Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is well-expressive of the poet’s profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley’s poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period.
{"title":"Urban Decay or the Uncanny Return of Dionysus","authors":"","doi":"10.3167/cs.2021.340106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2021.340106","url":null,"abstract":"Written in the familiar genre of ruin poems, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is well-expressive of the poet’s profound hatred of tyranny. One of the distinctive features of the poem is the vividly visual images it provides of the ruined statue and the desert as the setting of the poem. Focusing on the images of the desert and ruins, and using the concept of urban decay and mytho-archetypal notions, this study attempts to show that the ruins of the poem anticipate the modern phenomenon of urban decay as the return of the repressed in city-forms. However, what the poem presents as destruction, death, ruins and decay is in fact the potential of bringing about spring and regeneration. Reading this poem in the light of the mentioned concepts provides the reader with an understanding of the function of the ruins in Shelley’s poems as an uncanny Dionysian defiance against both the tyranny of his age and the rationalism of the Enlightenment period.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48390793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article concerns the expression ‘logical phallusies’, imputed to Jacques Derrida by Barry Smith in 1992 in a letter arguing against the proposed award to Derrida of an honorary doctorate at Cambridge. Derrida insisted that this expression appeared nowhere in his oeuvre – it has never been found – and yet it has endured, in discussions of Derrida’s work and general legacy, more than any other aspect of Derrida’s ‘Cambridge Affair’. I address two cases of the expression’s weird stubbornness, arguing that its misattribution to Derrida is a gesture which Derrida’s work guards against and undermines – even deconstructs – in advance. The article sounds a note of caution about the ‘post-theoretical’ practice of assimilating philosophers and theorists to the humanities via the decontextualised appropriation of putatively synecdochic buzzwords.
{"title":"‘Fanciful associations’","authors":"","doi":"10.3167/cs.2021.340107","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2021.340107","url":null,"abstract":"This article concerns the expression ‘logical phallusies’, imputed to Jacques Derrida by Barry Smith in 1992 in a letter arguing against the proposed award to Derrida of an honorary doctorate at Cambridge. Derrida insisted that this expression appeared nowhere in his oeuvre – it has never been found – and yet it has endured, in discussions of Derrida’s work and general legacy, more than any other aspect of Derrida’s ‘Cambridge Affair’. I address two cases of the expression’s weird stubbornness, arguing that its misattribution to Derrida is a gesture which Derrida’s work guards against and undermines – even deconstructs – in advance. The article sounds a note of caution about the ‘post-theoretical’ practice of assimilating philosophers and theorists to the humanities via the decontextualised appropriation of putatively synecdochic buzzwords.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49135898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetry","authors":"Giles C. Watson","doi":"10.3167/cs.2022.340209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2022.340209","url":null,"abstract":"Rivets and The Hanney Brooch By Giles Watson","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48137717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article explores the role of the strange and spectacular in early modern dramatic (re)presentations of the Islamic world by discussing two sixteenth-century tragedies by Thomas Goffe that engage with Turkish dynastic history. No longer employing the fantastical elements used in medieval literature to mark the East as a spectacular space, Goffe presents a vision of Turkish otherness based on a new (mundane) notion of strangeness that relies on the staging of ‘unnaturally’ excessive behaviour and strangely hyperbolic passions. This strategy emphasises the supposed antagonistic alterity of the Muslim other. However, it also (inadvertently) undermines conventional Ottoman stereotypes by offering points of (emotional) contact and recognition between the audience and the Turkish characters on stage.
