Edgar Poe's Eureka

I'm excited to share (okay, a little self-promotion) that my publication in the Fall 2008 issue of the Edgar Allan Poe Review is now available online at The EAP site. The essay started as a class paper and evolved into the article after a tremendous amount of hard work. What I didn't know at the time was how Poe's Eureka would overlap with my dissertation topic. Mostly, it's the circular reasoning aspect of Poe's prose-poem, but also the related paradoxes and the encountering of the sublime. Anatomy has these things.

Here's an excerpt:

In Eureka, Poe’s narrator reads, “We will come at once to a proposition which he [John Stuart Mill] regards as the acme of the unquestionable -- as the quintessence of axiomatic undeniability. Here it is: -- 'Contradictions cannot both be true -- that is, cannot coexist in nature.’” In other words, Poe implicitly argues that contradictions are the essence of truth in a near-celebration of circular reasoning. Poe sees beauty in contra-diction, in speaking against, revealing his belief in the religious unification of aesthetics and science. The satire of “Aries Tottle” questions Aristotle’s statements about God and the universe; the “real” Aristotle felt that the universe had very little “direct bearing on any belief in the existence of god” and was “non-committal” about it. But Poe is anything but non-committal. He depends on Greek/Ptolemaic cosmology, which had been modified in medieval philosophy to be “compatible” with Judaic and Christian theology. Poe views this division as in need of reconciliation, and Eureka is his attempt at such reunification.

Many of those things apply to the anatomy--unification of aesthetics and science, use of satire, and contradiction.

New Formalism

After being questioned about my own work as formalist, I've been on a reading tear to see the history of the intellectual debate about formalism in English studies. I know it's been out of fashion for some time, and formalism is practically used synonymously with "totalizing." But I wanted to know how and when that attitude about formalism began. What caused the shift away from formalism in literary studies? Is formalism really "dead," or is there a new version of it? And, in fact, am I "doing" a sort of "new formalism" with my work on genre?

When I was in high school, our teachers were trained to analyze literature per the New Critics school--Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, etc. I wasn't permitted to hint at an author's intent or make any assumption about anything beyond the text. Pure analysis of the text, itself...or so we were taught, because there is an assumption of "purity" in that sort of work, and it doesn't take long to get to Platonic textual ideals when you follow that line of thinking.

When I was an undergrad the thinking was shifting to theory, but I didn't know it. So, flashing forward about 15 years, graduate school brought a surprise with a host of "isms" I knew little about. I had to reconsider my approach to text, which meant beginning a process of positioning myself, asking myself what "ism" I "belonged" to or fit. It's not something I like doing. It's easier for me to say what "isms" I am not than what ones I possibly am. For now, I'll just stick with saying my fields are American literature and digital humanities and leave the "isms" out of it.

But I still have a nagging feeling about "new formalism," which seems to be a label, after all. I found this article by Marjorie Levinson about it--http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/pmla_article/home

More on that later.

Northrop Frye, Anatomy, and Formalism

I'm beginning to realize how much I'm going to have to explain my use of Northrop Frye in my dissertation. It seems like Frye is a little more dangerous than I expected because of his "formalism." Thing is, Frye isn't the same as the New Critics, and I think Frye looked much more at process and was, in fact, historical.

I started looking around for some support and found Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process, by Nella Cotrupi, 2000. I'm checking it out today because from what I've read (here at the review http://www.amazon.com/Northrop-Frye-Poetics-Process-Studies/dp/080204316X and elsewhere), Cotrupi rehabs Frye, who is usually seen as out of style. But I have a hunch that Cotrupi sees something I see, too, but that I'm just beginning to articulate, and lucky for me, she's written a book about it.

One of my friends told me I have to be careful bringing up Frye because it's "easy to get an eye roll." I'd like an eyebrow raise, so someone might be a little surprised and then want to know more about what I'm doing, but an eye roll...no thanks.

Wordpress and Themes and Not Moving Yet

I said only two days ago that I'm moving the blog over, but then I started to want to get fancy with it and discovered the world of Wordpress themes. So probably I'll wait a little longer. I fell in love with the theme above because it has that romantic look I'm fond of...but I have to wait because...

I always seem to think I have more time than I do, but I'm heading off to Canada soon for a digital humanities "summer camp." Here's the link: http://www.dhsi.org/home/schedule

If you look really hard you might see "Elizabeth Vincelette" in tiny letters as a presenter in the grad student part of things. I'm going to try out the "anatomy" idea, and I'm hoping to be able to develop the theory to include some more solid statements about database as a genre. It's hard to make claims my knowledge of TEI and XML is shaky and so under-development.

Editing a 50-page dissertation chapter to a ten-page conference paper is tough, too, especially because the "anatomy" is such an esoteric thing. I think I'll have to quote a little more than I'd like for a conference paper, but I think I need the clout of the experts when I'm making my argument.

Moving this Blog Soon

It's time for me to move this blog to another site, over to my own domain at

http://www.elizabethvincelette.com/category/elizabeth-vincelette/

I'm going to leave this one as it is, though, and probably link back to it as I develop new ideas that I need to connect back to old ideas.

Thanks for reading.