This chapter considers James Joyce’s paradigmatic modernist epic, Ulysses (1922), reading its meticulous reconstruction of 1904 Dublin as a nostalgic return to the author’s homeland and childhood. While scholars have recently recognized the role of nostalgia in Joyce’s work, they have overlooked its significance to the form and content of Ulysses. The text privileges personal experience of a place and culture over linear ideas of national heritage; in so doing, it disrupts xenophobic accounts of Irish identity founded on racial purity. Its juxtaposition of everyday experience with ancient epic sidesteps an exclusionary idea of heritage while retaining the literary resonance of mythic parallels. In other words, it rejects an unhealthy obsession with the past through its use of nostalgia.

Chapter 7 surveys the various Balkanisms that emerge from a consideration of the syntax of the Balkan languages. Particular attention is given to the ordering of elements in phrases and sentences, the syntax of clitics and the “little words” that play such a key role in Balkan syntax, and various types of sentence-combining, especially subordination (complementation) and coordination, but parataxis as well. Three key aspects of Balkan syntax—the loss of the infinitive and its replacement by finite verbs, impersonal constructions, and the narrative use of imperatives—are discussed at length.

This chapter tabulates the number of pieces of direct discourse in each book of Daphnis and Chloe, the number of sentences in each of these, and the number of words in each sentence. As well as some immediately obvious results – e.g. that the first case of direct discourse in surprisingly late in Book 1 (1.14.1), and is given to Chloe; that the number of speeches, and speakers, rises book by book – it explores some of the effects Longus’ artistry achieves: the quasi-stichomythia of Daphnis’ internal debate at 3.6 and the stichomythic exchange between him and Chloe at 3.10; the play with vocatives; the differences between emotional reflections expressed in mainly short, paratactic sentences, and the instructions of Philetas, Lycaenion and of the Nymphs, the arguments of Lamon, or the pleas of Gnathon, all articulated in more complex sentences. Unlike Morgan 2021 it does not bring indirect discourse into the discussion.

Chapter 4 begins by exploring the productive tension that can exist between gestural articulation and formal continuity in Schubert’s music, and its affinity with Schubert’s paratactic forms which exploit unexpected disjunction as a formal premise. It focuses on the expositional interpolations in Schubert’s sonatas that exhibit characteristics normally associated with development sections. The three analytical case studies that follow have been chosen for their distinctive approach to this formal practice, and demonstrate its early stages of development in D36/i and D353/i as well as a mature example, D804/i. Three fundamental questions underline my analyses: first, in what sense do the interpolations in Schubert’s first-movement expositions function as development (D353/i); second, the question of whether or not synthesis of the formal dialectic is achieved (D36/i), and finally, what the implications of this are for the articulation of a lyrically conceived teleology (D804/i). This chapter also contains a methodological interlude wherein I define my extension of Edward T. Cone’s concept of stratification to Schubert’s music and its relevance to the sonatas.

Chapter 1 focuses on the concept of ’the lyric’, considering various definitions of the term from literary criticism (the lyric mode in poetry), philosophy (via Hegel and Adorno), and musicology. It argues that the lyric mode’s professed ’unitary nature’ is offset by a distinctly sectional and disjunctive musical setting (via Marx’s Liedsatz), and illustrates this critical tension through an analysis of Schubert’s ’Ihr Bild’. Second, it examines Felix Salzer’s account of lyricism in Schubert’s sonatas, isolating the questions raised by this regarding the potentiality of lyrical themes and their will to repetition in contrast to the sonata’s imperative to develop. Third, it presents Schubert’s lyric parataxis (Mak, Adorno) as a viable alternative to the ’dramatic-dialectic’ model of sonata form exemplified in Beethoven’s music and explores the implications of this for the temporal unfolding of the music and the sense of directionality it articulates. In Part II, the chapter lays out three central propositions for a definition of lyric form and explains the book’s analytical methodology, placing it into the context of recent developments in the field of the new Formenlehre.

