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GAVIN HOPPS
Beyond Embarrassment:
A Post-Secular Reading of Apostrophe
Nor blush if o’er your heart be stealing A love for things that have no feeling [...]. Dorothy Wordsworth, ‘Loving and Liking: Irregular Verses Addressed to a Child’, 29–30) 1
One of the purposes of theology, according to Thomas Aquinas, is to defend faith against the laughter of the non-believer.^2 Though engaging in a literary debate, this essay similarly has recourse to a theological point of view in an attempt to counter the ridicule of apostrophe and its ‘embar- rassing’ metaphysical implications in recent writing on the figure. Whilst the narrowness as well as the breadth of its concerns might appear to place the essay outside of the customary interests of Romantic studies, I wish to suggest that an examination of apostrophe and the embarrassment it causes may illuminate and be illuminated by a consideration of Romantic practice, and that the problems the essay uncovers in its critique of exist- ing theoretical accounts of the figure have important implications for Romantic criticism more generally. This essay is thus indebted to even as it disagrees with recent ‘suspicious’ writing on apostrophe, which, in bringing to light the embarrassment it causes, lays bare the figure’s meta- physical pretensions but, constrained by its secular presuppositions, is unwilling to entertain all of the possible interpretations of what it brings into view. Hence, although this essay has a ‘positive’ aim – namely, retrieving that which has been suppressed in the currently dominant accounts of apostrophe – its procedure in the first place is largely ‘nega- tive’, since it is necessary to cast doubt upon the doubt that has been cast upon the ‘scandalous’ implications of the trope in order to clear a space in which an alternative, theologically-grounded reading of apostrophe may be given a fair hearing.
I
It appears to be a truth incestuously disseminated, if not universally acknowledged, that apostrophe in poetry is embarrassing. The most impressive exponent of this hypothesis is Jonathan Culler.^3 To Culler, the use of apostrophe in poetry is embarrassing, firstly, because it is un- realistic or non-representational; he writes:
It is hard to imagine what sort of situation would lead someone to speak in this way or what non-poetic act they would be performing. The answer we are likely to come up with is that these speakers are getting carried away and waxing poetical, extravagantly posturing. If we try to understand these poems as fictional imitations of ordinary speech acts, the act seems to be that of imitating poetry itself.^4
Apostrophe, then, is unrealistic because it is hyperbolic and metapoetic. It is a contrived and extravagant gesture, self-consciously performed in front of others ‘in order to dramatize voice: to summon images of its power so as to establish its identity as poetic and prophetic voice’.^5 The second, related reason why, according to Culler, the figure is embarrassing is because it implies things that we do not believe; namely, it appears to make present and personify that which is absent or inanimate, suggesting the possibility of responsivity and relation, and also represents a temporality or presentness which outwits the linear flow of time. Such serendipitous implications are, in Culler’s view, ‘enforced by [...] apostrophe’ – and indulged by poets – ‘independent[ly] of any claims made about the actual properties of the object addressed’. 6 Neglecting, as J. Douglas Kneale points out, ‘a distinguished tradition of commentary’ on the figure, Culler claims that, out of embarrassment, in the face of such pretension, criticism has ‘repressed’ and ‘systematically avoided both the topic of apostrophe and actual apostrophes’.^7 We should therefore, it seems, acknowledge the Emperor’s nakedness and see apostrophe as a rhetorical trick, whose ‘time- less present [...] is better seen as a temporality of writing’,^8 and whose power to confer the appearance of presence or sentience is, as Barbara Johnson puts it, ‘a form of ventriloquism through which the speaker throws voice, life, and human form into the addressee, turning its silence into mute responsiveness’.^9 How convincing is Culler’s argument? His account of apostrophe certainly identifies a number of significant and intriguing facts about the figure. Most importantly, he draws attention to the crucial fact that the act of apostrophe makes something happen , and that this something is, to use Graham Ward’s fine phrase, an ‘ontological scandal’. 10 With great origin- ality and insight, Culler thus helps us to understand why the Romantics
