Dickinson Criticism 1996

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Dickinson Criticism 1996

Altieri, Charles. "Dickinson's Dialectic." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 66-71. Not a grand Hegelian dialectic, but one of coming to terms with and performing the self.

Ando Midori. "Emily Dickinson's Vision of 'Circumference' and Death from a Japanese Perspective." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 221-225. Looks at ED through the Japanese concept of shugo--taking from any situation what is favorable and building on it. This concept energizes a certain skepticism like ED's, though she was less comfortable with such skepticism herself than a Japanese reader might be.

Ardanaz, Margarita. "Emily Dickinson's Poetry: On Translating Silence." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 255-260. On encountering, in the author's second language, ED and the academic criticism on her work.

Barrett, Faith. "Inclusion and Exclusion: Fictions of Self and Nation in Whitman and Dickinson." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 240-246. From opposite ends (public and private respectively), the two poets struggle, and fail, to develop a poetic self.

Bauerlein, Mark. "Emily Dickinson, Harper's and Femininity." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 72-77. Studies Harper's magazine issues from the 1850s as indications of ideologies about women. Domestic duty, sacrifice, and misery in marriage are common themes; so are stories about "exotic" women. ED's work lies in complicated relation to such representations.

Carney, Mary. "Dickinson's Poetic Revelations: Variants as Process." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 134-138. ED "was more interested in the process of creation" than in editing her poems for publication; yet her poems are not "unfinished," either.

Chaichit, Chanthana. "Emily Dickinson Abroad: The Paradox of Seclusion." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 162-168. ED went "abroad" in her imagination and is there now as a topic of interest to readers worldwide.

Costa, Catherine. "'My George Eliot': Deutera Dickinson / Mutter Eliot." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 59-65. Affinities to Eliot's work in Dickinson, an under-studied topic.

Crumbley, Paul. "Art's Haunted House: Dickinson's Sense of Self." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 78-84. Dickinson preferred being a haunting presence to being corporeal.

Diehl, Joanne Feit. "Selfish Desires: Dickinson's Poetic Ego and the Rites of Subjectivity." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 100-106. As a way of looking toward what ED makes of gender, we need to start with what she makes of the self.

Doriani, Beth Maclay. Emily Dickinson: Daughter of Prophecy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. The Bible and the New England sermon tradition as influences on Dickinson. She reacted as a woman to this complex and largely male influence; Doriani studies the tension between gender and religious themes in her work. ED is in the tradition of independent, antinomian critique of received religion.

Dow, William. "Elle signe souvent 'Emilie': Emily Dickinson and the French Critical Response." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 226-231. Survey of French scholarship on ED 1925-1993, which points out correctly that most of this work is not visible to American scholars.

Eberwein, Jane Donahue. "'Siren Alps': The Lure of Europe for American Writers." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 176-182. Sets ED's images of Europe in a context of travel writing that tends toward cultural commentary, including Washington Irving, Ik Marvel, &c.

Erickson, Marianne. "The Scientific Education and Technological Imagination of Emily Dickinson." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 91996): 45-52. Surveys the impact of sciences (especially botany, engineering, and geology) on Dickinson's work.

Francis, David Thomas. "Poetry's presence: Dickinson, Stevens, Celan, and the time of poetry." DAI 57.7 (1996): 3018A. [U of Washington: Leroy Searle] Presence, in the sense of a text's full use of the present moment, as feature of these poet's work.

---. "The Giant at the Other Side: Emily Dickinson and the Inhuman." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 267-272. Metaphysics, time, desire, and Dickinson.

Giffen, Allison. "That White Sustenance Despair: Emily Dickinson and the Convention of Loss." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 273-279. Part of a larger study on women's poetics of loss.

Grabher, Gudrun M. "Emily Dickinson and the Austrian Mind." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 10-17. Pastiches, in the Dickinson mode, of famous Austrian thinkers.

Grünzweig, Walter. "Cries of Distress: Emily Dickinson's Initial German Reception from an Intercultural Perspective." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 232-239. The career of Amalie von Ende, ED's first German translator (1898) and an interesting early commentator on her work.

Guthrie, James. "Law, Property, and Provincialism in Dickinson's Poems and Letters to Judge Otis Phillips Lord," The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.1 (1996): 27-44. Several early poems that draw imagery from the law and contain the word "Lord" may be addressed to Judge Lord. Guthrie works these possible allusions into a conventional courtship scenario; for contrast, see Werner.

Hagenbüchle, Roland. "'Sumptuous -- Despair': The Function of Desire in Emily Dickinson's Poetry." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 91996): 1-9. The concept of "lack" in Dickinson's lyric self.

Hallen, Cynthia L. "Brave Columbus, Brave Columba: Emily Dickinson's Search for Land." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 169-175. Various resonances of Columbus in ED's work; perhaps her entire oeuvre is an integrated "epic of America."

