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This lecture discusses some of the different ways in which a tussle between reticence and release is played out in A. E. Housman's verse. It can be found in allusions that turn individual lines into miniature models of human relations and in its sceptical attention to commonplaces and bits of received wisdom, to name a few. The lecture also shows how the personal and cultural circumstances of Housman's poetry provoked him into the creation of an imagined alternative, which is a world where his unlucky love would be able to find an answer.

Chapter Four introduces the strategies of a postmodern plantation imaginary by scrutinizing La isla que se repite (The Repeating Island, 1989), by the Cuban Antonio Benítez Rojo, and Faulkner, Mississippi (1996), by the Martinican Edouard Glissant. The latter is the only book chosen for this study originally written in French, and the only U.S.-centered text not written by a U.S. American. Perhaps for this reason, more than any other author examined, Glissant liberates the U.S. South from the myth of southern exceptionality by insisting that it be understood as part of an expansive but coherent hemispheric past. Benítez Rojo, likewise, taps into a transnational imaginary but, in contrast to Glissant, remains silent about linkages between the plantation histories of the U.S. South and the Caribbean. Moreover, he defines the plantation as an indestructible, consummately modern machine from its inception, while Glissant depicts it as a self-destructing institution doomed by its inability to adapt to the technological demands of modernity. Despite these discrepancies, both writers articulate a poetics that interprets the plantation past through a postmodern critical perspective that employs strategies in which rhythm, reticence, performance, testimony, and traversals of all kinds become important means by which to confront official narratives about the past.

The route taken here divides the theological history of suicide into two phases, shared out respectively between this chapter and the next. This chapter deals with the first, the age of reticence about suicide. The later sections of this chapter identify isolated areas of writing where suicide was debated, and the reasons why it was. An understanding of these reasons helps explain why it was in the thirteenth century that the theological discovery of suicide became complete. The discussion establishes that the first phase was one of comparative reticence. The reticence can best be spotted by a look at early medieval biblical commentary.

The Epilogue addresses Le Va's historical position, examining the way in which a kind of “minor status” has been ascribed to him since almost the beginning of his career. It suggests that while a number of factors likely contributed to Le Va’s comparative lack of renown the best explanation is Le Va’s own demonstrated reticence to pursue a higher artistic profile. This must be understood not only as an expression of an individual’s understandable desire to work outside of the limelight but also as a part of a critique of the mechanisms of art world fame. By not seeking a place in the pantheon of great artists, Le Va insists on a kind of art history—multiple, fragmented and temporary—that echoes his own work.

This chapter offers data and a model that may shed light on the developmental course of shyness and social inhibition. It describes the various psychological literatures to explore the short and long-term effects of three constructs commonly used to describe social reticence (behavioral inhibition, social isolation, and shyness) and their relationship to social phobia. It begins with a conceptualization of shyness. There is evidence for stability of behavioral inhibition over time, even though the associations are only moderate. In addition, correlates of behavioral inhibition include theoretically related constructs and disorders such as shyness, specific fears, separation anxiety, and social isolation. It is noted that there is much overlap in behavioral inhibition and social phobia, as well as some differences. However, it is likely that at least some of the children in these various categories suffer from the same condition, and the model proposes one heuristic conceptualization of the relationships among these constructs.

The essay highlights the epistemological benefits of applying a history of emotions perspective to the already very well developed historiography of the Holocaust. It examines emotions involved in the reception of survivor testimony as well as the extent to which historians’ own emotions shape the interpretation and use of such memoirs. The reception of Holocaust memoirs after 1945 was determined by emotional contexts that were based on cultural assumptions about the nature of the “ideal” victim. Holocaust victims experienced aversion and rejection if they did not correspond to the cultural norm of the innocent, modest, and reticent victim. The essay rejects the conceptualization of emotional responses to victim testimony as merely natural and biological and instead pleads for a historically specific reconstruction of emotions in the postwar period. The essay moves beyond the traditional dichotomy between history and memory and ultimately makes it possible to conceptualize the existence of multiple truths in victims’ testimony.

This chapter examines both the absence of ideology and its hesitant return in Kyrgyzstan, with particular emphasis on hopeless situations and the concomitant glimmering of hope. Focusing on the inhabitants of Kokjangak, a destitute former mining town and urban wasteland, it explores how political-economic transformation and urban decline affect the ways people deal with questions of existence; for example, how to survive, what to do, who and what to trust, what to believe. The chapter first provides a (pre-)historic overview of Kokjangak and describes how it turned into one of the poorest settlements in Jalalabad Province after the collapse of the USSR. It shows how the condition of uncertainty in Kokjangak paved the way for an apparent openness to new ideologies, but this openness was coupled with reticence, a curiosity matched with suspicion, all of which resonated with the landscape.

In this chapter, the author offers a reading of William Faulkner from his point of view of as a writer. He begins by discussing one of Faulkner's unique narrative techniques, “reticence,” and explaining that when he reads Faulkner's novels, he always puts the translations beside the originals, whenever they are available. He claims that he experiences Faulkner through a triangular circuit for the transmission of verbal symbols—Faulkner; the translator, who is a specialist; and himself, a reader of the words of the other two. He also reflects on his response to Faulkner's attitude toward writing novels and to his way of activating the imagination. Finally, he considers Faulkner's way of manipulating his male and female characters by focusing on his novels The Hamlet, The Mansion, The Wild Palms, and Absalom, Absalom!.

The myth of Jane Morris’s strategic invalidism has often been linked with the trait of melancholy silence as defining aspects of her life and personality. This chapter re-interprets previous accounts in the light of recent studies of Victorian invalidism and feminine embodiment. In her letters, speaking and silence, action and immobility, illness and vitality emerge as pressing concerns, suggesting a historical subject who was highly aware of the conflicting possibilities afforded by her social position as the wife of William Morris. The silence of Jane Morris is shown to be open to a range of interpretations, from shyness to contemplativeness, and her letters reveal a woman who maintained networks of care and intimacy with a range of friends and family.

