Search Results

This chapter introduces Hugh’s spiritual masterpiece, De arrha anime or Soliloquy. It concerns the soul’s down payment or bridal gift (arrha), the love of the bridegroom (Song of Songs), and personal testimony.

This chapter analyses the use of verses as dialogue in the prosimetrum of Gísla saga. It shows how crediting a saga character with a verse may be a literary device to make manifest that character's inner life, something not accessible through the usual external focalization of saga narrative, through soliloquy, and how the attribution of verse dialogue can mark out a character as a dominant, controlling voice in the narrative.

This chapter explores the complex interplay of diagetical and extra-diagetical, or soloiloquizing, dialogue verses in the prosimetrum of Grettis saga. Its hero, Grettir, is both ostensibly the author of some of the text (the verses) and the subject of its biographical narrative. The attribution of verses marks him out as an isolated protagonist, a dominant voice in the narrative, and a voice from the past. The verses chart the pace and rhythm of the narrative, but also function reflexively, characterizing the saga itself as a late product of Old Norse literary tradition.

Chapter 1 defines the sense of modernism used in the book and outlines the linguistic-literary coordinates of English, Creole, and Indonesian modernisms. It frames the study to come in terms of the parallel historical formations of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Indonesian language during the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The second part of the chapter introduces the genealogies of modernism implicit in the work of Conrad, Rhys, and Pramoedya, as these emerge in autobiographical fragments from each writer's work.

Chapter 7 focuses on Pramoedya's prison notes from Buru Island, showing how Pramoedya turns the gaps of historical documentation into a resource for decolonizing literary and cultural traditions. Paying special attention to Pramoedya's reflections on his mother and father, the chapter finds a principle of genealogy and critique informing all of his work. Connecting this genealogy to the revolutionary family romances of his fiction, early and late, the chapter shows how Pramoedya's principle of genealogy illuminates the book's overall comparison between Pramoedya's revolutionary Indonesian family romance, Rhys's Creole family romance, and Conrad's colonial English-Malay family romance.

This chapter concerns the ‘middle early’ dialogues, Soliliquia, De immortalitate animae and De animae quantitatae. Augustine continues to defer his explicit treatment of memory, but lays the groundwork here by purging his own understanding of the soul of materialist language, while simultaneously avoiding the excessive dualism of an early platonic picture of the human person.

This chapter demonstrates how, in addition to surprising Milton's readers by sin, the affective stylistics of Fishian literary analysis can be applied to Milton's treatment of the aftermath of the Fall to assure readers of the provision of grace. Irony, when treated as a species of allegory, has a crucial ethical function within Milton's poetics, comparable to its purpose in Socratic, Pauline, Lutheran, and even Kierkegaardian discourse, so that, when the ironic mode is applied to Book Ten's fallen world, the action of what I term ‘redeeming irony’ can bring Adam, Eve, and the reader back from a cursed state to a state of grace, from penitence to repentance, and from an apprehension of divine wrath to a realization of divine mercy. The chapter concludes with a close reading of the human drama of Book Ten that illustrates how Milton's highly nuanced Christology and soteriology are inseparable from the poem's core meaning.

This chapter examines Augustine of Hippo's treatment of first-person truths. Augustine recognized the antiskeptical potential of the first-person truths that he identified from his earliest days as a writer and considered their apprehensibility to be immune to skeptical challenge. We may take such first-person truths to constitute a fifth class of truths, whose existence Augustine thinks is a decisive refutation of the Academics' denial of the possibility of knowledge. This chapter begins with an overview of the earliest discussions of first-person truths in Augustine's corpus, including Soliloquies, and goes on to consider Augustine's account of our knowledge of first-person truths. It then analyzes Augustine's defense of his claim to know first-person truths and relates his treatment of first-person truths to his exploration of introspection as a fertile source of knowledge that is grounded in the mind's presence to itself.

It is a common occurrence, too little remarked on, that speakers (with or without an audience) work with words in order to convince themselves. Characters in fiction may not consciously trace a path of persuasion, but great writers are adroit at doing so. Shakespeare, for example, in the soliloquies by Brutus in Julius Caesar and Angelo in Measure for Measure; Milton in the speeches of Satan in Books I and V of Paradise Lost; and Henry James in the recognition scene in the mind of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. The train of thought of a speaker may afford a clue—by means of language that inseparably mixes motives with reasons—to the definiteness and the elusiveness of personal character.

This section looks at the end of the first Tom-scene, and the passage into the next, focusing on difficult questions of notice and recognition and care: the son’s of his father; the father’s of his son, Edgar’s of Tom, and how the actor has to experience for his character, or explicit scripting has to catch up with furtive choices known only to the actor with his part. This is exemplified in the dramaturgy of Gloucester’s blinding. Edgar/Tom speaks a soliloquy in-between this scene and the previous: the closing repeated cue makes it possible that Edgar/Tom is given a phantom presence at the blinding. Like us, he is forced to bear witness, replaying a horror he could not prevent. The scenography itself is eloquent. Edgar/Tom occupies a spatially ambiguous place, haunting and haunted, neither in-the-scene nor out of it. The break between scenes epitomizes Tom’s home: his alpha and omega, the place where his energies are garnered, stored, and protected. Identities are likewise permeable, exchangeable.