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in front of us? As Barbara Hardy has observed: ‘[l]yric poetry thrives [...] on exclusions. It is more than usually opaque because it leaves out so much of the accustomed context and consequences of feeling that it can speak in a pure, lucid, and intense voice’. 13 What may be an advantage to the genre, though, is problematic for the critic. How are we to understand or define poetry which consists entirely of direct address? Can we consider an utterance to be a ‘turning away’ without the inclusion of a pre-text from which it turns? J. Douglas Kneale strictly distinguishes between address and apostrophe (and takes Jonathan Culler to task for not doing so) on the grounds that the latter, by definition, requires an explicit pre-text. 14 I am not so sure how helpful (or justified) this is. This is partly because I think that some prior orientation – and I think it is the orientation rather than the textuality that is important – is, typically, supposed to be implied. Surely not imagining most Romantic lyrics as a turn – from something more quotidian, however unspecified – would rob them of the apparently intended and important impression of ‘spontaneous overflow’? But it is also because it ignores the ways that such poems may use or, paradoxi- cally, include the silence or space which surrounds them. Is not one of the consequences of the non-inclusion of a particular interrupted discourse the dilation of that which is interrupted? Does not the utterance, in the absence of any specific prior orientation, appear to be (and gain power from appearing to be) a turning away from everything? Alternatively, in that this everything-else is, paradoxically, signified by nothingness, the utterance may represent the mysterious emergence of voice out of blank- ness, situating this emergence in a deeper source of self, so that the utter- ance is seen to arise not out of the already speaking self, but out of a silence within the self, or out of a silence in which the self stands before it stands in speech. Supposing we accept that a poem may be an apostrophe without the inclusion of an explicit pre-text, this still leaves us with the question of what it might mean to ‘turn’ in poetry. Clearly, there are competing claims. Are we to recognize – and define the figure according to – syntactic or contextual criteria? Customarily, and with good reason, apostrophe is iden- tified as a vocative utterance. Yet there are problems with such a definition. In the first place, it ignores the fact that it is possible to have an apos- trophe, contextually speaking, without the use of vocative forms (Thomas Hardy, for example, has a poem entitled ‘Apostrophe to an old Psalm Tune’, which, though addressed to the psalm, as indicated by its use of second person pronouns, is devoid of vocative forms). 15 It is also troubled by the fact that the syntactic constitution of the vocative is less stable and more problematic than is routinely assumed. The problem is primarily posed (or
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revealed) by the presence of complex dependent constructions. Whilst we might not have a problem where the modification is relatively simple, as, for instance, in the following examples –
Ye flowery banks o’bonie Doon Robert Burns, ‘Ye flowery banks’ O thou who camest from above, Charles Wesley, ‘Hymn’ 16
- manifestly there is a point at which the modification tilts the balance of the vocative’s function away from more simply addressing towards a characterization of that which is addressed or the speaker’s attitude towards it. 17 Such attributive ‘thickening’, which in extreme cases may lead to what Michael R.G. Spiller appositely refers to as a ‘grammatical ominousness’, may be seen, for example, in the opening lines of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:
Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time
or in one of Milton’s sonnets to Cyriack Skinner:
Cyriack , whose Grandsire on the Royal Bench Of Brittish Themis , with no mean applause Pronounc’t and in his volumes taught our Lawes Which others at their Barr so often wrench [...].^18
If, however, a strictly syntactic definition of the figure is problematic, a more inclusive contextual approach, based on the use of second person discourse, would elide the traditional importance and concentration of the vocative form. How, then, might we accommodate these competing claims? The following compromise suggests itself. There is a sense in which one might distinguish between explicit apostrophe (vocative utter- ances, such as ‘O sylvan Wye’, ‘O wild West Wind’) and contextual apos- trophe. Thus, the whole of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, for example, would be an apostrophe, or what we might term ‘apostrophaic’, in that the speaker is evidently ‘turned towards’ and speaking to the nightingale, though there are counter-tendencies in the poem (such as observation or reflection) which are sufficiently felt to make the use of explicit apos- trophe seem like a turn – in this case, a turning back to the form of the poem as address. Hence, though the poem as a whole may represent an act of turning away and address, it may nonetheless incorporate apparently divergent modes, and sustain (perhaps residually) its apostrophaic mode,
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permanent reality – namely, that personhood floods the material universe
