Journal articles on the topic 'English love poetry – History and criticism'

This celebration of modern Chinese literature is a tour de force, David Wang's third major summation in English. He is even more prolific in Chinese. Wang's command of the creative and critical literatures is unrivalled.Monster's subject is “the multivalence of Chinese violence across the past century”: not 1960s “structural violence” or postcolonial “epistemic violence,” but hunger, suicide, anomie, betrayal (though not assassination or incarceration), and “the violence of representation”: misery that reflects or creates monstrosity in history. Monster thus comments on “history and memory,” like Ban Wang's and Yomi Braester's recent efforts, although for historical reasons modern Chinese literature studies are allergic to historical and sociological methodologies.Monster is comparative, mixing diverse – sometimes little read – post-May Fourth and Cold War-era works with pieces from the 19th and 20th fins de siècle. Each chapter is a free associative rhapsody (sometimes brilliant, sometimes tedious; often neo-Freudian), evoking, from a recurring minor detail as in new historicist criticism, a major binary trope or problematic for Wang to “collapse” or blur. His forte is making connections between works. The findings: (1) decapitation (loss of a “head,” or guiding consciousness?) in Chinese fiction betokens remembering or “re-membering” (of the severed), as in an unfinished Qing novel depicting beheaded Boxers, works by Lu Xun and Shen Congwen, and Wuhe's 2000 commemoration of a 1930 Taiwanese aboriginal uprising; (2) justice is poetic, but equals punishment, even crime, in late Qing castigatory novels, Bai Wei, and several Maoist writers; (3) in revolutionary literature, love and revolution blur, as do love affairs in life with those in fiction; (4) hunger, indistinct from anorexia, is excess; witness “starved” heroines of Lu Xun, Lu Ling, Eileen Chang and Chen Yingzhen; (5) remembering scars creates scars, as in socialist realism, Taiwan's anticommunist fiction, and post-Mao scar literature; (6) in fiction about evil (late Ming and late Qing novels; Jiang Gui), inhumanity is all too human and sex blurs with politics; (7) suicide can be a poet's immortality, from Wang Guowei to Gu Cheng; (8) cultural China's most creative new works invoke ghosts again, obscuring lines between the human, the “real,” and the spectral.

Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. To his credit, therefore, this genius of a literature scholar has singularly authored over 70 articles, six critically engaging books, a novel, and three volumes of poetry. His PhD thesis, Structuring and Meaning in the Nigerian Novel, which he completed in 1989, is a staggering 734-page document. Professor Akwanya has also taught many literature courses, namely: European Continental Literature, Studies in Drama, Modern Literary Theory, African Poetry, History of Theatre: Aeschylus to Shakespeare, European Theatre since Ibsen, English Literature Survey: the Beginnings, Semantics, History of the English Language, History of Criticism, Modern Discourse Analysis, Greek and Roman Literatures, Linguistics and the Teaching of Literature, Major Strands in Literary Criticism, Issues in Comparative Literature, Discourse Theory, English Poetry, English Drama, Modern British Literature, Comparative Studies in Poetry, Comparative Studies in Drama, Studies in African Drama, and Philosophy of Literature. A Fellow of Nigerian Academy of Letters, Akwanya’s open access works have been read over 109,478 times around the world. In this wide-ranging interview, he speaks to Andrew Bula, a young lecturer from Baze University, Abuja, shedding light on a variety of issues around which his life revolves.

As the centuries passed by, the galaxy of Indian English Poetry become increasingly crowded. But the scenario was not like this during the early years. It is because only a few stars shine there, and Nissim Ezekiel is the pole star. His poetry contains so many aspects, themes, motives and symbols that sharpen and shape his poetic world. His poetry often shows irony, emotion, love, man-woman relationship, self- consciousness, a sense of discipline and self – criticism. He shows his concern for both modern and urban art and culture with the touch of Indian ethos and local colour. But as an Indian poet, he shows his thinking about God and religion in a vivid way. He also shows his changing view towards God and Indian theology in his poems. In this paper, I have tried to show Ezekiel’s religious outlook and aspects through some of his verses.

Abstract Time is a singular noun, but includes a multiplicity of temporalities, including what J. T. Fraser has termed sociotemporality. In this paper, I discuss facing the urgency of time in a narrative dominated by sociotemporality, that of the Old English poem Beowulf, and suggest how criticism of the narrative structure of Beowulf has derived from a monovalent understanding of narrative time. Moreover, in recognizing sociotemporality as dominant in the organization of the poem, the modern reader can gain greater access to what was valued in the social context of its response to “the urgency of time.”

Against the “presentism “ of current criticism linking the Defence's universalizing epistemology to the absolutism of Soviet-style propaganda, this study historicizes Philip Sidney's poetics as a consciously constructed vehicle of political liberation. The Defence's epistemology is recontextualized as a governing body of assumptions about the nature of knowledge that Sidney derived from the revival of natural law theory among an intellectual elite closely associated with the late Philip Melanchthon — the so-called Philippists — and the proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. Poetry's preeminence, Sidney maintains, derives from its serviceability in freeing us from the sovereignty of self-love and self-loving sovereigns.

The idea that the Great French Revolution for the age of early English Romanticism is a signal for mankind to transition into a new era, into a new apocalyptic time of the end of human history, is considered established in modern literary studies. At the same time, such issues remain underdeveloped as the relationship between the images of the Golden Age, paradise regained, and New Jerusalem in the poetry of Elder English Romantic poets and the interpretation of modernity in its connection with the past in the context of a biblical myth. The search for answers to these two questions is the goal of this research. The study is conducted within the framework of comparative literary studies with elements of comparative cultural studies. The significant results include the ideas that the human history during the early poetry by Elder English Romantic poets is depicted as mankind’s transition from blissful primordial harmony of the unity of the person-in-love with nature and another person to the oppressed-divided internal (spiritual) and external (social and political) state and, finally, to the new external (free) and internal (spiritually harmonious) bliss. In this new image of human history, the biblical myth of the Last Judgment and the New Jerusalem is superimposed on the idea of the return of the Golden Age and, simultaneously, paradise lost, and is interpreted through enlightenment ideas and romantic philosophy and aesthetics. The Great French Revolution seems to be the precursor of not only the common longing for the new bliss but also the transformation of human nature on the way to returning to the righteous state of sacrificial love.

This paper is part of my PhD thesis. It examines contemporary Northern Irish Literature written in English with the help of the theoretical approach of Irish Studies. It aims to introduce and make a critique of poetry written by Tom Paulin, a contemporary British poet who is regarded one of the major Protestant Irish writers to emerge from Ulster province. The thread pursued in this analysis relates to an investigation of how ideological discourses and the issues of identity are represented in the poet’s work. The author’s critical evaluation of existing ideologies and identities and his attempt to respond to them will also be analyzed. Four poems from three different collections are investigate. Paulin’s poems function as testimonies, denouncement and criticism of the Irish history.

The love-hate nature of the relations between England and Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is well known. Ever since Henry VIII broke with Rome after Pope Clement VII refused to allow his divorce, things Italian were a popular object of satire and general disdain. An ever-increasing British nationalism founded on political, religious, and aesthetic principles during the seventeenth century fanned the flames of anti-Italian sentiment. This nationalism, newly consolidated in the seventeenth century by the ambitions of the Stuart monarchs to destroy Parliament, was intimately connected with English Protestantism. As Samuel Kliger has argued, the triumph of the Goths—Protestant Englishmen's Germanic ancestors—over Roman tyranny in antiquity became for seventeenth-century England a symbol of democratic success. Moreover, observes Kliger, an influential theory rooted in the Reformation, the “translatio imperii ad Teutonicos,” emphasized traditional German racial qualities—youth, vigor, manliness, and moral purity—over those of Latin culture—torpor, decadence, effeminacy, and immorality—and contributed to the modern constitution of the supreme role of the Goths in history. The German translatio implied an analogy between the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Goths (under Charlemagne) and the rallying of the humanist-reformers of northern Europe (e.g., Luther) for religious freedom, understood as liberation from Roman priestcraft; that is, “the translatio crystallized the idea that humanity was twice ransomed from Roman tyranny and depravity—in antiquity by the Goths, in modern times by their descendants, the German reformers…the epithet ‘Gothic’ became not only a polar term in political discussion, a trope for the ‘free,’ but also in religious discussion a trope for all those spiritual, moral, and cultural values contained for the eighteenth century in the single word ‘enlightenment.’”

“Love is the eminence grise of history”, – once one of the greats of the past said. Few doubt that history is driven by human, more or less conscious interests – economic, political, religious, etc. As for feelings, passions and instincts, their role in the historical process is not so obvious, particularly of those that are connected with policy or economy indirectly. The objective necessity to rehabilitate the position of Eros in the political life of 18th-century Russia determines the significance of the current research. The article aims to analyse how the feeling of love and/or the underpinning instincts of procreation and self-preservation affect the political life and the course of history. The most important task is to examine some of the poetic texts of the 18th – early 19th centuries, the authors of which are the part of this still non-trivial historiosophical paradigm. So, it is mainly going to be about love, but not always – about love poems. The novelty of the conducted research lies in the fact that mythological and political issues of Anacreonic poetry have already become the matter of literary criticism [1, 2], while the hidden historiosophical senses have been still neglected. Certain creative works of the 18th-century poets: M.V. Lomonosov, G.R. Derzhavin, S.S. Bobrov served as research material. The practical significance of the investigation consists in the fact that the results can be used for further studying of 18th-century literature and historiosophical problems as well as to develop special courses in historical poetry.

Abstract This article probes into the motivation behind Zhou Zuoren’s (1885-1967) translation and imitation of the English poet William Blake’s (1757-1827) poems about love and sexuality in the May Fourth era. It situates Zhou’s approach to Blake’s poems in the contemporary context of the New Culture Movement and traces the Japanese and English sources that informed Zhou’s reading of Blake. By analyzing Zhou’s selective use of his foreign sources and his calculated translation of Blake’s poems, it argues that Zhou’s appropriation of Blake was driven by his agenda for unfettered sexuality, free love, and women’s emancipation, i.e. the reform of the relations of the sexes in China. This study goes on to investigate Zhou’s reference to and imitation of Blake in the controversy over a young poet’s writing of love poems in 1922. It further contends that Zhou’s concern for sex relations was part and parcel of his vision of modern Chinese poetry, which resonates with his earlier and far-reaching proposal for a literature of humanity that profited from Blake’s theory of the unity of body and soul.

This article argues that Isabella Whitney’s verse epistles ‘To Her Unconstant Lover’ and ‘The Admonition’ in The Copy of a Letter (c. 1566–67) are enmeshed more thoroughly in the early modern English soundscape than previous criticism has tended to acknowledge. Seeking to enrich current understandings of Whitney’s confluences, this article first examines the vibrant musical sphere in which The Copy of a Letter’s printer-publisher Richard Jones was demonstrably immersed before moving on to explore the more specific implications of an acoustically evocative allusion to ‘Raging Love’ (a now-lost Elizabethan ballad melody) in the opening lines of ‘The Admonition’.

AbstractA new English translation, by Peter Khoroche and Herman Tieken, of “Hāla's 700” Prakrit verses caters for a long-felt want in the field of classical Indology. It is an attractive literary rendering, succinctly annotated, of stanzas epitomizing the delights and sorrows of love. The result is not, however, in every case an improvement upon previous efforts, and it emphasizes the need for more objective textual criticism. It is the compilers' personal selection, both from among the thousand or so verses that vie to represent the nominal 700, and from among the multifarious variant readings that have accrued over the centuries in half a dozen distinct recensions. It is particularly regrettable that the work is based substantially upon Weber's Madhyadeśa Vulgate text, despite the indications, largely provided by Tieken's own previous work on the text, of the reliability of the “Jaina” recension, especially Bhuvanapāla's readings when supported and corrected by their Madhyadeśa and Kerala offshoots. The evidence does not really justify postulation, following Weber, of an underlying original corpus of 700 verses.

In the first half of the twentieth century, when Japanese and Arabic poets began writing free-verse poetry, many terms were proposed as labels for the new form. In addition to the calques on “free verse,” neologisms were created to name the new poetry. What is striking is that, in these two quite different literary spheres, a number of the proposed neologisms were the same: for example, in both Japanese and Arabic the terms prose poetry, modern poetry, and colloquial poetry were proposed (among others) as alternatives to the label free poetry. This essay provides an annotated list of the neologisms in Japanese and Arabic, with a list of English terms for comparison; and by referring to the contemporary Japanese and Arabic criticism on the topic of poetic innovation, this essay attempts to explain the similarity between the Japanese and Arabic neologisms. In short, the Japanese and Arabophone arguments in favour of adapting the free-verse form were based on similar premises regarding modernity, freedom, and a vision of literary history that was rooted in an evolutionary theory of genre development.

AbstractThe paper first traces the history and elaboration of the tertiary discipline English Literature through the 19th and 20th centuries to the present day, with special focus on the axiology, the values, given to the discipline and with a brief account of literary criticism and literary theory. It then refers to the work on registerial cartography in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and explores the register of the contemporary discipline in first-order field of activity and second-order field of experience, with examples from the language of webpages and exam papers of Australian universities. It continues with a brief overview of the author’s own work using SFL in the study ofthe poeticandthe narrativein English poetry and prose fiction of different historical periods and concludes with a caveat on the central disciplinary process, that of interpretation.

In this essay, Drew Milne suggests affinities between the dramatization of history in the work of John McGrath and Karl Marx. He shows how both Marx and McGrath refused to mourn the histories of Germany and Scotland as tragedies, but that differences emerge in the politics of McGrath's radical populism – differences apparent in McGrath's use of music, historical quotation, and direct address. McGrath's layered theatricality engages audience sympathies in ways that emphasize awkward parallels between modern and pre-modern Scotland, and this can lead to unreconciled tensions between nationalism and socialism which are constitutive of McGrath's plays. Drew Milne is the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He has published various articles on drama and performance, including essays on the work of August Boal, Samuel Beckett, and Harold Pinter, and is currently completing a book entitled Performance Criticism.

“The Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism,” an informal group of feminist literary critics active at Yale University during the 1970s, were inspired by second-wave feminist curriculum, activities, and thought, as well as by the politics of the women's and gay liberation movements, in their effort to intervene into patterns of female effacement and marginalization. By the early 1980s, while helping direct deconstructive reading away from the self-subversiveness of French and English prose and poetry, the Brides made groundbreaking contributions to—and in several cases founded—fields of scholarly inquiry. During the late 1980s, these feminist deconstructionists, having overcome resistance from within Yale's English Department and elsewhere, used their works as social and political acts to help pave the way for the successes of cultural studies in the North American academy. Far from a supplément to what Barbara Johnson boldly called the “Male School,” the Brides of Deconstruction and Criticism arguably were the Yale school. Examining the distinct but interrelated projects of Yale's feminist deconstructive moment and how local and contingent events as well as the national climate, rather than the importation of so-called French theory, informed this moment gives us a clearer rendering of the story of deconstruction.

In an effort to capture how Orientalist translations, imitations and criticism of Asian poetry came to inform the idealization of lyric as a universal genre, this paper focuses on the practice of poetic metre in the nineteenth century. How did Victorian conceptions of recitational communities, bounded by shared ‘national’ metres, square against the wealth of translated works that were a major component of Victorian print culture? The amateur Orientalist Ebenezer Pocock explained various metres and musical practices associated with ‘Persian lyrics’ in his book Flowers of the East (1833) and offered equivalent metres in English before replicating these shared English/Persian metres in his own imitative poem ‘The Khanjgaruh: A Fragment’. This article sketches how Pocock's casting of this hybrid material in metres that would already have been recognizable to his English readers seems to have the intended effect of both orienting his work towards his domestic audience and grounding such a flexible approach within the Persian tradition itself. Pocock's poem sits amongst a range of accompanying materials including translations of Sa‘dī and scholarly essays on comparative philology and Persian literary history. Each of these different pieces supports the collection's greater effort – best encapsulated by ‘The Khanjgaruh’ – to both remember and imagine the shared poetic history between Asia and Europe. Pocock's writing thus emblemizes how the nineteenth-century ‘West–East lyric’ was a product of both historical and philological recovering as well as the willed creation of poets and poetry enthusiasts. As a category, lyric performs a binding function in Pocock's work to pull together a linguistically and professionally diverse community of writers.

James W. Underhill. Voice and Versification in Translating Poems. University of Ottawa Press, 2016. xiii, 333 p. After its very strong stance in the 19th century, the versification part of translation scholarship was gradually declining during the 20th century, substituted by the innovative searches for semasiology, culture and society in text. The studies of structural and cognitive approaches to writing, its postcolonial identity or gender-based essence uncovered a lot of issues of the informational essence of texts, but overshadowed the meaning of their formal structures. The book ‘Voice and Versification in Translating Poems’ welcomes us to the reconsideration of what formal structures in poetry can mean. James William Underhill, a native of Scotland and a graduate of Hull University, got Master’s and PhD degrees from Université de Paris VIII (1994 and 1999 respectively). He has translated from French, German and Czech into English, and now, he is full professor of poetics and translation at the English Department of Rouen University as well as the director of the Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project. His scholarly activities focused on the subject of metaphor, versification, cultural linguistics and translation. He also authored ‘Humboldt, Worldview, and Language’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), ‘Creating Worldviews: Ideology, Metaphor and Language’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), and ‘Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: Truth, Love, Hate and War’ (Cambridge University Press, 2012). the belief of the impossibility of translating poems, poems are translated and sometimes translated quite successfully. In contemporary literary criticism, one observes the contradiction that despiteJames W. Underhill investigates this fascinating observable fact by deploying the theory of voice. The first part of the book, ‘Versification’, is more theoretical as the researcher is to summarizes the existing views and introduce fundamental terms and guidelines. The book is strongly influenced by the French theoretician Henri Meschonnic, but other academic traditions of researching verse are also present. This part includes four chapters where the author discusses recent scholarship in the subject-matter (‘Form’), theories of verse structure (‘Comparative Versification’), rhythm and stress systems (‘Meter and Language’), and the issues of patterning and repetition (‘Beyond Metrics’). The author shapes the key principle of his views that ‘[v]oice represents the lyrical subject of the poem, the “I” that creates it, but that is also created in and by the poem’ (p. 44). This stipulation drives him to the analysis of five facets in poetry translation: 1) the voice of a language; 2) the voice of an era; 3) the voice of a literary movement or context of influence; 4) the voice of a poet; 5) the voice of the particular poem. Part 2, ‘Form and Meaning in Poetry Translation’, offers more theorizing on how we can (or should) translate form. The triple typology of main approaches – (translating form blindly; translating a poem with a poem; translating form meaningfully) – sounds like a truism. The generic approach might be more beneficial, as the variety of terms applied in poetry translation and applicable to the idea of the book – (poetic transfusion, adaptation, version, variant) – would widen and deepen the range of questions trying to disclose the magic of transformations while rendering poetry of a source author and culture to the target reader as an individual and a community. The experience of a reader (individual and cultural personality) could be a verifying criterion for translating strategies shaped the translator’s experience. In Part 3, ‘Case Studies’, the author explores the English translations of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and the French and German translations of Emily Dickinson’s poems. All translations theoreticians and practitioners will agree with the researcher’s statement that “[t]ranslating that simplicity is inevitably arduous” (p. 187). Balancing between slavery-like formalist operations and free transcreations, translators experiment on strategies of how to reproduce the original author’s voice and versification successfully enough. The longing categorically pushes us to the necessity of understanding what is in language but communication, how a nation’s emotionality is built linguistically, and why a language applies certain meters for specific emotional articulation. ‘Glossary’ (p. 297-319), compiled on the basis of theoretical reflections in the main text on the book, is of significant practical value. This could really become a good sample to follow in any academic book. This book takes us closer to the questions ‘How can a form mean something?’ and ‘How can we verify this meaning?’, though further research merged in ethnolingual, ethnopoetic and ethnomusical studies still promises to be extremely rich.

Searching for the phrase “appreciation of literature” in Google's Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase reached its peak usage in English publications between 1936 and 1937 and then nosedived after those years. It's interesting to speculate about what came together at that time. In 1937, DC Thomson published the first issue of The Dandy, one of the best selling comics in the history of British pop culture and the third-longest-running comics in the world; Daffy Duck debuted in the animated short Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery for the Looney Tunes series; and Detective Comics commenced publication. A year later, Superman went public. But 1937 also was the year that John Crowe Ransom left Vanderbilt University for Kenyon College and published “Criticism, Inc.” in The Virginia Quarterly Review. The target of Ransom's ire is “moralist” historical criticism, into which camp he puts actual morality purveyors, the new humanists and the new leftists (those purveyors of what we often now call symptomatic readings), and “personal registrations” or unfettered appreciation (597). While of course correlation is not causation, 1937 might mark an important fork in the subterranean lines in the United States, where the two trains of comics fandom and literary criticism begin to go in different directions, on trajectories that take them farther apart during and after World War II: comics toward the aesthetics of appreciation, and criticism to increasingly professionalized literary analysis. Critics today seem to be returning to this junction, asking how comics and criticism might reunite. Perhaps that convergence is happening now, through approaches variously known as surface reading (Best and Marcus), reparative reading (Sedgwick), close reading, postcritique (Felski, Limits), thin description (Love), or redescription (Latour)—each of which encourages professionalized critical appraisal without taking rolling stock into dead-end symptomatic tunnels. Perhaps it is through some other approach, one that may look like Hillary Chute's Why Comics?

