Decomposing Figures

Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition
Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4214-3409-4
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 250 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 415 g

Originally published in 1986. The ghastly fate of a drowned man brought to a lake's surface in Wordsworth's "Prelude" typifies a fundamental pattern in Romantic writing, argues Cynthia Chase. Disfiguration involves not only a departure from representation but a disruption of the logic of figure or form, a decomposition of the figures composing the text. Ultimately it manifests the conflict between a work's meaning and its mode of performance. By means of an intense engagement with texts in the romantic tradition, Decomposing Figures rearticulates and recasts crucial concepts in recent literary theory, including the notion of the self-referential or self-reflexive nature of the literary work. Chase's readings show that, far from implying a privileged status, the work's self-reflexive structure entails its opacity, its inability to read itself, and the necessity of its decomposition.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Chase, Cynthia

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: Mutable Images: Voice and Figure
Chapter 1. The Accidents of Disfiguration

Limits to Literal and Figurative Reading of Wordsworth's "Books"
Chapter 2. The Ring of Gyges and the Coat of Darkness

Reading Rousseau with Wordsworth
Chapter 3. Viewless Wings Keats's Ode to a Nightingale
Chapter 4. Giving a Face to a Name De Man's Figures
Chapter 5. Getting Versed

Reading Hegel with Baudelaire
Part II: Past Effects: The Double Reading of Narrative
Chapter 6. Mechanical Doll, Exploding Machine

Kleist's Models of Narrative
Chapter 7. The Decomposition of the Elephants

Double-Reading Daniel Deronda
Chapter 8. Oedipal Textuality

Reading Freud's Reading of Oedipus
Chapter 9. Paragon, Parergon

Baudelaire Translates Rousseau
Notes

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Chase, Cynthia
Cynthia Chase teaches in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her focuses are on literature of the Romantic period and on nineteenth and twentieth century writing about the survival of poetry and the concept of human rights.