Poetry is about the experience of meaning as well as the meaning of experience. To read a poem is to feel one's way into the inner workings of its language, rather than to peer through that speech to an extractable truth. Most students of literature today have difficulty in grasping the performative or rhetorical dimensions of the texts with which…

Defninig rhetorical analysis as a means of studying writer/audience relationships allowing both intrinsic and extrinsic analysis, the author discusses the three sections of Levertov's poem, "From a Notebook: October '68--May '69." Section 1 is the speaker's personal comparison of her associations with life and death, comparison of…

The poet always listens to himself or herself as part of the expressive act that is the poem, and that listening becomes an essential part of the completed poem. The listening is never fused into the expressiveness of the poem's making, however, but continues in a dramatic relationship with that expressiveness. The difficulty of poetry stems from…

Develops, refines and qualifies a thesis relating to the symbolism of the sea and investigates the evolution and gradual emergence of two separate patterns for the sea symbol in poetry and public rhetoric. (MH)

Argues against Thomas O. Sloane's allegation that John Milton's "Artis Logicae," a commentary on Pierre de la Ramee's "Dialecticae libri duo," manifests antihumanism characteristics of Milton and Ramus. Reexamines Milton's account of probability, the links between Ramus and Cicero, and the roles Ramism played in sixteenth- and…

This paper uses narrative criticism to analyze the ancient Indian religious poem, the "Bhagavad Gita." This important text, the second most widely translated piece of literature in the world, will receive much-deserved rhetorical attention to its narrative and how this helps construct issues of the self, the world, action, and ontology.…

Debate is compared to modern poetry in its tension between content and form. From the perspective of this comparison, debate is defended against charges that it is unnecessarily structured, a distortion of normative language use, uncommunicative, and pertinent only to an esoteric group of listeners. (JF)

In criticism, as in real life, we should take into account what the dramatic speaker is doing in the act of uttering a piece of discourse. (JH)

Examines three representative short poems to illustrate some of the difficulties that traditional textual criticism would encounter with them. Outlines some ways in which different approaches could deal with these difficulties. (RL)

Critical discussions of reader reaction are often only disguised discussions of author intention. (JH)

Intended as a guide for students of literature, this book introduces literary analysis through discussion of forms, elements, and genres. The first half of the book focuses on theory, with each section preceded by literary passages and interpretative questions. The second half is devoted to practice, and contains three contrasting literary genre…

The teaching-questioning strategy developed in this paper, based on reader-response criticism and Kenneth Burke's pentad, can be used by teachers to elicit responses to any literary work and is designed to help students participate in a work's dramatic context, discover meaning as they read, and assure that their critical essays are based on an…

Examines how literary criticism exploits and marginalizes the poem as printed artifact. Argues that the author-centered, phonocentric premise of close reading neutralizes spatial dynamics and reduces material identity to the status of a transparent medium. Suggests that appreciation of silent visual form is a convention of post modernist writing.…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 16 titles deal with the following topics: (1) a psycholinguistic analysis of the rhetoric of Abba S. Eban; (2) synergetic tetrahedral communication models; (3) a form critical approach to the oral traditions of the black church…