Something there is that doesn't love a wall": Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity Quando una st... more Something there is that doesn't love a wall": Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity Quando una studiosa di teoria della letteratura e un medico collaborano per studiare l'opera, molti confini disciplinari devono essere negoziati. Guardando sia l'esperienza personale che la letteratura scientifica, questo articolo indaga il processo di tale collaborazione interdisciplinare ed esplora i suoi vantaggi e i suoi rischi. When a literary theorist and a physician collaborate to research and write about opera, many disciplinary boundaries have to be negotiated. Looking at both personal experience and the scholarly literature, this article investigates the process of such interdisciplinary collaboration and explores its advantages as well as its dangers.
Certain things about postmodernism today feel very familiar. For ex ample, Italian literature (am... more Certain things about postmodernism today feel very familiar. For ex ample, Italian literature (among others) can boast a long tradition of self reflexive self-theorizing, dating back to Dante's pilgrim/poet doubling and Boccaccio's use of framing devices. Many more recent writers Volponi, Calvino, Manganelli, Eco-also operate within this formal tra dition, but with post modernity has come a certain, almost embarrassed self-consciousness that in turn has brought with it not a little irony. This irony can be seen in many ways, on many levels of their texts, and with many different functions, not the least important of which is the paradoxi cal mocking as well as milking of literary conventions and of the authority of the author as both creative writer and critical commentator. In addi tion, this irony self-reflexively turns back upon the reader-especially the reader as critic-undermining our presumed (or presumptuous) author ity as arbiters, as interpreters, as hermeneutic guides. At times (like the present), it seems as if there is little remaining for the critic to do but to repeat the text's own discourse. What do we do, for example, with a novel like Il pendolo di Foucault by Umberto Eco a most puzzling ironic novel in which contradictions get welded into a totalizing vision of order, where life imitates art, where the narrative structure, while seemingly loose and baggy, is in fact obsessively ordered around the form of the occult Tree of the Sefirot, where the individual subject is asserted, even at the point of annihilation? Unlike his first novel, this second is not really a traditional detective story: it ends rather than begins with the requisite deaths, but there is a plot-indeed a plethora of plots wedded together into a «Plan». The detective as the metaphor of order and logic is ironized in a lot of post
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
Perhaps it is a truism that poetry has always been about poetry and its powers: "Not marble, nor ... more Perhaps it is a truism that poetry has always been about poetry and its powers: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." In fiction, this self-reflexive quality also developed early: Don Quijote is as much about the writing and reading of literature as it is about the adventures of someone named Don Quijote. Romanticism, of course, brought new self-consciousness to both forms, a self-consciousness based on inquiries into the nature of the poet's imagination. Modern verse and fiction both, however, have subtly altered this focus . The interest of contemporary self-reflexive literature seems to be less in its pre-textual genesis than in its own textual processes. The author's text is seen as activated by the reader who therefore actually partakes of the creative role of the writer by his own act of making meaning of the perception of black marks on white paper. Texts which reveal this modern sort of textual interest in the processes of reading and writing are as frequent in Canadian poetry as in any other, and awareness of this fact might serve to help both in the interpretation of individual enigmatic poems, and in the identifying of structural patterns, as opposed to thematic ones, in our literature. Indeed, even if we begin with the poems of a poet as technically "unmodern" as E.J. Pratt we find many which are self-conscious about language, about its powers and its relation to imagination. As the title of his poem, "Towards the Last Spike" (emphasis mine) suggests, it is the process of creating lines of communication-be they lines of a railway or of a poem-that interests Pratt. Macdonald, the orator-visionary of the poem, aware of the power of verbal connotation, locks in battle with Blake, with his language of "facts" and "principles," with the " balance of his mind. " 1 At first Sir John is in danger of losing: "Passion became displaced by argument" (p. 48); but he fights on, knowing that this is a "battle of ideas and words" (p. Sl) and that the orator, like the poet, can sway, can play with the multiple connotations of those words.