The article notes that critics of the Ukrainian diaspora emphasized the significance of the works of the „Lanka”-MARS authors, considered the main strategies of their work, and determined the connection of the works with the world literary tradition. Lavrinenko's anthology „The Executed Renaissance” allows us to understand the specifics of the history of Ukrainian literature of the 1920s and 1930s. Yu. Lavrinenko represented articles about the works of B. Antonenko-Davydovych, G. Kosynka, T. Osmachka, E. Pluzhnyk, V. Pidmohylny, and D. Falkivsky, which testify to the specifics of Yu. Lavrinenko's reception. The critic called love the main characteristic of T. Osmachka's poems. Yu. Lavrineno emphasized that D. Falkivsky's poetry is characterized by simplicity and naturalness. The article defines that the critic, characterizing the poetic texts of E. Pluzhnyk, emphasizes the principles of his poetics that represent acmeistic traditions. Yu. Lavrinenko focuses on determining the main principles of V. Pidmohylny's works. The article states that Yu. Lavrinenko calls G. Kosynka a talented author of his time, in his skill the writer stands next to M. Khvylov and V. Pidmohylny, his epic works reveal a synthesis of lyricism and brutal metaphor. B. Antonenko-Davidovych's story „Death” is represented by the critic of the Ukrainian diaspora as a confrontation between man, personality and the Communist Party. The article considers the reception of Yu. Sherekh by V. Pidmohylny and T. Osmachka. The critic reveals the deep meaning of V. Pidmohylny's novel „City”, which allows the modern reader to read the work from a different angle, to see new aspects of the artistic world of the text. The article examines the strategies of interpretation of the works of T. Osmachka. Yu. Sherekh called the Ukrainian poet one of the best modern authors, saw his connection with the world tradition, with the works of D. Byron and O. Pushkin.

Novels, of any time, carry certain stories related to reality. The earlier forms of the Novel, Allegory and Romance, contained religious, philosophical facts. These literary genres took the shape of Novels, which continue to carry moral, philosophical and historical truths. George Meredith, a Victorian novelist, defined Novel as the ‘summary of actual life’. According to William Henry Hudson, an English writer, Novel is an effective medium of the portrayal of human thoughts and actions. The English word, Novel derived from the Italian term, Novelle, which means ‘a fresh story’. It was in 1350 that the Italian writer, Giovanny Boccassio, wrote his world famous collection of love stories in prose, named Decameron. Such stories in prose were called ‘novelle’ and a story in verse was known as ‘romance’. It meant a story of the legendary past. Malory’s Morte d’Arthur is an example. Some experts gave various definitions for a ‘Novel’. According to an American novelist, F. Marion Crawford, a Novel is a pocket theatre; a novel contained all accessories of a drama without requiring to be staged before an audience. George Meredith, an English novelist, called it a ‘summary of actual life’ including both ‘the within and the without’. According to W.H Hudson, Novel is an effective medium of the portrayal of human thought and action, ‘combining in itself the creations of poetry, the details of history and generalised experience of philosophy’.

Abstract Batsheva Goldman-Ida, art historian and museum curator, introduces the article by Jiří Mordechai Georgo Langer (1894, Prague–1943, Tel Aviv): “On the Function of the Jewish Doorpost Scroll,” presented for the first time in English translation, and originally written for the Freud journal Imago in 1928. Langer, a Hebrew poet and teacher of Jewish studies was a friend of Franz Kafka. Langer joined the Belz Hasidism from 1913–16 and was one of the people who introduced Kafka to Hasidism. Langer suggests an explanatory model for Jewish religious artifacts such as the Mezuzah and Phylacteries in the context of compulsion neuroses, referencing the rites of indigenous people and totem theory. The introduction provides background material on the author and details of his other books and endeavors, as well as a framework to better appreciate his poetry and scholarly work. Langer sought a revival of “comrade love” whose homerotic bias is of interest today. His essay on the Mezuzah opens up a range of questions on Jewish artifacts, psychoanalysis, and the origins of Jewish rites. Long left unnoticed, it challenges the current field of Jewish scholarship to rethink its methodology.

Think of the intensity and notoriety of Sylvia Plath in the English-speaking world, and multiply it several times: that is Yona Wallach for the Hebrew-speaking world today. The most passionate and flamboyant figure in postwar literary Israel, Wallach was born on a small farming village in 1944, lived there most of her life until her death of breast cancer in 1985, and after her death has become a cultural legend. In life Wallach experimented with sex, drugs, and madness (she checked herself into a mental hospital in 1964 and remained for three months, deliberately exploring what the subconscious yielded), was a compelling live performer of her poems, and was typically surrounded by worshipful younger writers. In her art she was yet more experimental. Her poetry combines mysticism, sexuality, an ecstatic love of nature and a correspondingly powerful mistrust of society and its conventions, a fascination with language and the breakdown of language, an insistence on the validity of freedom and will. Steeped in biblical allusions, mythology, fairy tales, and kabbalistic imagery, she often twists and turns her sources with playful or violent irony. Her lexicon swerves through extremes of exaltation and crudeness. Her verse sometimes is traditionally rhymed, more often unpredictably and jazzily ragged, her imagery is often surreal, her narratives elliptic, her syntax fractured—yet thrillingly readable.

The main purpose of this article is to consider the conceptual approach of the patriotic attitude to the historical roots and individuality of nations in works of fiction on historical themes by outstanding writers who lived in different countries in the same century. In their works, Mary Stewart and Aziza Jafarzade wrote about the historical environment, human relations, religion, the struggle for their beliefs, and other issues. One thing that unites writers is that their appeals to historical works coincide with their age of wisdom. Writers created their works, feeling the spirit of the historical realities of their countries, and skillfully used the artistic imagination to depict events of the long past. This article mainly compared Mary Steward�s �Arthur pentalogy� and Aziza Jafarzade�s �Baku-1501� historical novel and �Hun Mountain� story. The real historical person living in the 16th century AD. Shah Ismail Khatai is the protagonist of �Baku-1501� written by Aziza Jafarzade. Shah Ismail�s name is connected with the flourishing of the Azerbaijani language as both poetry and a diplomatic language. He has a special place in our history and his name is written with golden letters in the history of Azerbaijan. Of course, the appeal to this period is a manifestation of love for Azerbaijan. The same motive is clearly seen in Mary Stewart�s �Arthur pentalogy�. The love for her country aroused interest in the historical subject. Thanks to the legendary king Arthur writer decodes the real identity of the nation. The heroes of these two novels struggle for their convictions and during their reign, they become masters of the ruling. Although the exact period is not indicated in the story about the Turkic-speaking tribe �Hun Mountain�, it is possible to define the era based on historical realities. The Huns� migration to Azerbaijan falls approximately to the 4th century AD. At the same time, Aziza Jafarzade makes special stresses in the story of �Hun Mountain� to our ancient Turkish words. The period of �Arthur pentalogy� is the 5-6th centuries AD. The parallels between Mary Stewart�s pentalogy and Aziza Jafarzade�s �Hun Mountain� are that they describe the far periods of our age and the main feature of that period is that the elements of legendary motifs are inevitable.

<p>In recent decades, ethnopoetics has become one of the new philological disciplines. Its idea first appeared in the treatise of Nicolas Boileau &ldquo;The Art of Poetry&rdquo; (1674), in which the classicist theorist formulated the requirement of local and historical color in art. His rule was followed by many poets, playwrights and novelists of Modern history. In Anglo-American criticism, the term ethnopoetics was introduced in 1968. Jerome Rotenberg, who, along with Dennis Tedlock and Dell Himes, founded the principles and methods of studying American Indian poetry. In the 2000s. this concept has entered encyclopedic dictionaries in English and other European languages, but this word is still not in Russian terminological dictionaries. So far, the concept of poetics, which restricts the semantics of words forming a term, has received recognition. Already in the process of formation of ethnopoetics, its subject was expanded at the expense of middle Eastern and Jewish folklore, and later the oral creativity of other peoples. The word formation model (ἔ&theta;&nu;&omicron;&sigmaf;/ ethnos&nbsp;+&nbsp;&pi;&omicron;&iota;&eta;&tau;&iota;&kappa;ή/poetics) cancels limited interpretations of the term. In modern usage, the term ethnopoetics is used in a wide range of meanings that have not yet been marked by lexicographers, but convey the full semantics of the words forming the term. The idea of ethnopoetics gave rise to not one, but several of its concepts. The author of the article develops his earlier understanding of ethnopoetics as a discipline that should study the national identity of the oral and written text, describe in the categories of poetics the specific things that make national literature national. It is characterized by concepts and conceptospheres, they form the mentality, reveal the cultural code of national literatures. The analysis of ethnopoetics opens up great opportunities in the comparative analysis of thesauri of different authors and their works.</p>

The article focuses on the first period in the history of Australian cinema. It is well-known that the present is always rooted in the past. This is true of any national cinema, and the Australian one is no exception. This subject is relevant in the light of the fact that, in the first place, the reasons for the contemporary boom in Australian cinema are impossible to understand and analyze unless they are derived from the awareness of the first steps of Australian cinema. It was in the very first years of the existence of Australian cinema that there emerged a special worldview, inherent in the cinematographic messages of this nation, that would later become iconic of Australian cinema: addressing the reality of Australia, love for its wild and beautiful nature and for the people who civilize this severe land. In their works the filmmakers of the Green Continent have almost always unflaggingly introduced two protagonists, an animate one, a manly, daring human being, and an inanimate one, the nature, magnificent, powerful, unexplored... At the same time, there was formed an image of a Hero: a fair, proud man, for whom honor and dignity are closely linked to striving for freedom. A conflict between the Individual and a soulless system is manifested in the early bushranger films and in the contemporary ones alike, now that the films by the Australian filmmakers come out again and again featuring the Individuals attempts at breaking his bondage. The novelty of this research lies in the fact that while the contemporary period of Australian cinema is well-covered in the global film criticism, the past of this national cinema is almost unknown. Considering the interest in the phenomenon of the contemporary cinema of the Green Continent, the author concludes that the global success of the Australian films today is largely linked to the accomplishments of the cinema pioneers, who against tough competition from American and English films, have laid a foundation for the future victories of this special national cinema.

Grundtvig in Normal Danish.Helge Grell: The Spirit of the Creator and the Spirit of the People. An examination of Grundtvig’s ideas about peoples and popular culture, and their connection with his Christian view. Anis Publishing House, Århus. 346 pp.A Human First, A Christian Next. Helge Grell’s dissertation on Grundtvig under debate. Edited by Jens Holger Schjørring, the writers, and Anis Publishing House. Århus, 1988. 101 pp.Grundtvig’s prose is difficult to read, even for Danes. In this book Helge Grell has made his ideas about people, nations, and popular culture readable and intelligible. He has also examined Grundtvig’s relations with the non-Danish writers who have dealt with nationality and nationalism, and whom Grundtvig has known. The main problem has been whether Grundtvig - particularly in his writings from 1810 to 1865 - misused Christianity for the purpose of nationalistic propaganda against Germany, which he has been accused of, especially as regards the time around the two Schleswig wars, 1848-50 and 1864.The book is a chronological study of Grundtvig’s ideas from 1810 to 1865 which shows that his thoughts about peoples and popular culture have grown out of the particular philosophy and theology of creation that Grundtvig developed after his Christian revival in 1810 and which found its practical theological form especially in his years as pastor from 1821, and during his three journeys to England 1829-1831. From 1821 Grundtvig sees God’s work of creation as an act of love, which in the course of history has led Him to include the creation of peoples and popular culture. Grundtvig now sees the Holy Ghost as the spirit of human history who creates an interaction between God’s word and man’s word in its national form: the mother tongue, and who works through the spirit of a people. His ideas about people and popular culture are thus brought into connection with the Mosaic-Christian view of human life as a whole.To Grundtvig the Jewish people with its particular history constitutes what he understands by an "artificial people” in which the national spirit has, ’’with marvellous artistry”, created a unique God-chosen people from whose history Christianity was to develop (Selected Works, vol.V, p. 401-425). Grundtvig substitutes the phrase for Fichte’s "normal people”. Grell writes in this connection: ”The view of man of this people, developed through Christianity, must stand as normative in the interaction with the spirits of the two other great peoples, i.e., those of Greece and the Nordic countries, in order that they may serve universal history, and all other peoples are evaluated (by Grundtvig) in comparison with them." Grundtvig uses the term "natural peoples” for these two other principal peoples, i.e., peoples whose history can be traced chronologically, and who have preserved a living connection with the people’s spirit through a living mother tongue.A people’s spirit is regarded by Grundtvig as an image of God’s creator- spirit, just as poetry with its imagery is. Grell has made a more elaborate examination of Grundtvig’s theology of the Word in his preliminary study for the dissertation "The Creator Word and the Figurative Word”, which was published in 1980 and was reviewed in Grundtvig Studies 1982. It is also included in the German summary appended to the dissertation. It is through this close connection between Grundtvig’s theology of the Creation and his theology of the Word that Grell succeeds in defending Grundtvig against the accusations of nationalistic propaganda. Grell rightly claims that it is this key theme in his writings that must be attacked if one wants to make any effective criticism of his ideas about peoples and popular culture.Grell’s two theses are not directed against any other view of Grundtvig’s thinking. Only in the conclusion of the work did it appear that his dissertation might be read as an alternative to Kaj Thanings understanding of Grundtvig ("A Human Being First...”, Dissertation, Copenhagen 1963). A good deal of the debate during and after the public defence has therefore turned on this question, which in the dissertation is only brought up in the comprehensive notes. The dialogue between Thaning and Grell clearly demonstrates the mutual respect of the two scholars, but causes neither of them to change their attitudes or standpoint.

-Peter Hulme, Stephen Greenblatt, New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xviii + 344 pp.-Nigel Rigby, Alan Riach ,The radical imagination: Lectures and talks by Wilson Harris. Liège: Department of English, University of Liège, xx + 126 pp., Mark Williams (eds)-Jonathan White, Rei Terada, Derek Walcott's poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: North-eastern University Press, 1992. ix + 260 pp.-Ray A. Kea, John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic world, 1400-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xxxviii + 309 pp.-B.W. Higman, Barbara L. Solow, Slavery and the rise of the Atlantic system. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. viii + 355 pp.-Sidney W. Mintz, Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave acculturation and resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 412 pp.-Karen Fog Olwig, Corinna Raddatz, Afrika in Amerika. Hamburg: Hamburgisches Museum für Völkerkunde, 1992. 264 pp.-Lee Haring, William Bascom, African folktales in the new world. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. xxv + 243 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Dale A. Bisnauth, History of religions in the Caribbean. Kingston: Kingston Publishers, 1989. 225 pp.-Gloria Wekker, Philomena Essed, Everyday racism: Reports from women of two cultures. Alameda CA: Hunter House, 1990. xiii + 288 pp.''Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory. Newbury Park CA: Sage, 1991. x + 322 pp.-Deborah S. Rubin, Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White women, racism, and history. London: Verso, 1992. xviii + 263 pp.-Michael Hanchard, Peter Wade, Blackness and race mixture: The dynamics of racial identity in Colombia. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993. xv + 415 pp.-Rosalie Schwartz, Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Slaves, sugar, & colonial society: Travel accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899. Wilmington DE: SR Books, 1992. xxvi + 259 pp.-Susan Eckstein, Sandor Halebsky ,Cuba in transition: Crisis and transformation. With Carolee Bengelsdorf, Richard L. Harris, Jean Stubbs & Andrew Zimbalist. Boulder CO: Westview, 1992. xi + 244 pp., John M. Kirk (eds)-Michiel Baud, Andrés L. Mateo, Mito y cultura en la era de Trujillo. Santo Domingo: Librería La Trinitario/Instituto del Libro, 1993. 224 pp.-Edgardo Meléndez, Andrés Serbin, Medio ambiente, seguridad y cooperacíon regional en el Caribe. Caracas: Editorial Nueva Sociedad, 1992. 147 pp.-Dean W. Collinwood, Michael Craton ,Islanders in the stream: A history of the Bahamian people. Volume One: From Aboriginal times to the end of slavery. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. xxxiii + 455 pp., Gail Saunders (eds)-Gary Brana-Shute, Alan A. Block, Masters of paradise: Organized crime and the internal revenue service in the Bahamas. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991. vii + 319 pp.-Michaeline Crichlow, Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican people 1880-1902. London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991. xiv + 300 pp.-Faye V Harrison, Lisa Douglass, The power of sentiment: Love, hierarchy, and the Jamaican family elite. Boulder CO: Westview, 1992. xviii + 298 pp.-Frank Jan van Dijk, Bob Marley, Songs of freedom: From 'Judge Not' to 'Redemption Song.' Kingston: Tuff Gong/Bob Marley Foundation / London : Island Records, 1992 (limited edition). 63 pp. + 4 compact discs.-Riva Berleant-Schiller, Veront M. Satchell, From plots to plantations: Land transactions in Jamaica, 1866-1900. Mona: University of the West Indies, 1990. xiii + 197 pp.-Hymie Rubenstein, Christine Barrow, Family, land and development in St. Lucia. Cave Hill, Barbados: Institute for social and economic studies (ISER), University of the West Indies, 1992. xii + 83 pp.-Bonham C. Richardson, Selwyn Ryan, Social and occupational stratification in contemporary Trinidad and Tobago. St. Augustine, Trinidad: ISER, 1991. xiv + 474 pp.-Bill Maurer, Roland Littlewood, Pathology and identity: The work of Mother Earth in Trinidad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xxii + 322 pp.-Robert Fatton, Jr., Brian Weinstein ,Haiti: The failure of politics. New York: Praeger, 1992. ix + 203 pp., Aaron Segal (eds)-Uli Locher, Michel S. Laguerre, The military and society in Haiti. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. x + 223 pp.-Paul E. Brodwin, Leslie G. Desmangles, The faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xiii + 218 pp.-Marian Goslinga, Enid Brown, Bibliographical guide to Caribbean mass communication. John A. Lent (comp.). Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. xi + 301 pp.''Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles: An annotated English-language bibliography. Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. xi + 276 pp.-Jay B. Haviser, F.R. Effert, J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong, curator and archaeologist: A study of his early career (1910-1935). Leiden: Centre of Non-Western studies, University of Leiden, 1992. v + 119 pp.-Hans van Amersfoort, Anil Ramdas, De papegaai, de stier en de klimmende bougainvillea. Essays. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1992.-Ineke van Wetering, Deonarayan, Curse of the Devtas. Paramaribo: J.J. Buitenweg, 1992. v + 103 pp.-Ineke van Wetering, G. Mungra, Hindoestaanse gezinnen in Nederland. Leiden: Centrum voor Onderzoek Maatschappelijke Tegenstellingen, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1990. 313 pp.-J.M.R. Schrils, Alex Reinders, Politieke geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba 1950-1993. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1993. 430 pp.-Gert Oostindie, G.J. Cijntje ,Stemmen OK, maar op wie? Delft: Eburon, 1991. 150 pp., A. Nicatia, F. Quirindongo (eds)-Genevieve Escure, Donald Winford, Predication in Caribbean English Creoles. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993, viii + 419 pp.-Jean D'Costa, Lise Winer, Trinidad and Tobago. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993. xi + 369 pp. (plus cassette)

