This article explores the poetics at work in Black American poet Ross Gay’s contemporary two-volume Book of Delights (2019 and 2023). I argue that his delights are phytopoetic, which describes moments when plants impact the human imagination and, by extension, shape human culture and aesthetic production, such as literary texts. Such phytopoetic processes are moments of co-creation, involving plants both as engaged in poietic making and in the shaping of the poetics of a given text. By examining patterns of form (...) in Gay’s prose and close reading some of his delights that center on plants, this article unfolds Gay’s specific phytopoetics and shows that the delights are a genre that operates on plant time: seasonal, cyclical, and rooted in growth. As such, the genre slows down the reader and draws attention to the delight found in small, everyday encounters with plants and the world around us, even in the midst of overwhelming crises. (shrink)

The article introduces the problematics of the classical two-valued logic on which Western thought is generally based, outlining that under the conditions of its logical assumptions the subject I is situated in a world that it cannot address. In this context, the article outlines a short history of cybernetics and the shift from first- to second-order cybernetics. The basic principles of Gordon Pask’s 1976 Conversation Theory are introduced. It is argued that this second-order theory grants agency to others through a (...) re-conception of living beings as You logically transcending the I. The key principles of Conversation Theory are set in relation to the poetic forms of discourse that played a key role in art as well as philosophical thinking in China in the past. Second-order thinking, the article argues, is essentially poetic. It foregoes prediction in favour of the potentiality of encountering tomorrow’s delights. (shrink)

Speaking of “delight of knowledge” al-Māwardī- explains the meaning of knowledge in a sense which is alien to the philosophical tradition, but well known in the ancient Greek rhetoric. Some signs indicate that the Arabic adab-literature is in a certain respect heir to the Greek rhetoric. The presence of some elements of philosophy in al-Māwardī’s writings can be explained by the fact that the traditional rhetoric formation relied on a basic knowledge of philosophy too. This kind of the popular (...) version of philosophy has been conveyed to al-Māwardī, and through him to the Arab readers. One has to take into account the ancient rhetoric and the adab-literature as an alternative channels through which Greek philosophy has been transmitted to the Islam. (shrink)

The study aims to address the existing research gap through a thematic comparison between the aesthetics of Kant and Abhinavagupta. This paper explores Kant’s notion of aesthetic judgment based on disinterestedness with Abhinavagupta’s analysis of sādhāraṇīkaraṇa. We argue that the notions of “disinterested judgment” in Kant and sādhāraṇīkaraṇa in Abhinavagupta points towards the impersonal nature of aesthetic delight which makes the universality of aesthetic experience possible. Hence, aesthetics in both Kant and Abhinavgupta are not the personal and subjective experience (...) but a kind of universality based on the ability to experience the impersonal joy. However, the notion of aesthetic delight in Kant is confined to the agreeable mental states only while in Abhinavgupta the notion of rasa includes both positive as well as the negative mental states like fear, disgust, etc. In this regard, the paper will also analyze the affinity between notion of sensus communius in Kant and sahṛdaya in Abhinavagupta which highlights the importance of aesthetic community and the impersonal nature of aesthetic delight. (shrink)

'" -Daniel Cottom, David A. Burr Chair of Letters, University of Oklahoma Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman investigates the fascination with joyful malice in eighteenth-century Europe and how this obsession helped inform ...

Empirical research in the psychology of nature appreciation suggests that humans across cultures tend to evaluate nature in positive aesthetic terms, including a sense of beauty and awe. They also frequently engage in joint attention with other persons, whereby they are jointly aware of sharing attention to the same event or object. This paper examines how, from a natural theological perspective, delight in natural beauty can be conceptualized as a way of joining attention to creation. Drawing on an analogy (...) between art and creation, we propose that aesthetic appreciation of nature may provide theists with a unique phenomenological insight into God's creative intentions, which are embodied in the physical beauty of creation. We suggest two directions in which this way of looking at the natural world can be fleshed out: in a spontaneous way, that does not take into account background information, and with the help of science. (shrink)

Can you draw a clear line through American history from the Puritans to the "Nones" of today? On the surface, there is not much connective tissue between the former, who often serve as shorthand for a persistent religious fanaticism in the United States, and the almost one quarter of the population who now regularly check the "None" or "None of the above" box when responding to surveys of religious preference. But instead of seeing a disconnect between these two groups separated (...) by time, historian Catherine Albanese insists there is a deep connection that spans the centuries. With a targeted romp through American history from the seventeenth century to the present, Albanese ties together these seemingly disparate groups through a shared and distinctively American preoccupation with delight and desire. Albanese begins our journey with the role of delight and desire in the brand of Calvinism championed by renowned Puritan minister Cotton Mather and later Jonathan Edwards. She then traces the development of these themes up through the present, treating the reader to revelatory readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Andrew Jackson Davis, William James, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Elizabeth Towne, and others, revealing the contours of an evolving theology of desire. The result is an original and entertaining take on an underexamined through line in American history. (shrink)

K Williams; The Labour We Delight In, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 32, Issue 2, 28 June 2008, Pages 293–303, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.000.

