Band 132, Heft 1

In this article I examine a number of scenes in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida where trumpet calls punctuate the action, arguing that they index forms of early modern masculine warrior identity. The apparently peripheral theatrical signs highlight, by means of their acoustic semiosis, forms of masculinity imbricated in processes of self-perpetuating violence. That spiralling violence is referred to at one juncture, as a ‘rank feud’ (4.7.16) - a conflict both growing out of control but also one centred around ‘rank’, that is, hierarchical competition generating violence out of violence. I claim that the play, by exploring the deeply oxymoronic structure of the masculine warrior ethos, what it in the context of Hector and Ajax’ duel calls, ‘A gory emulation ’twixt us twain’ (4.7.7), points to broader structures of endemic conflict in early modern English society. The play repeatedly uses the term of imitative ‘emulation’ to index this phenomenon. Such a term, though referring specifically to internecine aristocratic competition, in turn pointed to wider patterns of violence which were of great concern to contemporaries, but which changes in English society down the seventeenth century would gradually make obsolete. The theatre, I suggest, unwittingly imagined these transformations by its very aesthetic form, ‘[a]nticipating time’ in Agamemnon’s phrasing (4.6.2). It did so not out of any uncanny prescience, but because the early modern theatre’s own variety of imitative ‘emulation’, albeit short-lived, was one sector of an emergent capitalist economy in whose interests social strife, culminating in the civil wars and the collective trauma of 1649, would be increasingly curtailed as the century entered its last quarter.

In a time of representation and self-fashioning, as in the Renaissance, the body becomes the main vehicle of expression. Renaissance self-fashioning is one example of how the body was made into a ‘product’, an exhibit of the social and political discourses of its time. The most efficient means provided by ‘polite learning’ of exercising and forming the body (both for purposes of representation, and as proof of one’s physical prowess and health) was dance: rigorous daily practice would facilitate the proper accomplishment of one’s duties at court according to the courtly ideal of control, refinement and grace (in keeping with the concept of sprezzatura). As a well-established discursive practice of the time, dance was a powerful instrument of royal propaganda and an ideal means of vindicating the networks of power. In this paper, I will use the example of the Masque to show how dance and images of dance in literature were used in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture to legitimize and ‘inscribe’, but also to undermine and subvert the power structures of the period for the promotion of individual interests.

Virginia Woolf’s notion of memory, outlined in her memoir “A Sketch of the Past”, destabilises conventional conceptions of the relation between past and present. For Woolf, memory escapes linear time: past and presence no longer follow each other chronologically. Paradoxically, remembered scenes render the past present. It is important to note that only special experiences, characterised as moments of being, have this potential. In contrast to everyday life, which is “not lived consciously”, moments of being are described as “sudden, violent shocks”, remembered “forever”. At the same time, moments of being are only created in retrospect, when they are written down. In this sense, one can observe a striking parallel between Woolf’s moments of being and the notion of traumatic memory outlined by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The article shall focus on the way in which traumatic memories find their way into Virginia Woolf’s literary texts. References to traumatic events like World War I do not occur in the form of narrated past events, but as memory traces articulating themselves in a symptomatic and performative manner. Thus, traumatic memories are preserved in her words as present symptoms that are encountered and acted out by the readers.

This essay approaches T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1935-1942) from the perspectives of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critical practice of reparative reading and of Paul Ricoeur’s poststructuralist hermeneutics. It demonstrates that Sedgwick’s and Ricoeur’s approaches can be productively combined to investigate hermeneutic processes in which the textual energy of a dissemination of meaning is redirected by a reparative or integrative impulse. In Four Quartets, this impetus induces the creation of semantic innovation through a violation of semantic pertinence, that is, through novel, tensional and provisional connections between formerly separate textual elements and semantic units.

In this article we argue that the aesthetic appeal of D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir may be attributed to the many surprises its hybrid form delivers. What sets off this little book from so many other narratives about the American post-war history of suburbanization is the complexity of its literary shape. We analyse this by returning to Michel de Certeau’s opposition between a voyeur-god’s totalizing panorama-city and the immersive experience of the walker at street level. Holy Land presents a series of fragmented observations formally modelled upon the grid pattern that structures the author’s built environment. Roaming across this grid is a walking participant observer: the narrator, who decentres the Cartesian eye of the cartographer. This laconic narrator plays around in a metonymical manner with an endlessly extendable chain of links, disturbing all attempts at reducing and synthesizing his suburban narrative. In the end, however, neither the act of gridding the text nor the insertion of a walking perspective lend themselves to straightforward allegorical interpretations. We are left with an unpredictable stage for the circulation and mutual transformation of information and affect, which in the final analysis appears to be a textual enactment of the workings of desire.

For almost a century, the theory that the intentions of the author ought to be excluded from literary criticism has excited as many theorists as it has exasperated critics and teachers. Advocates of that theory required severe constrictions to be placed upon reading of works - most famously, that the author is or ought to be treated as “dead”. Even attempts to defend the importance of the author placed some constraint on practice. Hence, it seems to us, the discussion led to a scission between theorists and practitioners. This essay aims to rectify that division… but also to “prove” the intentions of the author by a relatively rigorous yet novel approach. As it seeks to keep both audiences, it nevertheless proceeds accessibly (so any critics or teachers who had begun to flip the page, please read on). It thus begins from premises common to the theoretical debate, expands those in accordance with Husserl, but initiates a “mini-Copernican” inversion: taking teaching as the arbiter of what is possible, so what theory ought to account for rather than preclude. The essay then develops those premises in a single sequence to “prove” that an author’s intention appears in the work (as a “phantasm”), then that such intentions are incontrovertibly necessary and possible in literary criticism and teaching. That will permit critics and teachers to consider the author’s intentions in accordance with theory, at last without constraint. Yet it will also allow for a revitalised theory that again supports literary critique.