Background. Choral work of American composers of the second half of the XX century is characterized by new qualities that have appeared because of not only musical but also non-musical factors generated by the system of cultural, historical and social conditions. Despite of a serious amount of scientific literature on the history of American music, the choral layer of American music remains partially unexplored, especially, in Ukrainian musical science, that bespeaks the science and practical novelty of the research results. The purpose of this study is to discover and to analyze the peculiarities of the historical formation and identity of American choral art of the second half of the twentieth century using the the works of famous American artists as examples. The research methodology is based on theoretical, historical and analytical methods, generalization and specification. Results. The general picture of the development of American composers’ practice in the genre of choral music is characterized by genre and style diversity. In our research we present portraits of iconic figures of American choral music in the period under consideration. So, the choral works of William Dawson (1899–1990), one of the most famous African-American composers, are characterized by the richness of the choral texture, intense sonority and demonstration of his great understanding of the vocal potential of the choir. Dawson was remembered, especially, for the numerous arrangements of spirituals, which do not lose their popularity. Aaron Copland (1899–1990), which was called “the Dean of American Composers”, was one of the founder of American music “classical” style, whose name associated with the America image in music. Despite the fact that the composer tends to atonalism, impressionism, jazz, constantly uses in his choral opuses sharp dissonant sounds and timbre contrasts, his choral works associated with folk traditions, written in a style that the composer himself called “vernacular”, which is characterized by a clearer and more melodic language. Among Copland’s famous choral works are “At The River”, “Four Motets”, “In the Beginning”, “Lark”, “The Promise of Living”; “Stomp Your Foot” (from “The Tender Land”), “Simple Gifts”, “Zion’s Walls” and others. Dominick Argento’s (1927–2019) style is close to the style of an Italian composer G. C. Menotti. Argento’s musical style, first of all, distinguishes the dominance of melody, so he is a leading composer in the genre of lyrical opera. Argento’s choral works are distinguished by a variety of performers’ stuff: from a cappella choral pieces – “A Nation of Cowslips”, “Easter Day” for mixed choir – to large-scale works accompanied by various instruments: “Apollo in Cambridge”, “Odi et Amo”, “Jonah and the Whale”, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”, “Te Deum”, “Tria Carmina Paschalia”, “Walden Pond”. For the choir and percussion, Argento created “Odi et Amo” (“I Hate and I Love”), 1981, based on the texts of the ancient Roman poet Catullus, which testifies to the sophistication of the composer’s literary taste and his skill in reproducing complex psychological states. The most famous from Argento’s spiritual compositions is “Te Deum” (1988), where the Latin text is combined with medieval English folk poetry, was recorded and nominated for a Grammy Award. Among the works of Samuel Barber’s (1910–1981) vocal and choral music were dominating. His cantata “Prayers of Kierkegaard”, based on the lyrics of four prayers by this Danish philosopher and theologian, for solo soprano, mixed choir and symphony orchestra is an example of an eclectic trend. Chapter I “Thou Who art unchangeable” traces the imitation of a traditional Gregorian male choral singing a cappella. Chapter II “Lord Jesus Christ, Who suffered all lifelong” for solo soprano accompanied by oboe solo is an example of minimalism. Chapter III “Father in Heaven, well we know that it is Thou” reflects the traditions of Russian choral writing. William Schumann (1910–1992) stands among the most honorable and prominent American composers. In 1943, he received the first Pulitzer Prize for Music for Cantata No 2 “A Free Song”, based on lyrics from the poems by Walt Whitman. In his choral works, Schumann emphasized the lyrics of American poetry. Norman Luboff (1917–1987), the founder and conductor of one of the leading American choirs in the 1950–1970s, is one of the great American musicians who dared to dedicate most of their lives to the popular media cultures of the time. Holiday albums of Christmas Songs with the Norman Luboff Choir have been bestselling for many years. In 1961, Norman Luboff Choir received the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus. Luboff’s productive work on folk song arrangements, which helped to preserve these popular melodies from generation to generation, is considered to be his main heritage. The choral work by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) – a great musician – composer, pianist, brilliant conductor – is represented by such works as “Chichester Psalms”, “Hashkiveinu”, “Kaddish” Symphony No 3)”,”The Lark (French & Latin Choruses)”, “Make Our Garden Grow (from Candide)”, “Mass”. “Chichester Psalms”, where the choir sings lyrics in Hebrew, became Bernstein’s most famous choral work and one of the most successfully performed choral masterpieces in America. An equally popular composition by Bernstein is “Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers”, which was dedicated to the memory of John F. Kennedy, the stage drama written in the style of a musical about American youth in searching of the Lord. More than 200 singers, actors, dancers, musicians of two orchestras, three choirs are involved in the performance of “Mass”: a four-part mixed “street” choir, a four-part mixed academic choir and a two-part boys’ choir. The eclecticism of the music in the “Mass” shows the versatility of the composer’s work. The composer skillfully mixes Latin texts with English poetry, Broadway musical with rock, jazz and avant-garde music. Choral cycles by Conrad Susa (1935–2013), whose entire creative life was focused on vocal and dramatic music, are written along a story line or related thematically. Bright examples of his work are “Landscapes and Silly Songs” and “Hymns for the Amusement of Children”; the last cycle is an fascinating staging of Christopher Smart’s poetry (the18 century). The composer’s music is based on a synthesis of tonal basis, baroque counterpoint, polyphony and many modern techniques and idioms drawn from popular music. The cycle “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, created by a composer and a pianist William Bolcom (b. 1938) on the similar-titled poems by W. Blake, represents musical styles from romantic to modern, from country to rock. More than 200 vocalists take part in the performance of this work, in academic choruses (mixed, children’s choirs) and as soloists; as well as country, rock and folk singers, and the orchestral musicians. This composition successfully synthesizes an impressive range of musical styles: reggae, classical music, western, rock, opera and other styles. Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) was named “American Choral Master” by the National Endowment for the Arts (2006). The musical language of Lauridsen’s compositions is very diverse: in his Latin sacred works, such as “Lux Aeterna” and “Motets”, he often refers to Gregorian chant, polyphonic techniques of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and mixes them with modern sound. Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna” is a striking example of the organic synthesis of the old and the new traditions, or more precisely, the presentation of the old in a new way. At the same time, his other compositions, such as “Madrigali” and “Cuatro Canciones”, are chromatic or atonal, addressing us to the technique of the Renaissance and the style of postmodernism. Conclusions. Analysis of the choral work of American composers proves the idea of moving the meaningful centers of professional choral music, the gradual disappearance of the contrast, which had previously existed between consumer audiences, the convergence of positions of “third direction” music and professional choral music. In the context of globalization of society and media culture, genre and stylistic content, spiritual meanings of choral works gradually tend to acquire new features such as interaction of ancient and modern musical systems, traditional and new, modified folklore and pop. There is a tendency to use pop instruments or some stylistic components of jazz, such as rhythm and intonation formula, in choral compositions. Innovative processes, metamorphosis and transformations in modern American choral music reveal its integration specificity, which is defined by meta-language, which is formed basing on interaction and dialogue of different types of thinking and musical systems, expansion of the musical sound environment, enrichment of acoustic possibilities of choral music, globalization intentions. Thus, the actualization of new cultural dominants and the synthesis of various stylistic origins determine the specificity of American choral music.

A Rooted Man and a Sacred PoetBy Viggo MortensenA Review of A.M. Allchin: N.F.S. Grundtvig. An Introduction to his Life and Work. With an afterword by Nicholas Lossky. 338 pp. Writings published by the Grundtvig Society, Århus University Press, 1997.Canon Arthur Macdonald Allchin’s services to Grundtvig research are wellknown to the readers of Grundtvig Studier, so I shall not attempt to enumerate them. But he has now presented us and the world with a brilliant synthesis of his studies of Grundtvig, a comprehensive, thorough and fundamental introduction to Grundtvig, designed for the English-speaking world. Fortunately, the rest of us are free to read as well.It has always been a topic of discussion in Denmark whether Grundtvig can be translated, whether he can be understood by anyone except Danes who have imbibed him with their mother’s milk, so to speak. Allchin is an eloquent proof that it can be done. Grundtvig can be translated and he can be made comprehensible to people who do not belong in Danish culture only, and Allchin spells out a recipe for how it can be done. What is required is for one to enter Grundtvig’s universe, but to enter it as who one is, rooted in one’s own tradition. That is what makes Allchin’s book so exciting and innovative - that he poses questions to Grundtvig’s familiar work from the vantage point of the tradition he comes from, thus opening it up in new and surprising ways.The terms of the headline, »a rooted man« and »a sacred poet« are used about Grundtvig in the book, but they may in many ways be said to describe Allchin, too. He, too, is rooted in a tradition, the Anglican tradition, but also to a large extent the tradition taken over from the Church Fathers as it lives on in the Orthodox Church. Calling him a sacred poet may be going too far.Allchin does not write poetry, but he translates Grundtvig’s prose and poetry empathetically, even poetically, and writes a beautiful and easily understood English.Allchin combines the empathy with the distance necessary to make a renewed and renewing reading so rewarding: »Necessarily things are seen in a different perspective when they are seen from further away. It may be useful for those whose acquaintance with Grundtvig is much closer, to catch a glimpse of his figure as seen from a greater distance« (p. 5). Indeed, it is not only useful, it is inspiring and capable of opening our eyes to new aspects of Grundtvig.The book falls into three main sections. In the first section an overview of Grundtvig’s life and work is given. It does not claim to be complete which is why Allchin only speaks about »Glimpses of a Life«, the main emphasis being on the decisive moments of Grundtvig’s journey to himself. In five chapters, Grundtvig’s way from birth to death is depicted. The five chapters cover: Childhood to Ordination 1783-1811; Conflict and Vision 1811-29; New Directions, Inner and Outer 1829-39; Unexpected Fulfilment 1839-58; and Last Impressions 1858-72. As it will have appeared, Allchin does not follow the traditional division, centred around the familiar years. On the contrary, he is critical of the attempts to focus everything on such »matchless discoveries«; rather than that he tends to emphasize the continuity in the person’s life as well as in his writings. Thus, about Thaning’s attempt to make 1832 the absolute pivotal year it is said: »to see this change as an about turn is mistaken« (p. 61).In the second main section of the book Allchin identifies five main themes in Grundtvig’s work: Discovering the Church; The Historic Ministry; Trinity in Unity; The Earth made in God’s Image; A simple, cheerful, active Life on Earth. It does not quite do Allchin justice to say that he deals with such subjects as the Church, the Office, the Holy Trinity, and Creation theology.His own subtitles, mentioned above, are much more adequate indications of the content of the section, since they suggest the slight but significant differences of meaning that Allchin masters, and which are immensely enlightening.It also becomes clear that it is Grundtvig as a theologian that is the centre of interest, though this does not mean that his work as educator of the people, politician, (history) scholar, and poet is neglected. It adds a wholeness to the presentation which I find valuable.The third and longest section of the book, The Celebration of Faith, gives a comprehensive introduction to Grundtvig’s understanding of Christianity, as it finds expression in his sermons and hymns. The intention here is to let Grundtvig speak for himself. This is achieved through translations of many of his hymns and long extracts from his sermons. Allchin says himself that if there is anything original about his book, it depends on the extensive use of the sermons to illustrate Grundtvig’s understanding of Christianity. After an introduction, Eternity in Time, the exposition is arranged in the pattern of the church year: Advent, Christmas, Annunciation, Easter and Whitsun.In the section about the Annunciation there is a detailed description of the role played by the Virgin Mary and women as a whole in Grundtvig’s understanding of Christianity. He finishes the section by quoting exhaustively from the Catholic theologian Charles Moeller and his views on the Virgin Mary, bearing the impress of the Second Vatican Council, and he concludes that in all probability Grundtvig would not have found it necessary to disagree with such a Reformist Catholic view. Finally there are two sections about The Sign of the Cross and The Ministry of Angels. The book ends with an epilogue, where Allchin sums up in 7 points what modem features he sees in Gmndtvig.Against the fragmented individualism of modem times, he sets Gmndtvig’s sense of cooperation and interdependence. In a world plagued with nationalism, Gmndtvig is seen as an example of one who takes national identity seriously without lapsing into national chauvinism. As one who values differences, Grundtvig appeals to a time that cherishes special traditions.Furthermore Gmndtvig is one of the very greatest ecumenical prophets of the 19th century. In conclusion Allchin translates »Alle mine Kilder« (All my springs shall be in you), »Øjne I var lykkelige« (Eyes you were blessed indeed) and »Lyksaligt det Folk, som har Øre for Klang« (How blest are that people who have an ear for the sound). Thus, in a sense, these hymns become the conclusion of the Gmndtvig introduction. The point has been reached when they can be sung with understanding.While reading Allchin’s book it has been my experience that it is from his interpretation of the best known passages and poems that I have learned most. The familiar stanzas which one has sung hundreds of times are those which one is quite suddenly able to see new aspects in. When, for example, Allchin interprets »Langt højere Bjerge« (Far Higher Mountains), involving Biblical notions of the year of jubilee, it became a new and enlightening experience for me. But the Biblical reference is characteristic. A Biblical theologian is at work here.Or when he interprets »Et jævnt og muntert virksomt Liv paa Jord« (A Simple Cheerful Active Life on Earth), bringing Holger Kjær’s memorial article for Ingeborg Appel into the interpretation. In less than no time we are told indirectly that the most precise understanding of what a simple, cheerful, active life on earth is is to be found in Benedict of Nursia’s monastic mle.That, says Allchin, leads us to the question »where we are to place the Gmndtvigian movement in the whole spectmm of Christian movements of revival which are characteristic of Protestantism« (p. 172). Then - in a comparison with revival movements of a Pietistic and Evangelical nature – Allchin proceeds to give a description of a Grundtvigianism which is culturally open, but nevertheless has close affinities with a medieval, classical, Western monastic tradition: a theocentric humanism. »It is one particular way of knitting together the clashing archetypes of male and female, human and divine, in a renunciation of evil and an embracing of all which is good and on the side of life, a way of making real in the frailties and imperfections of flesh and blood a deeply theocentric humanism« (p. 173).Now, there is a magnificent English sentence. And there are many of them. Occasionally some of the English translations make the reader prick up his ears, such as when Danish »gudelige forsamlinger« becomes »meetings of the godly«. I learnt a few new words, too (»niggardliness« and »esemplastic«) the meaning of which I had to look up; but that is only to be expected from a man of learning like Allchin. But otherwise the book is written in an easily understood and beautiful English. This is also true of the large number of translations, about which Allchin himself says that he has been »tantalised and at times tormented« by the problems connected with translating Grundtvig, particularly, of course, his poetry. Naturally Allchin is fully aware that translation always involves interpretation. When for example he translates Danish »forklaret« into »transfigured«, that choice pulls Grundtvig theologically in the direction that Allchin himself inclines towards. This gives the reader occasion to reflect. It is Allchin’s hope that his work on translating Grundtvig will be followed up by others. »To translate Grundtvig in any adequate way would be the work of not one person but of many, not of one effort but of many. I hope that this preliminary study may set in train a process of Grundtvig assimilation and affirmation« (p. 310)Besides being an introduction to Grundtvig, the book also becomes an introduction to past and contemporary Danish theology and culture. But contemporary Danish art, golden age painting etc. are also brought in and interpreted.As a matter of course, Allchin draws on the whole of the great Anglo-Saxon tradition: Blake, Constable, Eliot, etc., indeed, there are even quite frequent references to Allchin’s own Welsh tradition. In his use of previous secondary literature, Allchin is very generous, quoting it frequently, often concurring with it, and sometimes bringing in half forgotten contributions to the literature on Grundtvig, such as Edvard Lehmann’s book from 1929. However, he may also be quite sharp at times. Martin Marty, for example, must endure being told that he has not understood Grundtvig’s use of the term folkelig.Towards the end of the book, Allchin discusses the reductionist tactics of the Reformers. Anything that is not absolutely necessary can be done away with. Thus, what remains is Faith alone, Grace alone, Christ alone. The result was a radical Christ monism, which ended up with undermining everything that it had originally been the intention to defend. But, says Allchin, Grundtvig goes the opposite way. He does not question justification by faith alone, but he interprets it inclusively. The world in all its plenitude is created in order that joy may grow. There is an extravagance and an exuberance in the divine activity. In a theology that wants to take this seriously, themes like wonder, growth and joy must be crucial.Thus, connections are also established back to the great church tradition. It is well-known how Grundtvig received decisive inspiration from the Fathers of the Eastern Church. Allchin’s contribution is to show that it grows out of a need by Grundtvig himself, and he demonstrates how it manifests itself concretely in Grundtvig’s writings. »Perhaps he had a deep personal need to draw on the wisdom and insight of earlier ages, on the qualities which he finds in the sacred poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, in the liturgical hymns of the Byzantine Church, in the monastic theology of the early medieval West. He needs these resources for his own life, and he is able to transpose them into his world of the nineteenth century, which if it is no longer our world is yet a world in which we can still feel at home. He can be for us a vital link, a point of connection with these older worlds whose riches he had deciphered and transcribed with such love and labour« (p. 60).Thus the book gives us a discussion - more detailed than seen before – of Grundtvig’s relationship to the Apostolic Succession, the sacramental character of the Church and Ordination, and the phenomenon transfiguration which is expounded, partly by bringing in Jakob Knudsen. On the background of the often observed emphasis laid by Grundtvig on the descent into Hell and the transfiguration, his closeness to the orthodox form of Christianity is established. Though Grundtvig does not directly use the word »theosis« or deification, the heart of the matter is there, the matter that has been given emphasis first and foremost in the bilateral talks between the Finnish Lutheran Church and the Russian Orthodox Church. But Grundtvig’s contribution is also seen in the context of other contemporaries and reforming efforts, Khomiakov in Russia, Johann Adam Möhler in Germany, and Keble, Pusey and Newman in England. It is one of Allchin’s major regrets that it did not come to an understanding between the leaders of the Oxford Movement and Grundtvig. If an actual meeting and a fruitful dialogue had materialized, it might have exerted some influence also on the ecumenical situation of today.Allchin shows how the question of the unity of the Church and its universality as God’s Church on earth acquired extreme importance to Grundtvig. »The question of rediscovering Christian unity became a matter of life and death« (p. 108). It is clear that in Allchin’s opinion there has been too little attention on this aspect of Grundtvig. Among other things he attributes it to a tendency in the Danish Church to cut itself off from the rest of the Christian world, because it thinks of itself as so special. And this in a sense is the case, says Allchin. »Where else, at the end of the twentieth century, is there a Church which is willing that a large part of its administration should be carried on by a government department? Where else is there a state which is still willing to take so much responsibility for the administration of the Church’s life?« (p. 68). As will be seen: Allchin is a highly sympathetic, but far from uncritical observer of Danish affairs.When Allchin sees Grundtvig as an ecumenical theologian, it is because he keeps crossing borders between Protestantism and Catholicism, between eastern and western Christianity. His view of Christianity is thus »highly unitive« (p. 310). Grundtvig did pioneer work to break through the stagnation brought on by the church schisms of the Reformation. »If we can see his efforts in that way, then the unfinished business of 1843 might still give rise to fruitful consequences one hundred and fifty years later. That would be a matter of some significance for the growth of the Christian faith into the twentyfirst century, and not only in England and Denmark« (p. 126).In Nicholas Lossky’s Afterword it is likewise Grundtvig’s effort as a bridge builder between the different church groupings that is emphasized. Grundtvig’s theology is seen as a »truly patristic approach to the Christian mystery« (p. 316). Thus Grundtvig becomes a true all-church, universal, »catholic« theologian, for »Catholicity is by definition unity in diversity or diversity in unity« (p. 317).With views like those presented here, Allchin has not only introduced Grundtvig and seen him in relation to present-day issues, but has also fruitfully challenged a Danish Grundtvig tradition and Grundtvigianism. It would be a pity if no one were to take up that challenge.

Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, is best known to most modern readers as the woman John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, abducted and later wed. As Samuel Pepys memorably records in his diary entry for 28 May 1665:Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the Tower. (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)Here Pepys provides an anecdote that offers what Helen Deutsch has described in another context as “the elusive possibility of truth embodied by ‘things in themselves,’ by the things, that is, preserved in anecdotal form” (28). Pepys’s diary entry yields up an “elusive possibility” of embodied truth; his version of Wilmot’s abduction solidifies what he perceives to be the most notable features of her identity: her beauty, her wealth, and her sexual trajectory.Pepys’s conclusion that “the lady is not yet heard of” complicates this idea of anecdotal preservation, for he neatly ties up his story of Wilmot’s body by erasing her from it: she is removed, voiceless and disembodied, from even this anecdote of her own abduction. Pepys’s double maneuver demonstrates the complex set of interactions surrounding the preservation of early modern women’s sexual and textual selves. Written into Pepys’s diary and writing in conversation with her husband, Wilmot has generally been treated as a subordinate historical and literary figure—a character rather than an agent or an author. The richness of Wilmot’s own writing has been largely ignored; her manuscript poetry has been treated as an artefact and a source of autobiographical material, whereas Rochester’s poetry—itself teeming with autobiographical details, references to material culture, and ephemera—is recognised and esteemed as literary. Rochester’s work provides a tremendous resource, a window through which we can read and re-read his wife’s work in ways that enlighten and open up readings rather than closing them down, and her works similarly complicate his writings.By looking at Wilmot as a case study, I would like to draw attention to some of the continued dilemmas that scholars face when we attempt to recover early modern women’s writing. With this study, I will focus on distinct features of Wilmot’s sexual and textual identity. I will consider assumptions about female docility; the politics and poetics of erotic espionage; and Wilmot’s construction of fugitive desires in her poetry. Like the writings of many early modern women, Wilmot’s manuscript poetry challenges assumptions about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and authorship. Early Modern Women’s Docile Bodies?As the entry from Pepys’s diary suggests, Wilmot has been constructed as a docile female body—she is rendered “ideal” according to a set of gendered practices by which “inferior status has been inscribed” on her body (Bartky 139). Contrasting Pepys’s references to Wilmot’s beauty and marriageability with Wilmot’s own vivid descriptions of sexual desire highlights Wilmot’s tactical awareness and deployment of her inscribed form. In one of her manuscript poems, she writes:Nothing ades to Loves fond fireMore than scorn and cold disdainI to cherish your desirekindness used but twas in vainyou insulted on your SlaveTo be mine you soon refusedHope hope not then the power to haveWhich ingloriously you used. (230)This poem yields up a wealth of autobiographical information and provides glimpses into Wilmot’s psychology. Rochester spent much of his married life having affairs with women and men, and Wilmot represents herself as embodying her devotion to her husband even as he rejects her. In a recent blog entry about Wilmot’s poetry, Ellen Moody suggests that Wilmot “must maintain her invulnerable guard or will be hurt; the mores damn her whatever she does.” Interpretations of Wilmot’s verse typically overlay such sentiments on her words: she is damned by social mores, forced to configure her body and desire according to rigorous social codes that expect women to be pure and inviolable yet also accessible to their lovers and “invulnerable” to the pain produced by infidelity. Such interpretations, however, deny Wilmot the textual and sexual agency accorded to Rochester, begging the question of whether or not we have moved beyond reading women’s writing as essential, natural, and embodied. Thus while these lines might in fact yield up insights into Wilmot’s psychosocial and sexual identities, we continue to marginalise her writing and by extension her author-self if we insist on taking her words at face value. Compare, for example, Wilmot’s verse to the following song by her contemporary Aphra Behn:Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d,For whom Fresh paines he did Create,And strange Tyranick power he show’d;From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,Which round about, in sports he hurl’d;But ’twas from mine, he took desire,Enough to undo the Amorous World. (53) This poem, which first appeared in Behn’s tragedy Abdelazer (1677) and was later printed in Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), was one of Behn’s most popular lyric verses. In the 1920s and 1930s Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Edmund Gosse, and others mined Behn’s works for autobiographical details and suggested that such historical details were all that her works offered—a trend that continued, disturbingly, into the later half of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Paula R. Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Markley, Paul Salzman, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd have shown that Behn’s works are not simple autobiographical documents; they are the carefully crafted productions of a literary professional. Even though Behn’s song evokes a masochistic relationship between lover and beloved much like Wilmot’s song, critics treat “Love Arm’d” as a literary work rather than a literal transcription of female desire. Of course there are material differences between Wilmot’s song and Behn’s “Love Arm’d,” the most notable of which involves Behn’s self-conscious professionalism and her poem’s entrenchment in the structures of performance and print culture. But as scholars including Kathryn King and Margaret J. M. Ezell have begun to suggest, print publication was not the only way for writers to produce and circulate literary texts. King has demonstrated the ways in which female authors of manuscripts were producing social texts (563), and Ezell has shown that “collapsing ‘public’ into ‘publication’” leads modern readers to “overlook the importance of the social function of literature for women as well as men” (39). Wilmot’s poems did not go through the same material, ideological, and commercial processes as Behn’s poems did, but they participated in a social and cultural network of exchange that operated according to its own rules and that, significantly, was the same network that Rochester himself used for the circulation of his verses. Wilmot’s writings constitute about half of the manuscript Portland PwV 31, held by Hallward Library, University of Nottingham—a manuscript catalogued in the Perdita Project but lacking a description and biographical note. Teresa D. Kemp has discussed the impact of the Perdita Project on the study of early modern women’s writing in Feminist Teacher, and Jill Seal Millman and Elizabeth Clarke (both of whom are involved with the project) have also written articles about the usability of the database. Like many of the women writers catalogued by the Perdita Project, Wilmot lacks her own entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and is instead relegated to the periphery in Rochester’s entry.The nineteen-page folio includes poems by both Rochester and Wilmot. The first eight poems are autograph manuscript poems by Rochester, and a scene from a manuscript play ‘Scaene 1st, Mr. Daynty’s chamber’ is also included. The remaining poems, excluding one without attribution, are by Wilmot and are identified on the finding aid as follows:Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotMS poem, untitled, not ascribed Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth Wilmot Autograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotTwo of the songs (including the lyric quoted above) have been published in Kissing the Rod with the disclaimer that marks of revision reveal that “Lady Rochester was not serving as an amanuensis for her husband” yet the editors maintain that “some sort of literary collaboration cannot be ruled out” (230), implying that Rochester helped his wife write her poetry. Establishing a non-hierarchical strategy for reading women’s collaborative manuscript writing here seems necessary. Unlike Behn, who produced works in manuscript and in print and whose maximization of the slippages between these modes has recently been analyzed by Anne Russell, Wilmot and Rochester both wrote primarily in manuscript. Yet only Rochester’s writings have been accorded literary status by historians of the book and of manuscript theory such as Harold Love and Arthur Marotti. Even though John Wilders notes that Rochester’s earliest poems were dialogues written with his wife, the literariness of her contributions is often undercut. Wilders offers a helpful suggestion that the dialogues set up by these poems helps “hint … at further complexities in the other” (51), but the complexities are identified as sexual rather than textual. Further, the poems are treated as responses to Rochester rather than conversations with him. Readers like Moody, moreover, draw reflections of marital psychology from Wilmot’s poems instead of considering their polysemic qualities and other literary traits. Instead of approaching the lines quoted above from Wilmot’s song as indications of her erotic and conjugal desire for her husband, we can consider her confident deployment of metaphysical conceits, her careful rhymes, and her visceral imagery. Furthermore, we can locate ways in which Wilmot and Rochester use the device of the answer poem to build a complex dialogue rather than a hierarchical relationship in which one voice dominates the other. The poems comprising Portland PwV 31 are written in two hands and two voices; they complement one another, but neither contains or controls the other. Despite the fact that David Farley-Hills dismissively calls this an “‘answer’ to this poem written in Lady Rochester’s handwriting” (29), the verses coexist in playful exchange textually as well as sexually. Erotic Exchange, Erotic EspionageBut does a reorientation of literary criticism away from Wilmot’s body and towards her body of verse necessarily entail a loss of her sexual and artefactual identity? Along with the account from Pepys’s diary mentioned at the outset of this study, letters from Rochester to his wife survive that provide a prosaic account of the couple’s married life. For instance, Rochester writes to her: “I love not myself as much as you do” (quoted in Green 159). Letters from Rochester to his wife typically showcase his playfulness, wit, and ribaldry (in one letter, he berates the artist responsible for two miniatures of Wilmot in strokes that are humorous yet also charged with a satire that borders on invective). The couple’s relationship was beleaguered by the doubts, infidelities, and sexual double standards that an autobiographical reading of Wilmot’s songs yields up, therefore it seems as counterproductive for feminist literary theory, criticism, and recovery work to entirely dispense with the autobiographical readings as it seems reductive to entirely rely on them. When approaching works like these manuscript poems, then, I propose using a model of erotic exchange and erotic espionage in tandem with more text-bound modes of literary criticism. To make this maneuver, we might begin by considering Gayle Rubin’s proposition that “If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (398). Wilmot’s poetry relentlessly unsettles the binary set up between partner and present, thereby demanding a more pluralistic identification of sexual and textual economies. Wilmot constructs Rochester as absent (“Thats caused by absence norished by despaire”), which is an explicit inversion of the gendered terms stereotypically deployed in poetry (the absent woman in works by Rochester as well as later satirists like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope often catalyzes sexual desire) that also registers Wilmot’s autobiographical contexts. She was, during most of her married life, living with his mother, her own mother, and Rochester’s nieces in his house at Adderbury while he stayed in London. The desire in Wilmot’s poetry is textualised as much as it is sexualised; weaving this doublebraid of desires and designs together ultimately provides the most complete interpretation of the verses. I read the verses as offering a literary form of erotic espionage in which Wilmot serves simultaneously as erotic object and author. That is, she both is and is not the Cloris of her (and Rochester’s) poetry, capable of looking on and authorizing her desired and desiring body. The lyric in which Wilmot writes “He would return the fugitive with Shame” provides the clearest example of the interpretive tactic that I am proposing. The line, from Wilmot’s song “Cloris misfortunes that can be exprest,” refers to the deity of Love in its complete context:Such conquering charmes contribute to my chainAnd ade fresh torments to my lingering painThat could blind Love juge of my faithful flameHe would return the fugitive with ShameFor having bin insenceable to loveThat does by constancy it merritt prove. (232)The speaker of the poem invokes Cupid and calls on “blind Love” to judge “my faithful flame.” The beloved would then be returned “fugitive with Shame” because “blind Love” would have weighed the lover’s passion and the beloved’s insensibility. Interestingly, the gender of the beloved and the lover are not marked in this poem. Only Cupid is marked as male. Although the lover is hypothetically associated with femaleness in the final stanza (“She that calls not reason to her aid / Deserves the punishmentt”), the ascription could as easily be gendering the trait of irrationality as gendering the subject/author of the poem. Desire, complaint, and power circulate in the song in a manner that lacks clear reference; the reader receives glimpses into an erotic world that is far more ornately literary than it is material. That is, reading the poem makes one aware of tropes of power and desire, whereas actual bodies recede into the margins of the text—identifiable because of the author’s handwriting, not a uniquely female perspective on sexuality or (contrary to Moody’s interpretation) a specifically feminine acquiescence to gender norms. Strategies for Reading a Body of VerseWilmot’s poetry participates in what might be described as two distinct poetic and political modes. On one hand, her writing reproduces textual expectations about Restoration answer poems, songs and lyrics, and romantic verses. She crafts poetry that corresponds to the same textual conventions that men like Rochester, John Dryden, Abraham Cowley, and William Cavendish utilised when they wrote in manuscript. For Wilmot, as for her male contemporaries, such manuscript writing would have been socially circulated; at the same time, the manuscript documents had a fluidity that was less common in print texts. Dryden and Behn’s published writings, for instance, often had a more literary context (“Love Arm’d” refers to Abdelazer, not to Behn’s sexual identity), whereas manuscript writing often referred to coteries of readers and writers, friends and lovers.As part of the volatile world of manuscript writing, Wilmot’s poetry also highlights her embodied erotic relationships. But over-reading—or only reading—the poetry as depicting a conjugal erotics limits our ability to recover Wilmot as an author and an agent. Feminist recovery work has opened many new tactics for incorporating women’s writing into existing literary canons; it has also helped us imagine ways of including female domestic work, sexuality, and other embodied forms into our understanding of early modern culture. By drawing together literary recovery work with a more material interest in recuperating women’s sexual bodies, we should begin to recuperate women like Wilmot not simply as authors or bodies but as both. The oscillations between the sexual and textual body in Wilmot’s poetry, and in our assessments of her life and writings, should help us approach her works (like the works of Rochester) as possessing a three-dimensionality that they have long been denied. ReferencesBartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 129-54.Behn, Aphra. “Song. Love Arm’d.” The Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 1: Poetry. Ed. Janet Todd. London: William Pickering, 1992. 53.Clarke, Elizabeth. “Introducing Hester Pulter and the Perdita Project.” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005). ‹http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/article_view?article_id=lico_articles_bsl159›. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Doctor Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Diamond, Irene, Ed. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.Farley-Hill, David. Rochester’s Poetry. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. Greene, Graham. Lord Rochester’s Monkey. New York: Penguin, 1974. Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, Ed. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse. New York: Noonday Press, 1988. Kemp, Theresa D. “Early Women Writers.” Feminist Teacher 18.3 (2008): 234-39.King, Kathryn. “Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text.” ELH 61 (1994): 551-70.Love, Harold, and Arthur F. Marotti. "Manuscript Transmission and Circulation." The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 55-80. Love, Harold. "Systemizing Sigla." English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700. 11 (2002): 217-230. Marotti, Arthur F. "Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England." A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 185-203.McNay, Lois. Foucault And Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self. Boston: Northeastern, 1992.Moody, Ellen. “Elizabeth Wilmot (neé Mallet), Countess of Rochester, Another Woman Poet.” Blog entry 16 March 2006. 11 Nov. 2008 ‹http://server4.moody.cx/index.php?id=400›. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 23 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/05/28/index.php›. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 392-413. New York: Norton, 2007.Russell, Anne. “Aphra Behn, Textual Communities, and Pastoral Sobriquets.” English Language Notes 40.4 (June 2003): 41-50.———. “'Public' and 'Private' in Aphra Behn's Miscellanies: Women Writers, Print, and Manuscript.” Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 29-48. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.Seal, Jill. "The Perdita Project—A Winter's Report." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January, 2001): 10.1-14. ‹http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-3/perdita.htm›.Wilders, John. “Rochester and the Metaphysicals.” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Hamden: Archon, 1982. 42-57.Wilmot, Elizabeth, Countess of Rochester. “Song” (“Nothing Ades to Love's Fond Fire”) and “Song” (“Cloris Misfortunes That Can Be Exprest”) in Kissing the Rod. 230-32.

If you cannot learn to love (yes love) this city you have no other. Simon Tay, 'Singapore Night Song' (137). Having lived in Australia for more than a year now, it is easier to view my own country through a telescope and learn to love what I used to loathe. It is easier to hold and weigh the ball of its contradictions in my palm and learn how each strand I unknot tells on myself, on my writing, to realise with a shudder that I am a moving microcosm of the city I was born in. Indeed, the more removed I am, the easier it is to be an apologist as it is to be a patriot. Robert Drewe makes the claim that Australia is the most urbanised country in the world (7). Obviously, he has yet to walk the length and breadth of Singapore. To talk about Singapore is to talk about the city. As the joke goes, the capital of Singapore is Singapore, and there is no other city quite like Singapore. It cheerfully admits to being an artificial creation, a test tube mixing West and East and bubbling with possibilities. It resents the reach and rinse of Western influences, yet it cannot afford to close itself from international trade and commerce. It is an Asian metropolis with a noveau-riche arrogance about its place in the world, yet is a mere blip on the map. Call it what you will - a glass-dome city, a Disneyland postcard, an autocratic, authoritarian state with a muzzle and cane ready to keep its citizens in line the name-calling is probably valid, at some point, to some extent. Yet Surprising Singapore, as the tourist brochures coin it, is a lot more elusive than the rumours. Everything about it - its size and vulnerability, the quirk of its history, the fabric of its immigrant cultures that sometimes threatens to fray along the fringes - demands its failure. But in just one full leap of a generation, Singapore has sprung the trap of Third World poverty, rising to become one of the richest nations in the world. Something has to give, and it is in the Singaporean writer's sensibility that we read and understand the human cost. Sometimes it is hard to believe that creatures of flesh and bone may tear up the roads like paper, peeling the rind of earth as carelessly as eating an orange. Aaron Lee, 'Road-Works' (65). Dennis Haskell rightly points out that it would be impossible to be a Romantic in Singapore (27). Not only impossible, but also false. For the reality is this: whatever nature there is, is there by design, not by default, nor by coincidence. Nostalgia is cheap when land is scarce. The country has no hinterland to call its own, no natural resources to draw on but the will of its population of just over three million people. Because of the sheer limitation of size poet Edwin Thumboo once quipped that Singapore is physically an island 224 square miles - 226 square miles at low tide (159) the city has to keep changing, evolving, re-sculpting its coastlines, taking over the sky, laying mazes of walkways and tunnels beneath the ground. Flux becomes a necessity by virtue of circumstance, a virtue of necessity. We are a country of dust where nothing is saved but face. Felix Cheong, 'Work in Progress' (45). The consequence is that Singapore is and will always be - a work in progress, constantly re-modelling its fa瀥volvAade, its face, its planners drafting and grafting the way a poet must rework his manuscript to the fullness of his gift. It is a post-modernist fable turning upon itself, over and over, deconstructing its own meaning, answering only to its own vision. The moment it has finished, arms outstretched and ill at ease, it is finished. In his essay Chaos in Poetry, D.H. Lawrence avers that the task of poets is to reveal the inward desire of mankind… The desire for chaos is the breath of their poetry. The fear of chaos is in their parade of forms and technique (92). Stretch the analogy a little and the same holds true for Singapore. Examine its skyline on a clear blue day and you cannot help but marvel at how well this city-state parades its forms and technique. How well it conceals its fear of chaos beneath skyscraper chrome and glass. How, at its heart, it is still a frightened child of a city learning to cope with the means and meanings of change, pitched at once between promise and compromise, between a desire for chaos and the craftsmanship to contain it. Perhaps this fluidity is a measure of redemption, like a writer with the wit and strength to scratch out the eyes of an unclear poem and begin on a clean sheet, all resources and lines shaped and sharpened by impatient fingers. Everything else about Singapore its politics, policies, polemics follows from this, originates from this fundamental insecurity. When I love you for my fallen love, O City of Endless Energies, your eyes burn out along the street. Gwee Li Sui, 'Kenosis' (34). Having grown up in the relative ease and affluence of Singapore after independence, all I know is the city. I am a child of my times, a child of the city, and its energy has now become my own. It is in my fingertips, in the grip of pen poised steady above paper. The restlessness owns me, steers eloquence towards a mouth, towards poetry. I have even conditioned myself to write on the move in a crowded train or a bus letting the jolt and shuffle set a rhythm in my head. The whirl of a world as I stand on the still ledge of words, recording, rendering, remembering. There is poetry in the silence of a man contemplating his feet on a train, unable - or unwilling - to connect with another through the corner of his eye. There is poetry in the knowing snatches of conversation eavesdropped. There is poetry in the smile of flowers as the boy opens his heart, for the first time, to his first love. For a moment, just a moment the lyrical in the transient. The City is what we make it, You and I. We are the City. For better or for worse. Edwin Thumboo, 'The Way Ahead' (39). Excerpts of poems taken from No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry. References Drewe, Robert. Introduction. The Penguin Book of the City. Victoria, Australia: Penguin Books, 1997. 1-7. Haskell, Dennis. Foreword. No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry. Ed. Alvin Pang and Aaron Lee. Singapore: Ethos Books, 2000. 26-31. Lawrence, D.H. Selected Literary Criticism. London: Heinemann, 1967. Thumboo, Edwin. Edwin Thumboo Interviewed by Peter Nazareth. World Literature Written in English. 18.1(1979): 151-171. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Cheong, Felix. "A Poets Sense of the City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/poets.php>. Chicago Style Cheong, Felix, "A Poets Sense of the City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/poets.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Cheong, Felix. (2002) A Poets Sense of the City. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/poets.php> ([your date of access]).

If Medea has attracted more readers to the Argonautica than any other character – thereby also determining which parts of the poem have become generally familiar – she has also provided critics of the poem with their major (sometimes their sole) topic for discussion. The main charge, particularly among critics writing in English, is that the various aspects of Medea – awakening love, deadly magic, fratricide – form neither a consistent nor a credible whole. One quotation, from an article which explicitly aims to summarise recent criticism, may stand as representative: ‘[Medea′s passion] produced an inconsistency [Apollonius] either ignored deliberately in the confidence of his Medea in love, or, just possibly, may not have noticed. The same emotionally immature and helpless Medea is the competent, unfrightened servant of Hecate, the cool instructress of Jason in taming the bulls, the calm soother of the dragon…the behaviour of Medea later in the [fourth] Book is, against all reason, quite untouched by what we would think of as a shattering experience, at the very least destructive of any real trust between her and Jason….It is as if Apollonius has thrown in [Apsyrtus′ murder] without care or realisation of its consequence for the consistency of her character’. Behind criticism of this kind lies both an understandable desire to relate the characters of ancient literature, if not to our own experience, at least to what instinct tells us is possible, and the whole tradition of criticism which descends from the Poetics of Aristotle. In recent years other approaches have gained currency, but in this paper I shall explore the presentation of Medea as a whole (Part I) and particularly of her flight from Colchis (Part II) within a traditional framework in an attempt to clarify what seem to me to be critical misunderstandings.

This research paper studies a relationship between literature and the physical world is known as eco-criticism. In English Literature Eco criticism refers to specific types of texts.The word "Eco-criticism" depicts the images of nature, forests, animals, birds, seasons, rivers, cities, and flowers. In addition to novels, eco-criticism contains drama, poetry, travel books,cartoons,fables, short stories,movies, songs,games,children's stories and this is an Old English literature concept that's still trendy today,from Beowulf to the present writer.Animals have existed from the beginning of history. That means animals were depicted in literature since the start of history.When Christianity was introduced to the world, the Holy Bible says God created birds, animals first, at last man, it is called natural theology, and also nature is divine. Critics said,for western people's experience on earth is different from other people on the earth,Westerners believed in "Nature's uncountable sounds... have been deafening." The contrast, which is promoted by social anthropology of animism, highlights an element in contemporary society at large connection towards the physical world which is also gradually becoming a central focus when it comes to the environment."The natural world is a social and cultural category." In animistic traditions, those few who believe that perhaps the natural environment is inspirited, not only human beings, and also for life of animals, trees, and even "inert" entities like stones. Rivers and seas are seen as articulate and sometimes intelligible beings, capable of communicating and interacting with humankind for good and bad.There is also the language of animals,air,horses,lions,seas,trees,in the novel of Gulliver's Travels and in this novel animal world also have politics, rules of their society, they won't allow outsiders, and have own food, medicine, the different body structure of animals,these are the things we can see in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver Travels in all four books.

Although critical interest in Roy Campbell’s work remains lively and his place in South African literary history seems secure, he is not a vital presence in the new South Africa; his work has become peripheral to metropolitan English literature, a small manifestation of a more general shift in global culture. Where then does Roy Campbell stand? Is there a new context for his work? In a review of a range of criticism from the first decade of the 21st century, this article finds that Roy Campbell’s work can be rewardingly read in the context of the Graeco-Roman classical inheritance that he embraced and the Romance culture in which he settled. This recognition has both enriched the resonance of Campbell’s poetry and aligned him with other artists who have been re-absorbed into Europe as the colonial appropriation of Africa recedes.

