The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Volume 34) (Theory and History of Literature)

About this book

The Unremarkable Wordsworth was first published in 1987. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. William Wordsworth was attacked by the critics of his time for imposing unremarkable sights and sentiments on his audience. In this books title essay an exemplary reading of the Westminster Bridge sonnet Geoffrey Hartman shows how Wordsworths "unremarkable phrases" attain their curious vigor. Drawing upon the propositions of semiological analysisthat signs are not signs unless they become perceptible through the contrast between "marked" and "unmarked"Hartman in a deft and sensitive analysis is able to play these notions of marking and the unremarkable off against each other. Wordsworth in the end overcomes both his critics and the science of signs: his quiet sonnetwith its muted or near-absent signsis itself as epitaph for an era a faithful sign of the times. Hartmans capacity to open up a dialogue between contemporary theory and Wordsworths poetry informs all of these essays written since the 1964 publication of Wordsworths Poetry a book that marked an epoch in the study of that poet and of Romantic poetry in general. In the years since then the nature of literary study has changed dramatically and Hartman has been a leader in the turn to theoretical modes of interpretation. The fifteen essays in The Unremarkable Wordsworth draw upon a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches from psychoanalysis to structuralism from deconstruction to phenomenology. Yet as Donald Marshall points out in his foreword "Wordsworth remains so much the focus of this book that critical method is strangely transmuted." For Hartman reading and thinking are inseparable; he has an uncanny power to convey in an intensified form the poets own consciousness not under the rubric of "intertextuality" but because he "has ears to hear." Geoffrey H. Hartman is Karl Young Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. His most recent book is Easy Pieces. Donald G. Marshall is a professor of English at the University of Iowa.