Si nous dt;finissons le post-modernisme selon le modèle de l'architecture de ce terme, la fiction... more Si nous dt;finissons le post-modernisme selon le modèle de l'architecture de ce terme, la fiction post-moderne serait un phinomène paradoxal : résolument historique bien qu'indluctablement mitafictive et parodique. Puisque l'historiographie (de même que le statut documentaire des faits et de l'archive)-en tant qu'acte qui ordonne, centralise et narrativise-a fait l'objet ces dernières années d'une analyse des plus rigoureuses, il n'est guère surprenant de constater une problématisation semblable de ce qu'on pourrait appeler la << métafiction historiographique >>. L'une des manières majeures dont se signale le double caractère de cette écriture parodique et ouvertement fictive et en même temps historique, c'est par la paratextualité. En tant que convention majeure de la documentation historiographique (et, par implication, de la vérification et de la certification textuelle), les paratextes sont utilisés pour le meilleur et pour le pire dans la fiction post-moderne afin d'installer et de subvertir, de souligner et de miner I'autorité de I'historiographie comme description objective du passé, qui n'a subi la con
One has to learn what stories are, as a child, in order to enjoy them. Similarly one has to learn... more One has to learn what stories are, as a child, in order to enjoy them. Similarly one has to learn to read-actively, imaginatively-in order to enjoy the demanding fiction of today," says the author. Contemporary self-reflexive novels demand that the reader participate in the fictional process as imaginative co-creator. At the same time, they distance the reader by their textual selfconsciousness. Like Narcissus in the Greek myth, the novel of today is intensely aware of its own existence, continuously drawing attention to its own storytelling processes and linguistic structures. The author analyzes four different modes of "narcissistic" fiction, revealing an extensive awareness of the arts in North America and Europe, quoting intensively from English, French, and Italian sources. Her clear, incisive discussion of literary forms and contemporary criticism, and the conclusions she draws about the link between art and life, will interest creators and students of literature and the other arts.
Figurations, usually of an ideological origin whether acknowledged or no, will be found in histor... more Figurations, usually of an ideological origin whether acknowledged or no, will be found in history as well as in the history-like. (Frank Kermode) In the postmodern 'history-like'-be it in architecture, the visual arts, or literaturethe ideological and the aesthetic are turning out to be 1 inseparable. The overt and self-implicating paradox of self-reflexivity ' meeting historical grounding in the postmodern fiction of, for example, Rushdie, Fowles, Eco or Doctorow resists any temptation to see
‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has... more ‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.’ That, of course, is the well-known opening of, appropriately, the fifth chapter of Howards End. Forster’s biographer, P. N. Furbank, has suggested that this passage and what follows recall a dialogue written in 1904, six years earlier, by Forster’s friend and. mentor, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.1 In that piece, a poet returns in an exalted mood from hearing this same music, and finds himself attacked by two friends, a musician and a painter who resembles Roger Fry, for using music as a substitute for living. In his defence, the poet offers an allegorical interpretation of the Beethoven that is not unlike that offered by Helen Schlegel in the novel: goblins and elephants, ‘panic and emptiness’. Forster’s use of Beethoven in this novel is worth stressing in conjunction with Dickinson, Fry, and the possible functions of music if only because when we think of Bloomsbury and its Cambridge roots, it seems more natural to think of literature, and perhaps even painting, than it is to think of music. Yet the images and structures of that third art significantly inform the writings, both critical and creative, not just of Forster, but also of other members of the Bloomsbury Group.