{"title":"Turkish History on the Early Stuart Stage","authors":"M. Hartner","doi":"10.3167/cs.2022.340205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2022.340205","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the role of the strange and spectacular in early modern dramatic (re)presentations of the Islamic world by discussing two sixteenth-century tragedies by Thomas Goffe that engage with Turkish dynastic history. No longer employing the fantastical elements used in medieval literature to mark the East as a spectacular space, Goffe presents a vision of Turkish otherness based on a new (mundane) notion of strangeness that relies on the staging of ‘unnaturally’ excessive behaviour and strangely hyperbolic passions. This strategy emphasises the supposed antagonistic alterity of the Muslim other. However, it also (inadvertently) undermines conventional Ottoman stereotypes by offering points of (emotional) contact and recognition between the audience and the Turkish characters on stage.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47932883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The two early modern meanings of the word ‘stranger’ (someone one does not know; a foreigner) have become separated in modern English. This article looks at attitudes to the ‘stranger’ both as pathetic victim and as someone outside Anglophone language and culture, with special reference to the arrival of a Scottish king and his followers in 1603–04. Horatio’s ‘wondrous strange’ (here, referring to the apparent ubiquity of the Ghost’s voice) is as metatheatrical as Hamlet’s later jokey comment on ‘this fellow in the cellarage’. The language of ‘wonder’, a particularly Jacobean phenomenon, suggests that intense artistic experiences, like experiences of shock and horror, can make the spectator or listener – as Milton put it – ‘marble with too much conceiving’.
{"title":"‘As a Stranger Give it Welcome’","authors":"L. Potter","doi":"10.3167/cs.2022.340202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2022.340202","url":null,"abstract":"The two early modern meanings of the word ‘stranger’ (someone one does not know; a foreigner) have become separated in modern English. This article looks at attitudes to the ‘stranger’ both as pathetic victim and as someone outside Anglophone language and culture, with special reference to the arrival of a Scottish king and his followers in 1603–04. Horatio’s ‘wondrous strange’ (here, referring to the apparent ubiquity of the Ghost’s voice) is as metatheatrical as Hamlet’s later jokey comment on ‘this fellow in the cellarage’. The language of ‘wonder’, a particularly Jacobean phenomenon, suggests that intense artistic experiences, like experiences of shock and horror, can make the spectator or listener – as Milton put it – ‘marble with too much conceiving’.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45174423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.
{"title":"Whoso List to Find?","authors":"","doi":"10.3167/cs.2021.340102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2021.340102","url":null,"abstract":"Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48093792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore inverts Romeo and Juliet by making its core relationship endogamous rather than exogamous. Perkin Warbeck is a sequel to Richard III, but undoes its original by telling a story fundamentally incompatible with Shakespeare’s. The Lover’s Melancholy echoes both Twelfth Night and King Lear, collapsing the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Above all, Ford reworks Othello, which lies behind the plots of four of his plays. The estranging effect produced by these reshapings is underlined by Perkin Warbeck’s subtitle ‘A Strange Truth’ and the word ‘strange’ appears forty-nine times in his plays. Ford uses familiar Shakespearean stories to highlight the strangeness of the stories which he himself tells.
{"title":"John Ford’s Strange Truth","authors":"L. Hopkins","doi":"10.3167/cs.2022.340208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2022.340208","url":null,"abstract":"From the 1620s to the 1630s, John Ford revisited Shakespeare and made him strange. ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore inverts Romeo and Juliet by making its core relationship endogamous rather than exogamous. Perkin Warbeck is a sequel to Richard III, but undoes its original by telling a story fundamentally incompatible with Shakespeare’s. The Lover’s Melancholy echoes both Twelfth Night and King Lear, collapsing the distinction between comedy and tragedy. Above all, Ford reworks Othello, which lies behind the plots of four of his plays. The estranging effect produced by these reshapings is underlined by Perkin Warbeck’s subtitle ‘A Strange Truth’ and the word ‘strange’ appears forty-nine times in his plays. Ford uses familiar Shakespearean stories to highlight the strangeness of the stories which he himself tells.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49430290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses the pirate figures in The Double Marriage (1619–22) and The Unnatural Combat (1624–26) by delineating the crucial role of strangeness in the depiction of piracy on the one hand and the generic status of these plays on the other. In both texts, the main pirate figure moves from strange outsider to morally upright anti-hero. Strangeness (and with it, piracy) thus serves to question and undermine the stability of the social status quo. Strangeness and unnaturalness also inherently affect the generic status of both plays. In The Unnatural Combat, a revenge plot becomes obsolete with the death of one of the protagonists; and The Double Marriage becomes strange in its undermining of generic expectations, generating a tragicomic plot and at least three different revenge plots.