In recent times it has seemed to many people as if the unifying impact of mass forms of popular culture has been overshadowed by the postmodernism of cultural pluralism, identity politics, niche marketing and lifestyle diversity. Using insights from psychoanalysis, this new book suggests that powerful forces may still be at work extending and deepening their hold on popular experience through the unifying forms of modern culture. The practices and aesthetic codes of popular culture provide ways of confronting and managing (...) the basic psychic tensions and anxieties of modern life, appealing globally across the deep divides of class, gender and ethnicity. In a series of extended illustrations, Barry Richards explores the emotional underpinnings of the rise of football as the 'people's game', the appeal of the motor car and other consumer goods, the strategies of advertising, the cultural predominance of pop music, and popular images of the countryside. While each phenomenon has a range of meanings of its own, the illustrations reveal the common positive side of these cultural forms, which serve as vehicles for psychological integration. At the core of this book is the idea that the pleasures of popular culture are at their strongest and best when they confirm our sense of belonging in the social order. Despite the constraint and disappointment inevitably involved in this, the reconciliation with authority which it brings is vital for the containment of the anxieties with which we all struggle. Disciplines of Delight reveals how psychoanalytic thinking can add to social understanding and is an original contribution to current debates on the nature of contemporary society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonaventure's Aesthetics: The Delight of the Soul in Its Ascent into God by Thomas J. McKennaDennis P. BrayThomas J. McKenna, Bonaventure's Aesthetics: The Delight of the Soul in Its Ascent into God. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020. 186 pp. $100. ISBN: 978-1-4985-9765-4.It has been just over three decades since the last book-length engagement with aesthetics in Bonaventure's work (S. McAdams, "The Aesthetics of Light: A Critical (...) Examination of Bonaventure's Doctrine of Light in View of His Aesthetics," [PhD diss., Pontifica Universitas Gregoriana, 1991]). Heartily welcome, then, is Thomas McKenna's Bonaventure's Aesthetics. The purpose of the book, in McKenna's words, is "to provide a comprehensive analysis of Bonaventure's aesthetics, that is, his philosophy, theology, and mystical theology" (2). In so doing, he intends also to argue for a resolution to a list of disputed questions raised by contemporary voices – most famously that of Balthasar – in the debate on Bonaventure's aesthetics. Put another way, McKenna's project has two aims: first, to understand Bonaventure's aesthetics on its own (historical, theological, philosophical) terms; second, to determine whether that aesthetic connects significantly to contemporary questions in the field of aesthetics. In this review I will detail and engage critically with some of the foundational methodological moves McKenna makes in the book's introduction. I will then summarize the big themes of the book's four chapters, and conclude with a few evaluative remarks.However extensive their merits, earlier studies on Bonaventure's aesthetics are not as thorough as McKenna's and, more problematically, are limited by their investment in predominantly Enlightenment-era concerns. What I mean is that thinkers such as Shaftesbury, Baumgarten, and Kant were absorbed with matters such as the immediacy of the aesthetic experience, disinterest, the role of the affect, freedom of the imagination, and the categorization of les beaux arts. It is this trajectory (call it "the standard paradigm," using McKenna's terminology) that the field of aesthetics, as we know it, has largely followed. Early historians of aesthetics viewed, and often evaluated, medievals through the standard paradigm. Even later, more revisionist historical work sought to understand medieval thought in distinction from the paradigm. In most instances, [End Page 243] though, it is the Enlightenment-era list of concerns that serves as the fulcrum on which historical work has tended to swing. Our understanding of Bonaventure, then, is limited to the extent that we take the standard paradigm as guide.Bonaventure's Aesthetics is so compelling, in part, because it does not begin with the standard paradigm, but rather a more historically sound (and frankly, more interesting) list of research questions. This is not to say that McKenna rejects the standard paradigm. It is simply too deeply embedded in how we conceive of such matters to naively ignore. Instead, McKenna works to situate these later concerns as secondary, or parallel, to Bonaventure's concerns and interests. McKenna realizes that he faces a difficulty at this juncture, one that must be addressed by anyone aiming for historical sensitivity regarding their object of study. The difficulty is what McKenna calls "the hermeneutical crisis," and he formulates the key issues by quoting Jean Grondin: "The basic doctrine…is that every particular phenomenon must be conceptualized within the context of its age" to avoid anachronism. But if so, this "raises a striking epistemological problem…Our view of earlier ages must itself be produced by reference to our present, and is thereby relativized." Thus Grondin asks, "how if at all, is it possible to escape from the hermeneutic circle of our historicity?" (9, quoting J. Grondin, Introduction to Philosophicaal Hermeneutics [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997], 76).Restricted to Bonaventure studies, McKenna poses the worry this way: "is it possible to accurately recover the conceptualization of beauty and, perhaps, the arts of any age – ancient, medieval, or modern – with a reasonable degree of accuracy? If so, does it remain relevant to current aesthetic theory and practice?" (9).In sum, the apparent dilemma is between, on the one hand, "a historically accurate conceptualization of the aesthetic sympathies of the past," and on the other hand, "a... (shrink)