This chapter analyzes Saint Paul's cryptic remark regarding the Holy Spirit's intercession on behalf of God's people. It links Jacques Derrida's conception of the messianic prayer of the oui, oui to the coming of the Impossible with the impossibility of praying in Romans 8:26 by pointing out that the context of Romans 8 is itself the messianic. It also suggests that the Spirit prays on our behalf in a divine soliloquy in which God addresses Godself.

This chapter presents an overview of St. Augustine's Soliloquies. The completion of the first two books of the Soliloquies in the winter of A.D. 386/387 was a groundbreaking accomplishment. Although the philosophical dialogue was by then a well-established genre, it was unprecedented to have an entire work devoted to a conversation between a man and himself. Part of the originality of the Soliloquies lies in its personification of Reason, who serves as Augustine's sole interlocutor. In an earlier dialogue, Augustine had narrated a scenario in which Reason speaks to himself; in the Soliloquies, Augustine augments this conceit by depicting Reason speaking on his own and directly to Augustine. In addition, it is unusual in a philosophical dialogue for the character that best epitomizes the philosophical life to assume a subordinate role. If the Soliloquies contributes to the quest for self-knowledge, it also shines a light on some of the obstacles in the way. Much of the Soliloquies is also devoted to the question of whether the human soul is immortal.

The idea of the soliloquy is central to Shakespeare's dramatic poetry, especially as a dramatist of personhood. Indeed, it is the argument of Catherine Belsey in The Subject of Tragedy (1985) that the modern liberal ideology of individualism is epitomized by Hamlet, and that this individualism is epitomized by the soliloquy. This chapter traces the development of the soliloquy in plays such as Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Macbeth. It also examines the history of the word ‘soliloquy’ and its origins in religious meditation, in models based on Augustine. The chapter rejects the idea of secularization in order to consider other models for the Shakespearian soliloquy, especially devotional meditation on the moment of death.

Although Annie Hall was celebrated as Allen’s most personal and representational film to date, and one which constituted a significant change in his scriptwriting/filmmaking, this chapter emphasizes the movie’s “antimimetic emblems”—those moments when the characters step outside the illusions of cinematic realism to comment on and undermine the film’s mimetic expectations. Interpreting these moments as derivative of playwrights such as George S. Kaufman and Tennessee Williams, the chapter argues that, with the substantial assistance of editor Ralph Rosenbloom, Allen discovered in Annie Hall that he was capable of creating screenplays that were far more than concatenations of gags, even if many of those moments could be perceived as remarkably gaglike.

This chapter considers the first and only soliloquy in Richard II. Until now Richard has always directed his eloquence—whether sardonic or self-pitying—toward others. Do we infer from this that he suddenly becomes aware of the audience off stage and moves forward to address them? Does this mean that he assumes his fans in the theater audience have been wondering what he's been up to since they last saw him, and that he considerately brings them up to date? Since, in contrast to the actor, the character is by convention unaware of the theater audience he appears to address, whom does he address? Is he imagining or constructing the audience he wants to be heard by, the audience he wants to persuade or be judged by, an audience that may include (or consist entirely of) himself?

This chapter opens with Harry's “I know you all” soliloquy in Henry V. It shows that the drama of his transactions with himself, with Falstaff, with his father, and with the rest of the world unfolds coherently from the second scene in 1 Henry IV through the tetralogy. It argues that because Henry V unfolds in a kind of tetralogical echo chamber, it suffers when it is performed as an independent play rather than as the last in a series. The continuity of the sequence adds richness and specificity to the protagonist's motivation. Should this continuity get bracketed out in the interest of theatrical self-sufficiency, those involved in the production and performance of Henry V would have to pretend that factors intrinsic to its motivational drama either do not exist or are relatively trivial. Respect for the play's relative self-sufficiency has to share the stage with attention to the textual affiliations that bind it to the other plays. The chapter then follows some of those affiliations back through the Henriad, beginning with the echo-chamber effect in passages from act 1, scenes 1 and 2 of Henry V.

If Donne’s poems are preparations for faith, thanksgiving, and prayer in the specific sense of exercises that use poetic language to overcome distraction, how could they defeat the very distraction that their poetic language provides? In order to answer this question, this chapter turns to Saint Augustine, whose works offer the most complete account of attention’s role in vocalized devotion. Augustine’s central thesis is that a perfectly pure, holy attention is impossible for created beings because of their flesh. By embedding it in space and time, the flesh is attention’s permanent blind-spot, constantly producing distraction as a by-product of every act of attention. For this reason, Augustine sees distraction and the resulting scattering of the self as the defining qualities of the human condition. Poets in the Petrarchist tradition follow him: works from the Canzoniere to the Sidney psalm translations present lyric poems as illustrations of the scattered, distracted self of Augustine’s Confessions. Donne’s devotional poems are a response to this tradition. In the Holy Sonnets, Donne uses the signature sonnet form of Petrarchism not to associate poetry with distraction but to overcome distraction by poetic means, by turning distraction against itself.