- which the believer never quite forgets, but which she only directly encounters in such heightened moments of perception or being. From such a perspective, apostrophe may be seen as in some sense mimetic – even though it fashions what it reveals, and represents what did not ‘exist’ as such prior to its representation (in spite of the fact that what it reveals is paradoxically what made its revelation possible)^19 – since the presence, personhood, timelessness and relation it announces are held to corre- spond to that which is the case. In spite of the fact, as Valentine Cunningham has recently reminded us, that ‘apostrophe is, of course, the fundamental trope of prayer’,^20 this sort of explicitly theological reading of the trope is silently excluded from Culler’s account, which assumes, as if it did not need arguing, that the viewpoint of contemporary secularism represents the last – and univer- sally accepted – word on ‘that which is’, and is somehow capable, without apparently raising any suspicions, of vouching for its own validity. In arro- gating to itself a transcendental vantage point from which it is supposed to be possible securely and decisively to know about knowing, Culler’s sceptical account of apostrophe may be seen unwittingly to exhibit by falling prey to the dangers of dogmatic secular criticism more generally, which has become increasingly influential (and unreflexive) in contem- porary Romantic studies. The other principal reason why apostrophe in poetry is deemed to be embarrassing is because it is supposed to be non-representational; in other words, normal people in normal life do not do it. This is sheer misinfor- mation. Even if we leave aside the enormous number of people who publicly and privately address themselves in prayer to that which is with- out material evidence, it ignores the fact that all sorts of perfectly sensible people, and not merely the Basil Fawltys of this world, are forever irrationally shouting at malfunctioning electrical appliances, televised football matches and unhearing motorists, tenderly talking to animals and birds that are evidently incapable of reciprocal response, and whispering the names of or interiorly turning towards absent or deceased loved ones.^21 How might we explain this exclusion? The vanishing act performed by recent criticism on real life apostrophes obviously buttresses its contention that apostrophe is a purely artistic extravagance – and that poetry is in love with and hankers after its own image – which in turn underpins Culler’s central claim that the figure is embarrassing. This attempt to sunder poetic apostrophe from its real life counterparts – which covertly emasculates whilst appearing to exalt the former – depends upon two related manoeuvres. Whilst the examples that
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Culler takes clearly do not correspond to speech acts uttered in mundane situations, this does not mean that all apostrophes in poetry must be of this sort. Neither does it mean, as I shall illustrate shortly, that there are no specialized contexts outside of poetry which are similarly removed from quotidian behaviour in which comparable utterances might be used. Culler’s claim that apostrophe is non-representational might thus be said to depend upon a shrinking as well as a shifting of the goalposts. The significance of the problems I have outlined above, from the point of view of Romantic studies, is that the unwarranted assumption that contemporary secularism provides us with an authoritative perspective from where it is possible to arbitrate once and for all about ‘that which is’ permits Culler to view Romantic opposition to the Enlightenment project as self-evidently a step in the wrong direction, which is founded upon an erroneous view of reality and may therefore be dismissed as wishful think- ing or make-believe. If, however, as I am arguing, one doubts the pre- supposed validity of contemporary secularism’s way of looking at things, it permits an alternative reading of the Romantic project, not as a reversal of ‘the progress of knowledge’ and a ‘wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance’, as Thomas Love Peacock has it,^22 and as Culler seems to concur, but, on the contrary, as an inchoate groping towards truth and reason. 23
II
The foregoing reflections may be reformulated with respect, more specifically, to the Romantics’ use of apostrophe. If the act of apostrophe is embarrassing and does not ‘make sense’, this is obviously because it radically conflicts with our conception of reality. One natural response to this conflict is to assume that our conception of reality is correct, and conclude, as recent criticism has, that the act of apostrophe is a curious aberration. It could, however, equally be argued that it is our conception of reality that is incorrect, and that the act of apostrophe residually gestures towards that which has been lost sight of. It is this second, troubling thesis, which draws upon even as it radically disagrees with Jonathan Culler’s account of the figure, and which views the act of apostrophe as a sort of fallen prayer, that I wish to suggest has not been refuted but is as plausible as the reading by which it has been excluded. How might we set about supplying a corrective to the sceptical im- poverishment of apostrophe and establishing the plausibility of an alterna- tive ‘post-secular’ reading of the figure? Although there is not enough space to elaborate upon their arguments here, I wish, to this end, to invoke two divergent theological accounts of what takes place when we apos-