Beauty has not figured prominently in contemporary notions of human flourishing. This essay seeks to reclaim a notion of beauty that the Church and the academy can find valuable again. The question is engaged here specifically from the perspective of a biblical scholar using a biblical text-the poem in Song 4:1–7 — to focus and source the discussion.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:René Girard LOVE DELIGHTS IN PRAISES: A READING OF THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA Valentine and Proteus have been friends since their earliest childhood in Verona, and their two fathers want to send them to Milan for their education. Because of his love for a girl named Julia, Proteus refuses to leave Verona; Valentine goes to Milan alone. In spite ofJulia, however, Proteus misses Valentine greatly and, after a (...) while, he, too, goes to Milan. The two friends are reunited in the ducal palace; the duke's daughter, Silvia, is present and Valentine briefly introduces Proteus. After she departs, Valentine announces that he loves her and his hyperbolical passion irritates Proteus. Once alone, however, Proteus has his own announcement to make: he no longer loves Julia; he, too, has fallen in love with Silvia: Even as one heat another heat expels, Or as one nail by strength drives out another, So the remembrance of my former love Is by a newer object quite forgotten.1 If there ever was a "love at first sight," this must be it, we think, but Proteus is not so sure: in three crucial lines, he suggests a different explanation: Is it mine eye, or Valentinus' praise, Her true perfection or my false transgression, That makes me reasonless, to reason thus? (Il.iv. 196-98) 231 232Philosophy and Literature The entire comedy massively confirms the crucial role of Valentine in the genesis of Proteus's sudden passion for Silvia. According to our romantic and individualistic ideology, a borrowed sentiment such as this one is not genuine enough to be really intense. This is not true in Shakespeare; Proteus's desire is so furious that he would actually rape Silvia if Valentine did not rescue her in extremis. When Shakespeare wrote his plays, the second-hand desire he portrays had no name, no official existence, but this is no longer true. We call it mimetic or mediated desire. Valentine is the model or mediator of this desire. Proteus is its mediated subject and Silvia is their common object. Mimetic desire can strike with the speed of lightning because it does not really depend upon the visual impact made by the object; it only seems to. Proteus desires Silvia not because their brief encounter made a decisive impression on him but because he is predisposed in favor of whatever Valentine desires. Mimetic desire is not some modern idea that I would force upon an unwilling writer; it is Shakespeare's own idea and we can see this again in Proteus's soliloquy, which keeps minimizing the role of perception in the genesis of his desire for Silvia: She is fair; and so is Julia that I love, That I did love,... (Il.iv. 199-200) IfSilvia is no more desirable objectively thanJulia, her only advantage is that Valentine already desires her. Shakespeare undermines the predominance of sight in the expression love at first sight. In A Midsummer Night's Dream as well, the two girls are said to be equally beautiful, also for the purpose of reinforcing the case for mimetic desire. II The dramatic context of this first mimetic desire, and of many others in Shakespeare, is the close and ancient friendship of the two protagonists. When Proteus is about to arrive in Milan, Valentine describes this friendship to Silvia and her father: I knew him as myself; for from our infancy We have convers'd and spent our hours together. (II.iv.62-63) René Girard233 When two young men grow up together, they learn the same lessons, they read the same books, they play the same games, and they agree on just about everything. They also tend to desire the same objects. This perpetual convergence is not incidental but essential to the friendship ; it occurs so regularly and inevitably that it seems preordained by some supernatural fate; it really depends on a mutual imitation so spontaneous and constant that it remains unconscious. When we think of imitation, we imagine two people copying each other's manners, habits, accents, and even their likes and dislikes in the still childish and innocent manner of two childish friends. We never think of what Proteus's desire for... (shrink)