{"title":"Massinger’s Strange Pirates","authors":"S. Gruss","doi":"10.3167/cs.2022.340207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2022.340207","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the pirate figures in The Double Marriage (1619–22) and The Unnatural Combat (1624–26) by delineating the crucial role of strangeness in the depiction of piracy on the one hand and the generic status of these plays on the other. In both texts, the main pirate figure moves from strange outsider to morally upright anti-hero. Strangeness (and with it, piracy) thus serves to question and undermine the stability of the social status quo. Strangeness and unnaturalness also inherently affect the generic status of both plays. In The Unnatural Combat, a revenge plot becomes obsolete with the death of one of the protagonists; and The Double Marriage becomes strange in its undermining of generic expectations, generating a tragicomic plot and at least three different revenge plots.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43019681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Strangeness occurs in many places and in a variety of forms in Shakespeare, but nowhere more compellingly than in The Tempest. This late, ‘magical’ play distinguishes itself by its depiction of the bizarre and the unusual in terms both of character and incident. In this article, I argue that, in deploying and developing his understanding of the strange, Shakespeare takes his cue to a degree from The Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser, whose allegorical method also employs the odd and the unfamiliar. Spenser’s epic poem was published in three separate editions in the course of Shakespeare’s writing career: at its beginning in 1590 (the first three books), again in 1596 (six books), and in 1609, a year or two before the composition of The Tempest.
{"title":"The Tempest and The Faerie Queene","authors":"J. Roe","doi":"10.3167/cs.2022.340203","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2022.340203","url":null,"abstract":"Strangeness occurs in many places and in a variety of forms in Shakespeare, but nowhere more compellingly than in The Tempest. This late, ‘magical’ play distinguishes itself by its depiction of the bizarre and the unusual in terms both of character and incident. In this article, I argue that, in deploying and developing his understanding of the strange, Shakespeare takes his cue to a degree from The Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser, whose allegorical method also employs the odd and the unfamiliar. Spenser’s epic poem was published in three separate editions in the course of Shakespeare’s writing career: at its beginning in 1590 (the first three books), again in 1596 (six books), and in 1609, a year or two before the composition of The Tempest.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46304220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, we learn that a revenger must be ‘strange-disposed’ or ‘strange-composed’ (1.1.86/96), and in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy the vengeful Amintor claims ‘what a strange thing am I’ (2.1.298). In these utterances, the speakers tie their desires for vengeance into their affective state. As both plays progress, however, the evocations of strangeness shift, moving from an association with the revenger to an association with the act of revenge itself. In working to unpack the interrelationships between the revenger, the strangeness of their affective experience and the strangeness of the act of revenge itself, this article considers what questions these plays ask regarding the tension between embodiment and disembodiment in the act of revenge.
{"title":"‘You Mean Some Strange Revenge’","authors":"Katherine M. Graham","doi":"10.3167/cs.2022.340204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2022.340204","url":null,"abstract":"In Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, we learn that a revenger must be ‘strange-disposed’ or ‘strange-composed’ (1.1.86/96), and in Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy the vengeful Amintor claims ‘what a strange thing am I’ (2.1.298). In these utterances, the speakers tie their desires for vengeance into their affective state. As both plays progress, however, the evocations of strangeness shift, moving from an association with the revenger to an association with the act of revenge itself. In working to unpack the interrelationships between the revenger, the strangeness of their affective experience and the strangeness of the act of revenge itself, this article considers what questions these plays ask regarding the tension between embodiment and disembodiment in the act of revenge.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41575566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}