ABSTRACT Although Ps 23 can be called a psalm of trust, its purpose is to impart comfort in concrete life. In times of sorrow and crisis, this psalm has struck home. The article starts by reading Ps 23 as composition, then turns to the reception history, and finally shows the resonance of this psalm in two contemporary poems. A network of metaphors is built around the shepherd motif. The motif of the shepherd is a central metaphor in this psalm. This motif is also found elsewhere in the OT. The shepherd takes care of his flock. This shepherd is identified as Yahweh. In the structure of Ps 23, v. 4b is the axis, as it is demonstrated by its occurrence precisely in the middle of the psalm. "You are with me." This confession is the heartbeat of the psalm. The second part of v. 4b indicates that the presence of Yahweh is a protective presence. Yahweh is not only the shepherd, but also the host who prepares a table before his guest. Yahweh also anoints the poet's head with oil before the commencement of the meal. The poet's cup overflows. Goodness and love will follow him. All the days of his life, he will experience the presence and protection of Yahweh. In the following part, the reception history of Psalm 23 is elucidated. The echoes of Ps 23 can be heard in two of my poems that were written in Afrikaans and superbly translated into English by the renowned translator, poet and novelist, Leon de Kock. Keywords: Psalm 23, Orientation, Interpretation, Structure, Reception history, Resonance in poetry

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)“I must plunge again and again in the water of doubt” (Wittgenstein 1e). The Holy Grail in the phenomenology of religion (and, to a lesser extent, the sociology of religion) is a definition of religion that actually works, but, so far, this seems to have been elusive. Classical definitions of religion—substantive (e.g. Tylor) and functionalist (e.g. Durkheim)—fail, in part because they attempt to be in three places at once, as it were: they attempt to distinguish religion from non-religion; they attempt to capture what religions have in common; and they attempt to grasp the “heart”, or “core”, of religion. Consequently, family resemblance definitions of religion replace certainty and precision for its own sake with a more pragmatic and heuristic approach, embracing doubt and putting forward definitions that give us a better understanding (Verstehen) of religion. In this paper, I summarise some “new” definitions of religion that take this approach, before proposing and defending another one, defining religion as non-propositional and “apophatic”, thus accepting that doubt is central to religion itself, as well as to the analysis of religion.The question of how to define religion has had real significance in a number of court cases round the world, and therefore it does have an impact on people’s lives. In Germany, for example, the courts ruled that Scientology was not a religion, but a business, much to the displeasure of the Church of Scientology (Aldridge 15). In the United States, some advocates of Transcendental Meditation (TM) argued that TM was not a religion and could therefore be taught in public schools without violating the establishment clause in the constitution—the separation of church and state. The courts in New Jersey, and federal courts, ruled against them. They ruled that TM was a religion (Barker 146). There are other cases that I could cite, but the point of this is simply to establish that the question has a practical importance, so we should move on.In the classical sociology of religion, there are a number of definitions of religion that are quite well known. Edward Tylor (424) defined religion as a belief in spiritual beings. This definition does not meet with widespread acceptance, the notable exception being Melford Spiro, who proposed in 1966 that religion was “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated super-human beings” (Spiro 96, see also 91ff), and who has bravely stuck to that definition ever since. The major problem is that this definition excludes Buddhism, which most people do regard as a religion, although some people try to get round the problem by claiming that Buddhism is not really a religion, but more of a philosophy. But this is cheating, really, because a definition of religion must be descriptive as well as prescriptive; that is, it must apply to entities that are commonly recognised as religions. Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, proposed that religion had two key characteristics, a separation of the sacred from the profane, and a gathering together of people in some sort of institution or community, such as a church (Durkheim 38, 44). However, religions often reject a separation of the sacred from the profane. Most Muslims and many Calvinist Christians, for example, would insist strongly that everything—including the ostensibly profane—is equally subject to the sovereignty of God. Also, some religions are more oriented to a guru-pupil kind of relationship, rather than a church community.Weber tried to argue that religion should only be defined at the end of a long process of historical and empirical study. He is often criticised for this, although there probably is some wisdom in his argument. However, there seems to be an implicit definition of religion as theodicy, accounting for the existence of evil and the existence of suffering. But is this really the central concern of all religions?Clarke and Byrne, in their book Religion Defined and Explained, construct a typology of definitions, which I think is quite helpful. Broadly speaking, there are two types of classical definition. Firstly, there are substantive definitions (6), such as Tylor’s and Spiro’s, which posit some sort of common “property” that religions “have”—“inside” them, as it were. Secondly, functionalist definitions (Clarke and Byrne 7), such as Durkheim’s, define religion primarily in terms of its social function. What matters, as far as a definition of religion is concerned, is not what you believe, but why you believe it.However, these classical definitions do not really work. I think this is because they try to do too many things. For a strict definition of religion to work, it needs to tell us (i) what religions have in common, (ii) what distinguishes religion on the one hand from non-religion, or everything that is not religion, on the other, and (iii) it needs to tell us something important about religion, what is at the core of religion. This means that a definition of religion has to be in three places at once, so to speak. Furthermore, a definition of religion has to be based on extant religions, but it also needs to have some sort of quasi-predictive capacity, the sort of thing that can be used in a court case regarding, for example, Scientology or Transcendental Meditation.It may be possible to resolve the latter problem by a gradual process of adjustment, a sort of hermeneutic circle of basing a definition on extant religions and applying it to new ones. But what about the other problem, the one of being in three places at once?Another type identified by Clarke and Byrne, in their typology of definitions, is the “family resemblance” definition (11-16). This derives from the later Wittgenstein. The “family resemblance” definition of religion is based on the idea that religions commonly share a number of features, but that no one religion has all of them. For example, there are religious beliefs, doctrines and mythos—or stories and parables. There are rituals and moral codes, institutions and clergy, prayers, spiritual emotions and experiences, etc. This approach is of course less precise than older substantive and functional definitions, but it also avoids some of the problems associated with them.It does so by rethinking the point of defining religion. Instead of being precise and rigorous for the sake of it, it tries to tell us something, to be “productive”, to help us understand religion better. It eschews certainty and embraces doubt. Its insights could be applied to some schools of philosophy (e.g. Heideggerian) and practical spirituality, because it does not focus on what is distinctive about religion. Rather, it focuses on the core of religion, and, secondarily, on what religions have in common. The family resemblance approach has led to a number of “new” definitions (post-Durkheim definitions) being proposed, all of which define religion in a less rigorous, but, I hope, more imaginative and heuristic way.Let me provide a few examples, starting with two contrasting ones. Peter Berger in the late 1960s defined religion as “the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as humanly significant”(37), which implies a consciousness of an anthropocentric sacred cosmos. Later, Alain Touraine said that religion is “the apprehension of human destiny, existence, and death”(213–4), that is, an awareness of human limitations, including doubt. Berger emphasises the high place for human beings in religion, and even a sort of affected certainty, while Touraine emphasises our place as doubters on the periphery, but it seems that religion exists within a tension between these two opposites, and, in a sense, encompasses them both.Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal Church and arch-nemesis of the conservative Anglicans, such as those from Sydney, defines religion as like good poetry, not bad science. It is easy to understand that he is criticising those who see religion, particularly Christianity, as centrally opposed to Darwin and evolution. Holloway is clearly saying that those people have missed the point of their own faith. By “good poetry”, he is pointing to the significance of storytelling rather than dogma, and an open-ended discussion of ultimate questions that resists the temptation to end with “the moral of the story”. In science (at least before quantum physics), there is no room for doubt, but that is not the case with poetry.John Caputo, in a very energetic book called On Religion, proposes what is probably the boldest of the “new” definitions. He defines religion as “the love of God” (1). Note the contrast with Tylor and Spiro. Caputo does not say “belief in God”; he says “the love of God”. You might ask how you can love someone you don’t believe in, but, in a sense, this paradox is the whole point. When Caputo says “God”, he is not necessarily talking in the usual theistic or even theological terms. By “God”, he means the impossible made possible (10). So a religious person, for Caputo, is an “unhinged lover” (13) who loves the impossible made possible, and the opposite is a “loveless lout” who is only concerned with the latest stock market figures (2–3). In this sense of religious, a committed atheist can be religious and a devout Catholic or Muslim or Hindu can be utterly irreligious (2–3). Doubt can encompass faith and faith can encompass doubt. This is the impossible made possible. Caputo’s approach here has something in common with Nietzsche and especially Kierkegaard, to whom I shall return later.I would like to propose another definition of religion, within the spirit of these “new” definitions of religion that I have been discussing. Religion, at its core, I suggest, is non-propositional and apophatic. When I say that religion is non-propositional, I mean that religion will often enact certain rituals, or tell certain stories, or posit faith in someone, and that propositional statements of doctrine are merely reflections or approximations of this non-propositional core. Faith in God is not a proposition. The Eucharist is not a proposition. Prayer is not, at its core, a proposition. Pilgrimage is not a proposition. And it is these sorts of things that, I suggest, form the core of religion. Propositions are what happen when theologians and academics get their hands on religion, they try to intellectualise it so that it can be made to fit within their area of expertise—our area of expertise. But, that is not where it belongs. Propositions about rituals impose a certainty on them, whereas the ritual itself allows for courage in the face of doubt. The Maundy Thursday service in Western Christianity includes the stripping of the altar to the accompaniment of Psalm 22 (“My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me”), ending the service without a dismissal (Latin missa, the origin of the English “mass”) and with the church in darkness. Doubt, confusion, and bewilderment are the heart and soul of this ritual, not orthodox faith as defined propositionally.That said, religion does often involve believing, of some kind (though it is not usually as central as in Christianity). So I say that religion is non-propositional and apophatic. The word “apophatic”, though not the concept, has its roots in Greek Orthodox theology, where St Gregory Palamas argues that any statement about God—and particularly about God’s essence as opposed to God’s energies—must be paradoxical, emphasising God’s otherness, and apophatic, emphasising God’s essential incomprehensibility (Armstrong 393). To make an apophatic statement is to make a negative statement—instead of saying God is king, lord, father, or whatever, we say God is not. Even the most devout believer will recognise a sense in which God is not a king, or a lord, or a father. They will say that God is much greater than any of these things. The Muslim will say “Allahu Akhbar”, which means God is greater, greater than any human description. Even the statement “God exists” is seen to be well short of the mark. Even that is human language, which is why the Cappadocian fathers (Saints Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Naziansus) said that they believed in God, while refusing to say that God exists.So to say that religion is at its core non-propositional is to say that religious beliefs are at their core apophatic. The idea of apophasis is that by a process of constant negation you are led into silence, into a recognition that there is nothing more that can be said. St Thomas Aquinas says that the more things we negate about God, the more we say “God is not…”, the closer we get to what God is (139). Doubt therefore brings us closer to the object of religion than any putative certainties.Apophasis does not only apply to Christianity. I have already indicated that it applies also to Islam, and the statement that God is greater. In Islam, God is said to have 99 names—or at least 99 that have been revealed to human beings. Many of these names are apophatic. Names like The Hidden carry an obviously negative meaning in English, while, etymologically, “the Holy” (al-quddu-s) means “beyond imperfection”, which is a negation of a negation. As-salaam, the All-Peaceful, means beyond disharmony, or disequilibrium, or strife, and, according to Murata and Chittick (65–6), “The Glorified” (as-subbuh) means beyond understanding.In non-theistic religions too, an apophatic way of believing can be found. Key Buddhist concepts include sunyata, emptiness, or the Void, and anatta, meaning no self, the belief or realisation that the Self is illusory. Ask what they believe in instead of the Self and you are likely to be told that you are missing the point, like the Zen pupil who confused the pointing finger with the moon. In the Zen koans, apophasis plays a major part. One well-known koan is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Any logical answers will be dismissed, like Thomas Aquinas’s statements about God, until the pupil gets beyond logic and achieves satori, or enlightenment. Probably the most used koan is Mu—Master Joshu is asked if a dog has Buddha-nature and replies Mu, meaning “no” or “nothing”. This is within the context of the principle that everything has Buddha-nature, so it is not logical. But this apophatic process can lead to enlightenment, something better than logic. By plunging again and again in the water of doubt, to use Wittgenstein’s words, we gain something better than certainty.So not only is apophasis present in a range of different religions—and I have given just a few examples—but it is also central to the development of religion in the Axial Age, Karl Jaspers’s term for the period from about 800-200 BCE when the main religious traditions of the world began—monotheism in Israel (which also developed into Christianity and Islam), Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Confucianism and Taoism in China, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. In the early Hindu traditions, there seems to have been a sort of ritualised debate called the Brahmodya, which would proceed through negation and end in silence. Not the silence of someone admitting defeat at the hands of the other, but the silence of recognising that the truth lay beyond them (Armstrong 24).In later Hinduism, apophatic thought is developed quite extensively. This culminates in the idea of Brahman, the One God who is Formless, beyond all form and all description. As such, all representations of Brahman are equally false and therefore all representations are equally true—hence the preponderance of gods and idols on the surface of Hinduism. There is also the development of the idea of Atman, the universal Self, and the Buddhist concept anatta, which I mentioned, is rendered anatman in Sanskrit, literally no Atman, no Self. But in advaita Hinduism there is the idea that Brahman and Atman are the same, or, more accurately, they are not two—hence advaita, meaning “not two”. This is negation, or apophasis. In some forms of present-day Hinduism, such as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (commonly known as the Hare Krishnas), advaita is rejected. Sometimes this is characterised as dualism with respect to Brahman and Atman, but it is really the negation of non-dualism, or an apophatic negation of the negation.Even in early Hinduism, there is a sort of Brahmodya recounted in the Rig Veda (Armstrong 24–5), the oldest extant religious scripture in the world that is still in use as a religious scripture. So here we are at the beginning of Axial Age religion, and we read this account of creation:Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it.Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal.Darkness there was: at first concealed in darkness this All was indiscriminated chaos.All that existed then was void and form less.Sages who searched with their heart's thought discovered the existent's kinship in the non-existent.Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence comes this creation?The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being?He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not.(Rig Veda Book 10, Hymn 129, abridged)And it would seem that this is the sort of thought that spread throughout the world as a result of the Axial Age and the later spread of Axial and post-Axial religions.I could provide examples from other religious traditions. Taoism probably has the best examples, though they are harder to relate to the traditions that are more familiar in the West. “The way that is spoken is not the Way” is the most anglicised translation of the opening of the Tao Te Ching. In Sikhism, God’s formlessness and essential unknowability mean that God can only be known “by the Guru’s grace”, to quote the opening hymn of the Guru Granth Sahib.Before I conclude, however, I would like to anticipate two criticisms. First, this may only be applicable to the religions of the Axial Age and their successors, beginning with Hinduism and Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, and early Jewish monotheism, followed by Jainism, Christianity, Islam and so on. I would like to find examples of apophasis at the core of other traditions, including Indigenous Australian and Native American ones, for example, but that is work still to be done. Focusing on the Axial Age does historicise the argument, however, at least in contrast with a more universal concept of religion that runs the risk of falling into the ahistorical homo religiosus idea that humans are universally and even naturally religious. Second, this apophatic definition looks a bit elitist, defining religion in terms that are relevant to theologians and “religious virtuosi” (to use Weber’s term), but what about the ordinary believers, pew-fillers, temple-goers? In response to such criticism, one may reply that there is an apophatic strand in what Niebuhr called the religions of the disinherited. In Asia, devotion to the Buddha Amida is particularly popular among the poor, and this involves a transformation of the idea of anatta—no Self—into an external agency, a Buddha who is “without measure”, in terms of in-finite light and in-finite life. These are apophatic concepts. In the Christian New Testament, we are told that God “has chosen the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong…, the things that are not to shame the things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:27). The things that are not are the apophatic, and these are allied with the foolish and the weak, not the educated and the powerful.One major reason for emphasising the role of apophasis in religious thought is to break away from the idea that the core of religion is an ethical one. This is argued by a number of “liberal religious” thinkers in different religious traditions. I appreciate their reasons, and I am reluctant to ally myself with their opponents, who include the more fundamentalist types as well as some vocal critics of religion like Dawkins and Hitchens. However, I said that I would return to Kierkegaard, and the reason is this. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Of course, religion has an aesthetic and an ethical dimension, and in some religions these dimensions are particularly important, but that does not make them central to religion as such. Kierkegaard regarded the religious sphere as radically different from the aesthetic or even the ethical, hence his treatment of the story of Abraham going to Mount Moriah to sacrifice his son, in obedience to God’s command. His son was not killed in the end, but Abraham was ready to do the deed. This is not ethical. This is fundamentally and scandalously unethical. Yet it is religious, not because it is unethical and scandalous, but because it pushes us to the limits of our understanding, through the waters of doubt, and then beyond.Were I attempting to criticise religion, I would say it should not go there, that, to misquote Wittgenstein, the limits of my understanding are the limits of my world, whereof we cannot understand thereof we must remain silent. Were I attempting to defend religion, I would say that this is its genius, that it can push back the limits of understanding. I do not believe in value-neutral sociology, but, in this case, I am attempting neither. ReferencesAldridge, Alan. Religion in the Contemporary World. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.Aquinas, Thomas. “Summa of Christian Teaching”. An Aquinas Reader. ed. Mary Clarke. New York: Doubleday, 1972.Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Barker, Eileen. New Religious Movements: a Practical Introduction. London: HMSO, 1989.Berger, Peter. The Social Reality of Religion. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.Caputo, John. On Religion. London: Routledge, 2001.Clarke, Peter, and Peter Byrne, eds. Religion Defined and Explained. New York: St Martin’s Press. 1993.Durkheim, Emile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995.Holloway, Richard. Doubts and Loves. Edinburgh: Caqnongate, 2002.Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977.Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or. London: Penguin, 1992.———. Fear and Trembling. London: Penguin, 1986.Murata, Sachiko, and William Chittick. The Vision of Islam. St Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1994.Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Social Sources of Denominationalism. New York: Holt, 1929.Spiro, Melford. “Religion: Problems of Definition and Explanation.” Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. Ed. Michael Banton. London: Tavistock, 1966. 85–126.Touraine, Alain. The Post-Industrial Society. London: Wilwood House, 1974.Tylor, Edward. Primitive Culture. London: Murray, 1903.Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Nottingham: Brynmill Press, 1979.

The effects of translation have been felt in the development of most languages, but it is particularly marked in English language and literature, where it is a highly charged topic because of its fundamental connection with colonial expansion. Britain shaped a "national" literary identity through borrowing from other languages and infected and inflected other languages and literatures in the course of cultural migrations that occurred in Europe since at least the medieval period onward. As Stephen Greenblatt points out in his essay, "Racial Memory and Literary History," the discovery that English is a "mixed, impure, and constantly shifting medium" is not a new one, citing the preface to the first etymological dictionary in English, published in 1689, in which its author describes English as a hybrid tongue: a Composition of most, if not all the Languages of Europe; especially of the Belgick or Low-Dutch, Saxon, Teutonic or High-Dutch, Cambro-British or Welsh, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin; and now and then of the Old and Modern Danish, and Ancient High-Dutch; also of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabick, Chaldee, Syriack, and Turcick. ((Skinner A3v-A4r, in Greenblatt 52) The "English" literary canon has translated material at its heart; there is the Bible, for instance, and classical works in Greek, which are read and discussed in translation by many who study them. Beowulf is a translation that has been canonized as one of the "original" texts of English literature, and Shakespeare was inspired by translations. Consider, for instance, Greenblatt's description of The Comedy of Errors, where a "Plautine character from a Sicilian city, finding himself in the market square of a city in Asia Minor, invokes Arctic shamanism – and all this had to make sense to a mixed audience in a commercial theater in London" (58), and there is a strong sense of the global cultural discourse that has been translated into a "national" and international canon of literature in English. English as a language and as a literature, however, has not been contained by national boundaries for some time, and in fact is now more comfortably conceived in the plural, or as uncountable, like a multidirectional flow. English has therefore been translated from solid, settled, and certain representations of Anglo-Celtic culture in the singular to a plurality of shifting, hybrid productions and performances which illuminate the tension implicit in cultural exchange. Translation has become a popular trope used by critics to describe that interaction within literatures defined by language rather than nation, and as a mutable and mutual process of reading and reinscription which illuminates relationships of power. The most obvious power relationship that translation represents, of course, is that between the so-called original and the translation; between the creativity of the author and the derivation of the translator. In The Translator's Invisibility (1995), Lawrence Venuti suggests that there is a prevailing conception of the author as a free and unconstrained individual who partially shapes the relationship: "the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial individuality" (6). The translation then can only be defined as an inferior representation, "derivative, fake, potentially a false copy" (7) and the translator as performing the translation in the manner of an actor manipulating lines written by someone else: "translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts" (7). The transparent translation and the invisibility of the translator, Venuti argues can be seen as "a mystification of troubling proportions, an amazingly successful concealment of the multiple determinants and effects of English-language translation, the multiple hierarchies and exclusions in which it is implicated" (16). That is, translation exerts its own power in constructing identities and representing difference, in addition to the power derived from the "original" text, which, in fact, the translation may resist. Recognition of this power suggests that traditional Western representations of translation as an echo or copy, a slave toiling on the plantation or seductive belle infidèle, each with its clear affinity to sexual and colonial conquest, attempts to deny translation the possibility of its own power and the assertion of its own creative identity. However, the establishment of an alternative power arrangement exists because translations can "masquerade as originals" (Chamberlain 67) and infiltrate and subvert literary systems in disguise. As Susan Stewart contends in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, if we "begin with the relation between authority and writing practices rather than with an assumption of authorial originality, we arrive at a quite different sense of history" (9) and, indeed, a different sense of literary creativity. This remainder of this paper will focus on Nicole Brossard's Le désert mauve and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, to exemlify how a translator may flaunts her creativity, and allow the cultural position of the translator vis à vis language, history, or gender to be critically exposed by the text itself. Québécoise feminist writer Nicole Brossard's 1987 novel, Le désert mauve [Mauve Desert], is perhaps the most striking example of how a translator foregrounds the creative process of reading and re-writing. Brossard constructed her novel by becoming her own reader and asking questions, imagining dialogues between the characters she had already created. This "interactive discourse" shaped the text, which is a dialogue between two versions of a story, and between two writers, one of whom is an active reader, a translator. Le désert mauve is a structural triptych, consisting of Laure Angstelle's novel, Le désert mauve, and Mauve l'horizon, a translation of Angstelle's book by Maude Laures. In the space between the two sites of writing, the translator imagines the possibilities of the text she has read, "re-imagining the characters' lives, the objects, the dialogue" (Interview, 23 April 96). Between the versions of the desert story, she creates a fluid dimension of désir, or desire, a "space to swim with the words" (Interview). Brossard has said that "before the idea of the novel had definitely shaped itself," she knew that it would be in a "hot place, where the weather, la température, would be almost unbearable: people would be sweating; the light would be difficult" (Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation). That site became the desert of the American southwest with its beauty and danger, its timelessness and history, and its decadent traces of Western civilization in the litter of old bottles and abandoned, rusting cars. The author imagined the desert through the images and words of books she read about the desert, appropriating the flowers and cacti that excited her through their names, seduced her through language. Maude Laures, the translator within Brossard's novel, finds the desert as a dimension of her reading, too: "a space, a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading" (133). From her first readings of a novel she has discovered in a used bookshop, Laures, confronts the "the issue of control. Who owns the meaning of the black marks on the page, the writer or the reader?" (Godard 115), and decides the book will belong to her, "and that she can do everything because she has fallen in love with the book, and therefore she's taken possession of the book, the author, the characters, the desert" (Interview). The translator is fascinated by Mélanie, the 15-year-old narrator, who drives her mother's car across the desert, and who has been captivated by the voice and beauty of the geometrician, Angela Parkins, imagining dialogues between these two characters as they linger in the motel parking lot. But she is unwilling to imagine words with l'homme long (longman), who composes beautiful equations that cause explosions in the desert, recites Sanskrit poems, and thumbs through porno in his hotel room. Le désert mauve was an attempt by Brossard to translate from French to French, but the descriptions of the desert landscape – the saguaro, senita, ocotillos, and arroyo—show Spanish to be the language of the desert. In her translation, Maude Laures increases the code switching and adds more Spanish phrases to her text, and Japanese, too, to magnify the echo of nuclear destruction that resonates in l'homme long's equations. She also renames the character l'homme oblong (O'blongman) to increase the dimension of danger he represents. Linking the desert through language with nuclear testing gives it a "semantic density," as Nicholis Entrikin calls it, that extends far beyond the geographical location to recognize the events embedded in that space through associative memory. L'homme long is certainly linked through language to J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the original atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico and his reference to the Bhagavad Gita after seeing the effects of the atomic bomb: "I/am/become Death—now we are all sons of bitches" (17). The translator distances herself by a translating Death/I /am/death—I'm a sonofabitch" (173). The desert imagined by Laure Angstelle seduces the reader, Maude Laures, and her translation project creates a trajectory which links the heat and light of the desert with the cold and harsh reflective glare of sunlit snow in wintry Montréal, where the "misleading reflections" of the desert's white light is subject to the translator's gaze. Laures leans into the desert peopled with geometricians and scientists and lesbians living under poisonous clouds of smoke that stop time, and tilts her translation in another direction. In the final chapter of Laure Angstelle's novel, Mélanie had danced in the arms of Angela Parkins, only to find she had run out of time: Angela is shot (perhaps by l'homme long) and falls to the dance floor. Maudes Laures is constrained by the story and by reality, but translates "There was no more time" into "One more time," allowing the lovers' dance to continue for at least another breath, room for another ending. Brossard has asserted that, like lesbian desire or the translator, the desert was located in the background of our thoughts. Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient (1992), locates the translator in the desert, linking a profession and a place which have both witnessed an averting of Western eyes, both used in linguistic and imperial enterprises that operate under conditions of camouflage. Linked also by association is the war in the Sahara and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. As in Brossard, the desert here is a destination reached by reading, how "history enters us" through maps and language. Almásy, "the English patient," knew the desert before he had been there, "knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, for this cause or that greed" (18). Books in code also serve to guide spies and armies across the desert, and like a book, the desert is "crowded with the world" (285), while it is "raped by war and shelled as if it were just sand" (257). Here the translator is representative of a writing that moves between positions and continually questions its place in history. Translators and explorers write themselves out of a text, rendering themselves invisible and erasing traces of their emotions, their doubts, beliefs, and loves, in order to produce a "neutral" text, much in the way that colonialism empties land of human traces in order to claim it, or the way technology is airbrushed out of the desert in order to conceal "the secret of the deserts from Unweinat to Hiroshima" (295). Almásy the translator, the spy, whose identity is always a subject of speculation, knows how the eye can be fooled as it reads a text in disguise; floating on a raft of morphine, he rewrites the monotone of history in different modes, inserting between the terse lines of commentary a counternarrative of love illumined by "the communal book of moonlight" (261), which translates lives and gives them new meaning. The translator's creativity stems from a collaboration and a love for the text; to deny the translation process its creative credibility is synonymous in The English Patient with the denial of any desire that may violate the social rules of the game of love by unfairly demanding fidelity. If seas move away to leave shifting desert sands, why should lovers not drift, or translations? Ultimately, we are all communal translations, says Ondaatje's novel, of the shifting relationship between histories and personal identities. "We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience" (261). This representation of the translator resists the view of identity "which attempts to recover an immutable origin, a fixed and eternal representation of itself" (Ashcroft 4) by its insistence that we are transformed in and by our versions of reality, just as we are by our readings of fiction. The translators represented in Brossard and Ondaatje suggest that the process of translation is a creative one, which acknowledges influence, contradictory currents, and choice its heart. The complexity of the choices a translator makes and the mulitiplicity of positions from which she may write suggest a process of translation that is neither transparent nor complete. Rather than the ubiquitous notion of the translator as "a servant an invisible hand mechanically turning the word of one language into another" (Godard 91), the translator creatively 'forges in the smithy of the soul' a version of story that is a complex "working model of inclusive consciousness" (Heaney 8) that seeks to loosen another tongue and another reading in an eccentric literary version of oral storytelling. References Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Brossard, Nicole. Le désert mauve. Montréal: l'Hexagone, 1987. Mauve Desert. Trans. Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990. Brossard, Nicole. Personal Interview. With Beverley Curran and Mitoko Hirabayashi, Montreal, April 1996. Chamberlain, Lori. "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation." Reinventing Translation. Lawrence Venuti, Ed. 57-73. Godard, Barbara. "Translating (With) the Speculum." Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 4 (2) 1991: 85-121. Greenblatt, Stephen. "Racial Memory and Literary History." PMLA 116 (1), January 2001: 48-63. Heaney, Seamus. "The Redress of Poetry." The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. 1-16. Jenik, Adriene. Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation. Los Angeles: Shifting Horizon Productions, 1997. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.