This book is about the three kinds of plots that run the lives ofpatients--subservience, bureaucratic delay and overpowering. It isalso about the three kinds of psychotherapy that attempt to deal withthese plots: objective psychiatry, which deals with the outsidesurface; subjective psychiatry, which deals with the inside; andnarrative psychiatry, which attempts to deal with both.

Unlike science fiction, which assumes a baseline of ordinary experience and sense of the nature of reality that are marked white, Black speculative literature's baseline is a parallel tradition responding to Black origins in slavery, racism, and colonialism; it imagines a future that critiques and is not bound up with science fiction's white origins in the onset of modernity. Its cosmologies and anthropologies are completely different. The Dark Delight of Being Strange is a work of but not about Black (...) speculative fiction. It explores the inherent meaning of speculative production for thinking, writing, living, and enacting concepts of Black freedom and why it is so critical for understanding Black sociality and politics. It combines memoir, storytelling, and philosophical prose with the Black imaginary to capture the idea that Black life is surreal, extraordinary--but not (or not only) in the sense of speculative fiction. It leaves us squarely in our world and time to reveal these aspects within the mundane or everyday. James Haile challenges us to rethink contemporary and historical Black life and approaches to freedom outside of Euromodernity in order to demonstrate the avant-garde aesthetic expressions critical to Black political thinking. It offers a rereading of enslavement through an innovative account of Henry Box Brown's famed escape, posits a parallel Black lifeworld as the destination of H. G. Wells' Journey to the Center of the Earth, thematizes time in Henry Dumas as an embodied phenomenological reality, imagines the survival skills of the octopus as an emblem for how to negotiate Black existence, theorizes memory as subject to metaphysical and ontological lack as a result of social alienation, questions whether there can be an outside--a place where Black people can be free--given the condition of death we call democracy as related in James Baldwin's letter to his nephew, and concludes by depicting Frederick Douglass as exemplar of the aesthetic, political, and philosophical Blackness that can be free. Each narrative is accompanied by a critical introduction and endnotes that provide philosophical context; together they argue that Blackness is a fundamental entanglement and not a limit--of the human or of freedom--rather somewhere beyond. Dark Delight invites us to reimagine time, space, place, history, and memory and how to understand the past. (shrink)

Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain, all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...) help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art—namely that if one is going to do so, one must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point, I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (although not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain. (shrink)

Hunting ducks with a firearm has become increasingly contested in industrialized and urbanized contemporary societies. In southern New Zealand, an area that maintains strong connections to rural life ways, duck shooting is still a very popular activity. However, even duck shooters living in this region are increasingly finding that they must justify an activity their grandparents practiced without compunction. This paper considers ethical discourses associated with the killing of ducks, particularly the ways in which people who shoot ducks construct the (...) act of killing as an activity that can be ethically justified. As this paper will show, duck hunters assert that they have a more realistic and appropriate view of nature and animal life cycles than the average antihunter who might criticize them. New Zealand duck hunters also embed their hunting activities within a discourse of wetland conservation, arguing that they do far more to preserve and develop wetlands than do non-hunters. This paper concludes that duck hunters' understandings of nature are intrinsic to the ethical discourses that underpin duck hunting activities in New Zealand. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Amusement, Delight, and Whimsy: Humor Has Its Reasons that Reason Cannot Ignore” by Edith K. Ackermann. Upshot: Ackermann’s target article strikes a chord by thinking together oblique and rational aspects of knowing in constructivism. Her target article points out uses of humor and various ways of making sense of our experience that have been underestimated in constructivist discourse. While I can agree on the main lines of her argument, I want to argue for (...) further differentiation and clarification with respect to some historic and systematic aspects. (shrink)

What makes something good for me? Most contemporary philosophers argue that something cannot count as good for me unless I am in some way attracted to it, or take delight in it. However, subjectivist theories of prudential value face difficulties, and there is no consensus about how these difficulties should be resolved. Whether one opts for a hedonist or a desire-satisfaction account of prudential value, certain fundamental assumptions about human well-being must be abandoned. I argue that we should reconsider (...) Plato's objectivist theory of goodness as unity, or the One. This view is both consistent with and explains our most basic views both about goodness in general and human well-being in particular. (shrink)