This chapter contains as slap of Hallgerd sometime later, as it relates to how embarrassing incidents are handled, as well as a discussion of poise and tact. The sagas, and indeed the heroic, feature poise as a constituent virtue, but tact is sometimes harder to find. Yet we see evidence of it in certain styles of reticence, and above all perhaps in the remarkable restraint of the saga style itself. The importance of seating arrangements and visible signs of precedence are considered. We see that the initial fillip that begins the central feud of the saga, leading to the virtual extermination of the parties, arises because of the women refusing to give way on claiming the center seat. The chapter also discusses the privileges accorded Thorhalla Asgrimsdottir.

The chapter briefly analyzes Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s tales of Griselda and contends that Chaucer refashioned Petrarch’s distinction between patience and constancy by making his Oxford logician a man in transit, having subordinated physical necessities to mastering the abstract rules of inference and deduction but not yet committed to the spiritual life of priesthood. The Merchant’s portrait, prologue, tale, and epilogue share the concept of revision. Instead of bringing clearer understanding, the chance to see again allows a character to close his eyes, or to try to close someone else’s, to something that has been seen. The verbal counterpart to this ocular revisioning is reticence: we encounter repeated attempts to unsay something that has been said. These movements echo the Merchant’s desire to buy back disclosures and erase the transaction from the ledger, making him a hard man keep in focus. If the Clerk is in transit, he is in flux.

The introduction argues that blurring the line between score and sound design represents an important new trend in contemporary soundtrack practice. It contends that the one factor that connects all the different cultural, aesthetic, and technological influences, and all manifestations of the present shift in practice, is a musical approach to film soundtrack conceived as an integrated whole. The chapter explains how the notions of an integrated soundtrack and the musicality of the soundtrack relate to this trend and looks at how they have been addressed in the existing literature. This chapter also provides an outline of the content, arguing for an approach that addresses the interdependency of intellectual, affective, and sensory stimuli in the film experience.

Chapter 3 focuses on methods of replacing diegetic sound with electroacoustic music and/or musique concrète, or their seamless merging, arguing that they represent a significant development in the practice of erasing the line between score and sound design. The main case studies—Katalin Varga and Berberian Sound Studio—come from the work of British director Peter Strickland, whose methods of “scoring with sound design” are informed by his interest in avant-garde and experimental music. Connecting Strickland’s methods with a growing tendency among some filmmakers to reject the conventions of traditional scoring and its values of passive spectatorship, this chapter introduces the aesthetics of reticence as a conceptual framework embraced by artists who encourage the audience’s active intellectual and emotional engagement with the text.

Chapter 6 offers concluding thoughts on various methods of blurring the line between score and sound design and their common themes such as integration, inclusion, the erasure of boundaries, and the toppling of hierarchies. The chapter notes the inner dialectics of this trend, epitomized in the forces of change understood as progression and those explained by the cyclical reappearance of certain tendencies. The former are manifested in the use of a contemporary musical language that draws on the whole world of sound and the use of digital technology; the latter include the musical approach to soundtrack, aesthetic trends such as the aesthetics of reticence, and a fascination with the materiality, texture, and hapticity of sound, which all have precedents of some kind in the past. This chapter asserts that the main methods of blurring the line between score and sound design are inspired by music or informed by musical logic.

Christina Rossetti is well known for subjecting her poems to what Jerome McGann calls ‘severe prunings’, the most conspicuous of her strategies for achieving her characteristically spare lyricism. She isolates the two stanzas of ‘Bitter for Sweet’ from a longer draft; she retrieves the two stanzas of ‘The Bourne’ from a shapeless 12-stanza poem. The extant Rossetti Notebooks, now at the Bodleian and the British Libraries, reveal intensely careful work—an adroit verbal change here, a rhythmic adjustment there—on the poems that eventually appear in Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince’s Progress (1866). For Rossetti, a manuscript ‘fair copy’ seldom remains pristine. The revisions to a poem such as ‘My Dream’ show that the deft revision that produces Rossettian understatement in her poems also produces their fine exuberance.

The traditional way of stating the common view of the moral asymmetry between keeping secrets and lying is that keeping secrets is prima facie morally permissible, whereas lying is prima facie morally wrong. This chapter argues that the correct way of stating the common view is that both keeping secrets and lying are prima facie morally wrong, but lying is worse than keeping secrets, all things being equal. The author draws upon the work of Thomas Nagel and compares candor, non-acknowledgment, informativeness, and reticence with secrecy, and compares secrecy with deception and lying. It is argued that keeping secrets must be distinguished from being reticent, and that understood this way, it is clear that it is prima facie wrong to keep secrets. Having the correct way of stating the common view of the moral asymmetry between keeping secrets and lying will allow us to evaluate the common view.

This chapter presents new findings about Maria von Herbert’s life. Building on this, an interpretation is offered of what she means when she calls upon Kant ‘for solace … or for counsel to prepare [her] for death’. It is then argued that Kant’s reply is more satisfactory than is commonly appreciated, as he explicitly defines the roles which he is prepared to adopt—that of a ‘moral physician’ and of a ‘mediator’—and thus the standards by which to judge his reply. Having said that, his letter does not address what has been viewed as a challenge to Kantian ethics. It is a matter of dispute what exactly this challenge consists in. This chapter identifies the challenge and the terms in which it is most productively stated. Finally, it provides sufficient reasons to establish that a portrait that resurfaced in November 2016 does indeed depict Maria von Herbert.