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Conclusion Mahon and the Echo

BEN LEVITAS

in The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890-1916

This chapter reassesses the role of the theatre in pre-Revolutionary Ireland. Considering Yeats's ‘Man and the Echo’, it argues that the theatre was central to the Irish revival. Parnellism provided ... More

This chapter reassesses the role of the theatre in pre-Revolutionary Ireland. Considering Yeats's ‘Man and the Echo’, it argues that the theatre was central to the Irish revival. Parnellism provided an important opening for cultural nationalism because it looked forward to ripening opinion rather than established consensus. Nationalism contained conflicts along lines of class, gender, and generation, all revealed in theatre as much as in the activities of Irish Socialist and Feminists; and the regional development of theatre in Cork and Ulster is emphasised. The model of Ireland as lost to tribal opposition is rejected; left-literati alliances were indicators of resistance to bourgeois nationalist imperatives. Republicanism proved open to such modernist lessons, but while Synge is presented as influentially provocative, his creative anxiety should not be reduced to revolutionary provocation alone.Less

Narcissus and Echo: The Arrows of Love's Errors

Micaela Janan

in Reflections in a Serpent's Eye: Thebes in Ovid's Metamorphoses

The scholarship on Narcissus and Echo generally holds up both as cautionary exempla of what is to be avoided in human life and love. By contrast, this chapter uses Lacan's analysis of the abstract ... More

The scholarship on Narcissus and Echo generally holds up both as cautionary exempla of what is to be avoided in human life and love. By contrast, this chapter uses Lacan's analysis of the abstract ideals Man and Woman, and their basis in Kant's epistemology, to argue that Narcissus and Echo are not ‘bad, false’ images of love, the self, the uses of language or of knowledge we can avoid by being thoughtful, humble, wary, or discreet. Rather, Ovid deploys Narcissus and Echo's paradigmatic primacy—first human, first female, of the epic to be enamoured; consequently first to suffer for it—because their cases illustrate what plagues intersubjectivity intrinsically and ineluctably, albeit in extremis. They exemplify the ways in which desire—and thus the subject founded by desire—revolves around a certain necessary ignorance, a ‘gap’ or ‘blank space’ in knowledge upon which fantasy is founded, and toward which the perpetual unrest of longing can surge.Less

EPILOGUE: New Deal Landscapes in the Environmental Era

Neil M. Maher

in Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Enviromental Movement

The final chapter traces the CCC's legacy into the post–World War II period. It does so by focusing on the controversy, during the mid-to-late 1940s, surrounding the Bureau of Reclamation's plan to ... More

The final chapter traces the CCC's legacy into the post–World War II period. It does so by focusing on the controversy, during the mid-to-late 1940s, surrounding the Bureau of Reclamation's plan to construct a hydroelectric dam in Dinosaur National Monument's Echo Park, which straddles the Utah—Colorado border. While environmental historians have long viewed the defeat of the Echo Park dam as one of the founding moments of the American environmental movement, this chapter argues that this victory by environmentalists was predicated on the Corps and its conservation work during the New Deal period. For instance, during the 1930s the CCC developed Dinosaur National Monument for outdoor recreation, a process that later brought outdoor enthusiasts into the anti-dam camp. Criticism of Corps conservation work during the early 1940s, however, raised public concern about the destruction of wilderness and ecological balance in the region as well. When the federal government announced plans for the Echo Park dam during the late 1940s, these concerns resurfaced and guided environmentalist opposition. This chapter ends by discussing the declining power of the federal government within postwar conservation, and concludes, somewhat ironically, that the strong hand of the New Deal helped make what eventually became environmentalism a more democratic movement.Less

Variations on the Theme of a Painting by Poussin

Claude Lévi-Strauss

in We Are All Cannibals: And Other Essays

myths of the echo in Europe and the Americas

Visions of Narcissus

Eric Langley

in Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

This chapter discusses Renaissance depictions of Narcissus and the rhetorical strategies of gemination and mirrored repetition employed in translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses (including those by ... More