The very idea of a collection of essays on the topic 'romantic adaptations'counter-intuitive for ... more The very idea of a collection of essays on the topic 'romantic adaptations'counter-intuitive for an era whose ideology of originality is infamousmakes this an appealingly contrarian volume from the start. It is well setup by an able critical, theoretical, and historical introduction that deconstructs various commonly accepted hierarchies: those of 'original' source material and adaptation, as well as high art and popular culture. Offering a wide definition of the Romantic period (encompassing the eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries) and an even wider sense of what constitutes adaptation or remediation, its nine essays focus on the genres of Romanticism, and on Romanticism itself as a 'cultural genre' in history (140). What readers will not find here are the usual straightforward case studies so common in adaptation studies of film and literature. When adaptations or remediations (the distinction is not always clear) of individual works are analysed, it is usually with an intriguing twist: for example, Frankenstein is read in the context of the discourse of today's stem cell technology/embryology (in 'The Monstrous Hybrid as Object of Scientific Experiment' by Allyson Purcell-Davis). Similarly Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is read by James Vigus, in 'Adapting Rights', as a discourse of rights that is simultaneously parodied and politically appropriated by Thomas Taylor's A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. Readers will also not find much new theorizing of adaptation, although Matthew Sangster's 'occlusive adaptation' model of competition (58), in his 'Adapting to Dissect: Rhetoric and Representation in the Quarterly Reviews in the Romantic Period,' is a welcome addition to the field. What is especially innovative and valuable here is the study of genres and forms such as reviews, anthologies, and criticism as kinds of 'adapting agents'. Reflecting an ambition to dominate and shape literary culture, the Edinburgh Review writers are said by Sangster to have, first, adapted the form of the review itself with their 'felicity of style', 'frequent censure', and radical selection of what to reveal and what to conceal of the work under review (62). This last point made the review itself into an adapting, or at least remediating, agent, argues Sangster. Similarly, Daniel Cook, in 'The Beauties of Byron and Shelley', shows how the nineteenthcentury 'Beauties' anthology collections remediated texts of the past, shaping and 'purifying' even salacious works for their present-day 'polite consumers' (87). In an essay provocatively entitled 'The Imprisonment of Foucault', Peter Howells argues that a critic too can take on this agential role in adaptation: Richard Rorty, he claims, remediated philosopher Michel Foucault into a 'Romantic intellectual' (125) who had himself remediated Jeremy Bentham in theorizing the Panopticon. Peter J. Kitson's essay '"Reason in China is not Reason in England": Eighteenth-Century Adaptations of China by Horace Walpole and Arthur Murphy' brings to the fore the intercultural dimensions of adaptations, engaging the role of fashion and translation in the transculturation of both texts and artefacts from other nations (here, respectively, a fourteenth-century Chinese drama and the then popular vogue of chinoiserie). Others take this transculturation idea in different social directionsinvolving both gender and class, rather than national cultureby examining how new markets were opened up and new audiences created through adaptations. Joseph Crawford's 'Through a Glass Darkly: Gothic Adaptation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel', argues that the 'lost past' (23) of medieval and early modern romances was remediated with a pedagogical intent in Gothic fiction for female readers. This is, of course, the same
Something there is that doesn't love a wall": Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity Quando una st... more Something there is that doesn't love a wall": Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity Quando una studiosa di teoria della letteratura e un medico collaborano per studiare l'opera, molti confini disciplinari devono essere negoziati. Guardando sia l'esperienza personale che la letteratura scientifica, questo articolo indaga il processo di tale collaborazione interdisciplinare ed esplora i suoi vantaggi e i suoi rischi. When a literary theorist and a physician collaborate to research and write about opera, many disciplinary boundaries have to be negotiated. Looking at both personal experience and the scholarly literature, this article investigates the process of such interdisciplinary collaboration and explores its advantages as well as its dangers.
Certain things about postmodernism today feel very familiar. For ex ample, Italian literature (am... more Certain things about postmodernism today feel very familiar. For ex ample, Italian literature (among others) can boast a long tradition of self reflexive self-theorizing, dating back to Dante's pilgrim/poet doubling and Boccaccio's use of framing devices. Many more recent writers Volponi, Calvino, Manganelli, Eco-also operate within this formal tra dition, but with post modernity has come a certain, almost embarrassed self-consciousness that in turn has brought with it not a little irony. This irony can be seen in many ways, on many levels of their texts, and with many different functions, not the least important of which is the paradoxi cal mocking as well as milking of literary conventions and of the authority of the author as both creative writer