to his use of parody to conflate, relativize and problematize the dominant aesthetic and Irish nationalist discourses of the early twentieth-century. Joycean parody also demonstrates parodic ambivalence and this is especially evident in what might be called his "parodic patriotism". In contrast to Wilde's and Joyce's use of parody for the expression of subversive or progressive political views, Stoppard's parodies confirm conservative English values not only in their reification of the English canon but also in terms of the ideological premises with which they invest their hypotexts. Chapters Six and Seven examine how parody can serve as one of the ways in which modem artists have managed to come to terms with tradition. Focusing on Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Travesties respectively, these chapters explore parody's capacity to function as tribute or homage to the writers of the past being parodied. Ultimately this thesis aims to demonstrate the continuum of parodic cultural work or effects of which parody, as a mode of generic engineering, is capable.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In hierdie tesis word daar - met verwysing na geselekteerde werke van Oscar Wilde, James Joyce en Tom Stoppard - 'n teorie van parodie as multi-funktionele praktyk ontwikkel. Parodie word bespreek as 'n vorm van generiese manipulasie (eerder as 'n genre op sigself) met ideologiese implikasies. Op die basis van 'n vertolking van literêre en nie-literêre genres as sosiale instellings, beskryf hierdie tesis die praktyk van parodie as die bewerkstelling van generiese en diskursiewe ongelyksoortigheid met 'n besondere kulturele oogmerk in gedagte. In die herfigurering van generiese konvensies is die beoefenaar van parodie terselfdertyd besig om hulle geïmpliseerde ideologiese aannames te herbewerk. Parodie word dus 'n metode om met behulp van generiese modifikasie in omgang met "die wêreld" te verkeer; en die idee van die sosiale agentskap en kulturele aksie van parodie staan dus ook sentraal tot hierdie tesis. Hoofstukke Twee en Drie fokus onderskeidelik op The Picture of Dorian Gray en The Importance of Being Earnest. In hierdie twee hoofstukke word Wilde se gebruik van parodie bespreek, met besondere aandag aan sy parodiese "woordmaskers" om die estetiese en sosiale konvensies van Victoriaanse Engeland te ondermyn, asook sy bedekte propagering - deur middel van parodiese binne-grappe -- van 'n gay subkultuur. Sentraal tot Wilde se parodie is woordmaskers wat 'n dubbelsinnige gebruik van teks en genre inspan as 'n dekmantel waaronder die beoefenaar van parodie ander betekenisse verskuil hou. As Wilde se parodie beskryfkan word as bedekte bemiddeling oftussenkoms (covert agency), moet Joyce se parodie - as teenstelling - identifiseer word as 'n uitdrukking van diepliggende politiese ambivalensie. In Hoofstukke Vier en Vyf word Joyce se Ulysses bespreek met spesifieke verwysing na sy gebruik van parodie om dominante estetiese en Ierse nasionalistiese diskoerse van die vroeë twintigste eeu saam te voeg, te relativiseer en te bevraagteken.. Joyce se parodie illustreer ook parodiese ambivalensie - 'n aspek wat duidelik blyk uit wat sy "parodiese patriotisme" genoem kon word. In teenstelling met Wilde en Joyce se gebruik van parodie as uitdrukking van ondermynende of pregressiewe gesigspunte, bevestig Stoppard se parodie konserwatiewe Engelse waardes nie net in hulle vergestalting van Engelse kanoniese tekste nie, maar ook in terme van die ideologiese aannames wat hulle aan hul hipotekste toeskryf. Hoofstukke Ses en Sewe ondersoek hoe parodie kan dien as een van die weë waarlangs moderne kunstenaars daarin geslaag het om hulleself te versoen met tradiese. In Hoofstukke Ses en Sewe - waar daar onderskeidelik op Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead en Travesties gefokus word - word ook aandag geskenk aan die vermoë van parodie om te funksioneer as huldeblyk of eerbetoon aan skrywers wie se werke geparodieer word. Hierdie tesis poog om die kontinuum van parodiese kulturele werk te illustreer waartoe parodie, as 'n vorm van generiese manipulasie, in staat is.

Heart of Darkness, Chance, and Lord Jim can be described as philosophical works if considered in light of "ordinary language" philosophy. Conrad wrestled with skepticism much as Wittgenstein later would, but his struggle with the "bewitchment" of skeptical thinking took a narratival form. His champion was Marlow, raconteur of the three novels, who recurrently loses and recovers his words and his capacity to tell (to judge, to narrate). In these works the Marlovian investigation of human convention, linguistic and otherwise, is shown to be a necessary but perilous task. The possibility that we may be dissatisfied with the ordinary or transcendental conditions of living is dramatized in all three novels, often (but not only) by threats to marriage. Heart of Darkness demonstrates the loss of linguistic attunement that may follow upon taking human relation to be a problem of knowledge, and links this to Kurtz's world-devouring repudiation of the ordinary. Chance explores in melodramatic form the "germ of destruction at the source of our strength", and unmasks men's denial of women as one face of skepticism. Lord Jim presents skepticism, Romanticism, and fantasy as different versions of ontological dissatisfaction, and shows how a return to the ordinary requires a practice of reading and remembering (our words).

This chapter examines the connection between modernism and close reading with reference to one major modernist writer, James Joyce. It examines a small number of examples of the close reading of Joyce’s fiction, trying to identify what happens at the level of interpretation, and also to describe what happens in the language of the critic. A premise of this discussion is that what we think of as close reading, when communicated to us, also implies a practice of writing. As Hugh Kenner, one of the readers under discussion, once remarked: ‘Criticism is nothing but explicit reading, reading articulating its themes and processes in the presence of more minds than one.’ The chapter seeks to discern how the writing of the critic, in thus making reading ‘explicit’, inflects our sense of the literary work.

Most early modern interpretations of the language / dialect distinction were synchronic, but one conception was diachronic, in that language was considered to generate different dialects. Chapter 10 argues that even though this language-historical conception had earlier precursors, it was only due to the influence of Joseph Justus Scaliger’s work that it became popular. Already in the early seventeenth century, this conception was framed by Abraham Mylius within a cyclical process of language change. The language-historical interpretation of the conceptual pair, otherwise primarily understood in synchronic terms, soon prompted criticism, voiced most fiercely by Johann Heinrich Hottinger. Chapter 10 also briefly comments on the emergent idea that dialects preserved archaic features, which was in apparent contradiction with the diachronic conception of the distinction. Finally, this chapter illustrates how the conceptual pair came to be used as a handy discursive strategy for historical classifications of language, especially in cases where evidence was lacking.