Birmingham, AL: Summa, 1986. 159pp.
Excerpt from Chapter I "Formal Repetition and Literature"
"Repetition has a bad reputation. Repetition is stasis, it is boredom, it is death, cf. Freud. For the sake of originality or difference, it must be avoided at all costs. Repetition in literature is thus to many the sign of a dull mind, and of an even duller pen. As Malherbe implied in his commentaries on the baroque poet Desportes, repetition destroys good style.
"Since this "evil" is found, however, in the theoretical works of thinkers from Aristotle to Derrida, as well as in the literary productions of writers from the Greeks right down through the New Novelists, one has to ask whether it really deserves this bad reputation. Indeed, the entire history of rhetorical and stylistic studies would seem to underscore rather than to reject the fact that the iterative process is constitutive of the artistic work. One need only look, for instance, at the definition of repetition in a dictionary of rhetoric to realize the extraordinary importance accorded this phenomenon in the classification and characterization of rhetorical tropes. Be they text-based, or reader-based, as with the current vogue, the vast majority of critical attempts to describe the literary event depend on the perception of repetitive textual traits for their epistemological grounding. Regardless of what a given critic may say about a piece of literature, he or she would be literally at a loss for words if there were no prior notation, conscious or unconscious, of formal iteration."
Understanding French Poetry
New York & London: Garland, 1994. Co-authored & edited volume of original essays. 271pp + xxx; 2nd edition (paperback) with new index, notes & preface by Rosemary Lloyd (Birmingham: Summa, 2001).
In an era of declining interest in poetry studies, this collection of essays provides the groundwork for understanding how and why French verse has been overshadowed by prose at the dawn of the new millennium. Although poetry has not declined in terms ot quality or quantity, its role within the French literary tradition has markedly diminished. This volume specifically addresses the issue of why French poetry has suffered a loss of prestige in the English speaking world and examines the three major causes of this fall from grace. Written by some of the foremost scholars of French poetry, the essays embrace a wide spectrum of topics such as versification, interpretation, translation, typography, canonization, politics, and gender. Highly recommended for the scholar and advanced undergraduate or graduate student. The book was originally published in a slightly different form by Garland Press.
Difference Unbound
Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995. 268pp & index.
This is the first book to examine the precise relationship between pluralism and the production of modern Western literature and criticism from the eighteenth century to the present. Unlike other recent studies of pluralism's role in interpretation (by Wayne Booth, Ellen Rooney, and K.M. Newton, for instance), it underscores the historical rather than exclusively epistemological reasons behind what might be called "the rise of literary pluralism." The latter term entails two different types of phenomena: critical pluralism and aesthetic pluralism. The critical type, the one more often studied by theorists, results from the co-existence of more and more readings of the same canonical works. The aesthetic variety refers instead to the ever-growing number of modern texts that have been intentionally written differently, i.e., in different styles or forms, and about different kinds of people, situations, and things.
Reviewing a wide range of authors - from German French, and English Romantics to contemporary Anglo-American and European poststructuralists - this polemic shows how and why the current literary emphasis on difference derives from an oftentimes unquestioned allegiance to the notion of cultural pluralism. Once the "problem" of literary pluralism is defined, the second chapter indicates how its historical rise is properly studied by shifting back and forth between differences in texts to differences in and among readers. The third and fourth chapters illustrate through numerous textual examples that modern literature and criticism have become pluralistic because European and American writers and critics have increasingly sought to be original and progressive, respectively. The book's conclusion calls for a renewal of critical approaches to literature based on a given society's values, all the while recognizing the evolutionary nature of such values.
Difference Defense
Why the Study of Pluralism Demands Pluralistic Approaches: Response to Susan Van Deventer's Review
The following is a response to Susan Van Deventer's review of my recent book, Difference Unbound: The Rise of Pluralism in Literature and Criticism (Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995) (hereafter DU) published in NCFS (25, Nos 3 &4, Spring-Summer 1997: 430-1). Van Deventer begins her review by claiming that my basic terms are "rather confusing," implying that the only unconfusing use of the term pluralism in literary discussions centers on "ethical issues involved in accepting multiple interpretive paradigms." To be sure, ethics will always be germane to studies of this concept. In examining pluralism's multiple relations with literature and criticism, however, one should realize that ethics are not the only thing involved, as my book clearly demonstrates. Defining as painstakingly as possible the term "literary pluralism," which includes both aesthetic and critical varieties (generated by the modern proliferation of texts and readings, respectively), the first chapter of DU situates this two-part phenomenon on the last of three levels—political structure, economic structure, and cultural life—which contemporary political scientists believe constitute the main foci of any study of pluralism. more...