This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for construing logical relations between clauses. The chapter begins by clarifying the distinction between a clause simplex and a clause complex and the distinction between a clause complex and a verbal group complex. Subsequently the basic oppositions between parataxis and hypotaxis on the one hand and between projection and expansion on the other are introduced and relevant resources are then presented, section by section, in more detail. A sample analysis of a longer clause complex rounds off the discussion.

Unica Zürn’s narratives exemplify the post-1945 afterlife of surrealist narrative forms, which persist as mutations ruptured by historical trauma, marked by and constitutive of the fractured, damaged temporalities of subjective and historical experience. Joao Ribas has commented on how Zürn’s drawings exploit a ’repertoire of surrealist techniques’ (Dark Spring, 21); her writings similarly adapt many familiar surrealist narrative-aesthetic traits and practices to explore specific German post-war and post-Shoah contexts, deploying strategies of automatism, prolepsis, cryptographic and other phantasmagorical techniques, fairytale, literary, cinematic and other allusions, alongside formally experimental, densely polysemic, and allegorically autobiographical structures. Adapting the extensive archival resources provided by surrealist techniques enabled Zürn to produce narratives focused on representing and navigating the damaged durational temporalities of traumatic experience, encountered as simultaneously subjective (and thus rooted in problematically autobiographical narratives) and social (and thus grounded in shattering historical events and their disastrous psychological impacts). The essay examines key works to explore her insistent linguistic registering of trauma through a poetics of the fragment – a remnant of shattered language, and a preoccupation she inherited from her involvement with Alexander Camaro and the post-war Berlin surrealist group Der Badewanne and its aesthetics of constrained recycling as a response to the post-war scarcity of art materials – in which meaning is encrypted, demanding decoding by the reader.

Elizabeth Bishop’s travel writings sometimes comprise accounts of voyages, but, more often, both poems and essays constitute meditations on travel itself, including questions about the traveler’s ability or inability to see what is before her, and the moral question of her own implication as an American tourist, observing cultures from the outside. While criticized at times for colonialist attitudes, Bishop in fact frequently offers critiques of colonialism in the poems. Her travel prose, including her account of a trip to the Amazon with Aldous Huxley and his wife, owes its richness to its freedom to introduce anecdote and observation without any obligation to adhere to a thesis, even while some of her poems express anxiety about that very lack. Additionally, some of Bishop’s key poems involve her “writing back” to certain travel texts, e.g. Robinson Crusoe, or, in another famous case, an article in National Geographic.

Rather than a possible resolution to the “Marriage Debate,” Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale is a meta-critical poem designed to challenge his readers’ critical acumen and to assist in refining their interpretative skills. One element in the Tale’s instructive program is Aurelius’s little-noticed yet symptomatic love-wound, his sursanure. Outlining and then deploying the techniques of “symptomatic” literary criticism, this essay concentrates on five symptomatic modalities in the Tale—“parataxis,” “surface,” “intention,” “radical cure,” and “dehiscence.” While many readers share an unqualified admiration for the Franklin’s romance, the approach of this study argues for the necessity of reading the Tale symptomatically and “against the grain”—that is, closely, aggressively, unsentimentally, and counter-romantically.

Nothing is more characteristic of Cormac McCarthy’s literary style than what Richard Woodward has called the “biblical gravity” of his prose. While references to the Bible abound in McCarthy’s work, it is the archaic vocabulary, powerful cadence, formal and thematic repetitions, and above all the paratactic syntax of McCarthy’s style inspired by the King James Bible that provide the closest link between his fiction and the Judeo-Christian tradition. This chapter examines the convergence of religion and aesthetics in McCarthy’s work as well as the function of a biblical narrative style in the fully administered world of contemporary society. Through readings of McCarthy’s essay “The Kekulé Problem” (2017), the importance of Christian mysticism to his work, and his peculiar association with the Santa Fe Institute, the chapter shows how McCarthy’s fiction draws on the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to produce a sense of mystery in the disenchanted world of modernity. At the same time, this production of mystery entails a mystification of literature that the chapter places in the postwar literary context in which McCarthy began his writing career.