Search Results

The singers and actors of the Belle Epoque are the focus of this chapter, which investigates the French art of diction in theatrical and musical performances circa 1900. The survey of performance practice includes not only sound recordings but also written records — treatises, memoirs, self-help manuals, and musical scores — that reveal how performers thought about the act of speaking French. Evidence from celebrities such as Sarah Berhardt and Marcel Proust, as well as lesser-known personalities such as Léon Brémont and Reynaldo Hahn, provide unique insight into pronunciation habits that defined both the French character and the character of French. The chapter ends with a close reading of the end of Debussy's opera Pelléas et Mélisande.

This chapter is primarily concerned with Anglo-Latin prose: that is to say, Latin prose composed in Anglo-Saxon England between roughly 650 and 1050. It poses the question of the extent to which Anglo-Latin authors were aware of different stylistic registers, and how well they understood what diction was appropriate to either prose or verse. Using the example of Bede as a starting point, the chapter provides a list of those features of poetic diction that are found, in varying degrees, in the authors of Anglo-Latin prose. The seven criteria presented provide a crude measuring-stick against which to assess the poeticism of the principal authors of Anglo-Latin prose. The study of poeticism in Anglo-Latin prose, and in medieval Latin literature in general, is a subject that awaits exploration.

The traditional ballad or folk song, in England at all events, is always strophical. Not only is ballad music looked upon by traditional singers merely as a convenient and beautiful way of reciting a ballad, but the ballad poetry itself is looked on as nothing other than a convenient and beautiful way of telling a story. The art of the traditional folk song is unconscious. Now there can be no doubt as to the traditional method of singing a ballad. Clearness of diction, perfection of melodic outline, and beauty of phrasing: these are the prominent characteristics of the best traditional singers' art. The essential characteristics of the ballad singer's style is summed up in the word “impersonal”; the singer must be absorbed in the song. This is certainly true of what is now known as “community” singing.

This is the last of five chapters on the text of the Old Testament, and discusses Hebrew poetry in the context of the Hebrew (Old Testament) Bible. The introductory section looks at recent work on the discovery of the verse traditions of the ancient Near East, and discusses the difficulty of reading Hebrew poetry, the Hebrew poet's resources (tradition versus innovation) and the poet's voice and the lyrical first person singular (the lyrical ‘I’). The second section discusses the issue of differentiating between prose and poetry, the third discusses metre and rhythm, and the fourth discusses parallelism. Further sections discuss building blocks (line, half‐line, and couplet), the segmentation of poems, repetition, the exploitation of sound, figurative language, and poetic diction. The last section of the chapter looks at the matter of holding the reader's attention.

This chapter examines some of the difficulties Boswell encountered in commemorating Johnson's littleness as well as his greatness. It sees in his Life a combination of classically allusive, heroic diction with low, trifling subjects: a combination that might be cast as a prose version of Pope's Rape of the Lock. The chapter also considers the ambiguously inclusive and exclusive aspects of Pope's attitude to his dunces; the ways in which literary taxonomies may alert us to what they have left out, as well as to what they have accommodated; how Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes as a catalogue poem sets particularity against generalization; and the uses of recognizing our own littleness.

This chapter explores the colorful array of lyric voices and personalities Mitchell brings to life in writing and performance. Special attention is paid to details of poetic technique. The first section systematically maps out categorical distinctions of poetic mode, representation, syntax, diction, and vocal performance, then illustrates their use through the analysis of an entire poem. The second section highlights five character types of special importance in her work.

This chapter discusses that Lydgate's short debate Between a Churl and a Bird used many of the formal features of literary language discussed in the previous chapters of the book. It describes the poem as illustrating the social mobility and inherent positionality of literary discourses. It adds that the poem was also a translation wherein a French tale was translated in order to deliver a lesson in social quietism and to sanction a conservative ordering of society as natural and God-given. It explains that the social disparity between the actors in the poem was consistently spelled out. The syntactical construction and diction of the poem also contributed to its meaning.

The centrality of Virgil as classical standard and example is demonstrated by systematic analysis of the De Arte Poetica of the Renaissance neo-Latinist Marcus Hieronymus Vida who mediates the Roman Augustan aesthetic in his three book verse treatise, attractively embodying in his method and style the precepts drawn from Virgil's example that he advocates. For Vida, the various rules of art are illustrated and illuminated by the example of Virgil superior in this respect to Homer to whom he is compared; his poetry is the ideal context for the proper understanding of such classical principles as the requirement for decorum, clarity, and artistic unity, while also expressing the variety of Nature. Virgil is exemplary too in his use of the figures of rhetoric, in his poetic diction and in his representation of imitative harmony, that is, the use the sound of words to express sense and meaning.

