Dickinson Criticism 1997

Crumbley, Paul. Inflections of the Pen: Dash and Voice in Emily Dickinson. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Treats Dickinson's poetry as dialogic, centered on writing, and spatial. Given these premises, her punctuation becomes extremely important, and this is the most intensive study of the punctuation since Edith Wylder's now mostly discredited studies of "rhetorical punctuation" in the 1960s and 70s. In Crumbley's readings, Dickinson's poems display performative discontinuities and affective openness.

Ernst, Katharina. "'It was not Death, for I stood up . . . ': 'Death' and the Lyrical I." The Emily Dickinson Journal 6.1 (1997): 1-24. For ED, death is an absolutely final closure; this belief (which she embraces with a kind of relief) conditions representations of death in her poetry.

Hagenbüchle, Roland. "Translating Dickinson: The Translator as Cultural Ambassador." The Emily Dickinson Journal 6.2 (1997): 28-37. How close can a translation be? For instance, German translation of Dickinson is in one sense "easy," given similar prosodic and rhyming patterns in the two languages--but does that make these translations more, or less, problematic?

Hallen, Cynthia L. "Cognitive Circuits: The Circumference of Dickinson's Lexicon." The Emily Dickinson Journal 6.2 (1997): 75-83. "Webplay" on the polysemousness and resonance of the word "circumference" in Dickinson's work.

Mackenzie, Cynthia Jane. "'Sweet torment': reading Emily Dickinson's language of desire." DAI 58:07: 2656A (1997). [Colorado: Suzanne Juhasz] Erotics and linguistics in Dickinson's work; subversion via erotic destabilization.

Mayer, Nancy. "A Poet's Business: Love and Mourning in the Deathbed Poems of Emily Dickinson." The Emily Dickinson Journal 6.1 (1997): 44-67. ED's deathbed poems enact images of a loving community--in a somewhat negative manner, as they show that community sundered by the death of a member.

Messmer, Marietta. "'I have a vice for voices': reconstructing Emily Dickinson's epistolary subject positions." DAI 58:10: 3923A (1997) [York University: Lesley J. Higgins] Feminist implications of voice in ED's letters; also studies intertextuality there and the intersections of monologic and dialogic modes.

Mock, Michele. "Partnership in Possibility: The Dialogics of 'his efficient daughter Lavinia and his poetess daughter Emily.'" The Emily Dickinson Journal 6.1 (1997): 68-88. ED and her sister Vinnie were close intellectually and aesthetically; the much-derided Vinnie was essential to ED's art, its publication, and its reception.

Morris, Timothy. "Dickinson's Arctic." The Emily Dickinson Journal 6.1 (1997): 89-108. Studies the reference to Lady Jane Franklin in ED's "When the Astronomer stops seeking."

Nesteruk, Peter. "The Many Deaths of Emily Dickinson." The Emily Dickinson Journal 6.1 (1997): 25-43. There are multiple ways of representing death in ED's work. Nesteruk invokes a Derridean distinction among physical disintegration, demise of the speaking subject, and the loss of individual consciousness.

Van Dreel, Katrina Marie. "Settings of Emily Dickinson by American composers." DAI 59:03A: 0766 (1997). [UC-Santa Barbara: Elizabeth Mannion] Reviews settings (most of them use the 1890s Todd texts) by various composers.