The poetic debate of Edmwnd Prys and Wiliam Cynwal

Williams, Gruffydd. 'The poetic debate of Edmwnd Prys and Wiliam Cynwal', In: The Renaissance and the Celtic Countries (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp.33-54 RAE2008

Najważniejsze kierunki, motywy i podstawy konstrukcji wierszy Pirbala Muhammuda

Wydział Neofilologii: Katedra Studiów Azjatyckich

Textual criticism and medieval Irish studies

Many textual scholars will be aware that the title of the present thesis has been composed in a conscious revisionary relation to Tim William Machan’s influential Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts. (Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville, 1994)). The primary subjects of Machan’s study are works written in English between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the latter part of the period conventionally labelled Middle English. In contrast, the works with which I am primarily concerned are those written by scholars of Old and Middle Irish in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Where Machan aims to articulate the textual and cultural factors that characterise Middle English works as Middle English, the purposes of this thesis are (a) to identify the underlying ideological and epistemological perspectives which have informed much of the way in which medieval Irish documents and texts are rendered into modern editions, and (b) to begin to place the editorial theory and methodology of medieval Irish studies within the broader context of Biblical, medieval and modern textual criticism. Hence, the title is Textual Criticism and Medieval Irish Studies, rather than Textual Criticism and Medieval Irish Texts

Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012

"Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012" is a critical history of the unfolding of feminist literary study in the US academy. It contributes to current scholarly efforts to revisit the 1970s by reconsidering often-repeated narratives about the critical naivety of feminist literary criticism in its initial articulation. As the story now goes, many of the most prominent feminist thinkers of the period engaged in unsophisticated literary analysis by conflating lived social reality with textual representation when they read works of literature as documentary evidence of real life. As a result, the work of these "bad critics," particularly Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin, has not been fully accounted for in literary critical terms.

This dissertation returns to Dworkin and Millett's work to argue for a different history of feminist literary criticism. Rather than dismiss their work for its conflation of fact and fiction, I pay attention to the complexity at the heart of it, yielding a new perspective on the history and persistence of the struggle to use literary texts for feminist political ends. Dworkin and Millett established the centrality of reality and representation to the feminist canon debates of "the long 1970s," the sex wars of the 1980s, and the more recent feminist turn to memoir. I read these productive periods in feminist literary criticism from 1968 to 2012 through their varied commitment to literary works.

Chapter One begins with Millett, who de-aestheticized male-authored texts to treat patriarchal literature in relation to culture and ideology. Her mode of literary interpretation was so far afield from the established methods of New Criticism that she was not understood as a literary critic. She was repudiated in the feminist literary criticism that followed her and sought sympathetic methods for reading women's writing. In that decade, the subject of Chapter Two, feminist literary critics began to judge texts on the basis of their ability to accurately depict the reality of women's experiences.

Their vision of the relationship between life and fiction shaped arguments about pornography during the sex wars of the 1980s, the subject of Chapter Three. In this context, Dworkin was feminism's "bad critic." I focus on the literary critical elements of Dworkin's theories of pornographic representation and align her with Millett as a miscategorized literary critic. In the decades following the sex wars, many of the key feminist literary critics of the founding generation (including Dworkin, Jane Gallop, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Millett) wrote memoirs that recounted, largely in experiential terms, the history this dissertation examines. Chapter Four considers the story these memoirists told about the rise and fall of feminist literary criticism. I close with an epilogue on the place of literature in a feminist critical enterprise that has shifted toward privileging theory.

The "Art" of Criticism: Rubén Darío and his Unknown Chronicles of the 1895 Salon for "La Prensa"

With the impetus that has led recent studies on Latin American Modernism to a reevaluation of the sense of cultural fluxes from the modernity capitals to its peripheries –discarding categories such as “influence”, “exotism” and “ivory tower”, stereotypes that have clouded critical understanding of this aesthetics for decades- the present study intends to investigate a persistent practice of the main writers of the movement. This practice is modernist pictorial criticism, a genre that will be approached through the analysis of an unknown corpus: the seven chronicles Rubén Darío published in the journal La Prensa on occasion of the third art exposition of the Ateneo de Buenos Aires. Our hypothesis is that the rare creators of images portrayed by Darío by the end of 1895 work as a visual counterpoint of the eccentric writers’ biographical sketches that a year later will be part of the fundamental volume Los raros (1896). In this early “salon”, which we reproduce in its entirety, accompanied by explanatory notes, the leader of Modernism rehearses and consolidates his transcultural work with the universal tradition –now applied to the Salons (1845-1860) by Charles Baudelaire and to the monumental project by John Ruskin in Modern painters (1843-1860)- to legitimate, from another subgenre of Modernist criticism, a new figure of the critic, in dissent with the Enlightenment model of the writer.

El "Fedro" de Platón: un ejercicio de buena retórica engañosa

En este artículo me propongo mostrar que lo que Sócrates hace con Fedro a lo largo de toda la obra no es otra cosa que utilizar la auténtica retórica (con su doble carga, dialéctica y psicológica) que es descrita en la segunda parte del diálogo. Las tensiones, rivalidades y celos de la situación inicial entre ellos expone un perfil representativo de relaciones entre interlocutores con perspectivas intelectuales opuestas. Es preciso disolver la resistencia emocional por medio de una serie de pasos graduales, estratégicos, y ‘engañosos’ (no se puede develar el propio juego desde el principio). Hay que partir de acuerdos, siquiera parciales, para continuar dialogando. Sin embargo, Sócrates también introduce nociones nuevas acerca del amor, pero éstas pasan desapercibidas a un Fedro obsesionado con la imitación de su enamorado Lisias. Hasta que Sócrates decide cortar el juego y cruzar el río. Este corte provoca un giro en ambos personajes: Fedro se dispone a escuchar lo que Sócrates quiere contarle (el mito del carro alado) y Sócrates se revela ante sí mismo como un personaje capaz de ‘encantar’ a Fedro con la belleza rapsódica del relato y superar su propio temor de convertirse en una bestia devoradora. Al final Sócrates muestra su juego a Fedro y le enseña cómo ha sido posible llegar a un auténtico diálogo filosófico, donde pueda tener lugar la enseñanza y el aprendizaje recíprocos.