In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

464 PAUL STEVENS Finally, what Boyle knows she knows well, and she states it forthrightly in a flatfooted prose which is not the aptest mediator between the inquiring reader and a poet so calculatedly ambiguous, and so deft with layers of meaning. The largest objective of Boyle's book is to recall us to a sense of the theological context of Petrarch'5 poetry in the Canzoniere, and in the end she is able to do so with revolutionary effect. But she also aspires to present us with the poet I as theologian.' In attempting this she has confused Petrarch's information about theology (and possibly her own) with the systematic thinking that characterizes the true theologian. Petrarch, we can be sure, was devout; in one of his copies of Horace, now in the Morgan Library, he annotated the poet's prayer to Apollo (Odes I, xxxi, 17) with the observation 'a good prayer, if it were made to Christ.' This note alone tends to confinn the direction Boyle takes in tracing Petrarch's Apollonian poetics. But Petrarch was not a systematic or creative theological mind. He was a systematic and creative poet, and with Petrarch, the poetry is where we have to begin. If Boyle's book may not answer the question it attempts to pose, it will nevertheless provide devastating annament for those who are willing to begin there. Tudor England's Postmodern Colonialists PA UL STEVENS Jeffrey Knapp. An Empire Nowhere: England, AmericaI and Literature From 'Utopia'to The Tempest' University of California Press 1992. xviI 388 At the high-water mark of the New CriticismI Cleanth Brooks defined the single most important distinguishing mark of poetry: 'the language of poetry is the language of paradox' (The Well-Wrought Urn, 1947). Paradox was central because in the long struggle between poetry and science it was paradox that most effectively humbled the pride of scientism, reducing its confident assertions about the nature ofthings to aporia, impasse, indeterminacy. NewCriticism's celebration ofparadox isimportantbecause it reveals justhow modernist so muchpostmodernistironizing is. The sceptical properties Linda Hutcheon claims for the postmodern, for instance, are almost exactly the same as those Rosalie Colie, writing over two decades earlier, claimed for paradox. For Hutcheon the postmodern is interrogative, subversive of convention, always contesting 'mastery and totalization' (The Politics of Postmodernism, 1989), while for Colie it was paradox that was subversive, an 'oblique criticism of absolute judgment and absolute convention,' always 'challenging some orthodoxy' (Paradoxia Epidemica, 1966). For a generation like Colie's brought up on such idealizations of paradox and the rhetoric of undecidability, it is not difficult to imagine how attractive the radical new ironies of French poststructuralism must have appeared. In the same year Paradoxia Epidemica was published, Derrida gave his seminar paper 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' at Johns Hopkins. There Derrida continued the struggle against POSTMODERN COLONIALISTS 465 scientism, suggesting OUf paradoxical complicity in every discourse we might wish to transcend: 'we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not slipped into the form, the logic, and the implied postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest' (Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed Davis and Schliefer, 1989). While paradox is, then, one of the most obvious means by which the continuity between New Criticism and a postmodern form of criticism like deconstruction, especially North American deconstruction, may be identified, Derrida's particular paradox here suggests an important difference between the two. The postrnodern does not simply locate or even deploy paradox, but also insistently calls attention to the paradoxicality of its own practice. As Hutcheon puts it, the postrnodern is fully conscious of the degree to which it simultaneously 'inscribes and subverts the conventions and ideologies of the dominant cultural and social forces.' Nowhere is this better exemplified than in New Historicism (or Cultural Poetics as it is now sometimes called), where, for instance, in the light of characterizations such as Hutcheon's, it is difficult not to see Stephen Greenblatt's famous representation of Shakespearean drama simultaneously containing the subversion it produces as something of a self-representation. When, in the first, most Foucauldian version of 'Invisible Bullets' (Glyph 8 1981), Greenblatt concludes...

pdf

Share