Get Not by War Alone Books now! Get The Stakes of the Warrior Books now! Master s Theses in the Arts and Social Sciences. Decayed Gods by Wouter W. Poetry History and Utopia by Hongsang Yeo. The London Mercury by Anonim. Chaucer s Queer Poetics by Susan Schibanoff. Knowing Persons by Lloyd P. The Spectator by Anonim. The Celestial Tradition by Demetres P. Reconstructing a National Identity by Marsha L. Not by War Alone by Paul Jabber. The legal documents, held by Balliol College Library, are neat in appearance and well bound in white-grey vellum.
The description of the book as old, crumpled and yellow gives it antique status, a poetic version of photoshopping an image to sepia. His choice of this particular book suggests that it is more significant and valuable than the other books he chooses not to purchase. The poet-collector takes pride in his ability to treasure meaning in the discredited, neglected work; his bargain is a testament to the luck of the astute bargain hunter who can discern worth where others cannot.
The book, which cost Browning eight pence, is valued highly as a rarity. In finding, buying and assessing it, the poet experiences in himself what is clever, successful, shrewd and passionate. As it turned out the poem based on the book sold for much more. Still read I on. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn ; London: Fontana, , pp. The image of grasping and gaining suggests that the poet sees truth as something to be possessed, as though it were a form of moral or intellectual property.
In this sense the purchase and reading of the book allows him to experience a sense of mastery: he sequestrates the object of his desire, and revels in the pride of ownership. Henry Francis Cary, ; London: Dent, , pp.
The chanting of monks in San Felice l. Amidst these proliferating significations what the poetry itself most insistently registers, I would suggest, is a surplus of thingness, enhanced by the odd contiguity of particularised objects in a way that escapes the temptations of weak metonymy.
The Roman lawyer, Cencini, gathered the documents of the Franceschini because he was interested in a particular point of law, whether a husband may kill a wife and escape the customary penalty. The Florentine vendor was making a living, Browning a poem, and, on account of the poem, the source book now resides Browning memorabilia in the commodity sphere of museums and libraries as collection and display.
As such, The Ring and the Book raises important questions about the regimes of value that define the circulation of objects, texts and artworks, the way objects come to convey and condense value and meaning over time and across boundaries local and national. As I have suggested, Browning is also alert to the process of active co-shaping, entanglement and co-constitution between objects and the people who value them. The Diaries [], eds.
John-Stevas ed. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World [], trans. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Harry Zohn. Penguin, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Aurora Leigh, ed. Browning, Robert, The Ring and the Book, ed. Richard D. Altick Baltimore: Penguin, Collins 2 vols, London: Penguin, Donald A. Chesterton, G. Cook, A. John Frederick Fritsch London, Griffin, W. Heffernan, J. Hillis Miller, J.
Hodell, Charles W. The moral,—fools elude their proper lot, Tempt other fools, get ruined all alike. Therefore go home, embrace your husband quick! Which if the Canon brother chance to see, He will the sooner back to book again. Browning pointedly elides the possible reference to reproduction in the metaphors of the apples and the fig: these speakers do not figure Pompilia as a tree that must be husbanded so she can reproduce but as fruit to be consumed.
Browning thus exposes the sexual exploitation justified via the imperative that women bear children. Because organic metaphors force assertion to align with reality, Violante also uses them when she thinks about her reasons for giving Pompilia to Guido in marriage. This leaves no room for contestation; it asserts that the present forms of things organisms, institutions, societies are their proper and timeless forms.
Browning ultimately shows that organic metaphors, when used to undergird exploitative power relationships, turn into their opposite: that is, they render dead and rigid what they are supposed to vivify.
To convey her sense of the strangeness her life has taken on for her, Pompilia tells how she and a childhood friend picked out figures for themselves from a tapestry.
Because the Pope describes Pompilia as she is, rather than telling her how she ought to be, his organic metaphor is the only one that escapes the exploit- ative logic of husbandry and harvest. Speaking of the trial documents that would form the Old Yellow Book, the Pope says, Truth, nowhere, lies yet everywhere in these— Not absolutely in a portion, yet Evolvible from the whole: evolved at last Painfully, held tenaciously by me.
Instead, the painter turns abrupt from these, And preferably buries him and broods Quite away from aught vulgar and extern On the inner spectrum, filtered through the eye, His brain-deposit, bred of many a drop, E pluribus unum. Though Browning and Coleridge both insist that the whole is not reducible to any one of its parts, and though both share a distaste for the mechanical addition of part to part, for Browning the ongoing distinctness of parts is more important than it is for Coleridge.
Browning underscores the materiality of historical documents: the Old Yellow Book, the highly contingent way in which he happened upon it, and its status as the unique record of a historical event are recurrent themes. Browning implies that active, enlivening reading is possible with any sort of textual object: in The Ring and the Book, Browning sets himself the task of teaching his own reader how to read actively, which means both attending to the particularity of a material text and working to reconstruct the truth that it, in conjunction with other documents, indicates obliquely.
He stands on the terrace and gazes in the direction of Arezzo and Rome, traveling with Pompilia and Guido as their story plays out before his eyes. He goes Step by step, missing none and marking all, Till Rome itself, the ghastly goal, I reached. Why, all the while,—how could it otherwise? I saw with my own eyes How it had run. As the poet-speaker retells the story, active reading becomes writing: the transition from reading the Old Yellow Book to rewriting it as The Ring and the Book is seamless.
Browning does not depict the poet as simply infusing his living spirit into the dead materiality of the historical record; the vital impulses go in both directions. After his laborious excursion through the ring metaphor, the poet-speaker returns to the document with glee: Enough of me! The Book! I turn its medicinable leaves In London now till, as in Florence erst, A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb, And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair, Letting me have my will again with these —How title I the dead alive once more?
For Browning, it is only reading that brings literature to life. As this essay has shown, Browning critiques organic metaphors primarily because they mis- represent agency. Not only can organic metaphors serve coercive ends, as when the Archbishop and other speakers use them to suggest that it is natural and right that Pompilia submit to her husband, but they also distort the agency of the poet—who becomes either an unconscious genius or a godlike creator—and distract from the agency of the reader.
In taking up and revising the trope of the poet as a tree, Browning thus specifically rejects the biographical reading that the metaphor seems to endorse.
He points out that, in a global market, organic metaphors no longer have to imply an immediate link to origin: fruit can be sold thousands of miles from the tree on which it grew. Notes Thanks to Caroline Levine for her generous comments on drafts of this essay.
Leon Golden, commentary by O. Hardison, Jr. Norton, , pp.
0コメント