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Ariadne with her thread is a hermeneutic muse, the spirit that traces meaning to its source (“It was the spirit that we sought,” after all, some kind of spirit), and “we” in the poem learn finally that what we want is the “ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds” of innuendo: more ectoplasmically written or depicted, sounded more subtly than the musical octave or the ocean allows.1 Having been deserted by Theseus, who turned “Toward the town,” Ariadne in some myths was rescued from solitude by Dionysus: inspiration championed by frenzy. [...]there are many Stevens poems that work that way, that advocate a function for poetry consistent with an emphasis on its social dynamic, though for the most part not at all intent on designating specific addressees. [...]he is not in a position to tell the speaker how it is that this local harbor scene, in a surprising turn to the pictorial, composes itself as an abstract painting—it must be abstract—with its bright angled lines arranging dark spaces, perhaps in the manner of Paul Klee. Consensus has it that in a developing poetic argument the female singer whose voice is at once mimetic and solipsistic is superseded by a conversational male celebration of the “maker,” whose “rage for order” composes something nonmimetic but essential, an authentic abstraction of reality.

Bringing his perennially popular course to the page, Yale University Professor Paul H. Fry offers in this welcome book a guided tour of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. At the core of the book's discussion is a series of underlying questions: What is literature, how is it produced, how can it be understood, and what is its purpose? Fry engages with the major themes and strands in twentieth-century literary theory, among them the hermeneutic circle, New Criticism, structuralism, linguistics and literature, Freud and fiction, Jacques Lacan's theories, the postmodern psyche, the political unconscious, New Historicism, the classical feminist tradition, African American criticism, queer theory, and gender performativity. By incorporating philosophical and social perspectives to connect these many trends, the author offers readers a coherent overall context for a deeper and richer reading of literature.

In this original book, distinguished literary scholar and critic Paul H. Fry sharply revises accepted views of Wordsworth's motives and messages as a poet. Where others have oriented Wordsworth toward ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or-more recently-political repression, Fry redirects the poems and offers a strikingly revisionary reading.Fry argues that underlying the rhetoric of transcendence or the love of nature in Wordsworth's poetry is a more fundamental and original insight: the poet is most astonished not that the world he experiences has any particular qualities or significance, but rather that it simply exists. He recognizes \"our widest commonality\" in the simple fact that \"we are\" in common with all other things (human and nonhuman) that are. Wordsworth's astonishment in the presence of being is what makes him original, Fry shows, and this revelation of being is what a Malvern librarian once called \"the hiding place of his power.\"

Peter Greenaway’s cinema questions the numerical, verbal and pictorial determinations of sets and systems. Two or one, even or odd? (Twelve drawings or ‒ thirteen?) Is two, as a stabilization of symmetry, undermined by decompositions in time and space that defy any possible reduction to sub-binaries? This latter question is reserved mainly for A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), though it is anticipated in Vertical Features Remake (1978) and especially The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), which I will treat as a response to both questions at once. The plot of this film, with its riderless horses and lack of an heir, raises the question Lévi-Strauss raised in the most influential exposition of structuralism we have, The Structural Study of Myth. Two or one? Are we born of parents or are we autochthonous? Lévi-Strauss’s reading of the Oedipus myth is an allegory of structuralism itself: are intelligible signs born from the differentiation of two other signs (binaries) or do they arise parthenogenetically, as “natural signs,” from the autonomous self-identity of what they represent? On the other hand, in the dissolution of identity we see in the body of Mr. Herbert raised from the moat, are there appearances that dissolve identity altogether? The paper will show how the overdetermined frame and its symmetries (the stationary camera, the draughtsman’s viewfinder and grid, the “framing” of Mr. Neville, etc.) are confirmed and disconfirmed by invasions of the frame, and the ways in which drawing, painting, and landscaping both “fix on paper” and disrupt the offspring or sterility of twinning.

