The Sonnet Over Time by Sandra L. Bermann (review)

94Rocky Mountain Review community, language/naming/power, and hope/desire/utopian discourse. This recurrence, informed by her careful and lucid readings ofthe novels, maintains direction despite a wealth of potential deflections and digressions. Bartkowski's book offers many insights, but it does so at the expense of a few blindnesses. A large-scale exploration of Marx would not be appropriate here, but the single paragraph (13) in which Marx, Engels, Bebel, and the Frankfurt School are examined for their attitudes to feminism and utopianism is simply too sketchy. Marx is mentioned in passing at a few other points, but his name does not even appear in the index. Given Bartkowski's declared historical interests, this failure to create richer historical context for Gilman's Herland, for example, is somewhat puzzling. A similar unenlightening reticence greets Jacques Lacan, who is associated with "the 'politics and psychoanalysis' group" in the French women's movement (35) and then forgotten, despite his more general importance for feminism and psychoanalysis and despite invitations like Bersianik's punning reference to St. Jacques Linquant. It would be unreasonable to insist that Bartkowski pay attention to every conceivable relevant detail, but her exclusion of both Marx and Lacan is unnecessarily limiting, especially since her book attempts to encompass an international perspective. Indeed, her internationalism is not all it could be, and her reliance on Freud in preference to Lacan and others constricts the horizon of her psychoanalytic commentary. Also somewhat troubling is Bartkowski's methodological fondness for the reproduction of dualities and binary oppositions. This shows most clearly in the structure of her chapters, which are founded on her reading of differences between two books. The method is admittedly a powerful one, but it pushes at times toward something like the patriarchal dualities of hierarchy, for all her care. The patriarchal discourse still powerful in North American academic writing exerts its pressure on Bartkowski's text as well, and the result is an occasional discord. There are also small occasional discords in usage and writing which should not appear in an academic book and which indicate lapses by the editor and proofreader as well as the author. The typography and design are very good, but the dustjacket has prompted some laughter. Bartkowski's interesting and rewarding text deserves better. J. E. SVILPIS University of Calgary SANDRA L. BERMANN. The Sonnet Over Time. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. 174 p. This remarkable study ofthe sonnet proposes rhetorical definitions ofthree specific verse modes from the Renaissance to the Romantic era, tracing as it were a genealogy of the contemporary lyric. Bermann's readings focus on selected pieces from Petrarch's Rime sparse (characterized as métonymie), Shakespeare's Sonnets (metaphoric), and Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (a blend ofallegorical and ironic). Shedding new light on the importance ofthese writers' Book Reviews95 poetics, Bermann makes a subtle statement about the historical turning point associated with the advent of modernism. "Rhetoric, in the broad sense in which Petrarch understood it, carries philosophy within itself" (37). If scholars often have referred to Petrarch as the first modern man, perhaps it is in part because his Rime embody this notion, expressed in similar terms by Mallarmé, that grammar is a form of "latent philosophy," that a text's structure—the prosody, for example, of a sonnetconstitutes the primary dimension ofits meaning. Bermann asserts that Laura (the "sexual other," the referential "object" of Petrarch's verse) "acts as little more than a means to present more clearly the image of the speaking self, the same" (30), implying a primary mirroring between rhetoric and personae. Bermann shows that the sonnet almost automatically engenders this mode of invention: as a compressed, fixed form, governed by inherently self-reflexive laws of difference and repetition, each sonnet remains a "closed" entity, yet may, as part ofa larger whole, produce an eminently modern sense ofopenness. Bermann notes in this regard that "no story progresses" through the Rime sparse (42); the métonymie character of what she calls Petrarch's "visible grammar" (17) corresponds to the poet-persona's indefinite postponement of desire. In contrast to Petrarch's predominantly métonymie figuration which highlights the play of...