Hart, Ellen Louise. "New approaches to editing Emily Dickinson." DAI 57:10 (1996): 4369A. [UC-Santa Cruz] Standard editions distort ED's manuscript form; print transcriptions are best done if arranged in genres that correspond to ED's own: fascicles, letters, drafts, correspondences.

Hewitt, Elizabeth. "The poetic correspondence of Emily Dickinson." DAI 57.1 (1996): 216A. [Johns Hopkins] Lyric and letter as integrated in ED's work, with "The Way I read a Letter's --This" as type specimen.

---. "Dickinson's Lyrical Letters and the Poetics of Correspondence." Arizona Quarterly 52.1 (Spring 1996): 27-58. A general survey of ED's letters, with thoughts on genre.

Holloway-Attaway, Lissa. "The Business of Circumference: Circularity and Dangerous Female Power in the Work of Emily Dickinson." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 183-189. ED used notions of circularity to (literally) get around linear thought in powerful ways.\

Horan, Elizabeth. "To Market: The Dickinson Copyright Wars." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.1 (1996): 88-120. The Bianchi / Todd publication struggles over ED's work from 1886 to 1955, mostly from Bianchi's point of view. An up-to-date and definitive insight into these "wars."

Jackson, Virginia. "Dickinson's Figure of Address, in Orzeck & Weisbuch. 77-103. Early editors hyped Dickinson as a reticent poet whose secrets were being wrested from her mss. for publication. This para-address encloses a complex rhetorical situation in the poems themselves, where "I" (the poet) is continually becoming "you" (the reader).

Kelly, Lionel. "Emily Dickinson: Imagining a Text." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 155-161. Assessment of the material availability of Dickinson's texts and its implications.

Kirkby, Joan. "Dickinson Reading." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 247-254. Examples of Kirkby's intensive study of the contexts of Dickinson's work and language in contemporary texts.

Koski, Lena. "Sexual Metaphors in Emily Dickinson's Letters to Susan Gilbert." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 26-31. Analyzes these metaphors by sorting Dickinson's language into three categories: affectionate, romantic, and erotic.

Langdell, Cheri Davis. "Pain of Silence: Emily Dickinson's Silences, Poetic Persona and Ada's Selfhood in The Piano." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 197-201. Comparison of ED to the heroine of The Piano by Jane Campion.

Loeffelholz, Mary. "Etruscan Invitations: Dickinson and the Anxiety of the Aesthetic in Feminist Criticism." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.1 (1996): 1-26. Surveys 1980s and 1990s feminist criticism on ED, organized around the problem of aesthetics and the dichotomy between embodied experience and knowledge.

Loehndorf, Esther. "Emily Dickinson: Reading a Spinster." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 113-119. ED's unmarried state was not unusual for her time; many women found opportunity in spinsterhood. Yet being unmarried, for her and her contemporaries, was always "linked to the experience of a split, disintegrated self."

Lopresti, A, James. "The linguistic reaction of Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson to the prescriptive tradition." DAI 57.5 (1996): 2040A. [U of Denver] Both exemplify a transcendentalist revolt against 18th-century prescriptive grammar.

Marcellin, Leigh-Anne Urbanowicz. "Emily Dickinson's Civil War Poetry." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 107-112. ED "cared very much about the causes and effects of the war"; previous scholarship, even that of Shira Wolosky, has limited itself to seeing how ED read her own concerns into the war.

Mariani, Andrea. "The System of Colors in Emily Dickinson's Poetry: Preliminary Observations." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 39-44. Dickinson saw colors as Wittgenstein did: as systems of the mind, not as real qualities of objects.

Messmer, Marietta. "Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Logic: The Example of Her Puritan Heritage." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 127-133. Seeing that Puritan doctrine holds the seeds of its own deconstruction, ED pushed that doctrine to its contradictory extremes.

Morse, Jonathan. "Some of the Things We Mean When We Say 'New England'." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 209-214. Interesting meditations on how "New England" can summon up a context, a cliché, an immediacy. The case presents analogies to uses of Hawaii in various discourses.

Mulvihill, John. "Why Dickinson Didn't Title." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.1 (1996): 71-87. ED tended to put "names" in scare quotes anyway; her concern with the ineffable led her to distrust names and to think of her poems as things, not names-in-quotes.

Murray, Aífe. "Kitchen Table Poetics: Maid Margaret Maher and Her Poet Emily Dickinson." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 285-296. The presence of a maid, Margaret O'Brien, in Dickinson's household from 1858 to 1865 was not just coincidental with the poet's greatest output. With no maid from 1865 to 1869, ED did not write as much; the arrival of Margaret Maher in 1869 may have freed her again to write.

Nekola, Charlotte. "'Red in My Mind': Dickinson, Gender, and Audience." In Orzeck & Weisbuch. 31-35. "How does one claim self, voice, or ego when trained in a cult of self-denial?" Wordsworth defined poetry as "a man speaking to men"; women poets faced tensions and paradoxes in trying to speak at all.

