Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse

by Michael Macovski

Overview

Extending and reframing the works of Bakhtin, Gadamer, Ong, and Foucault--with particular emphasis on Bakhtin's late essays --Macovski constructs a theoretical model of literary dialogue and applies it to a range of Romantic texts. In reconsidering specific works within the context of cultural heuristics, rhetorical theory, and literary history, Macovski redefines Romantic discourse as both extratextual and agonistic. He thereby re-evaluates such Romantic topics as the history of the autotelic self, the proliferation of lyric orality, and the nineteenth-century critique of rhetoric. He examines poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge, as well as such nineteenth-century prose works as Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, and Heart of Darkness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195345001
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/12/1994
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	1450L (what's this?)
File size:	459 KB

Table of Contents

	Abbreviations	xi
I	Romantic Formalism and the Specular Lyric	1
1.	Knowledge, Rhetoric, and Authority: Toward a Theory of Romantic Dialogue	3
2.	"The Language of My Former Heart": Wordsworth, Bakhtin, and the Diachronic Dialogue	41
3.	Coleridge, the "Rime," and the Instantiation of Outness	67
II	The Novel All Told: Audition, Orality, and the Collapse of Dialogue	103
4.	Three Blind Mariners and a Monster: Frankenstein as Vocative Text	105
5.	Wuthering Heights and the Rhetoric of Interpretation	134
6.	The Heartbeat of Darkness: Listening in(to) the Twentieth Century	151
7.	Conclusion: Dialogue, Culture, and the Heuristic "Third,"	171
	Notes	179
	Works Cited	211
	Index	221