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in recent criticism to keep the representational character of apostrophe out of sight.^29 This distinction is, I suggest, crossed by a third type of usage, which, on account of its conventionalized, public and ‘communal’ character, I propose may be designated ‘ritualized’ usage.^30 This threefold distinction would allow us to recognize the differences between (artistic representations of) passionate or ‘Romantic’ apostrophes, such as Byron’s address to Ada at the start of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , Canto III or Wordsworth’s address to the river Wye in ‘Tintern Abbey’; parodic or ‘rhetorical’ apostrophes, such as the Priest’s mock-heroic apostrophe to Geoffrey de Vinsauf in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (which grandiloquently denounces grandiloquence to the grandiloquent) or Culler’s own homo- logical apostrophe to Apostrophe; and, finally, public and ‘ritualized’ apostrophes, such as Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ or Milton’s invoca- tion at the start of Paradise Lost , which in spite of their public and ritual- ized character appear to represent serious attempts to establish relation. The two theological accounts of the figure may thus open up a space in which the ‘embarrassing’ claims made by the Romantics in and about the act of apostrophe may be taken seriously on their own terms, whilst at the same time allowing us to provide a more nuanced account of poetic practice. In the remaining space, I wish summarily, in support of this contention, to illustrate the seriousness with which the Romantics treated the ‘embarrassing’ metaphysical implications of apostrophe, and some- thing of the range of differences in their use of the figure with reference to a few well-known examples. At one extreme, we might see a poem such as Coleridge’s ‘Recollections of Love’, whose speaker appears to trust and take seriously the sense of counter-rational relation established by apostrophe in spite of the doubly embarrassing fact that it is addressed not only to an inanimate entity but one which, as the speaker’s earlier deictic reference to ‘Quantock’s heathy hills’ suggests, is also several hundred miles away:
But when those meek eyes first did seem To tell me, Love within you wrought – O Greta, dear domestic stream!
Has not, since then, Love’s prompture deep, Has not Love’s whisper evermore Been ceaseless, as thy gentle roar? Sole voice, when other voices sleep, Dear under-song in clamour’s hour. (23–30) 31
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At the other extreme, we might see the sort of playful or apparently more conventional use of apostrophe – which the Preface to Lyrical Ballads seeks to prohibit, insisting instead (in a move that might be seen as an aesthetic corollary of the Reformers’ insistence upon sola fide , which came to be set over against ritual practice) upon the sole importance of the criterion of psychological justification – as seen, for example, to stay with Coleridge, in ‘Monody on a Tea-Kettle’:
Perhaps O Kettle! thou by scornful toe Rude urg’d t’ignoble place with plaintive din, May’st rust obscure midst heaps of vulgar tin [...]. (26–8)
It may be worthwhile focusing in a little more detail on a few examples that fall somewhere in between these two extremes, partly because such apostrophes are often informatively concerned with their own efficacy, and partly because their ambiguities have, I think, been unfairly treated by recent ‘suspicious’ criticism. ‘Tintern Abbey’ is a far more troubled poem than ‘Recollections of Love’; though, if it exhibits anxieties about, even as it avows, its faith in moments of vision and relation, it also demonstrates the affective power of apos- trophe in sustaining such faith:
with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft, In darkness, and amid the many shapes Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! (48–58) 32
The famous verse paragraph which follows the poem’s central visionary assertion is an anacoluthon, which raises and then contradicts, whilst leaving unresolved the validity of, doubts about the foregoing claim. The (implied) horrors of the main clause are thus displaced by the apostrophe to the river Wye, which is born of, but also appears to repair, the speaker’s intimations of doubt. How does the apostrophe effect this reparation? In the first place, it does
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subdues his doubts may therefore, even if it is willed and in conflict with reason, and even if it is born of and nourished by itself, nonetheless turn out to be a promissory orientational sign of the truth. In which case, the act of apostrophe – which affects and endorses the faith it announces – would therefore be the handmaid of truth rather than or whilst at the same time being the bane of secular reason. If we turn to an example from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , we find the speaker’s sense of presence and relation in the act of apostrophe is under even greater strain:
There, thou! – whose love and life together fled, Have left me here to love and live in vain – Twin’d with my heart, and can I deem thee dead, When busy Memory flashes on my brain? Well – I will dream that we may meet again, And woo the vision to my vacant breast: If aught of young Remembrance then remain, Be as it may Futurity’s behest, For me ’twere bliss enough to know thy spirit blest! (II, 9)
After the admonitory and sceptical meditation on mortality that follows the canto’s invocation (II, 2–7), Byron, characteristically, turns upon himself and contemplates the possibility that there may be a Heaven after all (‘Yet if, as holiest men have deem’d, there be / A land of souls beyond that sable shore, / To shame the doctrine of the Sadducee / And sophists, madly vain of dubious law’) and considers ‘How sweet it were in concert to adore / With those who made our mortal labours light!’ (II, 8). The apostrophe that such thoughts provoke (quoted above) is informed by, and holds painfully together, the stoical scepticism that the poet vented in the foregoing stanzas and the contrary hypothesis, the ‘Yet if’, that inter- rupts it. The poet is torn by a sense of presence and relation, for which he is unable to settle on a name – ‘Memory’, ‘dream’, ‘vision’, ‘Remembrance’
- which coexists alongside an awareness of his addressee’s death and their separation. It might seem a little eccentric in a poem of approaching five hundred stanzas to focus upon a single interjection, but the ‘Well’ with which Byron answers the question ‘and can I deem thee dead, / When busy Memory flashes on my brain?’ – which strains towards but does not quite achieve the affirmative force of a rhetorical question – appears to trace a con- junction of conflicting voices, which seem both to give rise to and be constrained by one another, which is central to the poem: the way in
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which it circumvents a ‘yes’ signals the contours of a disbelieving part of self, which cannot be denied but which does not have absolute dominion either. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage contains a number of these sundered apostrophes, or what we might describe as instances of Byron’s ‘elegiac Thou’ – whose late inclusion decisively altered the poem – which, in being flooded with a tragic awareness of alienation and loss, test the limits of faith in, but also, in surviving their sundering, attest the power of, apostrophic relation. If Byron experiences the limits of apostrophe in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage , then Keats might be said to explore them in his famous odes. Whilst the odes ‘to a Nightingale’ and ‘on a Grecian Urn’ are, of course, about a nightingale and a Grecian urn, they are also, I suggest, about the nature of, and the relationship between, apostrophic and discursive modes; that is, they explore and test the limits of the sense of relation and animicity which provokes or is bestowed by apostrophe and the reversal of these effects in description. In the Nightingale Ode, for instance, Keats appears to be allured by, but also reluctant to give himself wholly up to, the apostrophic mode of relation, partly because of doubts about its efficacy and worries about the ethics of escaping ‘[t]he weariness, the fever and the fret’, but also partly because he wants consciously to feel or experience it; he wants, as it were, to be awake whilst he sleeps. Similarly, in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, the poet seems to be exploring how much description or detachment an address may tolerate before it ceases to feel like an address, and thereby reflexively recreates in the act of address the sort of teasing sense of animacy within inanimacy evoked by that which is addressed. Keats’s powers of imagination are such that not only could he con- vincingly imagine his way into such things as a grain of wheat, a sparrow and a billiard ball, he was able to imagine himself into himself imagining himself into other phenomena. To put this less convolutedly, Keats has the remarkable ability to do something and to watch himself doing it, without his ‘first’ self appearing to be conscious of or disturbed by his ‘second’ self watching (though like someone leaning back on their chair trying to find the point between falling backwards and falling forwards, it is a continual and precarious process of risk and adjustment). This is why, I suggest, his apostrophes both are and are not metapoetic. What these foregoing examples show, if my brief readings of the apostrophes are correct, is, firstly, the sheer range of attitudes towards (and effects produced by) the act of apostrophe in poetry – differences that are elided in recent homogenizing readings of the figure; and, secondly, the resilience of the apostrophic mode, which, it seems, may involve but never-
