Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition

Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition

Chase, Cynthia

Paperback

Health GeneralLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 1421434091
ISBN13: 9781421434094
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: Dec 1 2019
Pages: 250
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.57 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Originally published in 1986. The ghastly fate of a drowned man brought to a lake's surface in Wordsworth's Prelude typifies a fundamental pattern in Romantic writing, argues Cynthia Chase. Disfiguration involves not only a departure from representation but a disruption of the logic of figure or form, a decomposition of the figures composing the text. Ultimately it manifests the conflict between a work's meaning and its mode of performance. By means of an intense engagement with texts in the romantic tradition, Decomposing Figures rearticulates and recasts crucial concepts in recent literary theory, including the notion of the self-referential or self-reflexive nature of the literary work. Chase's readings show that, far from implying a privileged status, the work's self-reflexive structure entails its opacity, its inability to read itself, and the necessity of its decomposition.

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