Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic TraditionOriginally 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. |
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... Romanticism , copy- right by the Trustees of Boston University . Chapter 2 is reprinted from Romanticism and Language , ed . Arden Reed , copyright 1984 by Cornell University Press . Used by permission of the publisher , Cornell ...
... Romanticism plays a decisive role . For Romanticism has been most tellingly identified , be- yond considerations of style and theme , precisely with the full emer- gence and elaboration of the genetic model , whereby we imagine the ...
... Romanticism , since Romanticism ( itself a period concept ) would then be the movement that challenges the genetic principle which necessarily underlies all his- torical narrative . ” 4 What happens in testing this inference in the ...
Contents
The Accidents of Disfiguration | 13 |
The Ring of Gyges and the Coat of Darkness | 32 |
Viewless Wings | 65 |
Copyright | |
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Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition Cynthia Chase Limited preview - 2019 |
Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition Cynthia Chase No preview available - 2019 |