DiCamillo, Kate. Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated. Illus. K. G. Campbell. Somerville: Candlewick Press, 2013. Print.The Tickhams have acquired a new, vigorous vacuum cleaner. It is far beyond Mrs. Tickham’s Control. Next door, Flora is reading about The Amazing Incandesto while skilfully ignoring her mother who, in any case, is up to her eyes writing romance novels. A powerful noise outside attracts Flora’s attention: Mrs. Tickham’s new cleaner is making directly for an innocent little squirrel. Flora is just in time to see the squirrel vacuumed up before it can react.Running gallantly to the squirrel’s relief Flora succeeds in saving the poor thin creature (well, half of its fur has been vacuumed away). Without hesitation she administers CPR and revives a remarkable creature: part squirrel (he is always hungry) and part Super Squirrel. The potentially fatal accident has left a squirrel gifted with: strength, the ability to fly, and a gift for poetry (if not spelling). Flora now has a friend, a companion, and a little trouble ahead.Relying on her favourite books “Terrible Things Can Happen to You” and “The Criminal Element”, Flora becomes involved with Ulysses the squirrel in a series of adventures that heal hearts, mend wounds, and expose truths. There are possibilities for trust, for friendship and for love - prompted by the affection of a unique squirrel plus Flora’s intelligence, perception and good heart. Many things are healed by them both, reconciliations are achieved and misunderstandings cleared.The squirrel sums up some of it in his poem to Flora:Nothingwould beeasier withoutyou, because you areeverything,all of it-sprinkles, quarks, giantdonuts, eggs sunny-side up-youare the ever-expandinguniverseto meFlora and Ulysses is a funny, sensitive, perceptive and thoroughly enjoyable book housing two unique heroes. It is one of Kate DiCamillo’s finest.Flora and Ulyssesis this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Andrea DeakinAndrea has been involved with books since she was class librarian in Primary School, Student Librarian in Grammar School, student librarian for the Education Faculty when she was a student, and school librarian in schools both in England and in Canada, except for the first two years in Canada where she arrived in 1959. When she retired from teaching ( English and History) she was invited to review in February 1971, and continued to review for press, radio, and finally on the Internet (Deakin Newsletter from Okanagan College) until she retired in 2011. Forty years seemed sufficient- although she still cannot keep her nose out of good children's and YA fare.

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.