William Empson: Prophet Against Sacrifice provides the most coherent account of Empson's diverse career to date. While exploring the richness of Empson's comic genius, Paul H. Fry serves to discredit the appropriation of his name in recent polemic by the conflicting parties of deconstruction and politicized cultural criticism. He argues that Empson is a larger, more important figure than the orthodox in either camp can acknowledge, deserving to be considered alongside such versatile critics as Walter Benjamin, Kenneth Burke and Roland Barthes.

First there was the militia escapade, then Pantisocracy and his marriage with gentle Sara, toward whom he felt a strong physical attraction and with whom at least at first he shared an easy rapport. The themes are familiar: the rise of new skills and professions under the division of labor celebrated by Adam Smith; the doomed resistance to the commodification of the products of one's labor under capitalist pressures; the securing of the scribal professions, including poetry, as masculine preserves in the face of the rise of the novel and the success of women in that mode; the rethinking of vocation as career against the backdrop of widening print cultures and the drift of the public sphere away from the coffee house and toward the tea table. [...]with the city-spire or city-as/raVation of Bristol in view, Coleridge informs the dell, the cottage, and the local mountain that it's time to go. [...]the conversation he conducts in this longest of all conversation poems, The Prelude, takes place at long range, and Coleridge's remoteness, with his continued silence about just what Wordsworth is supposed to say in The Recluse, occasions a false note from time to time in Wordsworth's intended genial tone, as in the nervously patronizing fiat at the end of Book II: \"Healfli and the quiet of a healthful mind/ Attend thee\" (Ibid II, 480-81; italics mine).

[...]it's perfectly in keeping that even though the two boys plainly want to row he takes the oars without much embarrassment when he's offered them. Reflecting a commitment to feeling and custom and a curious indifference to his companions' need for definitive and transcendent truth, the Poet in The Excursion is a personality that has shone through a great many of Wordsworth's poems from the beginning.4 Despite the successive forms of moral and even political utility to which his vocation was prudently yoked over the years, each in turn wholly inadequate to explain his revolutionary position in literary history, he always knew and intermittently found ways of revealing the special niche from which poetry cannot be dislodged by any sort of cognitive or fideistic counter-claim. Wholly in keeping with this deliberate drawing back from vision, (he Poet's concluding lines speak movingly of a diminished thing, what is lost being precisely the transmission of Eastern sublimities into the soberer skies of the Western evening-land described so brilliantly by Hartman in the essays of Beyond Formalism and The Fate of Reading.5 This vesper-service closed, without delay, From that exalted station to the plain Descending, we pursued our homeward course, In mute composure, o'er the shadowy lake, Under a faded sky. An early Malraux title that Hartman as far as I know has not discussed in print is The Metamorphosis of the Gods, an account of the secularization of Early Modern art comparable to Hartman's account, in the \"westering\" essays of 1970 and 1975, of a somewhat later \"progress\" from divinity to presiding spirit to the spirit of dailiness in poetry. [...]Malraux offers yet another salvific allegory of weakening light.

[...]no doubt this catholicity, this touch of the nil humanum, helps to explain the tireless curiosity which moved him not only to engage in the scientific experiments for which he is noted - chiefly in thermometry and horticulture - but to write down information on all topics seemingly almost at random: compilations, lists of names, measurements, daily temperature recordings, inventories, and battle transcriptions. [...]this catholicity of spirit made him the radical democrat he was - at least as radical in principle as Samuel Adams: calling Paine's \"American Crisis\" \"a very animating piece\"; staying the course with Voltaire (\"Finished reading Voltaire's profane Philosophical Dictionary. To be a college president is an honor beyond all others, like a crown, but it is difficult to govern students, and moreover when it comes to colleges one can have too much of a good thing. Stiles himself holds officially to this view, as in his letter resigning from his Portsmouth ministry to go to Yale: \"I should spend the momentary remnant of my days in promoting Learning in conjunction with Religion, and in forming the rising Hopes of our Country for Usefulness in Church and State.\" The notion for example that academic promotion should hinge on teaching, a notion with which none dare disagree, is appropriate enough for a college, but it actually weakens what I am calling the idea of Ezra Stiles - which is, if I read him correctly, that whatever the case may be in a college, in a university teaching is not the transmission of universal knowledge but the by-product of scientific and philosophical discovery.