and critical commentator. In addi tion, this irony self-reflexively turns back upon the reader-especially the reader as critic-undermining our presumed (or presumptuous) author ity as arbiters, as interpreters, as hermeneutic guides. At times (like the present), it seems as if there is little remaining for the critic to do but to repeat the text's own discourse. What do we do, for example, with a novel like Il pendolo di Foucault by Umberto Eco a most puzzling ironic novel in which contradictions get welded into a totalizing vision of order, where life imitates art, where the narrative structure, while seemingly loose and baggy, is in fact obsessively ordered around the form of the occult Tree of the Sefirot, where the individual subject is asserted, even at the point of annihilation? Unlike his first novel, this second is not really a traditional detective story: it ends rather than begins with the requisite deaths, but there is a plot-indeed a plethora of plots wedded together into a «Plan». The detective as the metaphor of order and logic is ironized in a lot of post
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears... more Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
Perhaps it is a truism that poetry has always been about poetry and its powers: "Not marble, nor ... more Perhaps it is a truism that poetry has always been about poetry and its powers: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." In fiction, this self-reflexive quality also developed early: Don Quijote is as much about the writing and reading of literature as it is about the adventures of someone named Don Quijote. Romanticism, of course, brought new self-consciousness to both forms, a self-consciousness based on inquiries into the nature of the poet's imagination. Modern verse and fiction both, however, have subtly altered this focus . The interest of contemporary self-reflexive literature seems to be less in its pre-textual genesis than in its own textual processes. The author's text is seen as activated by the reader who therefore actually partakes of the creative role of the writer by his own act of making meaning of the perception of black marks on white paper. Texts which reveal this modern sort of textual interest in the processes of reading and writing are as frequent in Canadian poetry as in any other, and awareness of this fact might serve to help both in the interpretation of individual enigmatic poems, and in the identifying of structural patterns, as opposed to thematic ones, in our literature. Indeed, even if we begin with the poems of a poet as technically "unmodern" as E.J. Pratt we find many which are self-conscious about language, about its powers and its relation to imagination. As the title of his poem, "Towards the Last Spike" (emphasis mine) suggests, it is the process of creating lines of communication-be they lines of a railway or of a poem-that interests Pratt. Macdonald, the orator-visionary of the poem, aware of the power of verbal connotation, locks in battle with Blake, with his language of "facts" and "principles," with the " balance of his mind. " 1 At first Sir John is in danger of losing: "Passion became displaced by argument" (p. 48); but he fights on, knowing that this is a "battle of ideas and words" (p. Sl) and that the orator, like the poet, can sway, can play with the multiple connotations of those words.
Si nous dt;finissons le post-modernisme selon le modèle de l'architecture de ce terme, la fiction... more Si nous dt;finissons le post-modernisme selon le modèle de l'architecture de ce terme, la fiction post-moderne serait un phinomène paradoxal : résolument historique bien qu'indluctablement mitafictive et parodique. Puisque l'historiographie (de même que le statut documentaire des faits et de l'archive)-en tant qu'acte qui ordonne, centralise et narrativise-a fait l'objet ces dernières années d'une analyse des plus rigoureuses, il n'est guère surprenant de constater une problématisation semblable de ce qu'on pourrait appeler la << métafiction historiographique >>. L'une des manières majeures dont se signale le double caractère de cette écriture parodique et ouvertement fictive et en même temps historique, c'est par la paratextualité. En tant que convention majeure de la documentation historiographique (et, par implication, de la vérification et de la certification textuelle), les paratextes sont utilisés pour le meilleur et pour le pire dans la fiction post-moderne afin d'installer et de subvertir, de souligner et de miner I'autorité de I'historiographie comme description objective du passé, qui n'a subi la con
One has to learn what stories are, as a child, in order to enjoy them. Similarly one has to learn... more One has to learn what stories are, as a child, in order to enjoy them. Similarly one has to learn to read-actively, imaginatively-in order to enjoy the demanding fiction of today," says the author. Contemporary self-reflexive novels demand that the reader participate in the fictional process as imaginative co-creator. At the same time, they distance the reader by their textual selfconsciousness. Like Narcissus in the Greek myth, the novel of today is intensely aware of its own existence, continuously drawing attention to its own storytelling processes and linguistic structures. The author analyzes four different modes of "narcissistic" fiction, revealing an extensive awareness of the arts in North America and Europe, quoting intensively from English, French, and Italian sources. Her clear, incisive discussion of literary forms and contemporary criticism, and the conclusions she draws about the link between art and life, will interest creators and students of literature and the other arts.