This chapter discusses Renaissance depictions of Narcissus and the rhetorical strategies of gemination and mirrored repetition employed in translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses (including those by Golding and Sandys). Primarily used in moralized treatments as a representative figure of vanity or pride, Echo and Narcissus' cautionary tale also acts as condemnation of excessive introspection, self‐knowledge, or over‐involvement with art, the idolatrous image, or the body.Less

The Metamorphoses of Arthur Golding

Matthew Reynolds

in The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue

Metamorphosis is an obvious metaphor for translation. But in fact it is so multifarious that translators have generally eschewed it. Nevertheless, Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses ... More

Metamorphosis is an obvious metaphor for translation. But in fact it is so multifarious that translators have generally eschewed it. Nevertheless, Arthur Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses (1567) fleetingly adopts particular metamorphoses as metaphors for its own behaviour: it echoes Echo, interprets Deucalion's interpretation of an oracle, and so on. In this, it anticipates the more disciplined and extensive metaphors of translation that I have explored in the bulk of the book. Yet, to interpret a metamorphosis as the embodiment of a metaphor is to simplify it; to interpret a translation as the embodiment of a metaphor is a simplification too. Golding's Ovid vividly exemplifies what is true of all the translations I have discussed: the imaginative work done by a poem‐translation will always exceed the explanatory categories that are brought to bear on it—even the comparatively nuanced and complex metaphorical categories which I have proposed.Less

Is the Voice a Myth? A Rereading of Ovid

Shane Butler

in The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality

For Lacanian critics like Mladen Dolar, the voice as a bearer of deep meaning is a "structural illusion," the product of unfulfillable longing for a time and a world before language. Such a view, the ... More

For Lacanian critics like Mladen Dolar, the voice as a bearer of deep meaning is a "structural illusion," the product of unfulfillable longing for a time and a world before language. Such a view, the author of this chapter argues, is part of what we might call the "language myth" that shaped so much critical thought in the last century. But what if we turn to older myths? The voice, in fact, is key to the roles of several major figures in Greek and Roman mythology, such as Echo, Orpheus, and Philomela. This essay revisits these three myths, in the versions of the Latin poet Ovid, inviting us to close our eyes to Narcissus for a while, in order to listen for what he and we have been missing. What we hear is not just beautiful music, but a rebuke of Lacanian and other twentieth-century views of the voice. Here instead are sounds that index the bodies from which they come, reminding us that there can be no meaning, linguistic or otherwise, without matter.Less

Echoes

Matthew Bevis

in Wordsworth's Fun

This chapter begins where the poetry often begins, not with straightforward incitements to laughter but with oddly charged depictions of it. It considers two poems in detail--"I wandered lonely as a ... More

This chapter begins where the poetry often begins, not with straightforward incitements to laughter but with oddly charged depictions of it. It considers two poems in detail--"I wandered lonely as a cloud" and "To Joanna"--and relates them to contemporary discussions of laughter and to Wordsworth's figurations of laughter across his work. The poet's reworking of the myth of Echo and Narcissus is a recurring theme, and the chapter shows that Wordsworth, in his depictions of laughter, is often thinking about what poetry might be and do. Laughable echoes offer him a spur to self-exploration and a means to emblematize his own demands for poetry in relation to those of his audience.Less

The saving face of death: anthropology and the scene of knowing

Paul Carter

in Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology

This chapter develops a speculative account of the role that listening and architecture may have in reconfiguring the desire of anthropology to know the other through the face-to-face encounter. It ... More

This chapter develops a speculative account of the role that listening and architecture may have in reconfiguring the desire of anthropology to know the other through the face-to-face encounter. It stages three heterogeneous scenes of listening: the libretto and scenography for Luciano Berio's music theatre work, La Vera Storia, the staging of the conditions of self-knowing in the Phaedrus and some miscellaneous speculations about the visagéité of the wall. Through these scenes the wall is explored as a site of whispering, a gathering place of echoes and the place where it is proposed that anthropological insights may be had in recognizing that listening is always a matter of listening in and overhearing and being overheard.Less

