Repetition and Clare's Lyric of Withdrawn Revelation
This article argues that certain works by John Clare constitute what I term the lyric of withdraw... more This article argues that certain works by John Clare constitute what I term the lyric of withdrawn revelation, in which the lyric subject attempts to inscribe a nonhuman natural object in its discourse, both for mimetic and expressive purposes, but is prevented from doing so because of the nonhuman's radical dissimilarity to the human. The sonnet "November" and the triple sonnet "The Flood" exemplify this type of lyric by deploying two relational tropes, apostrophe and allegory, respectively, to establish an affinity between human subject and nonhuman object that functions on the subject's own terms. The poems' prosodic, sound, and rhetorical patterning facilitates apostrophe's and allegory's logic of resemblance insofar as regular repetition appeals to the human conceptual appetite for patterns; as a result, the nonhuman object's proneness to regularly patterned discourse suggests the object's likeness to the human lyric subject. Syntactic and figurative irregularity, however, emerges equally as an iterative form in these lyrics to clash with regular repetition and disrupt the logic of affinity that the latter furthers. The tension created points to the nonhuman object's status not as a transcendental signified, but as an extra-discursive context that informs yet remains extrinsic to lyric utterance. Midway through his enclosure elegy, "To a Fallen Elm," John Clare reflects on the "friendship" (28) he shared with the defunct tree: Friend not inanimate-tho stocks and stones There are and many cloathed in flesh and bones Thou ownd a language by which hearts are stirred Deeper than by the attribute of words Thine spoke a feeling known in every tongue. (29-33) 1 This address to the nonhuman and inanimate is nothing more than apostrophe's gesture of making "something which cannot normally be addressed into an addressee, treating it as a subject" (Culler 232). Yet, if apostrophe seeks to lie already beyond disbelief by inverting conventional assumptions about "what can act and what cannot" (242), then Clare's redundantly qualifying address-"Friend not inanimate"-betrays anxiety over the trope's intrinsic logic of affinity between speaker and addressee. The repeated use of the second-person singular (one a subject and the other a possessive pronoun)
This article argues that Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu's novel How to Read the Air (20... more This article argues that Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu's novel How to Read the Air (2010) generates a narrative and cultural conundrum. It contests mainstream, trauma-riddled depictions of immigrant life while simultaneously conforming to the reductive cultural tropes it criticizes. I approach the notion of the stereotypical "singular" immigrant story, wherein the individual's struggles stand for those of the diasporic community, by drawing on Kobena Mercer's and Stuart Hall's notion of "the burden of representation" as well as Cathy Park Hong's "literature of minor feelings." Situated within an ongoing critical conversation about Mengestu's relationship to diasporic identity and popular migrant stories, this article foregrounds How to Read the Air's narrative dissonance and departs from the current scholarly discourse, which tends to either interpret Jonas' individual experience as reflective of collective diasporic experience or overemphasize the novel's revisionist self-consciousness. Through close textual analysis, I show that How to Read the Air both masterfully employs irony and falls victim to it. The novel might not ultimately rise above tropes, but its ambivalence blends opposed positions, sentiments, and tones, and in doing so creates a pluralist revisionist narrative that assimilates stereotypes creatively.
Repetition and Clare's Lyric of Withdrawn Revelation
This article argues that certain works by John Clare constitute what I term the lyric of withdraw... more This article argues that certain works by John Clare constitute what I term the lyric of withdrawn revelation, in which the lyric subject attempts to inscribe a nonhuman natural object in its discourse, both for mimetic and expressive purposes, but is prevented from doing so because of the nonhuman's radical dissimilarity to the human. The sonnet "November" and the triple sonnet "The Flood" exemplify this type of lyric by deploying two relational tropes, apostrophe and allegory, respectively, to establish an affinity between human subject and nonhuman object that functions on the subject's own terms. The poems' prosodic, sound, and rhetorical patterning facilitates apostrophe's and allegory's logic of resemblance insofar as regular repetition appeals to the human conceptual appetite for patterns; as a result, the nonhuman object's proneness to regularly patterned discourse suggests the object's likeness to the human lyric subject. Syntactic and figurative irregularity, however, emerges equally as an iterative form in these lyrics to clash with regular repetition and disrupt the logic of affinity that the latter furthers. The tension created points to the nonhuman object's status not as a transcendental signified, but as an extra-discursive context that informs yet remains extrinsic to lyric utterance. Midway through his enclosure elegy, "To a Fallen Elm," John Clare reflects on the "friendship" (28) he shared with the defunct tree: Friend not inanimate-tho stocks and stones There are and many cloathed in flesh and bones Thou ownd a language by which hearts are stirred Deeper than by the attribute of words Thine spoke a feeling known in every tongue. (29-33) 1 This address to the nonhuman and inanimate is nothing more than apostrophe's gesture of making "something which cannot normally be addressed into an addressee, treating it as a subject" (Culler 232). Yet, if apostrophe seeks to lie already beyond disbelief by inverting conventional assumptions about "what can act and what cannot" (242), then Clare's redundantly qualifying address-"Friend not inanimate"-betrays anxiety over the trope's intrinsic logic of affinity between speaker and addressee. The repeated use of the second-person singular (one a subject and the other a possessive pronoun)
This article argues that Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu's novel How to Read the Air (20... more This article argues that Ethiopian-American writer Dinaw Mengestu's novel How to Read the Air (2010) generates a narrative and cultural conundrum. It contests mainstream, trauma-riddled depictions of immigrant life while simultaneously conforming to the reductive cultural tropes it criticizes. I approach the notion of the stereotypical "singular" immigrant story, wherein the individual's struggles stand for those of the diasporic community, by drawing on Kobena Mercer's and Stuart Hall's notion of "the burden of representation" as well as Cathy Park Hong's "literature of minor feelings." Situated within an ongoing critical conversation about Mengestu's relationship to diasporic identity and popular migrant stories, this article foregrounds How to Read the Air's narrative dissonance and departs from the current scholarly discourse, which tends to either interpret Jonas' individual experience as reflective of collective diasporic experience or overemphasize the novel's revisionist self-consciousness. Through close textual analysis, I show that How to Read the Air both masterfully employs irony and falls victim to it. The novel might not ultimately rise above tropes, but its ambivalence blends opposed positions, sentiments, and tones, and in doing so creates a pluralist revisionist narrative that assimilates stereotypes creatively.
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