• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.191-215
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• 2011

This paper aims at investigating Dorothy Wordsworth's later conversation poetry, which has not been the focus of critical discussions on her literary works. While many critics have been emphasizing Dorothy Wordsworth's journals and the tendency of self-effacement in her prose, this paper argues that her later poetry often reveals acute self-consciousness about the circumstances that condition this self-annihilation and searches for a creative way to endorse her own identity. In "Lines Intended for My Niece's Album," she expresses anxiety and uncertainty about the inclusion of her poetic piece in Dora Wordsworth's album, which contains poems by prominent male writers of the contemporary period. "Irregular Verses" presents Dorothy Wordsworth's self-conscious narrative of her girlhood and shows how her own ambition to become a "Poet" has been stifled by external circumstances, including the ideology that instills the idea of proper womanhood into aspiring girls. While these poems examine contemporary gender discourse and the frustrated poethood resulting from it, other poems activate conversations with William Wordsworth's poems and thereby provide a revisionary re-writing of her brother's texts. For example, in "Lines Addressed to Joanna H." Dorothy Wordsworth becomes "a woman addressed who herself addresses others." Her scrupulous approach to her own addressee refuses to subordinate the other to the self's will, and through this revision of "Tintern Abbey," Dorothy Wordsworth vicariously liberates her own self confined in her brother's poems. "Thoughts on My Sick-Bed," which echoes "Tintern Abbey" through borrowed phrases and direct address to William Wordsworth, foregrounds her own poetic identity in the form of the first-person pronoun "I." Dorothy Wordsworth's continual illness during this period of her life paradoxically allows her the time for personal reflection formerly denied to her in her busy life constantly occupied by physical and spiritual labor for others. Instead of earning satisfaction from the subsumption of her creative energy under William Wordsworth's poetical endeavor, Dorothy Wordsworth finally starts to affirm her own poetic identity that can properly express her inner vision and artistic talent. Although this final affirmation remains largely incomplete due to her later mental collapse bordering on madness, it powerfully conveys the hidden literary aspiration of the formerly frustrated female poet.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.89-109
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• 2017

This study focuses upon the fact that Wordsworth has a great interest in the epistemological understanding of nature. It denies that his early poems, such as An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, only represent the subtleties of nature, according to the picturesque mode of the eighteenth century, without any other consideration about human mind. It tries to trace his effort to deal with the relationship between nature and mind, which is committed to the apprehension of Wordsworth's experience which shapes much of his later work. Prior to Wordsworth, or in his earlier days, both the picturesque description and the descriptive poetry tend to be two-dimensional. Staying away from the cold rules of painting and overcoming passivity, he prefers to contemplate nature through his emotions and tries to come close to the sublime sense. Therefore, his poetic strategy is to show that his poetic description of nature goes beyond the limits which these picturesque rules and colors impose. His readers get the feeling of how desperate he become trying to choose the suitable poetic language to express the relationship between nature and mind. He also has an interest in developing a character, Dorothy, to match what he thinks and to mediate what he intends to describe through his epistemological understanding of nature.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.6
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• pp.1361-1378
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• 2010

This paper argues that it is possible to construct an analogy of the literary fragment to an organic individual on the basis of an autonomous system of organic unity by reading William Wordsworth's ways of self-writing in The Prelude. The organicity of a fragment is borrowed from Friedrich Schlegel's theoretic and literary approach to the Romantic fragment. Focusing primarily on the two "spots of time" in Book Twelfth, I attempt to formulate a reciprocal relationship between a work of art and a literary autobiographer in terms of the self-generativity of the fragment. To be precise, both the fragment and the autobiographical project presuppose and at the same time depend on the engendering force of an organic unity and its resistance to discontinuity, which ironically affirms the persistent threat of disruption and death. Rewriting traumatic childhood experiences as rites of passage into adulthood, the two specified "spots of time" show the dominant mode of memory operative in the poem. Asserting the prominence of the individual as the very vehicle of realizing universal humanity, Wordsworth tries to re-form his individuality grounded in his childhood memories in a literary fashion. Under the premise that the poet is remembered by his posterity, The Prelude is constituted and reconstituted in conjunction with different versions of each memory. The poem also marks the poet's unachieved project of writing a philosophical poem, namely, The Recluse; for this very reason, The Prelude, which is complete in itself, points to an eternal work in progress, turning the truth of every fragment complete in its incompletion. As a trope of fragmentation, an autobiographical individuality is reformed in the poet's process of writing and re-visioning while simultaneously being dispersed once again between words, sentences, and pages.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.36
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• pp.37-59
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• 2014

William Wordsworth's "The Thorn" revolves around the following questions: Who is Martha? Why does she go to the mountain top and repeat her doleful cry? To these questions, it gives us two different kinds of answers; one derives from the villagers, and the other from the narrator. This essay attempts to examine how the answers exemplify two different critical approaches to the problem of community, using Jacques Lacan's account of sexual difference in his seminar on Encore as a guiding thread of analysis. The important thing to retain here is that sexual difference in Lacan's seminar on Encore does not so much indicate biological determinations as two distinct forms of relating to the other which are intimately bound up with the question of how a community is constructed and maintained. The first form, called "masculine," suggests that it is a radical exception to a community that makes possible the community as a field of totality or sameness; the second form, called "feminine," shows that each of the subjects cannot be regarded as a member of a closed community which is guaranteed by the exceptionality, but as an exception that is radically singular. This in turn leads us to consider the possibility that the masculine form has to do with the villagers' effort to distinguish themselves from Martha and the feminine form with the way in which the narrator confronts and represents her. In the course of his formulation of sexuation graph, Lacan stresses that the masculine side must be supplemented by the feminine side, which allows us to elaborate on why, concerning Martha, the narrator does not just keep the completely different position from the villagers'. This is to say that the villagers' representation of Martha as an exception to the community should be supplemented by the narrator's attempt to tell Martha's story as the villagers do and at the same time to capture something of her enigmatic unrepresentability. Bearing in mind Charles Shepherdson's elaboration of traumatic memory, this essay also tries to clarify how the narrator preserves and even transmits something of Martha's truth that is embodied in her uncontrollable and unassimilable cry.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.339-363
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• 2014

This essay reconsiders the subject of Romantic self-consciousness in a post-de Manian perspective. Self-consciousness is an attribute of Romantic lyricism whereby the poetic speaker I remains conscious of how (s)he feels or lives here and now. This self-reflective feature of Romantic poetry has been controversially interpreted either as self-centered solipsism or as self-expressive objectivism. The question is stirring more disputes among Romantic critics after the advent of New Historicism and Feminism. These two historicistic approaches reprove Romantic poetry for a lack of the sense of history and ascribes it to Romantic self-consciousness. They argue that Romantic poets in general displace historical materiality into an object of internal consciousness, so negating absurd social realities "merely to gain their own immortal soul." This essay targets to overcome this negative stance on Romantic self-consciousness with a "subversive" return to Paul de Man's criticism of Romantic internality.

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