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246Rocky Mountain Review In the meantime, Montaigne will tell us in an "allongeail" ["extension"] that he "se forge" ["makes a memory] "de papier" ["of paper"] (1092; 837), and that in leafing through "ces petits brevets" ["these little notes"] he can find [à se] "consoler de quelque prognostique favorable en [son] experience passée (1092). ["grounds for comfort in some prognostic from [his] past experience" (838).] On the other hand, it is disconcerting to come across untranslated Greek words that occasionally appear in the critical commentary; if one must translate the essays of criticism as well as Montaigne's text (including his Latin citations), why not translate everything? Finally, the act of translation can perhaps be blamed for many ofthe dozens of misprints in the volume, such as "This considerations ..." (66) and "nonchalently" (60). In spite of these textual difficulties, however, the diligent reader will find these essays in reading Montaigne to be rewarding and thought-provoking. B. JANE WELLS RÖMER Rio Salado Community College ANTONY EASTHOPE. Poetry as Discourse.London: Methuen, 1983. 182 p. Poetry as Discourse is a 1983 addition to New Accents, the fine series on methods of literary analysis edited by Terence Hawkes (author of Structuralism and Semiotics, 1977). It is the only one ofthe series to deal exclusively with poetry, and while Easthope limits his analyses to British poetry (the feudal ballad, Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73," an excerpt from Pope's "Rape ofthe Lock" and another from Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," and Pound's "Canto 84"), his critical model can serve as a useful analytical tool of virtually any corpus of poetry for students at the graduate level and beyond. Easthope first posits that British poetry ofthe high cultural tradition can be understood as an order of discourse. He rejects the author as ultimate arbitrator of a univocal meaning provided once and for all by "the words on the page," for meaning only emerges through a process of reading, with the author emerging afterward as effect. When a really innovative voice is introduced among the canonical texts, the entire order of discourse is modified, for each text repeats previous discourse but also transforms it. Beginning with Saussure, Jakobson, and Austin, Easthope next discusses Derrida's concept of différance — that the text never means exactly the same to readers as it does or did to the author. He then proceeds to discuss poetry as a special discourse, using arguments of Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky that emphasize its occurrence always as a specific material and historical discourse. Easthope's chapter 2, "Discourse as Ideology," in which he recognizes that literary criticism must be able to provide an intelligent account of the relation of literature to the social order, is particularly useful for the reader who may still be clinging to vestiges of literary Formalism. Here he examines Louis Althusser's ideas as to how poetry fulfills not only an obligation to its historical position but also to its own nature as poetry. Line organization must always Book Reviews247 take a specific historical form; in British poetry the iambic pentameter dominates and "the consistent use of this metre is a major contribution to the cohesion of the discourse" (24). English poetic discourse since the Renaissance is co-terminous with "the capitalist mode of production and the hegemony of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class" (24). This discourse continues to "produce" the reader who produces it through a reading in the present. Chapter 3 deals with Jacques Lacan's marrying of Saussurean linguistics with Freudian psychoanalysis in order to clarify the concept of the subject of discourse. Easthope argues that the reader is always the subject of poetic discourse, but the traditional tendency to ascribe the shifter "I" to the poem's author disguises the act of the reader's production of the poem. Easthope then reveals the enterprise of his book's Part II — the seven chapters of poetic analysis to follow. This enterprise is to read the poetic discourse against the way it presents itself to be read. In a final summary of Part I, discourse is described as materially determined because of a certain consistent shaping of its signifier, ideologically determined because it is a product...

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