Could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences -- his feelings, moods, and the rest -- for his private use? Well, can't we do so in our ordinary language? -- But that is not what I mean. The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language. -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations par. 243 I will be using 'audience' in two ways in the following essay: as a phenomenon that produces and is produced by media technologies (readers, hearers, viewers, Internet-users), and as something, audiens, that is essential to language itself, something without which language cannot be. I shall do so in specific references to invented languages. Who, then, are the 'consumers' of invented languages? In referring to invented languages, I am not talking about speakers of Esperanto or Occidental; I am not concerned with the invention of international auxiliary languages. These projects, already well-debated, have roots that go back at least as far as the 17th-century language philosophers who were at pains to undo the damage of Babel and restore a common language to the world. While Esperanto never became what it intended to be, it at least has readers and speakers. I am also not even talking about speakers of Klingon or Quenya. These privately invented languages have had the good fortune to be attached to popular invented cultures, and to media with enough money and publicity to generate a multitude of fans. Rather, I am talking about a phenomenon on the Internet and in a well- populated listserv whereby a number of people from all over the globe have discovered each other on-line. They all have a passion for what Jeffrey Schnapp calls uglossia ('no-language', after utopia, 'no-place'). Umberto Eco calls it 'technical insanity' or glottomania. Linguist Marina Yaguello calls language inventors fous du langage ('language lunatics') in her book of the same title. Jeffrey Henning prefers the term 'model language' in his on-line newsletter: 'miniaturized versions that provide the essence of something'. On CONLANG, people call themselves conlangers (from 'constructed language') and what they do conlanging. By forming this list, they have created a media audience for themselves, in the first sense of the term, and also literally in the second sense, as a number of them are setting up soundbytes on their elaborately illustrated and explicated Webpages. Originally devoted to advocates for international auxiliary languages, CONLANG started out about eight years ago, and as members joined who were less interested in the politics than in the hobby of language invention, the list has become almost solely the domain of the latter, whereas the 'auxlangers', as they are called, have moved to another list. An important distinguishing feature of 'conlangers' is that, unlike the 'auxlangers', there is no sustained hope that their languages will have a wide-body of hearers or users. They may wish it, but they do not advocate for it, and as a consequence their languages are free to be a lot weirder, whereas the auxlangs tend to strive for regularity and useability. CONLANG is populated by highschool, college, and graduate students; linguists; computer programmers; housewives; librarians; professors; and other users worldwide. The old debate about whether the Internet has become the 'global village' that Marshall McLuhan predicted, or whether it threatens to atomise communication 'into ever smaller worlds where enthusiasms mutate into obsessions', as Jeff Salamon warns, seems especially relevant to a study of CONLANG whose members indulge in an invention that by its very nature excludes the casual listener-in. And yet the audio-visual capacities of the Internet, along with its speed and efficiency of communication, have made it the ideal forum for conlangers. Prior to the Web, how were fellow inventors to know that others were doing -- in secret? J.R.R. Tolkien has been lauded as a rare exception in the world of invention, but would his elaborate linguistic creations have become so famous had he not published The Lord of the Rings and its Appendix? Poignantly, he tells in "A Secret Vice" about accidentally overhearing another army recruit say aloud: 'Yes! I think I shall express the accusative by a prefix!'. Obviously, silent others besides Tolkien were inventing languages, but they did not have the means provided by the Internet to discover one another except by chance. Tolkien speaks of the 'shyness' and 'shame' attached to this pursuit, where 'higher developments are locked in secret places'. It can win no prizes, he says, nor make birthday presents for aunts. His choice of title ("A Secret Vice") echoes a Victorian phrase for the closet, and conlangers have frequently compared conlanging to homosexuality, both being what conservative opinion expects one to grow out of after puberty. The number of gay men on the list has been wondered at as more than coincidental. In a survey I conducted in October 1998, many of the contributors to CONLANG felt that the list put them in touch with an audience that provided them with intellectual and emotional feedback. Their interests were misunderstood by parents, spouses, lovers, and employers alike, and had to be kept under wraps. Most of those I surveyed said that they had been inventing a language well before they had heard of the list; that they had conceived of what they were doing as unique or peculiar, until discovery of CONLANG; and that other people's Websites astounded them with the pervasive fascination of this pursuit. There are two ways to look at it: conlanging, as Henning writes, may be as common and as humanly creative as any kind of model-making, i.e., dollhouses, model trains, role-playing, or even the constructed cultures with city plans and maps in fantasy novels such as Terry Pratchett's Discworld. The Web is merely a means to bring enthusiasts together. Or it may provide a site that, with the impetus of competition and showmanship, encourages inutile and obsessive activity. Take your pick. From Hildegard von Bingen's Lingua Ignota to Dante's Inferno and the babbling Nimrod to John Dee's Enochian and on, invented languages have smacked of religious ecstacy, necromancy, pathology, and the demonic. Twin speech, or 'pathological idioglossia', was dramatised by Jodie Foster in Nell. Hannah Green's 'Language of Yr' was the invention of her schizophrenic protagonist in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Language itself is the centre of furious theoretical debate. Despite the inventive 'deformities' it is put to in poetry, punning, jest, singing, and lying, human language, our most 'natural' of technologies, is a social machine, used by multitudes and expected to get things done. It is expected of language that it be understood and that it have not only hearers but also answerers. All human production is founded on this assumption. A language without an audience of other speakers is no language. 'Why aren't you concentrating on real languages?' continues to be the most stinging criticism. Audience is essential to Wittgenstein's remark quoted at the beginning of this essay. Wittgenstein posits his 'private languages theory' as a kind of impossibility: all natural languages, because they exist by consensus, can only refer to private experience externally. Hence, a truly private language, devoted to naming 'feelings and moods' which the subject has never heard about or shared with others, is impossible among socialised speakers who are called upon to define subjective experience in public terms. His is a critique of solipsism, a charge often directed at language inventors. But very few conlangers that I have encountered are making private languages in Wittgenstein's sense, because most of them are interested in investing their private words with public meaning, even when they are doing it privately. For them, it is audience, deeply desireable, that has been impossible until now. Writing well before the development of CONLANG, Yaguello takes the stance that inventing a language is an act of madness. 'Just look at the lunatic in love with language', she writes: sitting in his book-lined study, he collects great piles of information, he collates and classifies it, he makes lists and fills card indexes. He is in the clutches of a denominatory delirium, of a taxonomic madness. He has to name everything, but before being able to name, he has to recognize and classify concepts, to enclose the whole Universe in a system of notation: produce enumerations, hierarchies, and paradigms. She is of course describing John Wilkins, whose Real Character and Universal Language in 1668 was an attempt to make each syllable of his every invented word denote its placement in a logical scheme of classification. 'A lunatic ambition', Yaguello pronounces, because it missed the essential quality of language: that its signs are arbitrary, practical, and changeable, so as to admit neologism and cultural difference. But Yaguello denounces auxiliary language makers in general as amateurs 'in love with language and with languages, and ignorant of the science of language'. Her example of 'feminine' invention comes from Helene Smith, the medium who claimed to be channeling Martian (badly disguised French). One conlanger noted that Yaguello's chapter entitled 'In Defence of Natural Languages' reminded him of the US Federal 'Defense of Marriage Act', whereby the institution of heterosexual marriage is 'defended' from homosexual marriage. Let homosexuals marry or lunatics invent language, and both marriage and English (or French) will come crashing to the ground. Schnapp praises Yaguello's work for being the most comprehensive examination of the phenomenon to date, but neither he nor she addresses linguist Suzette Haden Elgin's creative work on Láadan, a language designed for women, or even Quenya or Klingon -- languages that have acquired at least an audience of readers. Schnapp is less condemnatory than Yaguello, and interested in seeing language inventors as the 'philologists of imaginary worlds', 'nos semblables, nos frères, nos soeurs' -- after all. Like Yaguello, he is given to some generalities: imaginary languages are 'infantile': 'the result is always [my emphasis] an "impoverishment" of the natural languages in question: reduced to a limited set of open vowels [he means "open syllables"], prone to syllabic reduplication and to excessive syntactical parallelisms and symmetries'. To be sure, conlangs will never replicate the detail and history of a real language, but to call them 'impoverishments of the natural languages' seems as strange as calling dollhouses 'impoverishments of actual houses'. Why this perception of threat or diminishment? The critical, academic "audience" for language invention has come largely from non-language inventors and it is woefully uninformed. It is this audience that conlangers dislike the most: the outsiders who cannot understand what they are doing and who belittle it. The field, then, is open to re-examination, and the recent phenomenon of conlanging is evidence that the art of inventing languages is neither lunatic nor infantile. But if one is not Tolkien or a linguist supported by the fans of Star Trek, how does one justify the worthwhile nature of one's art? Is it even art if it has an audience of one ... its artist? Conlanging remains a highly specialised and technical pursuit that is, in the end, deeply subjective. Model builders and map-makers can expect their consumers to enjoy their products without having to participate in the minutia of their building. Not so the conlanger, whose consumer must internalise it, and who must understand and absorb complex linguistic concepts. It is different in the world of music. The Cocteau Twins, Bobby McFerrin in his Circle Songs, Lisa Gerrard in Duality, and the new group Ekova in Heaven's Dust all use 'nonsense' words set to music -- either to make songs that sound like exotic languages or to convey a kind of melodic glossolalia. Knowing the words is not important to their hearers, but few conlangers yet have that outlet, and must rely on text and graphs to give a sense of their language's structure. To this end, then, these are unheard, unaudienced languages, existing mostly on screen. A few conlangers have set their languages to music and recorded them. What they are doing, however, is decidedly different from the extempore of McFerrin. Their words mean something, and are carefully worked out lexically and grammatically. So What Are These Conlangs Like? On CONLANG and their links to Websites you will find information on almost every kind of no-language imaginable. Some sites are text only; some are lavishly illustrated, like the pages for Denden, or they feature a huge inventory of RealAudio and MP3 files, like The Kolagian Languages, or the songs of Teonaht. Some have elaborate scripts that the newest developments in fontography have been able to showcase. Some, like Tokana and Amman-Iar, are the result of decades of work and are immensely sophisticated. Valdyan has a Website with almost as much information about the 'conculture' as the conlang. Many are a posteriori languages, that is, variations on natural languages, like Brithenig (a mixture of the features of Brythonic and Romance languages); others are a priori -- starting from scratch -- like Elet Anta. Many conlangers strive to make their languages as different from European paradigms as possible. If imaginary languages are bricolages, as Schnapp writes, then conlangers are now looking to Tagalog, Basque, Georgian, Malagasay, and Aztec for ideas, instead of to Welsh, Finnish, and Hebrew, languages Tolkien drew upon for his Elvish. "Ergative" and "trigger" languages are often preferred to the "nominative" languages of Europe. Some people invent for sheer intellectual challenge; others for the beauty and sensuality of combining new and privately meaningful sounds. There are many calls for translation exercises, one of the most popular being 'The Tower of Babel' (Genesis 10: 1-9). The most recent innovation, and one that not only showcases these languages in all their variety but provides an incentive to learn another conlanger's conlang, is the Translation Relay Game: someone writes a short poem or composition in his or her language and sends it with linguistic information to someone else, who sends a translation with directions to the next in line all the way around again, like playing 'telephone'. The permutations that the Valdyan Starling Song went through give good evidence that these languages are not just relexes, or codes, of natural languages, but have their own linguistic, cultural, and poetic parameters of expression. They differ from real languages in one important respect that has bearing on my remarks about audience: very few conlangers have mastered their languages in the way one masters a native tongue. These creations are more like artefacts (several have compared it to poetry) than they are like languages. One does not live in a dollhouse. One does not normally think or speak in one's conlang, much less speak to another, except through a laborious process of translation. It remains to a longer cultural and sociolinguistic study (underway) to tease out the possibilities and problems of conlanging: why it is done, what does it satisfy, why so few women do it, what are its demographics, or whether it can be turned to pedagogical use in a 'hands-on', high- participation study of language. In this respect, CONLANG is one of the 'coolest' of on-line media. Only time will show what direction conlanging and attitudes towards it will take as the Internet becomes more powerful and widely used. Will the Internet democratise, and eventually make banal, a pursuit that has until now been painted with the romantic brush of lunacy and secrecy? (You can currently download LangMaker, invented by Jeff Henning, to help you construct your own language.) Or will it do the opposite and make language and linguistics -- so often avoided by students or reduced in university programs -- inventive and cutting edge? (The inventor of Tokana has used in-class language invention as a means to study language typology.) Now that we have it, the Internet at least provides conlangers with a place to hang their logodaedalic tapestries, and the technology for some of them to be heard. References Von Bingen, Hildegard. Lingua Ignota, or Wörterbuch der unbekannten Sprache. Eds. Marie-Louise Portmann and Alois Odermatt. Basel: Verlag Basler Hildegard-Gesellschaft, 1986. Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Trans. James Fentress. Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995, 1997. Elgin, Suzette Haden. A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan. Madison, WI: Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science- Fiction, 1985. Henning, Jeffrey. Model Languages: The Newsletter Discussing Newly Imagined Words for Newly Imagined Worlds. <http://www.Langmaker.com/ml00.htm>. Kennaway, Richard. Some Internet Resources Relating to Constructed Languages. <http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/jrk/conlang.php>. (The most comprehensive list (with links) of invented languages on the Internet.) Laycock, Donald C. The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the Angelic Language as Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1994. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. Reprinted. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1994. Salamon, Jeff. "Revenge of the Fanboys." Village Voice 13 Sep., 1994. Schnapp, Jeffrey. "Virgin Words: Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua Ignota and the Development of Imaginary Languages Ancient and Modern." Exemplaria 3.2 (1991): 267-98. Tolkien, J.R.R. "A Secret Vice." The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. 198-223. Wilkins, John. An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language. Presented to the Royal Society of England in 1668. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958. Yaguello, Marina. Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and Their Inventors. Trans. Catherine Slater. (Les fous du langage. 1985.) London: The Athlone Press, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sarah L. Higley. "Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php>. Chicago style: Sarah L. Higley, "Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sarah L. Higley. (2000) Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on the Internet. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction When a text is said to be re-appropriated, it is at times unclear to what extent this appropriation is secondary, repeated, new; certainly, the difference between a reiteration and an iteration has more to do with emphasis than any (re)duplication. And at a moment in the development of crime fiction in France when the retranslation of now apparently dated French translations of the works of classic American hardboiled novels (especially those of authors like Dashiell Hammett, whose novels were published in Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire at Gallimard in the decades following the end of the Second World War) is being undertaken with the ostensible aim of taking the French reader back (closer) to the American original, one may well ask where the emphasis now lies. In what ways, for example, is this new form of re-production, of re-imagining the text, more intimately bound to the original, and thus in itself less ‘original’ than its translated predecessors? Or again, is this more reactionary ‘re-’ in fact really that different from those more radical uses that cleaved the translation from its original text in those early, foundational years of twentieth-century French crime fiction? (Re-)Reading: Critical Theory and Originality My juxtaposition of the terms ‘reactionary’ and ‘radical’, and the attempted play on the auto-antonymy of the verb ‘to cleave’, are designed to prompt a re(-)read of the analysis that so famously took the text away from the author in the late-1960s through to the 1990s, which is to say the critical theory of poststructuralism and deconstruction. Roland Barthes’s work (especially 69–77) appropriated the familiar terms of literary analysis and reversed them, making of them perhaps a re-appropriation in the sense of taking them into new territory: the text, formerly a paper-based platform for the written word, was now a virtual interface between the word and its reader, the new locus of the production of meaning; the work, on the other hand, which had previously pertained to the collective creative imaginings of the author, was now synonymous with the physical writing passed on by the author to the reader. And by ‘passed on’ was meant ‘passed over’, achevé (perfected, terminated, put to death)—completed, then, but only insofar as its finite sequence of words was set; for its meaning was henceforth dependent on its end user. The new textual life that surged from the ‘death of the author’ was therefore always already an afterlife, a ‘living on’, to use Jacques Derrida’s term (Bloom et al. 75–176). It is in this context that the re-reading encouraged by Barthes has always appeared to mark a rupture a teasing of ‘reading’ away from the original series of words and the ‘Meaning’ as intended by the author, if any coherence of intention is possible across the finite sequence of words that constitute the written work. The reader must learn to re-read, Barthes implored, or otherwise be condemned to read the same text everywhere. In this sense, the ‘re-’ prefix marks an active engagement with the text, a reflexivity of the act of reading as an act of transformation. The reader whose consumption of the text is passive, merely digestive, will not transform the words (into meaning); and crucially, that reader will not herself be transformed. For this is the power of reflexive reading—when one reads text as text (and not ‘losing oneself’ in the story) one reconstitutes oneself (or, perhaps, loses control of oneself more fully, more productively); not to do so, is to take an unchanged constant (oneself) into every textual encounter and thus to produce sameness in ostensible difference. One who rereads a text and discovers the same story twice will therefore reread even when reading a text for the first time. The hyphen of the re-read, on the other hand, distances the reader from the text; but it also, of course, conjoins. It marks the virtual space where reading occurs, between the physical text and the reading subject; and at the same time, it links all texts in an intertextual arena, such that the reading experience of any one text is informed by the reading of all texts (whether they be works read by an individual reader or works as yet unencountered). Such a theory of reading appears to shift originality so far from the author’s work as almost to render the term obsolete. But the thing about reflexivity is that it depends on the text itself, to which it always returns. As Barbara Johnson has noted, the critical difference marked by Barthes’s understandings of the text, and his calls to re-read it, is not what differentiates it from other texts—the universality of the intertext and the reading space underlines this; instead, it is what differentiates the text from itself (“Critical Difference” 175). And while Barthes’s work packages this differentiation as a rupture, a wrenching of ownership away from the author to a new owner, the work and text appear less violently opposed in the works of the Yale School deconstructionists. In such works as J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host” (1977), the hyphenation of the re-read is less marked, with re-reading, as a divergence from the text as something self-founding, self-coinciding, emerging as something inherent in the original text. The cleaving of one from and back into the other takes on, in Miller’s essay, the guise of parasitism: the host, a term that etymologically refers to the owner who invites and the guest who is invited, offers a figure for critical reading that reveals the potential for creative readings of ‘meaning’ (what Miller calls the nihilistic text) inside the transparent ‘Meaning’ of the text, by which we recognise one nonetheless autonomous text from another (the metaphysical text). Framed in such terms, reading is a reaction to text, but also an action of text. I should argue then that any engagement with the original is re-actionary—my caveat being that this hyphenation is a marker of auto-antonymy, a link between the text and otherness. Translation and Originality Questions of a translator’s status and the originality of the translated text remain vexed. For scholars of translation studies like Brian Nelson, the product of literary translation can legitimately be said to have been authored by its translator, its status as literary text being equal to that of the original (3; see also Wilson and Gerber). Such questions are no more or less vexed today, however, than they were in the days when criticism was grappling with translation through the lens of deconstruction. To refer again to the remarkable work of Johnson, Derrida’s theorisation of textual ‘living on’—the way in which text, at its inception, primes itself for re-imagining, by dint of the fundamental différance of the chains of signification that are its DNA—bears all the trappings of self-translation. Johnson uses the term ‘self-différance’ (“Taking Fidelity” 146–47) in this respect and notes how Derrida took on board, and discussed with him, the difficulties that he was causing for his translator even as he was writing the ‘original’ text of his essay. If translation, in this framework, is rendered impossible because of the original’s failure to coincide with itself in a transparently meaningful way, then its practice “releases within each text the subversive forces of its own foreignness” (Johnson, “Taking Fidelity” 148), thereby highlighting the debt owed by Derrida’s notion of textual ‘living on’—in (re-)reading—to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of translation as a mode, its translatability, the way in which it primes itself for translation virtually, irrespective of whether or not it is actually translated (70). In this way, translation is a privileged site of textual auto-differentiation, and translated text can, accordingly, be considered every bit as ‘original’ as its source text—simply more reflexive, more aware of its role as a conduit between the words on the page and the re-imagining that they undergo, by which they come to mean, when they are re-activated by the reader. Emily Apter—albeit in a context that has more specifically to do with the possibilities of comparative literature and the real-world challenges of language in war zones—describes the auto-differentiating nature of translation as “a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements” (6). In this way, translation is “a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change” (Apter 6). Thus, translation lends itself to crime fiction; for both function as highly reflexive sites of transformation: both provide a reader with a heightened sense of the transformation that she is enacting on the text and that she herself embodies as a reading subject, a subject changed by reading. Crime Fiction, Auto-Differention and Translation As has been noted elsewhere (Rolls), Fredric Jameson made an enigmatic reference to crime fiction’s perceived role as the new Realism as part of his plenary lecture at “Telling Truths: Crime Fiction and National Allegory”, a conference held at the University of Wollongong on 6–8 December 2012. He suggested, notably, that one might imagine an author of Scandi-Noir writing in tandem with her translator. While obvious questions of the massive international marketing machine deployed around this contemporary phenomenon come to mind, and I suspect that this is how Jameson’s comment was generally understood, it is tempting to consider this Scandinavian writing scenario in terms of Derrida’s proleptic considerations of his own translator. In this way, crime fiction’s most telling role, as one of the most widely read contemporary literary forms, is its translatability; its haunting descriptions of place (readers, we tend, perhaps precipitously, to assume, love crime fiction for its national, regional or local situatedness) are thus tensely primed for re-location, for Apter’s ‘subject re-formation’. The idea of ‘the new Realism’ of crime, and especially detective, fiction is predicated on the tightly (self-)policed rules according to which crime fiction operates. The reader appears to enter into an investigation alongside the detective, co-authoring the crime text in real (reading) time, only for authorial power to be asserted in the unveiling scene of the denouement. What masquerades as the ultimately writerly text, in Barthes’s terms, turns out to be the ultimate in transparently meaningful literature when the solution is set in stone by the detective. As such, the crime novel is far more dependent on descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life (in a given place in time) than other forms of fiction, as these provide the clues on which its intricate plot hinges. According to this understanding, crime fiction records history and transcribes national allegories. This is not only a convincing way of understanding crime fiction, but it is also an extremely powerful way of harnessing it for the purposes of cultural history. Claire Gorrara, for example, uses the development of French crime fiction plots over the course of the second half of the twentieth century to map France’s coming to terms with the legacy of the Second World War. This is the national allegory written in real time, as the nation heals and moves on, and this is crime fiction as a reaction to national allegory. My contention here, on the other hand, is that crime fiction, like translation, has at its core an inherent, and reflexive, tendency towards otherness. Indeed, this is because crime fiction, whose origins in transnational (and especially Franco-American) literary exchange have been amply mapped but not, I should argue, extrapolated to their fullest extent, is forged in translation. It is widely considered that when Edgar Allan Poe produced his seminal text “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) he created modern crime fiction. And yet, this was made possible because the text was translated into French by Charles Baudelaire and met with great success in France, far more so indeed than in its original place of authorship. Its original setting, however, was not America but Paris; its translatability as French text preceded, even summoned, its actualisation in the form of Baudelaire’s translation. Furthermore, the birth of the great armchair detective, the exponent of pure, objective deduction, in the form of C. Auguste Dupin, is itself turned on its head, a priori, because Dupin, in this first Parisian short story, always already off-sets objectivity with subjectivity, ratiocination with a tactile apprehension of the scene of the crime. He even goes as far as to accuse the Parisian Prefect of Police of one-dimensional objectivity. (Dupin undoes himself, debunking the myth of his own characterisation, even as he takes to the stage.) In this way, Poe founded his crime fiction on a fundamental tension; and this tension called out to its translator so powerfully that Baudelaire claimed to be translating his own thoughts, as expressed by Poe, even before he had had a chance to think them (see Rolls and Sitbon). Thus, Poe was Parisian avant la lettre, his crime fiction a model for Baudelaire’s own prose poetry, the new voice of critical modernity in the mid-nineteenth century. If Baudelaire went on to write Paris in the form of Paris Spleen (1869), his famous collection of “little prose poems”, both as it is represented (timelessly, poetically) and as it presents itself (in real time, prosaically) at the same time, it was not only because he was spontaneously creating a new national allegory for France based on its cleaving of itself in the wake of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s massive programme of urbanisation in Paris in the 1800s; it was also because he was translating Poe’s fictionalisation of Paris in his new crime fiction. Crime fiction was born therefore not only simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two, in the self-différance of translation. In this way, while a strong claim can be made that modern French crime fiction is predicated on, and reacts to, the auto-differentiation (of critical modernity, of Paris versus Paris) articulated in Baudelaire’s prose poems and therefore tells the national allegory, it is also the case, and it is this aspect that is all too often overlooked, that crime fiction’s birth in Franco-American translation founded the new French national allegory. Re-imagining America in (French) Crime Fiction Pierre Bayard has done more than any other critic in recent years to debunk the authorial power of the detective in crime fiction, beginning with his re-imagining of the solution to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and continuing with that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1998 and 2008, respectively). And yet, even as he has engaged with poststructuralist re-readings of these texts, he has put in place his own solutions, elevating them away from his own initial premise of writerly engagement towards a new metaphysics of “Meaning”, be it ironically or because he has fallen prey himself to the seduction of detectival truth. This reactionary turn, or sting-lessness in the tail, reaches new heights (of irony) in the essay in which he imagines the consequences of liberating novels from their traditional owners and coupling them with new authors (Bayard, Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur?). Throughout this essay Bayard systematically prefers the terms “work” and “author” to “text” and “reader”, liberating the text not only from the shackles of traditional notions of authorship but also from the terminological reshuffling of his and others’ critical theory, while at the same time clinging to the necessity for textual meaning to stem from authorship and repackaging what is, in all but terminology, Barthes et al.’s critical theory. Caught up in the bluff and double-bluff of Bayard’s authorial redeployments is a chapter on what is generally considered the greatest work of parody of twentieth-century French crime fiction—Boris Vian’s pseudo-translation of black American author Vernon Sullivan’s novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946, I Shall Spit on Your Graves). The novel was a best seller in France in 1946, outstripping by far the novels of the Série Noire, whose fame and marketability were predicated on their status as “Translations from the American” and of which it appeared a brazen parody. Bayard’s decision to give credibility to Sullivan as author is at once perverse, because it is clear that he did not exist, and reactionary, because it marks a return to Vian’s original conceit. And yet, it passes for innovative, not (or at least not only) because of Bayard’s brilliance but because of the literary qualities of the original text, which, Bayard argues, must have been written in “American” in order to produce such a powerful description of American society at the time. Bayard’s analysis overlooks (or highlights, if we couch his entire project in a hermeneutics of inversion, based on the deliberate, and ironic, re-reversal of the terms “work” and “text”) two key elements of post-war French crime fiction: the novels of the Série Noire that preceded J’irai cracher sur vos tombes in late 1945 and early 1946 were all written by authors posing as Americans (Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase were in fact English) and the translations were deliberately unfaithful both to the original text, which was drastically domesticated, and to any realistic depiction of America. While Anglo-Saxon French Studies has tended to overlook the latter aspect, Frank Lhomeau has highlighted the fact that the America that held sway in the French imaginary (from Liberation through to the 1960s and beyond) was a myth rather than a reality. To take this reasoning one logical, reflexive step further, or in fact less far, the object of Vian’s (highly reflexive) novel, which may better be considered a satire than a parody, can be considered not to be race relations in the United States but the French crime fiction scene in 1946, of which its pseudo-translation (which is to say, a novel not written by an American and not translated) is metonymic (see Vuaille-Barcan, Sitbon and Rolls). (For Isabelle Collombat, “pseudo-translation functions as a mise en abyme of a particular genre” [146, my translation]; this reinforces the idea of a conjunction of translation and crime fiction under the sign of reflexivity.) Re-imagined beneath this wave of colourful translations of would-be American crime novels is a new national allegory for a France emerging from the ruins of German occupation and Allied liberation. The re-imagining of France in the years immediately following the Second World War is therefore not mapped, or imagined again, by crime fiction; rather, the combination of translation and American crime fiction provide the perfect storm for re-creating a national sense of self through the filter of the Other. For what goes for the translator, goes equally for the reader. Conclusion As Johnson notes, “through the foreign language we renew our love-hate intimacy with our mother tongue”; and as such, “in the process of translation from one language to another, the scene of linguistic castration […] is played on center stage, evoking fear and pity and the illusion that all would perhaps have been well if we could simply have stayed at home” (144). This, of course, is just what had happened one hundred years earlier when Baudelaire created a new prose poetics for a new Paris. In order to re-present (both present and represent) Paris, he focused so close on it as to erase it from objective view. And in the same instance of supreme literary creativity, he masked the origins of his own translation praxis: his Paris was also Poe’s, which is to say, an American vision of Paris translated into French by an author who considered his American alter ego to have had his own thoughts in an act of what Bayard would consider anticipatory plagiarism. In this light, his decision to entitle one of the prose poems “Any where out of the world”—in English in the original—can be considered a Derridean reflection on the translation inherent in any original act of literary re-imagination. Paris, crime fiction and translation can thus all be considered privileged sites of re-imagination, which is to say, embodiments of self-différance and “original” acts of re-reading. References Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Barthes, Roland. Le Bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Baudelaire, Charles. Le Spleen de Paris. Trans. Louise Varèse. New York: New Directions, 1970 [1869]. Bayard, Pierre. Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1998. ———. L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2008. ———. Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968. 69–82. Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. Collombat, Isabelle. “Pseudo-traduction: la mise en scène de l’altérité.” Le Langage et l’Homme 38.1 (2003): 145–56. Gorrara, Claire. French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. Johnson, Barbara. “Taking Fidelity Philosophically.” Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 142–48. ———. “The Critical Difference.” Critical Essays on Roland Barthes. Ed. Diana Knight. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 174–82. Lhomeau, Frank. “Le roman ‘noir’ à l’américaine.” Temps noir 4 (2000): 5–33. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3.3 (1977): 439–47. Nelson, Brian. “Preface: Translation Lost and Found.” Australian Journal of French Studies 47.1 (2010): 3–7. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage Books, [1841]1975. 141–68. Rolls, Alistair. “Editor’s Letter: The Undecidable Lightness of Writing Crime.” The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 3.1 (2014): 3–8. Rolls, Alistair, and Clara Sitbon. “‘Traduit de l’américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire’s Greatest Hoax?” Modern and Contemporary France 21.1 (2013): 37–53. Vuaille-Barcan, Marie-Laure, Clara Sitbon, and Alistair Rolls. “Jeux textuels et paratextuels dans J’irai cracher sur vos tombes: au-delà du canular.” Romance Studies 32.1 (2014): 16–26. Wilson, Rita, and Leah Gerber, eds. Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2012.

Over the recent holiday season, I more than once found myself in the position of explaining to a relative what it is that I do: “Oh, you study video games? But I thought you were in an English Department . . . I see.” The uncomfortably interdisciplinary field of “Game Studies” has been implicitly dealing with the same question in a quiet disciplinary turf war between scholars who attempt to bring games into existing academic discourse communities and scholars who see games as an entirely unique medium warranting independent academic infrastructures. The study of video games in the Academy is steadily taking shape, but the question of whose “turf” video games fall under is at the root of the most divisive controversies in the fledgling discipline of game studies. Espen Aarseth, noted critic of Cybertext fame, has warned of “colonisation” attempts by pre-existing disciplines: The greatest challenge to computer game studies will no doubt come from within the academic world. … Games are not a kind of cinema, or literature, but colonising attempts from both these fields have already happened, and no doubt will happen again. (n.pag.) Gonzalo Frasca and others have also frequently argued that video games represent a new medium that requires an entirely new critical vocabulary, a nascent disciplinary definition, and clear academic infrastructures. The so-called ludology vs. narratology debate over the nature of games (ludologists allegedly argue that games should be understood from the standpoint of “play” and narratologists allegedly argue that games should be studied for their narrative content) seems to offer a convenient dividing line for the debate on games studies relationship to the academy. However, as Frasca has recently argued, the ludology vs. narratology debate itself is questionably construed, and, as a matter of “turf” these positions seem to lack coherence or even an identifiable membership (Frasca 1). A useful critical tactic in approaching a difficult question is to ask, “What’s at stake?” What is at stake in the ludology debate? The answer has larger implications that I hope to address by broadening the question one step further. What is at stake in forming new disciplines? The fragile state of higher education seems to be a common topic in the United States with state budgets showing signs of weakness and the siphoning of funds away from “non-critical” areas like the humanities. It is a broad generalisation—but often true—that major universities divide their students and, often, the layout of the campus, so that Liberal Arts students have little contact with the “hard science” of the medical schools and engineering programs. Thus, for example, Computer Science is often separated physically and culturally from Psychology, English, or Journalism. With game studies potentially engaging all four disciplines, it is admittedly difficult to imagine a useful cooperation that utilised the collective resources of each department. The alternative, a hybrid department, has its own problems, however. Georgia Tech’s nascent Ph.D. program in Digital Media and Aarseth’s Department of Humanistic Informatics often meet with skeptical responses from academic colleagues and administration. Furthermore, the American university system is increasingly pragmatic in its stated goals and in its allotment of funds. As recent changes in my own university suggests, the continuation of support for departments and disciplines that tend toward esoteric or theoretical study depends on that department’s ability to produce a practical education product. English departments have traditionally found such a balance by assigning graduate students and junior faculty to teach the ubiquitous first-year writing courses, leaving senior faculty free to advance their own scholarship and the academic reputation of the university. Such a balance is difficult to imagine in a Game Studies program or department or even in a more broadly construed Department of New Media. Following the typical departmental model, a hypothetical Game Studies department would have to offer a required, first-year course in game production or game literacy to support the research of the senior faculty. This first-year course would also have to fit within a definition of “Liberal Arts” education such that it would be a general requirement. Game studies seems much more plausible as a field in academics if it is attached to an existing department because universities with tight and shrinking budgets are less likely to support a field with such a short history without a pressing demand for basic instruction in the area. Thus, the question of “turf” has returned. Video and computer games are a dominant part of our cultural knowledge, so the answer is clear in the question “What is at stake in Game Studies?” That is, the increasing distance between the academy and everyday experience, a model whose very hierarchy recalls outdated modernist or neo-classical snobbery and threatens to erode the existence of academics and higher education as we know them. Clearly, ignoring games and Game Studies is out of the question, but fitting the study of games within existing academic discourse can only be attempted from within the system. That is why the web-based academic journal Game Studies (http://www.gamestudies.org) is such an important development in the history of computer game studies. Surveying the list of recent contributors, one finds independent scholars, game designers, and scholars affiliated with institutes of higher education, and the majority of those representatives of the academy tend be in Communications or Cultural Studies departments. Furthermore, the form and scope of the journal mimics a humanities-oriented journal such as Postmodern Culture, and the types of articles investigate the culturally significant aspects of gaming rather than the technological architecture of games or trends in the game development industry. Thus, the de facto alignment of the journal Game Studies suggests an inclusive, liberal arts approach even if it is fundamentally interdisciplinary. Furthermore, the unifying focus on games allows scholars from a wide range of departments to bring their expertise—on, say, economics or law—to games despite Aarseth’s mistrust of such borrowing from pre-existing departments. But there is another sense of division among those who study games that parallels the “gamer” vs. “player” designation among the gaming community of itself. In the context of game study, there is a growing sense that games “belong” to the younger generation that has grown up taking the significance of games as a granted part of our existence. The community of gamers identifies itself as more involved than the casual “players,” and the sense of pride gamers associate with social status within game communities is a significant part of their lives. Sue Morris’s research on the social aspects of online gaming bears this out. As Morris argues, “an air of tongue-in-cheek-bravado” pervades in-game taunting and many secondary gaming texts (94). This language is in some ways related to ever present “flame wars” on Internet message boards or forums where participants perceived as naive are abused for their “n00b” status. Similarly, in the context of game study, those of us in the “Nintendo generation” now attempting to carve out our spot in academics often feel a sense of ownership of games which privileges our perspective over established media scholars who may have learned about games primarily through their children. This problem suggests both that the existing study of games in the academy may be too far removed from actual game playing, and that a cultural studies or literature model might be most appropriate for understanding the most fundamental question about games, namely “Why do they mean so much to us?” Whether the ludology approach is in fact superior to a “narratological” model ultimately matters little in the disciplinary turf war. What matters is whether ludology is sufficiently robust as a hypothetical academic discipline to offer the kind of diverse and valuable criticism that seems to be coming from a variety of existing disciplines. The answer, currently, seems to be “no,” and it may be that game studies is better off as a melting pot of diverse academic backgrounds, each contributing to the general knowledge and understanding of the problematic and compelling phenomenon of video games. Works Cited Aarseth, Espen. “Computer Game Studies, Year One.” Game Studies. 1:1. (2001): n.pag. 19 Jan. 2004. <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.php>. Frasca, Gonzalo. “Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Notes from a Debate That Never Took Place.” Proceedings. Level Up 2003 Conference. <http://ludology.org/articles/Frasca_LevelUp2003.pdf>. Morris, Sue. “First-Person Shooters – A Game Apparatus.” Screenplay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. Ed. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska. London: Wallflower Press, 2002. 81-97. Links http://www.gamestudies.org Citation reference for this article MLA Style Whalen, Zach. "Ludology" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/08-ludology.php>. APA Style Whalen, Z. (2004, Mar17). Ludology. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/08-ludology.php>