Figurations, usually of an ideological origin whether acknowledged or no, will be found in histor... more Figurations, usually of an ideological origin whether acknowledged or no, will be found in history as well as in the history-like. (Frank Kermode) In the postmodern 'history-like'-be it in architecture, the visual arts, or literaturethe ideological and the aesthetic are turning out to be 1 inseparable. The overt and self-implicating paradox of self-reflexivity ' meeting historical grounding in the postmodern fiction of, for example, Rushdie, Fowles, Eco or Doctorow resists any temptation to see
‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has... more ‘It will be generally admitted that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.’ That, of course, is the well-known opening of, appropriately, the fifth chapter of Howards End. Forster’s biographer, P. N. Furbank, has suggested that this passage and what follows recall a dialogue written in 1904, six years earlier, by Forster’s friend and. mentor, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson.1 In that piece, a poet returns in an exalted mood from hearing this same music, and finds himself attacked by two friends, a musician and a painter who resembles Roger Fry, for using music as a substitute for living. In his defence, the poet offers an allegorical interpretation of the Beethoven that is not unlike that offered by Helen Schlegel in the novel: goblins and elephants, ‘panic and emptiness’. Forster’s use of Beethoven in this novel is worth stressing in conjunction with Dickinson, Fry, and the possible functions of music if only because when we think of Bloomsbury and its Cambridge roots, it seems more natural to think of literature, and perhaps even painting, than it is to think of music. Yet the images and structures of that third art significantly inform the writings, both critical and creative, not just of Forster, but also of other members of the Bloomsbury Group.
The very idea of a collection of essays on the topic 'romantic adaptations'counter-intuitive for ... more The very idea of a collection of essays on the topic 'romantic adaptations'counter-intuitive for an era whose ideology of originality is infamousmakes this an appealingly contrarian volume from the start. It is well setup by an able critical, theoretical, and historical introduction that deconstructs various commonly accepted hierarchies: those of 'original' source material and adaptation, as well as high art and popular culture. Offering a wide definition of the Romantic period (encompassing the eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries) and an even wider sense of what constitutes adaptation or remediation, its nine essays focus on the genres of Romanticism, and on Romanticism itself as a 'cultural genre' in history (140). What readers will not find here are the usual straightforward case studies so common in adaptation studies of film and literature. When adaptations or remediations (the distinction is not always clear) of individual works are analysed, it is usually with an intriguing twist: for example, Frankenstein is read in the context of the discourse of today's stem cell technology/embryology (in 'The Monstrous Hybrid as Object of Scientific Experiment' by Allyson Purcell-Davis). Similarly Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is read by James Vigus, in 'Adapting Rights', as a discourse of rights that is simultaneously parodied and politically appropriated by Thomas Taylor's A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. Readers will also not find much new theorizing of adaptation, although Matthew Sangster's 'occlusive adaptation' model of competition (58), in his 'Adapting to Dissect: Rhetoric and Representation in the Quarterly Reviews in the Romantic Period,' is a welcome addition to the field. What is especially innovative and valuable here is the study of genres and forms such as reviews, anthologies, and criticism as kinds of 'adapting agents'. Reflecting an ambition to dominate and shape literary culture, the Edinburgh Review writers are said by Sangster to have, first, adapted the form of the review itself with their 'felicity of style', 'frequent censure', and radical selection of what to reveal and what to conceal of the work under review (62). This last point made the review itself into an adapting, or at least remediating, agent, argues Sangster. Similarly, Daniel Cook, in 'The Beauties of Byron and Shelley', shows how the nineteenthcentury 'Beauties' anthology collections remediated texts of the past, shaping and 'purifying' even salacious works for their present-day 'polite consumers' (87). In an essay provocatively entitled 'The Imprisonment of Foucault', Peter Howells argues that a critic too can take on this agential role in adaptation: Richard Rorty, he claims, remediated philosopher Michel Foucault into a 'Romantic intellectual' (125) who had himself remediated Jeremy Bentham in theorizing the Panopticon. Peter J. Kitson's essay '"Reason in China is not Reason in England": Eighteenth-Century Adaptations of China by Horace Walpole and Arthur Murphy' brings to the fore the intercultural dimensions of adaptations, engaging the role of fashion and translation in the transculturation of both texts and artefacts from other nations (here, respectively, a fourteenth-century Chinese drama and the then popular vogue of chinoiserie). Others take this transculturation idea in different social directionsinvolving both gender and class, rather than national cultureby examining how new markets were opened up and new audiences created through adaptations. Joseph Crawford's 'Through a Glass Darkly: Gothic Adaptation in the Eighteenth-Century Novel', argues that the 'lost past' (23) of medieval and early modern romances was remediated with a pedagogical intent in Gothic fiction for female readers. This is, of course, the same
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