Abstract

What charm is we, by definition, can’t quite say: it notoriously eludes the language that would fix it analytically into semantic place. But its ineffability or discursive resistance occupies a theoretically complex and historically informative relation to the antique or outlandish quality – I call it irreference – of the language of magic charms: the spells whereby a sorcerer uses words not to mean something but to do something. This conjunction offers fresh ways of approaching the designs of modern literature, for the past half millennium, to enchant readers. Even as magic has come under steady suspicion, opprobrium, ridicule, and apparent neglect, writers have with great versatility continued to practice charm through modes of more or less frankly deployed incantation. In dramatic performance, fictional illusion, and above all the versification of a poetry (e.g., Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”) modern literature has cultivated species of the charm that still comes and goes after magic.

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