Teesid: Tõlkimine Eestis olnud seotud isiksuste ja missiooniga, eesti keele ja kirjanduse arendamisega, lugeja valgustamise ja harimisega. Tõlkimise oluline roll eesti kirjakeele ja omakirjanduse arengus on vastavalt ajalooperioodile mõjutanud valitseva tõlkemeetodi kujunemist. Jüri Talveti kui ühe olulisema kultuurivahendaja tõlkemõte on tõlget ikka vaadelnud osana üleüldisest kirjandustegevusest, tõlkekirjandust osana maailmakirjanduses, tõlkivaid väikerahvaid maailmakirjanduse loojana. Talveti ideaalne tõlkija-isiksus teeb tõlkest suurepärase teose ilma, et sellesse jääks jälge tema kunstilistest seisukohtadest, see isiksus muutub tõlketekstis ise nähtamatuks ja võimaldab tõlkel sulanduda vastuvõtva kirjanduse osaks. The importance of translation and translated literature in Estonian culture and literature does not need to be stressed, yet the recording of Estonian translation history is still in its early stage and, among other topics, it requires seeking answers to questions of why translation is as it is, why the translator deemed it necessary to emphasize certain qualities of a literary work and allowed others to get “lost in translation” and what these absent qualities could mean to the reader forming their opinion of the work and its author. As one of the most influential cultural mediators, Jüri Talvet has always seen translation as part of general literary activity, literary translations as part of world literature, and the translating small nations as creators of world literature. Talvet’s attention has been drawn to the translator’s personality and the problem of their visibility and invisibility. While Talvet admits that the work of many literary translators has remained undeservedly unrecognized, he still argues that the matter of translators’ invisibility does not justify the attention it has received. Translator’s visibility can only be guaranteed by their role as a cultural-historical personality, which our preeminent translators have always fulfilled. Translator-personality crafts the translation into an excellent work without leaving a single trace of the translator’s own artistic views, the personality itself becomes invisible in the translated text. The ideal invisible self-sacrificing translator-personality creates a translation that reads like a work written in Estonian rather than a translation. Translations where the translator remains visible betray the translator along with the translation’s translatedness. In Estonia, translation has been linked to personalities and a mission—the development of the Estonian language and literature as well as the enlightenment and education of the reader. This objective or principle has in its turn influenced the selection of works suitable for translation, since not all texts are suited to serve the purpose of the mission—translations must fill the gaps in national literature. The importance of translation in the development of the written Estonian language and national literature has, depending on the historical period, influenced the shaping of the dominant translation method, which, on the one hand, favours poetry translations that value the preservation or transfer of form, the meter of some poetic work over the content (narrative structure, terminological and descriptive accuracy, etc.). Even though the main objective and value of the equimetrical method is considered to be the enrichment of (Estonian) poetic language, it also fulfils the function of disguising a text’s translatedness: the use of certain techniques and calculations creates the impression of the translated poem’s similarity to another text written in another language, another time, and following another set of rules. By looking at the example of a translation of the Spanish syllabicassonant romance, we can see that while this method provides the reader with plenty of information on a foreign author’s verse construction, it fails to convey the narrative of the romance. In case of prose translation, the dominant norm demands translations that would, above all, strictly correspond to the grammar and spelling rules of the Estonian language (to avoid littering the language with foreign influences), the text should flow smoothly, be “resonant” and feel like an original. If a translation represents the foreign text singularly and in full right, it may acquire a canonical status in the receiving culture. New translations may demystify it and, in turn, highlight the values that allowed the inclusion of the translation in the dominant canon at a specific time. Therefore, different translators mediating texts by the same author shed light on the relativity of translational equivalence on the one hand and on the importance of the translator’s voice on the other: the translator’s word is the only point of reference that allows the reader to recreate the fictional world built by the work. The conception of a translator as a neutral mediator becomes questionable. The Estonian translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Of Love and Other Demons (Del amor y otros demonios, 1994) was first published in 2007, followed by another translation by a different translator in 2008. The translation as well as publishing of the two books took place almost simultaneously, which allows translation criticism to focus on the idiosyncrasies and the result of the two translators’ working styles and not the translation norms of different eras. This kind of situation also allows excluding the earlier translation’s influence to the later one. By juxtaposing two Estonian translations and the Spanish original of García Márquez’s text, we will see that the translation solutions are clearly different from each other. One translator used the so-called pictorial technique: the translator pictures what is described in the text as if it was a film and translates this vivid visual material back into text. On the one hand, Márquez’s rich world of events and metaphors seems to submit easily to this method, but on the other hand, this may entail the risk of changing the way the fictional world is presented to the reader. The functioning of Márquez’s narrative style and magical realism in general is characterized by the depiction of reality, both realistic and unexpected, fantastic, in a restrained manner without highlighting the element of surprise. If the narrator of the translation describes the events with heightened vividness and awe, the general understanding of magical realism may become something else for the reader. The second translation is focused on the text, word or language; the sentence structure follows the syntax of the original as closely as possible. This method can be regarded as literal but without the negative connotation that accompanies the definition of word-for-word translation. Part of the visibility of a translated work in a culture is shaped by the texts and meanings surrounding and accompanying the translation: the translator’s personality, choice of the original, afterword etc. The other kind of visibility is coded within text, it is the translator’s voice, translator’s intentions and the outcome of their work and in this case it does not matter whether the translator is a cultural-historical personality or invisible and almost anonymous. Perhaps the matter of the translator’s visibility-invisibility lies in the inability or unwillingness to value their role, their unavoidable “interference” with the text as significant enough because this could destroy the illusion of the possibility to produce a translation that would sound like it was written in the target language while also simultaneously being that other work written in a foreign language.

I. The early twentieth century may seem, at first glance, a strange place to begin a survey of attitudes towards deafness. At this point, the American Deaf community was just forming, American Sign Language was not yet recognised as a language, and most Americans who did consider deafness thought of it as a disability, an affliction to be pitied. As I will demonstrate, however, modernist writers actually had a great deal of insight into issues central to the experience of many deaf people: physical and visual language. While these writers were not thinking of such language in relation to deafness, their experimentations into the merging of the body and language can offer us fresh perspectives on the potential of manual languages to impact mainstream society today. In the early decades of the twentieth century deafness was becoming visible in new ways, due in large part to the rapid expansion of schools for the deaf. This increased visibility led to increased representation in popular culture. Unfortunately, as Trent Batson and Eugene Bergman point out, these literal portrayals of deafness were predictable and clichéd. According to them, deaf characters in literature functioned almost exclusively “to heighten interest, to represent the plight of the individual in a technocratic society, or simply to express a sense of the absurd” (140). In all of these cases, such characters were presented as pitiable. In the least derogatory accounts, like Isabel Adams’ 1928 Heart of the Woods, characters stoically overcome their “disability,” usually by displaying miraculous proficiency with lip-reading and the ability to assimilate into hearing society. Other texts portray deaf people as grotesques, as in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1919 “God’s fool,” or as the butts of jokes, as in Anatole France’s 1926 The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, a Comedy in Two Acts. Constructed as pathetic and disgusting, deaf characters were used thematically to invoke a sense of revulsion at the unknowable other, at those perceived as languageless and therefore cut off from full access to humanity. Literature was not the only medium in which representations of deaf people were appearing with greater frequency. Early filmmakers also demonstrated a fascination with the idea of deafness. But as John S. Schuchman points out in Hollywood Speaks, as in literature, these portrayals were nearly always one-dimensional. Depicted as mutes, fakers, comically clueless, and deeply unhappy individuals, with few exceptions these characters created a very negative image of deafness. In Siege (1925), for example, a deaf character is driven to suicide by cruel mockery. In The Silent Voice (1915), another deaf character contemplates suicide. In the 1932 version of The Man Who Played God, a deaf character falls into a deep depression, sends away his fiancé, and declares “I am not a man. I am just an empty shell…I am only an animal now” (qtd. in Schuchman 48). Without the solidarity of Deaf culture, community, or pride, these characters become morbidly depressed and alienated; they experience their hearing loss as a subject of shame, and it was this image of deafness that was presented to the public. Despite these unpromising literal references to deafness, however, the early twentieth century does in fact offer intriguing and productive ideas about how we might understand deafness today. In the years separating the beginning of the last century from this one, public perceptions of deafness have undergone a significant shift. Buoyed by developments in American Sign Language research and the political activism of the Deaf President Now movement (1988), Deaf people are increasingly viewed as a linguistic minority with a distinct and valuable cultural identity and history, whose communicative differences have much to teach us about how we all interact with language. Deafness (the capital D signaling the distinction between Deafness as a culture and deafness as an audiological condition) is now understood in many circles as a linguistic difference, rather than as a deficiency. And hearing modernist writers had very interesting things to say about the value of linguistic and communicative difference. Modernists’ interest in communication emerged in large part because the same cultural movement toward linguistic homogenisation that led to the denigration of sign language and the exclusive focus on speech and lip-reading in American deaf education also sought to draw a line around the kinds of language considered acceptable for usage in writing. Many of modernism’s formal innovations developed as responses to the push for conformity that we see evidenced in the thinking behind the Oxford English Dictionary, which was completed between the 1880s and the 1920s—notably the period during which most modernist writers were born and began publishing. The 1858 proposal for the dictionary was, in fact, one of the first instances in which the term “standard language” was used (North 12). A desire to establish “standard language” usage was also the goal of the American Academy of Arts, established in 1916 and dedicated to maintaining the integrity of English. Such projects strove to consolidate American national identity around the standardised use of the English language, thereby eliminating spaces for linguistic and communicative diversity within the national body politic. Within literary circles, many rebelled against both the political and aesthetic underpinnings of this movement by experimenting in increasingly dramatic ways with how written language could represent the fragmentation many associated with modern life. As part of their experimentation, some of these writers attempted to develop the idea of embodied language. While they were ignorant of the actual manual languages used by the deaf, the ways they were thinking outside the box in relation to communication can give us both a new perspective on manual languages and new insights into their relevance to mainstream society today. II. One writer whose poems engaged such themes was the poet Hart Crane. Though he worked during the period we think of as high modernist, publishing major volumes of verse in 1926 and 1930, his work challenges our definitions of modernist poetry. Unlike the sparse language and cynicism of his contemporaries, Crane’s poems were decadent and lush. As Eliza New has noted, “Hart Crane is the American poet of Awe” (184); his work reflected his belief in the power of the written word to change the world. Crane viewed poets as inheritors of an ecstatic tradition of prophesy, to which he hoped his own poems would contribute. It is because of this overflowing of sentiment that Crane frequently found both himself and his work mocked. He was accused of overreaching and falling short of his goals, of being nothing more than what Edward Brunner termed a “splendid failure” in the title of his 1985 book. Critics and ordinary readers alike were frustrated with Crane’s arcane language and convoluted syntax, as well as the fact that each word, each image, in his poems was packed with multiple meanings that made the works impossible to summarise. Far from constituting a failure, however, this tangled web of language was Crane’s way of experimenting with a new form of communication, one that would allow him to access the transformative power of poetry. What makes Crane instructive for our purposes is that he repeatedly linked this new conception of language with embodiment. Driven in part by his sense of feeling, as a gay man, a cultural outsider, he attempted to find at the intersection of words and bodies a new site for both personal and cultural expression, one in which he could play a central role. In “General Aim and Theories,” Crane explains his desire to imagine a new kind of language in response to the conditions of modernity. “It is a terrific problem that faces the poet today—a world that is so in transition from a decayed culture toward a reorganization of human evaluations that there are few common terms, general denominators of speech that are solid enough or that ring with any vibration or spiritual conviction” (218). Later in the same essay, Crane stresses that these new common terms could not be expressed in conventional ways, but would need to constitute “a new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate” (221). For Crane, such words were “impossible to enunciate” because they were not actually spoken through the mouth, but rather expressed in other ways through the body. In “Voyages,” a six-part poem that appeared in his first book, The White Building, Crane explores the potential of these embodied words. Drawing in the influence of Walt Whitman, the work is an extended meditation on the intersection of languages, bodies, and love. The poem was inspired by his relationship with the merchant seaman Emil Oppfer. In it, embodied language appears as a privileged site of connection between individuals and the world. The first section of “Voyages,” which Crane had originally titled “Poster,” predated the composition of the rest of the poem by several years. It opens with a scene on a beach, “bright striped urchins” (I. 2) playing in the sand with their dog, “flay[ing] each other with sand” (I. 2). The speaker observes them on the border between land and sea. He attempts to communicate to them his sense of the sea’s danger, but is unsuccessful. And in answer to their treble interjectionsThe sun beats lightning on the waves,The waves fold thunder on the sand;And could they hear me I would tell them: O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,Fondle your shells and sticks, bleachedBy time and the elements; but there is a lineYou must not cross nor ever trust beyond itSpry cordage of your bodies to caressesToo lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.The bottom of the sea is cruel. (I. 6-16) The speaker’s warning is incomprehensible to the children, not because they cannot literally hear him, but because he is unable to present his previous experience with the sea in a way that makes sense to the them. As Evelyn J. Hintz notes, “the child’s mode of communication is alogical and nonsyntactical—‘treble interjections.’ To tell them one would have to speak their language” (323). In the first section of the poem, the speaker is unable to do this, unable to get beyond linear verbal speech or to conceive of alternative modes of conveying his message. This frustrated communication in the first section gives rise to the need for the remaining five, as the poet explores what such alternatives might look like. In sections II through VI, the language becomes more difficult to follow as Crane breaks away from linearity in an attempt to present his newly conceived language on the page. The shift is apparent in the stanza immediately following the first section. –And yet this great wink of eternity,Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,Samite sheeted and processioned whereHer undinal vast belly moonward bendsLaughing the wrapt inflections of our love; (II. 1-5). It is not only that Crane’s diction has become more difficult and archaic, which it has, but also that he creates words that exist between two known meanings. “Wrapt,” for example, both visually and aurally calls to mind ‘wrapped’ as well as ‘rapt.’ “Leewardings” points both toward ships and something positioned away from the wind. What it means to be unrestrained or “unfettered” in this position, Crane leaves unclear. Throughout the remainder of the poem, he repeatedly employs these counterintuitive word pairings. Words are often connected not through logic, but through a kind of intuitive leap. As Brian Reed describes it, “the verse can…be said to progress ‘madly…logically,’ satisfying a reader’s intuition, perhaps, but rarely satisfying her or his rage for order” (115). The lines move according to what Crane called a “logic of metaphor” (General 63). Like his curving syntax, which draws the reader into the beautiful melody before pulling back, withholding definitive meaning like the sea’s waves lapping and teasing, Crane’s metaphoric associations endlessly defer definitive meaning. In “Voyages,” Crane associates this proliferation of meaning and lack of linear progression with physicality, with a language more corporeal and visceral that transcends the restrictions of everyday speech. In a letter to Waldo Frank describing the romantic relationship that inspired the poem, Crane declared “I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility” (O 186). Throughout “Voyages,” Crane highlights such words made flesh. The sea with whom the speaker seeks to communicate is embodied, given “eyes and lips” (III.12), a “vast belly” (II. 4-5), “shoulders” (II. 16), and “veins” (II. 15). What’s more, it is precisely through the body that communication occurs. “Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal, / Complete the dark confessions her veins spell” (II. 14-15, emphasis mine), the poet entreats. He describes the sea’s “Portending eyes and lips” IV. 12), her “dialogue with eyes” (VI. 23), and declares that “In signature of the incarnate word / The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling / Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown” (IV. 17-19, emphasis mine). It is only through this wordless communication that the kind of sublime meaning Crane seeks can be transmitted. For him, this “imaged Word” (VI.29) permits access to knowledge that conventional language obscures, knowledge that can only be transmitted through manual connection, as the speaker asks the sea to “Permit me voyage, love, into your hands…” (III.19). Crane saw the proliferation of meanings that he believed accompanied such embodied language as a response against the movement toward a standardisation of language that threatened to edit out modes of communication and identities that did not fit within its confines. As Thomas Yingling notes, “meaning, such as it occurs in Crane, is a process of indeterminacy, is constituted precisely in the abrupt disfigurements and dislocations, in the sudden clarities and semantic possibilities” (30). It was in large part these “semantic possibilities,” these indeterminate and multiple meanings that refused to line up, which led critics to characterise Crane’s work as a “poetics of failure” (Riddel). As later research into sign languages has revealed, however, far from representing a failure of poetic vision, Crane was actually incredibly forward thinking in associating embodied languages with a non-linear construction. Conventional spoken and written languages, those Crane was attempting to complicate, are necessarily linear. Letters and sounds must proceed one after another in order for an utterance to make sense. Manual languages, however, are not bound by this linearity. As Margalit Fox explained nearly a century later in Talking Hands, Because the human visual system is better than the auditory system at processing simultaneous information, a language in the visual mode can exploit this potential and encode its signals simultaneously. This is exactly what all signed languages do. Whereas words are linear strings, signs are compact bundles of data, in which multiple unites of code—handshapes, location and movement—are conveyed in virtually the same moment. (101) Such accounts of actual embodied languages help to explain the frustrating density that attends Crane’s words. Morphologically rich physical languages like the kind Crane was trying to imagine possess the ability for an increased layering of meaning. While limited by the page on which he writes, Crane attempted to create this layered affect through convoluted syntax and deliberately difficult vocabulary which led readers away from both a sense of fixed meaning and from normative standards usually applied to written words. Understanding this rebellion against standardisation is key to the turn in “Voyages.” It is when the speaker figures the sea’s language in conventional terms, when he returns to the more straightforward communication that failed in the first section, that the spell is broken. “What words / Can strangle this deaf moonlight?” (V. 8-9), he asks, and is almost instantly answered when the sea’s language switches for the first time into dialogue. Rather than the passionate and revelatory interaction it had been before, the language becomes banal, an imitation of tired words exchanged by lovers throughout history: “‘There’s // Nothing like this in the world,’ you say” (V. 13-14). “ ‘—And never to quite understand!’” (V. 18). There is “Nothing so flagless as this piracy” (V.20), this loss of meaningful communication, and the speaker bemoans the “Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved / And changed…” (V. 12-13). With the reversion to conventional language comes the loss of any intimate knowledge of both the sea and the lover. The speaker’s projection of verbal speech onto the sea causes it to “Draw in your head… / Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; / Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know” (V. 22-24). The imposition of normative language marks the end of the speaker’s experiment with new communicative modes. III. As he demonstrates by situating it in opposition to the enforced standardisation of language, for Crane embodied language—with its non-linear syntax and layered meanings—represented the future in terms of linguistic development. He saw such non-normative languages as having the potential to drastically change the ways human relationality was structured, specifically by creating a new level of intimacy through a merging of the semantic and the physical. In this way, he offers us productive new ways to think about the potential of manual languages, or any other non-normative means of human expression, to fundamentally impact society by challenging our assumptions about how we all relate to one another through language. When asked to define deafness, most people’s first response is to think of levels of hearing loss, of deficiency, or disability. By contrast, Crane’s approach presents a more constructive understanding of what communicative difference can mean. His poem provides an intense mediation on the possibilities of communication through the body, one that subsequent research into signed languages allows us to push even further. Crane believed that communicative diversity was necessary to move language into the next century. From this perspective, embodied language becomes not “merely” the concern of a “disabled” minority but, rather, integral to our understanding of language itself. References Batson, Trent, and Eugene Bergman, eds. Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. 3rd ed. Washington DC: Gallaudet UP, 1985. Brunner, Edward J. Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1985. Crane, Hart. “Voyages.” The Complete Poems of Hart Crane: The Centennial Edition. New York: Liveright, 2001. ———. “General Aims and Theories.” Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters. Ed. Langdon Hammer. New York: The Library of America, 2006. 160-164. ———. O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. Eds. Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997. Fox, Margalit. Talking Hands. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. Hinz, Evelyn J. “Hart Crane’s ‘Voyages’ Reconsidered.” Contemporary Literature 13.3 (1972): 315-333. New, Elisa. “Hand of Fire: Crane.” The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 182-263. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Reed, Brian M. Hart Crane: After His Lights. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2006. Riddel, Joseph. “Hart Crane’s Poetics of Failure.” ELH 33.4 (1966): 473-496. Schuchman, John S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. Yingling, Thomas. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.