The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry (Language, Discourse, Society (Paperback))

Working from recent advances in linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis and theory of ideology, the Language, Discourse, Society series is committed to forwarding an adequate account of the effective reality of meaning, sign, subject in the relations of signifying practices and formations. That such an account must have implications and repercussions for the current terms of cultural and political understanding will be the constant edge of the series. Contents 1 THE SECRET COMPLEMENT 1 The terms of the argument: the demise of the Common Reader, and the attempt to identify an uncommon one. Methods of identification: (a) margins and marginals in the poetry of Wordsworth and Arnold; (b) the use of external reference as a rhetorical strategy in poems by Wordsworth, Hardy, Eliot, Auden. 2 THE DURATION OF MORTMAIN 21 Rites of passage decline into caricature. Religious and neurotic ceremonial in Freud and Eliot. ## INTHECAGE 36 The choice between myth and ritual in 'modernist' literature. Sexuality and social division in 'A Game of Chess'. The language of neurotic ceremonial: 'this' and 'that'. The Waste Land: rite of passage or compulsive repetition? 4 WORDS FULL OF FAR-OFF SUGGESTION 58 Yeats's discouragement of the accidental and temporary among his readers. Robert Frost's somethings. Ritual and rhetoric in 'The Second Coming' and in the early Cantos. Front Matter....Pages i-viii The secret complement....Pages 1-20 The duration of mortmain....Pages 21-35 In the cage....Pages 36-57 Words full of far-off suggestion....Pages 58-69 The spirit of anti-pathos....Pages 70-81 Form-sense and dictator-sense....Pages 82-103 Going over....Pages 104-129 The serious action....Pages 130-149 Les blancs débarquent....Pages 150-176 Declarative voices....Pages 177-195 Playing havoc....Pages 196-230 Conclusion....Pages 231-250 Back Matter....Pages 251-272