Sedulius is a rather shadowy figure, though he himself describes a circle of Christian devotees, probably in Italy, to which he belongs. Almost exactly one hundred years later than Juvencus – this chapter includes a brief survey of the significant developments in Christian poetry in that time – Sedulius differs notably from him, concentrating for the most part on the New Testament miracles, which he elaborates with powerful rhetoric. Each of his five books is examined in turn, with particular attention to the first, introductory book, in which his ingenious and obviously admiring uses of Vergil are prominent. Sedulius's strong theological position centres on his attacks on the controversial Nestorius, but it is also clear throughout the work, that he too engages thoughtfully with the diction and artistry of Vergil (though not, it is argued, with his hero Aeneas).

This chapter introduces the motivations and method behind Deleuze’s philosophical project. It begins with a detailed reading of Deleuze’s review of Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence, in which Deleuze first articulates his claim that the goal of philosophy is to create a logic of sense, rather than a metaphysics of essence. This review introduces Deleuze’s central criticism that the history of philosophy has for too long given a foundational role to certain features of our naïve representation of the world, instead of explaining the genesis of these features. Among these is an understanding of difference as opposition that finds its ultimate expression in Hegelian contradiction. Deleuze briefly invokes Leibniz as a figure who is perhaps capable of providing an alternative concept of difference. The chapter then turns to the opening chapters of Difference and Repetition, where Deleuze again outlines a critique of the history of philosophy’s treatment of difference and its subordination to the structure of representation. This time Deleuze traces a history through Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and Hegel. In Leibniz he identifies for the first time a world of “restless” infinitely small differences which will become central to all his later readings.

This chapter uses concepts from Leibniz’s philosophy to provide an account of the metaphysical system Deleuze constructs in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense. This account has four key components. 1) An ideal continuum populated by reciprocally determined differential relations, from which individuals are produced. Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus is the technique most suited to describe this continuum. 2) The singularities or events which populate the continuum and which eventually form the “predicates” which are included within individuals. An inverted version of Leibniz’s theory of infinite analysis, which Deleuze dubs ‘vice-diction’, allows us to describe how these singularities are distributed. 3) The relations of compossibility between singularities which allow the articulation of a structure prior to any logical relations of opposition or contradiction. In Leibniz, a divergence between singularities marks a bifurcation into two distinct possible worlds. In Deleuze, by contrast, divergent series resonate and communicate with one another. 4) An “ideal game” which presides over the actualisation of this pre-individual continuum through the genesis of individuals. In Leibniz this game is subject to the rules of a divine calculus in which God selects a “best of all possible worlds” whose harmony is guaranteed. Deleuze, however, will reject this theological constraint.

Instead of being seen as an entity whose role is to prohibit refugees' entrance to the United States, the Coast Guard has typically been viewed through the lens of salvation. One cartoon even consecrated the Coast Guard as “New Orleans' Saints” through the drawing of a helicopter, rotating propellers giving off a halo-like glow, a cable extending below with a basket carrying an anonymous black body. In many ways this cartoon is part of a broader visual rhetoric of Coast Guard search-and-rescue, or “SAR” in Coast Guard parlance. The depiction of an anonymous black body hanging in the helicopter basket can be linked to the Coast Guard visual rhetoric whereby the interdiction of Haitian refugees on the high seas becomes recast as rescue.

This chapter discusses the importance of diction and vocal technique in singing. The production of vocal sound deals with the acoustic phenomena of vowel differentiation. Physiologically, laryngeal configuration and vocal tract configuration require correspondence if a sung vowel is to be clearly delineated. Trying to “add diction” to preexistent vocal sound violates the processes of both the tone and vowel differentiation. If permitted, the vocal tract filter (the resonator tube that extends from the vocal folds to the lips) will reinforce the acoustic potential inherent in each vowel by assuming the natural shapes of the resonance cavities appropriate to that vowel. The mouth and pharynx will match laryngeal vowel formation. Good singing is the result of laryngeal action and the corresponding shapes of the resonator tube. One may adopt a “diction” approach as the basis of good vocal pedagogy only if it means that vowel definition and consonant occurrences are produced phonetically, thereby inducing matching laryngeal and vocal tract adjustments.

This chapter discusses the portrayal of Menelaus in the Iliad. Menelaus is among the most important heroes in the Iliad, mentioned by name or making an appearance in seventeen out of the twenty-four books. Menelaus’ stature does not primarily depend, however, on the frequency of his appearances. The scholia note Homer’s evident sympathy for Menelaus, observing that Menelaus is, like Patroclus, ‘kindly’. Menelaus expresses concern for the sufferings of others; he takes pity on an enemy and swiftly comes to the aid of others, even at potential harm to himself. Moreover, Menelaus yields to his friends, not out of weakness, but regard. Ultimately, his ‘sympathetic’ personality arises from an acute awareness of his own responsibility for the Trojan War. Homer portrays this special trait of Menelaus’ character, his sympathy, through repeated actions and marked language. Indeed, Homer fashions Menelaus as a memorable and unique character within the traditional diction and rhetoric of his craft.