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In drawing attention to these correspondences, I am not suggesting that Shelley’s utterance is consciously modelled on liturgical practice. Nevertheless, it is important to point out that it is not without parallels outside of poetry. Indeed, the affinity noted by Culler between poetic and ritual use of apostrophe, whilst apparently intended to endorse his metapoetic reading of the figure, turns out to be something of a Trojan Horse, in that it brings into view a model of apostrophic usage in which the utterance’s multiple orientation and preparatory deferral or prefacing of itself forms part of a larger referential strategy, and thereby suggests that the ‘ritualized’ act of invocation in poetry may, in spite of its self- referentiality and surreptitiously split addressee, also be a hopeful and efficacious act of address. Something similar might be said, in conclusion, about Culler’s identifi- cation of the embarrassment apostrophe causes. Culler is right to identify the metaphysical implications of apostrophe as embarrassing. He is wrong, however, to conclude that this proves their inveracity or our lack of belief. Culler argues as though embarrassment were in itself (suffi- ciently) incriminatory – as though it necessarily meant and validated disbelief, or were at least incompatible with belief. Yet belief also , obviously, lives with embarrassment – countenancing that which is ‘scandalous to reason’. 38 Indeed, it is not the occurrence of embarrassment that is in dispute or even its meaning (though it is part of my argument, against recent univocal readings, that not all apostrophes are embarrass- ing or embarrassing in the same way), but rather the tyrannical authority accorded to it as arbiter of the real. Whereas embarrassment might be seen as policing the boundaries of secular reason, theology might be said to think and act – and perhaps even centrally to have its being – in the space beyond, or in spite of , such embarrassment. We might therefore say that embarrassment is the response of reason to that which exceeds it or goes over its head – its retaliation, we might say, not at being refused admission, but at being asked to forego its accustomed dominion. Addressing our- selves to that which is non-human or unseen is patently embarrassing, scandalous or quixotic. Though, as St Paul reminds us, wholly cognisant of the transgression of reason involved in faith, there is a foolishness that is wiser than the wisdom of the world.^39 R Wolfson College Cambridge
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N OTES
- Women Romantic Poets: 1785–1832 , ed. by Jennifer Breen (London: Dent, 1992).
- Summa Theologiæ , Ia. 46, 2.
- Culler’s views on the figure are most extensively set forth in his essay ‘Apostrophe’, in Diacritics , 7, 4 (Winter, 1977), pp. 59–69, rpt in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 135–54 (hereafter TPS ), and are repeated with minor variations in ‘Changes in the Study of the Lyric’, in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism , ed. by Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 38–54; ‘Reading Lyric’, in The Lessons of Paul de Man. Yale French Studies , 69 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 98–106; and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 71–4.
- Literary Theory , p. 72.
- Ibid ., p. 73.
- TPS , p. 141.
- J. Douglas Kneale, Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), p. 12; TPS , pp. 136–7; ‘Reading Lyric’, p. 99.
- TPS , p. 149.
- ‘Apostrophe, Animation and Abortion’, in Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies , ed. by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (New York: Longman, 1998), p. 221.
- The phrase is used by Ward in his discussion of the Eucharist in ‘Bodies: The displaced body of Jesus Christ’, in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology , ed. by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 168, and alludes to St Paul’s use of the word ‘scandal’ [ skandalon ] in his first letter to the Corinthians (1:23).
- ‘Changes in the Study of the Lyric’, p. 39.
- TPS , pp. 143, 140, 146, 137.
- The Advantage of Lyric (London: Athlone Press, 1977), p. 2.
- Romantic Aversions , Chapter 1.
- We might also note that there are, of course, no such syntactic stipulations as to what constitutes an apostrophe in classical rhetoric.
- The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns , ed. by James Kinsley, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse , chosen by David Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926).
- For want of space, I am skirting the complicated debate between Jean-Luc Marion and Jacques Derrida on praise and predication which relates to this issue.
- ‘“Per Chiamare e Per Destare”: Apostrophe in Milton’s Sonnets’, in Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images Contradictions , ed. by Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), pp. 484–5; John Keats: The Complete Poems , ed. by John Barnard (London: Penguin, 1973); The Poetical Works of John Milton , ed. by Helen Darbishire, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).
- What I am suggesting here is that apostrophe may be seen as a form of theological poiesis , that is, a ‘making’ which is nonetheless revelatorily truthful.
- In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts and History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 392.
- It is worth noting that Shoshana Felman ends her public tribute to Paul de Man – which was spoken at the Memorial Service at Yale University Art Gallery, and forms part of the volume that includes Culler’s essay ‘Changes in the Study of the Lyric’ – with
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