Noble, Marianne. "Dickinson's Sentimental Explorations of 'The Ecstasy of Parting'." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 280-284. Intriguing brief essay on the pains and pleasures of imagined parting scenes in ED's work.

Nuckels, Rosa Turner. "Visions of light in the poetry of William Blake and Emily Dickinson." DAI 57.11 (1996): 4731A. [U of North Texas] Visionary impulses, the Bible, and prophecy connect both poets.

Pagnattaro, Marisa Anne. "Emily Dickinson's Erotic Persona: Unfettered by Convention." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 32-38. ED chose a persona that resists marriage, invites gender and other sexual ambiguities, and remains open to possibility.

Pardo, Amy Jo. "'Out of the Attic': the Gothic mode in the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti." DAI 57.6 (1996): 2468A. [U of Alabama: Philip Beidler] Intersections of sentimental and Gothic in both poets. Gothic and the power for "disruptive knowledge."

Porter, David. "Dickinson's Unrevised Poems." In Orzeck & Weisbuch. 11-29. Since poetry is essentially linguistic, ED's outrageous syntaxes are central to an understanding of the possibilities of all poetry. "What did Dickinson seek to preserve at the cost of intelligibility for her audience?"

Price, Kenneth Robert. "'Nobody knows, so still it flows': the discourse of water in the poetry of Emily Dickinson." DAI 57.4 (1996): 1620A. [U of North Texas] "Dickinson's water poems are the poet's means of initiating a discourse with God."

Runzo, Sandra. "Dickinson, Performance, and the Homoerotic Lyric." American Literature 68.2 (1996): 347-363. ED's performative, permeable selves anticipate campy performances of gender. Brings Dickinson into line with Judith Butler.

Salska, Agnieszka. "Emily Dickinson in Polish: Recent Translations." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 215-220. ED is popular in Poland, though existing translations sacrifice surprise and resonance for the sake of technical accuracy.

Sands, Marget. "Re-Reading the Poems: Editing Opportunities in Variant Versions." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 139-147. Discussion of a new variant manuscript of "There came a Day at Summer's full" that may have been used by Susan Dickinson when preparing the poem for an 1890 printing in Scribner's.

Shilton, Wendy Pauline. "'As space sat singing': musical influence on the language of Emily Dickinson." DAI 57.4 (1996): 1622A. [U of Toronto: Eleanor Cook] Gender and class issues in musicology serve as a paradigm for reading the impact of music on ED's work. Music was defined by males in her culture, and had, then as now, strong social-class coding.

Short, Bryan C. "Emily Dickinson and the Scottish New Rhetoric." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 261-266. Sees ED's work as growing out of her own rhetorical education, and hence as being a rhetorical performance within established conventions.

Sielke, Sabine. "Dickinson's Threshold Glances, or, Putting the Subject on Edge." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 93-99. Utopia, heaven, pain, the bodiless, and sexuality as liminal elements of ED's work.

Smith, Martha Nell. "A Hypermedia Archive of Dickinson's Creative Work, Part II: Musings on the Screen and the Book." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 18-25. The importance of hypertext as a complement to print study of Dickinson. With an interesting critique of Franklin's Master Letters edition.

Sullivan, David. "Suing Sue: Emily Dickinson Addressing Susan Gilbert." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.1 (1996): 45-70. Close readings of texts addressed to Sue, with exemplary attention to their knotty language and a review of different approaches to the correspondence.

Sullivan, David. "Running the 'Doublr Risk': Emily Dickinson Fleeing the Worm's Secretions." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 190-196. Sexual situations, according to Erving Goffman, are staged social performances; Dickinson's "In Winter -- in my Room" may be about just such performative sex.

Tanter, Marcy Lynne. "'Behind the Wall of Sense': Emily Dickinson and her nineteenth-century British writers." DAI 57.7 (1996): 3025A. [U of Massachusetts; David Porter] ED's reading of various British writers, and her affinities with them, including Byron, George Eliot, Tennyson, and others.

Tingley, Stephanie A. "'A Letter is a Joy of Earth': Emily Dickinson's Letters and Victorian Epistolary Conventions." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 202-208. Letter-writing, for Victorian women, was a domestic duty. In her own letters, ED "continuously sets up a tension between Victorian epistolary conventions and her own desire to do something more."

Weisbuch, Robert. "Nobody's Business: Dickinson's Dissolving Audience." In Orzeck & Weisbuch. 57-76. Dickinson is obviously a universalist, ostensibly a liberal humanist--or is she? Does she include the reader in her humanist address, as a peer "I"? Or is her disjoinited sense of identity a counterpoint to her supposed humanism?

Yin, Joanna. "Wild Nights and White Nights: Dickinson's Vision of the Poet in Anna Akhmatova." The Emily Dickinson Journal 5.2 (1996): 53-58. Dickinson and Akhmatova are alike in creating poetry out of everyday experience, and in insisting on the moral imperative of poetry.