‘It seems an unaccountable pleasure’, Hume writes, ‘which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end.’ It is with this opening remark that Hume introduces the main subject of his essay, ‘Of Tragedy’. In that essay he (...) attempts to account for the pleasure spectators of well-written tragedies receive, i.e. he attempts to solve what might aptly be called the ‘delightful tragedy’ problem, which, in essence, is the paradoxical phenomenon of pleasure being aroused from the ‘bosom of uneasiness’. In this paper I shall critically analyse Hume's solution to the problem; the ultimate point of my discussion will be to determine whether his solution is adequate. I shall begin by focusing briefly upon two accounts of the paradoxical pleasure which Hume mentions and criticizes. Then I shall set out and analyse Hume's own account, and thereby determine its adequacy. (shrink)

A review-essay of P. Guyer's "A History of Modern Aesthetics" (CUP, 2014).

What makes something good for me? Most contemporary philosophers argue that something cannot count as good for me unless I am in some way attracted to it, or take delight in it. However, subjectivist theories of prudential value face difficulties, and there is no consensus about how these difficulties should be resolved. Whether one opts for a hedonist or a desire-satisfaction account of..

Introspective crocodiles and exhibitionist writers, queered gender and temporality, critiques of capitalism and canon, experimental form and technique, speculative storylines traversing the citysca...

Context: The idea for this article sprang from a desire to revive a conversation with the late Ernst von Glasersfeld on the heuristic function - and epistemological status - of forms of ideations that resist linguistic or empirical scrutiny. A close look into the uses of humor seemed a thread worth pursuing, albeit tenuous, to further explore some of the controversies surrounding the evocative power of the imaginal and other oblique forms of knowing characteristic of creative individuals. Problem: People generally (...) respond to humor, i.e., they are inclined to smile at things they find funny. People like to crack jokes, make puns, and, starting at age two, human infants engage in pretense or fantasy play. Research on creativity, on the other hand, has mostly scorned the trickster within. Cognitivists in particular are quick to relegate wit, whimsy, and even playfulness to the ranks of artful or poetic frivolities. Method: We use the emblems of the craftsman, the trickster, and the poet to highlight some of the oblique ways of knowing by which creative thinkers bring forth new insights. Each epitomizes dimensions intrinsic to the art of “possibilizing.” Taken together, they help us better understand what it means to be playful beyond curious, rigorous beyond reasonable, and why this should matter, even to constructivists! Results: The musings characteristic of creative individuals speak to intelligent beings’ ability to use glitches intentionally or serendipitously as a means to open up possibilities; to hold on to a thought before spelling it out; and to resist treating words or images as conventional and arbitrary signs regardless of their evocative power. To fall into nominalism, Bachelard insisted, is a poet’s nightmare! Implications: Psyche is image, said Jung, and when we feel alive we rely on the imaginal to guide our reason. Note that image is not here to be understood as a picture in the head or a photographic snapshot of the world. The imaginal does not represent, it brings forth what we understand beyond words. It does not lock us into a single mode. Instead, it is a call to be mindful, in Ellen Langer’s sense: in the present, mentally alert, and on the outlook for our psyche’s own surprising wisdom (sagacity. Constructivist content: Debates on the heuristic function and epistemological status of oblique ways of knowing have long occupied constructivist scholars. I can only guess whether my uses of Jung’s imaginal or Bachelard’s anti-nominalism would have amused or exasperated Ernst! I do know that, on occasion, Ernst the connoisseur, bricoleur, and translator allowed the rationalist-within to include the poet’s power to evoke as a legitimate form of rationality. He himself has written about oblique knowing as legit! (shrink)

Bonaventure’s Aesthetics: The Delight of the Soul in Its Ascent into God provides an extensive analysis of Bonaventure’s concept of beauty, the first to appear since Balthasar’s Herrlichkeit, and the role it plays in the Itinerarium mentis in Deum.

