• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.2
• /
• pp.329-356
• /
• 2010

Coleridge's fame as a poet rests on the achievement of the mystery poems, "The Anceint Mariner," "Kubla Khan," and "Christabel." Coleridge's achievement in "Christabel" goes far beyond what previous critics have imagined. Coleridge is one of a handful of great writers who are included as representatives of androgyny. Throughout his life, Coleridge was accustomed to point out feminine qualities within himself. "Christabel" exemplifies the kind of writing contemporary feminist theories call l'écriture féminine. L'écriture féminine is not necessarily the creation of women but may rather be the works of those who refuse to identify with the father and the laws of paternal discourse. "Christabel" becomes Coleridge's most daring symbolic story. "Christabel" appears in its full significance as a vehicle for some profound insights into the dynamics of relationships between men and women, fathers and daughters. Through her deformity, Geraldine is actually the casualty of her father's hatred of women, and is the embodiment of all its anti-virtual aspects. The poem shows no bitterness against women, only compassion and remorse. Coleridge is sympathetically presenting Christabel's suffering as a woman at the hands of an overmastering man. Also, "Christabel" demonstrates woman power as well. In fact, the one person whose tales have any real effect within this narrative is the ambiguous Geraldine. Geraldine excels at story-telling, at making words act for her. Perhaps, despite the appearance of the surface, in which men hold all the cards, it is in fact women, or the feminine, so necessary to procreation and creativity, who hold sway here. This apparent dominion of the feminine derives at least partly from Coleridge's use of the conventions of that feminine genre, the Gothic romance. L'écriture féminine is a concept defined by its divergence from a dominant cultural norm. One may speculate that the fragmentary state of "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" is in fact congruent with this mode of writing. If these poems imply a theoretical écriture féminine, they are by definition "incomplete," for completeness is a standard of patriarchal language and culture. More perplexing even than the other "mystery poems," "Christabel" is the true fragment of the three.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.57 no.5
• /
• pp.701-725
• /
• 2011

This paper attempts to read "The Nightingale" as an experimental proponent of Lyrical Ballads of 1798, one that inaugurated British Romanticism. It is never accidental for this poem to come to replace "Lewti" at the last moment of publication and to be tied to the poetic principles manifested in the "Advertisement" of the 1798 volume. The speaker of this poem, for example, is an ordinary man, who presents himself as a friend and a loving father. Opting for conversational styles rather than blindly copying literary conceits, he even incorporates an evening episode he happens to recall into a legitimate subject matter. The notion of "conversation," which appears in the subtitle, offers a key to figuring out the ideal of poetic language, the figure of the poet, and compositional procedures Coleridge and Wordsworth proposed in their collaborative project. "The Nightingale" can be a dubious, if not totally failed, poetical journey to subverting an incidence of misnaming acts. He finally reaches the limits of poetic figuration in a process of textualizing nature. The leitmotif of "In nature there is nothing melancholy" testifies to the fact that the bird nightingale, which the narrator is hard at work to rename as a joyous bird, is nothing but a poetic metaphor. "The Nightingale" is more likely to be a revisional, regenerative performance based on the strategy of conversation than an embodiment of a daring novelty.

• Lingua Humanitatis
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.5-50
• /
• 2002

This paper aims to illustrate and illuminate the relationship between language and its neighbor disciplines, in particular between language and literature, language and religion, and language and music. 1. Language and literature. Literature is an art of language. Therefore, linguistics, the science of language, should be able to explain how the grammar of literature elevates and ordinary language into a literary language. I illustrate poetic syntax with examples from Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. 2. Language and religion. I show how a linguistic analysis of a religious text can illuminate the background, authorship, chronology, etc., of a religious text with an example from the Book of Daniel. I also illustrate how a misanalysis of a poetic meter led to a mistranslation with an example from the Book of Psalms. 3. Language and music. First I trace an epochal event in the history of the Western music, i.e., the change of the musical style from the liturgical music of Latin in which the rhythm was created by the alternation of syllable duration into the liberated music of German in which the rhythm was generated by the alternation of lexical stress. I then illustrate a parallelism between linguistic and musical structures with several musical pieces including Gregorian chant, the 16th century music of Palestrina, the 17th century music of Schutz, the 18th century music of Mozart, and the 19th century Viennese music. Finally, the importance of text-tune (verse-melody) association is discussed with examples of mismatches in translated Korean hymns and contemporary Korean lyrical songs. In the concluding part, I speculate on some factors that are responsible for the same organizational devices in three different modes of human communication. An answer may be that all are under the same laws of mind that govern the way man perceives and organizes nature, i.e., the same cognitive abilities of man, in particular, the capacity to organize and impose structure on their respective inputs.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
• /
• s.13
• /
• pp.67-82
• /
• 2008

This exploratory study examined the possibility that the notion, willing suspension of disbelief, can explain the processing of animated spokes-character in advertising. Willing suspension of disbelief has originated from Coleridge's explanation of poetic faith. And the term has been theoretically studied in the response of fiction in creative works, such as cinema, dramas, and advertisements, as well as literature. So far, willing suspension of disbelief has been proposed as a mediator of empathy, cognitive responses and affective responses to fiction. On these theoretical bases, a survey was conducted to 64 people with 3 advertisements to test the validity of the discriminant function. Findings of discriminant function analysis are as follows: First, the variable of willing suspension of disbelief well discriminated between the willing group and the non-willing group. Secondly, the Intensity of willing suspension of disbelief showed statistically significant difference between the willing group and the non-willing group. Thus, according to these results, it is proposed that the effects of the willing suspension of disbelief can be examined as a mediator of the response of fiction in further substantial studios.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.5
• /
• pp.973-998
• /
• 2010

This paper aims at assessing the significance of Lyrical Ballads of 1798, the agreed inaugurator of English Romanticism, in terms of such key concepts as poetic "experiments," "conversation," and the authorial function. The 1798 volume marks an interesting incidence in which an author with no tangible substantiality can wield his authorial function over his works. The volume is signed without the named proper noun-its author is neither William Wordsworth nor Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The figure of the author in this case is realized by the poems he writes; he produces, and is produced by, his works-a fact that constitutes part of the poetic experiments manifested in the Advertisement. Working under this reciprocal production, the Author of the 1798 volume and his poems are collectively aiming at establishing a new class of poetry and an interpretive community. The notion of "conversation" is a key element in the thematic, stylistic ties among individual poems. Poems of the 1798 volume effect multi-layered, "blended" voices. Readers are expected to draw out the topological interweaving among poems through the practices of dialogic reading. In this light, the sequential necessity of "The Rime" and "Tintern Abbey" should be emphasized. They are stitched together in a logic of textual placement and the transition from one to the other is never arbitrary. Most of all, they are working under the same authorial function, complementing each other, and addressing the same poetic project in different textual locations. As an inaugural work of English Romanticism, Lyrical Ballads of 1798 in fact makes so many things happen and yet again anticipates something yet to come with elusiveness. The value of this poetic experiments should be judged not only by what is claimed in it, but what it sets out to do and "how far" it will be performed, as implied in the Advertisement. The efficacy of the volume, more than anything else, is dependent upon the performative power of words.