The Free State of Jones Revisited: Davis Knight’s Miscegenation Trial

Victoria E. Bynum

in "The Free State of Jones, Movie Edition": Mississippi's Longest Civil War

This chapter returns to the 1948 miscegenation trial of Newt and Rachel’s great-grandson, Davis Knight, outlined in the book’s Introduction. Utilizing the trial’s 150 page transcript, the epilogue ... More

This chapter returns to the 1948 miscegenation trial of Newt and Rachel’s great-grandson, Davis Knight, outlined in the book’s Introduction. Utilizing the trial’s 150 page transcript, the epilogue reveals the depth and style of popular opinions about Davis’s racial identity reflective of common racist assumptions. The “one drop rule” of race is compared with legal definitions of racial identity to further explain the complicated status of the Knight community, but also the trial’s significance to the broader Civil Rights movement. Significantly, the Davis Knight trial contributed to Ethel Knight’s decision to write her version of the story: The Echo of the Black Horn. Though largely based on Tom Knight’s research files, Ethel replaced Tom’s heroic vision of Newt Knight (his father) with one that rendered Newt a man guilty of treason against both his (Confederate) nation and his race.Less

Allegories of Writing: Figurations of Narcissus and Echo in W. B. Yeats’s Work

Hedwig Schwall

in Writing Modern Ireland

This essay offers a psychoanalytic, and specifically Lacanian, reading of W. B. Yeats's thinking about the role of the poet. More specifically, it examines “the transforming power” of the poet, who, ... More

This essay offers a psychoanalytic, and specifically Lacanian, reading of W. B. Yeats's thinking about the role of the poet. More specifically, it examines “the transforming power” of the poet, who, in Yeats's own words, “never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always a phantasmagoria.” It argues that this phantasmagoria is a drama within the psychic system, which the poet sometimes tries to stage in poetry and plays. The essay first discusses the concerns shared by Yeats and Jacques Lacan before turning to figurations of Echo and Narcissus in a range of Yeats's work. It shows that Yeats's ouevre shifted from narcissism and a strong love of Neo-Platonic theories to a more Surrealist logic that aims at sublimation and discrepancy.Less

“Haunt[ing] the Waterfront”: Place and Displacement in Echo’s Bones and Les Nouvelles

Nels Pearson

in Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett

The prevailing notion is that Samuel Beckett’s increasing minimalism and abstraction parallel his detachment from Ireland and his philosophical maturation on the continent. However, this narrative ... More

The prevailing notion is that Samuel Beckett’s increasing minimalism and abstraction parallel his detachment from Ireland and his philosophical maturation on the continent. However, this narrative relies upon a set of opposed concepts—“Ireland, nationalism, familiarity, physical territory” versus “expatriation, cosmopolitanism, disorientation, abstract space”—that Beckett’s life and work in the 1930s and 40s actually deconstruct. The chapter argues this point by examining the complex relationship between location and dislocation in the 1935 poems Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, written in English and set in Ireland and Europe, and the Nouvelles “The Expelled,” “The Calmative,” and “The End,” Beckett’s first French stories, written in 1946. Reading these texts against the grain of the traditional Irish-to-Cosmopolitan narrative, I argue that an original cultural estrangement relative to Ireland lingers actively throughout these works and that the paradoxical process of moving beyond this native estrangement is what generates their unique spatial poetics.Less

Latent Transformations: Reshaping the Metamorphoses

Monika Asztalos

in Metamorphic Readings: Transformation, Language, and Gender in the Interpretation of Ovid's Metamorphoses

In Ovid’s stories one finds metamorphoses where the outward appearance is transformed while the inner being remains the same. This chapter argues that the reverse can occasionally be detected in the ... More

