Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1986. The ghastly fate of a drowned man brought to a lake's surface in Wordsworth's Prelude typifies a fundamental pattern in Romantic writing, argues Cynthia Chase. Disfiguration involves not only a departure from representation but a disruption of the logic of figure or form, a decomposition of the figures composing the text. Ultimately it manifests the conflict between a work's meaning and its mode of performance. By means of an intense engagement with texts in the romantic tradition, DECOMPOSING FIGURES rearticulates and recasts crucial concepts in recent literary theory, including the notion of the self-referential or self-reflexive nature of the literary work. Chase's readings show that, far from implying a privileged status, the work's self-reflexive structure entails its opacity, its inability to read itself, and the necessity of its decomposition.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Mutable Images: Voice and Figure
Chapter 1. The Accidents of Disfiguration
Limits to Literal and Figurative Reading of Wordsworth's "Books"
Chapter 2. The Ring of Gyges and the Coat of Darkness
Reading Rousseau with Wordsworth
Chapter 3. Viewless Wings Keats's Ode to a Nightingale
Chapter 4. Giving a Face to a Name De Man's Figures
Chapter 5. Getting Versed
Reading Hegel with Baudelaire
Part II: Past Effects: The Double Reading of Narrative
Chapter 6. Mechanical Doll, Exploding Machine
Kleist's Models of Narrative
Chapter 7. The Decomposition of the Elephants
Double-Reading Daniel Deronda
Chapter 8. Oedipal Textuality
Reading Freud's Reading of Oedipus
Chapter 9. Paragon, Parergon
Baudelaire Translates Rousseau
Notes
Index
