Download Language, sign, and gender in Beowulf by Gillian R. Overing PDF
By Gillian R. Overing
Now not a publication approximately what Beowulf skill yet the way it potential, and the way the reader participates within the strategy of that means construction.Overing’s fundamental target is to deal with the poem by itself phrases, to track and advance an interpretive approach consonant with the level of its distinction. Beowulf’s arcane constitution describes cyclical repetitions and patterned intersections of subject matters which baffle a linear point of view, and recommend as a substitute the irresolution and dynamism of the deconstructionist unfastened play of textual elements.Chapter 1 posits the self/reader as a functionality of the text/language, analyzing the ways that the textual content "speaks" the reader. bankruptcy 2 develops an interactive semiotic approach in an try and describe an isomorphic relation among poem and reader, among textual content and self. bankruptcy three addresses the notions of textual content and self as extra advanced features or formulations of wish, and therefore complicates and expands the arguments of the 2 previous chapters. the ultimate bankruptcy examines the problem of wish within the poem, and, to a lesser quantity, hope within the reader (insofar as those could legitimately be seen as unique from every one other).
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Additional info for Language, sign, and gender in Beowulf
Sample text
The problematic of gender emerges as a more complex continuation of the open-ended movement of metonymy and of the restless dynamism of interlace. " Let me repeat that this is not a book about what the poem meanswe have plenty of these alreadybut rather how it means, and how the reader participates in the process of meaning construction. These chapters, therefore, will arrive at no formal conclusion. They perform the equivalent of a critical, interpretive balancing act, though one that is less accomplished than that achieved in the poem.
Here I stress the idea of fusion as ongoing process, rather than resolution or crystallization of meaning, and return to the metaphor of weaving described in the introduction, which stresses multifaceted process, continuity, and continual possibility. The structure of the web, which is an especially apt analogue for both the mode of Beowulf and our engagement with the poem, facilitates the play of difference, allowing lines of sense to converge and separate freely. What I loosely term "spontaneity" or "immediacy" is a function of this dynamic process of fusion, this simultaneity of impact on the reader.
It proposes that the standard characteristics of Old English poetic dictionalliteration, repetition, variation, parataxis, use of formulas, word compounds, "kennings," antithesis, understatementcan be recast as features of the metonymic mode in language. The continguous, dyadic alignment of metonymic phrases or ideas resists the interpretive closure of metaphor, where meaning is construed, governed, by a third element, a collocating reader or the poet's contextual directive. In terms of the overarching metaphor of weaving, the language of the text weaves its own open-ended, metonymic fabric.