In Ovid’s stories one finds metamorphoses where the outward appearance is transformed while the inner being remains the same. This chapter argues that the reverse can occasionally be detected in the poetic language: when an expression is repeated, the appearance (word) is the same while the inner being (meaning) is not. In three cases, from the stories of Echo, Pygmalion, and the plague in Aegina, it is shown that the hidden transformations are subtly signalled by the poet. In the first and third cases, the poet’s hints to the readers have been overlooked; as a result, lines containing one or both of the expressions have been considered interpolations by some critics. Arguments are presented in support of their authenticity, and it is suggested that textual problems which may have arisen from early readers’ failure to catch a hint by the poet can be eliminated in two cases by means of conjectures rather than by bracketing entire lines. In the third case the meaning of a repeated expression undergoes a transformation by reappearing in a different generic surrounding.Less

Digital Evolution and the Emergence of Complexity

John Johnston

in The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI

This chapter charts the history of artificial life (ALife) after Langton in relation to theories of evolution, emergence, and complex adaptive systems by examining a series of experiments carried out ... More

This chapter charts the history of artificial life (ALife) after Langton in relation to theories of evolution, emergence, and complex adaptive systems by examining a series of experiments carried out on various software platforms, including Thomas Ray’s Tierra, John Holland’s Echo, Christoph Adami’s Avida, Andrew Pargellis’ Amoeba, Tim Taylor’s Cosmos, and Larry Yaeger’s PolyWorld. It concludes by considering the limits of the first phase of ALife research and the new research initiatives represented by “living computation” and attempts to create an artificial protocell.Less

Introduction

Jayne Thomas

in Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth

This chapter sets out the scope and methodology of the book, revealing how it moves beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in Tennyson to uncover new and revealing connections and ... More

This chapter sets out the scope and methodology of the book, revealing how it moves beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in Tennyson to uncover new and revealing connections and interactions in some of the most emblematic poems of Tennyson’s career – ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Ulysses’, In Memoriam, Maud, and ‘Tithonus’. It explains the book’s use of the term ‘echo’ to track the sometimes loud, sometimes faint, yet always audible Wordsworthian resonances within Tennyson’s poetry, as well setting its analysis of Tennyson’s poetry in relation to the intertextual and allusive process in general and Harold Bloom’s theory of intra-poetic rivalry in particular. It gives an overview of Tennyson’s recorded relationship with Wordsworth, as set out in Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, I and II, edited by Hallam Tennyson, Tennyson’s son. It gives an overview of relevant critical work in the field, and chapter summaries of the five chapters to follow, including a brief acknowledgement of how the book will conclude with an analysis of Tennyson’s valedictory lyric, ‘Crossing the Bar’.Less

Richard Powers’s Strange Wonder

Heather Houser

in Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

Through Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations (1991) and The Echo Maker (2006), this chapter examines wonder, an affect related to intellection that is essential to inspiring medical and ... More

Through Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations (1991) and The Echo Maker (2006), this chapter examines wonder, an affect related to intellection that is essential to inspiring medical and environmental inquiry. Nature writers have turned to wonder to spark ecological awareness as a first step to promoting environmental care. Informed by new scientific paradigms, however, contemporary fiction rethinks the trajectories of wonder. The oscillation between familiarity and strangeness is the connection between the novel's two narratives as it defines the workings of cognition and of environmental awakening. This oscillation is also the generator of wonder itself. Toggling between a series of binaries, however, the text reveals that wonder can tip over into projection and paranoia, relations that divert energies away from ethical involvement. Ultimately, Powers's ecosickness fiction is a rejoinder to common places about connection and care found in environmental thought.Less

Echo and Narcissus: a Study in Duality: [From Classical Views 30 (1986) 43–8]

Niall Rudd

in The Common Spring: Essays on Latin and English Poetry

This reading of Ovid's telling of the myth of Echo and Narcissus (Metamorphosis 3.339-510) highlights the duality of auditory and visual reflection. Reflection, inversion, repetition and chiasmus are ... More

This reading of Ovid's telling of the myth of Echo and Narcissus (Metamorphosis 3.339-510) highlights the duality of auditory and visual reflection. Reflection, inversion, repetition and chiasmus are key to the effect of Ovid's verseLess