This essay traces the history of the hot-air balloon as a figure for formalist approaches to reading poetry, and finds the most compelling and enigmatic investigation of the trope in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s mock-epic poem of 1797, “Washing Day.” Anticipating Nicholson Baker, Maureen McLane, and Helen Vendler’s modern uses of the hot-air balloon as a symbol for formalist literary analysis, Barbauld concludes her poem with the figure of the Montgolfier balloon as a “bubble” that is equated with the production of verse, a simile rife with anxiety about the relationship of poetics to the domestic labor of washing, but also to the manifold discourses implied by the Romantic-era balloon, such as political invasion, femininity, cosmopolitanism, and even madness. What emerges at the end of Barbauld’s poem, however, is not the dismissal of eighteenth-century women’s work (whether laundry or poetry) but a transhistorical model of poetic form as a technology to be operated by a close reader, an idea that subverts Cleanth Brooks’ metaphor of the “well wrought urn” through Margaret Cohen’s account of “craft.” Resisting Brooks’ notion that the poetic vessel is antiquarian, inert, and stable, Barbauld’s airborne vessel, like Cohen’s ships, is dynamic, labor-intensive, and buffeted by external currents. The transhistorical reach of the trope of the balloon through literary criticism that this paper traces brings into focus the reader’s relation to poetic form in a new way, to ask what treating formalism as technology might mean for the conception of close reading as labor.

June 2017: Arden Hegele is a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities and a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her book project investigates the formal intersection of Romantic literature and medicine; other interests include technologies of reading, writing by women, and the British colonial project.

Thomas Pynchon’s interest in music is audibly reflected in the rich intertextual environments of his works such as Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel which includes numerous allusions to musical pieces, descriptions of performances, and song lyrics. The latter stand out from prose narrative as they introduce new diegetic dimensions to the novel by offering playful commentary on its plot and characters. The present study examines the novel’s acoustic background, pointing to the formal structure of songs and its role in locating singing human voices in opposition to noises emitted by technological devices such as V2 rockets. A classification scheme shows how Pynchon’s formal experimentation juxtaposes written and oral variants of language, thus connecting songs to one of the novel’s thematic centers — problematics of order. This function of songs is examined in an episode of Vaslav Tchitcherine’s mission of promoting literacy among oral tribes of Kazakhstan, that serves as a commentary on the conventional character of writing systems and their ability to transform the poetic quality of language into a systematic structure.

Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) eludes generic categorization by crossing the boundaries between dystopian fiction, fantasy novel, life writing, and fiction marked by magic realism. In postmodern fashion, it plays with spatiotemporal frameworks and narrative order, shifts narrative voices, and perspectives and uses a multiplicity of presentational modes including dialogue and scholarly text commentary with encyclopedic annotations. In its “Epilogue,” the novel features metalepsis when it introduces the author, who talks to his protagonist about his work. The question arises how the novel’s radio play adaptation, first broadcast by the BBC on 1 November 2014, translates this playfulness into its own semiotic system. This paper particularly focuses on the narratological category of “voice” and explores what happens when narrators’ and characters’ voices are actualized in radio drama, how the radio play uses voice-over narration, voice qualities and the doubling of parts to create a recognizable as well as surprising aural storyworld. It also analyzes how sound techniques and music are employed to create narrative structures. Because of their medial instantaneousness and evanescence, radio plays arguably have to rely on disambiguation to make themselves accessible to a listening audience. However, as this paper shows, they also have a range of radiophonic techniques at their disposal to create narrativity on their own terms.

This essay argues that the linguistic turn in literary theory, often seen as just a declarative and, in the view of some, catastrophic veering into deconstruction, actually had three 20^th-century phases. The first was associated with a reaction to Romantic linguistic excess and dominated the early part of the century, manifesting itself in the work and theories of Eliot, Hofmannsthal, and the logical positivists. The second phase was centered on semantics and was above all a reaction to what was seen as the misuse of language by midcentury totalitarian regimes in Europe. The New Criticism dominant in America during this era can be seen as part of this paradigm and therefore less oriented toward an aesthetic formalism than a defensive inoculation against linguistic abuse. The third phase is dominated by deconstruction and its promulgation of — following the earlier example of Roman Jakobson — a language radically independent of anterior reference and signification. Yet, paradoxically, the era, which was the ultimate unmooring of language from prudence and caution, also saw the elevation of a linguistic approach to all the disciplines, prompting speculation that perhaps the rhetoric of transgression concealed a reality of linguistic plenitude. In the twenty-first century, the epistemological primacy of language, though, seems to have yielded to empiricism and speculative ontology. Yet despite the new appeal of what Best and Marcus call “surface reading,” and though the linguistic turn cannot return as it was in the 20^th century, its multiple legacies are important. 

Contrary to widespread celebrations of the Western sixties as the antiauthoritarian heyday of “shining youthfulness” and “revolutionary lyricism” in contemporary cultures, Milan Kundera’s novel Život je jinde (Life Is Elsewhere), written shortly after the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968, exposes the narcissistic underside of this subversive epoch through a highly subjective juxtaposition of the two major historical events that happened in the same year in Eastern and Western Europe — Prague Spring and French May ’68. While Kudera’s idiosyncratic historical perspective, which perceived the Prague 1968 as more important than the May uprisings in Paris, may infuriate many Western readers, I argue that the book Život je jinde does not entertain a totally dismissive, unsympathetic attitude towards the revolutionary traditions of modern Europe at large. Relatively ignored by the critical world ever since its publication, Life Is Elsewhere not only outlines some radically alternative visions of the European sixties but also provides innovative ways to problematize the epistemological and ideological confines implicitly attached to the currently reigning liberal-democratic capitalism.