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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 50
... gesture by which the sensory component of the signifier is taken as an example and a guarantee of the phenomenality of the signified . This gesture forgets the blankness of the sign's mere material existence in the same way that the gesture ...
... gesture , or whose , is being said to be a threat ? Puzzlement sets in where de Man alludes to " the actual threat ... gesture that gives a face to a name : the gesture of Boucher the painter , identified with the gesture that does in ...
... gesture re- illuminated in a Girardian perspective , the Girardian reading ( both Goodhart's and Girard's own ) goes on to claim that Freud just blindly repeats the " mythopoetic gesture " of Oedipus . The claim is that Freud ...
Contents
The Accidents of Disfiguration | 13 |
The Ring of Gyges and the Coat of Darkness | 32 |
Viewless Wings | 65 |
Copyright | |
7 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
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 |