This study focuses on the influence of the quality of services received by thalassotherapy customers on their global satisfaction and the relationship between this and the word of mouth. This study uses a hybrid SEM—classification tree analysis. The empirical findings reveal a significant relationship between the quality of each offered service and global satisfaction. This study contributes to identify tourist’s satisfaction or delight on received thalasso services through a proposed methodology. The main contribution of this work consists of the (...) proposal of a methodology to identify objectively through the opinion of tourists if they were satisfied or had reached delight. This work demonstrates, confirming what has been found in previous literature, that global satisfaction is related to the different experiences provided by the service. Thus, all hypotheses are accepted, supporting the hypotheses that relate the pool, the staff, the treatments, and the environment to satisfaction. In addition, the hypotheses that link satisfaction with the word of mouth are also supported. This theoretical implication has important practical implications for managers of the type of facilities such as those studied in this paper, since it shows that it is not enough to do well in one of the services provided if the environment or the interaction with the staff is not right. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to give a high-level overview of Irenaeus’s beatific vision, and to suggest that for him, the beatific vision has a temporal dimension (now and future) and a dimension of degree (lesser now, greater in the future). His beatific vision is witnessed as it intersects with at least four main ideas in his writing—the Trinity, anthropology, resurrection, and his eschatology. Irenaeus famously held that ‘the glory of God is living man, and the life of man (...) is the vision of God’ (AH 4.20.7), which speaks to the reality of seeing God in the present, but he could also look forward in anticipation to beholding the face of God in the resurrected body in the new creation. What made the latter possible is the gradual beholding of God in the present that makes one prepared to see God’s glory in the future. Additionally, the visio Dei is Trinitarian. We behold God in Christ, since God the Father is invisible, and it is the Holy Spirit who prepares us incrementally to see God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley HopkinsRichard D. LordThe Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Franco Marucci; 261 pp. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1994, $44.95.Paging one day through Hopkins’s notebooks in the library at Campion Hall, I was startled to find the draft of “Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves” placed directly (...) opposite the tortuous grade computations for one of his classes. This book presents a similar contrast—insights into “The Wreck of the Deutschland” buried in the technical language of structuralism, semiotics, and rhetoric.In his preface, the author calls his book “a revised and updated translation of my I fogli della Sibilla. Retorica et medievalismo in Gerard Manley Hopkins” (p. ix). As the title indicates, it is divided into two parts, the former dealing with Hopkins’s poetic rhetoric viewed synchronically and the latter with his “textuality as a confluence of... cultural codes” (p. 89).In the chapter introducing part one, Marucci dismisses, with few exceptions, criticism from 1918 to the present as being of little use to one investigating “the function and functionality of Hopkins’s poetic rhetoric” (p. 3). The exemplifying portion of this chapter (“Amplification”) addresses “God’s Grandeur” and “The Wreck of the Deutschland” as judicial speech (persuasive), with the reader performing the judicial function. The analysis is useful in providing insights into the poet’s rhetorical planning as he guides the reader in this persuasive process.Moving from the “Deutschland” to the “terrible sonnets” as exemplifications of “autocommunication,” Marucci notes that here the interlocutor gradually disappears as the sender-receiver relationship fades. He believes that Hopkins became “no longer capable of finding in himself (or, more probably, of offering to a receiver who had proved cold and indifferent) the necessary stimuli” (p. 76) and names the editor of The Month, Bridges, and other correspondents as the probable receivers.In the second (and major) part of the book, the author sets out to examine the cultural codes influencing the poet’s textuality. The chapter introducing this section, “‘Integrated’ and ‘Apocalyptic’ Writers,” first looks at “the global syntagmatic model of the Victorian Age” (p. 98) and then divides its texts according to this model into three categories. The first two either reflect or modify the syntagmatic codes (“integrated” writers) while the third opposes these codes (“apocalyptic” writers). The author’s thesis is that Hopkins is not fully any one of these, but that his Victorianism is subsumed in various ways and ultimately subordinated to his medievalism. His position is that Victorian codes essentially ceased to affect the poet after his entrance into the Society of Jesus, when they were replaced by medieval codes. This is developed in some detail in the chapter entitled “Hopkins and Duns Scotus.”Although the book takes a narrow critical approach to Hopkins, it still might [End Page 149] well have been enriched by allowing for the ways in which the Ignatian method of meditation, with its emphasis on the “application of the senses,” so clearly drew Hopkins to find a kindred spirit in Scotus. This, together with the kind of seminary training in vogue in the Catholic Church until after Vatican II, certainly contributed to the medievalism that Marucci finds in the later Hopkins.This is a useful and provocative book for scholars, but many of the footnotes seem unnecessarily long and some chapters conclude too abruptly. The highly specialized language of structuralism and semiotics requires an expertise that probably eludes most undergraduate students.Richard D. LordWillamette UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)