Stephen Bretzius’s scientific contributions

Diacritics 27.1 (1997) 73-90 Joel Fineman. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. [SW] Stephen Greenblatt. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1990. ________. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. --Martin Heidegger, "Science and Reflection" --Hamlet 2.2.366-68 In setting forth Shakespeare's unique role within an important institutional appropriation of the early modern theater by the postmodern university, together with a corresponding postmodern theory already shaping the early modern theater, a highly stylized early play like Romeo and Juliet is a good place to begin. For here, and from the beginning, the play unfolds outside (and therefore inside) the "deconstructed" binarisms characteristic of a certain poststructural literary theory generally -- womb-tomb, light-dark, female-male, Capulet-Montague, waking-sleeping, all-nothing, lark-nightingale, love-hate, late-early, vice-virtue, poison-remedy, mercy-murder, wedding-funeral, dove-raven, fiend-angel, wolf-lamb, miss-mend, stand-stir, haste-destiny, and so on. Here the nonbinary language [Begin Page 75] of the theater anticipates the "unlimited semiosis" of postmodern literary and cultural theory precisely by extending that nonbinary language to the opposition theater-theory, which the play also undermines. To cite only one particularly central example, literary criticism's ongoing concerns with the cultural and ritualistic origins of tragedy are not just explored but explained -- theorized -- by the play's self-conscious identification of Juliet as both "dove" ("So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows" [1.5.48]) and "lamb" ("Juliet! Fast, I warrant her, she. / Why, lamb! Why, lady!" [4.5.1-2]). The theatrical experience of the play's "poor sacrifices" [5.3.318] is further related to the Catholic mass, out of which Shakespeare's own tragic theater significantly evolves, by "Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen" [1.3.17] (Lammas [hlammas] hlaf 'loaf, bread,' maesse 'mass') and "God's bread, it makes me mad!" [3.5.176]. Redoubling this Christian context for sacrifice, a seasonal parallel in the myth of Persephone stolen away by Pluto shows through "Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field" [4.5.28-29] and "O son, the night before thy wedding-day / Hath Death lain with thy wife" [35-36]. Within the same ongoing theorization of the play's own theater, the "pomegranate tree" in Juliet's "It was the nightingale, and not the lark . . . / Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree" [3.5.2-4] further joins Juliet to Persephone, Lady Capulet to Ceres, and "love-devouring death" [2.6.7] to Hades. From the play to the theory, then, influential critiques of performative discourse and its ritualistic origins in postsubjective (post-Lacanian) sacrifice are generated not only by the postmodern university, but also, in Romeo and Juliet, by the early modern theater. For the play, and not simply the theory, is already about the play -- and autobiographical, from Montague's "Away from light steals home my heavy son, / And private in his chamber pens himself" [1.1.137-38] through Juliet's "Was ever book containing such vile matter / So fairly bound" [3.2.83-84] to Romeo's frantic "get me ink and paper" [5.1.25] and the Prince's final "This letter doth make good...

MLN 110.4 (1995) 679-691 --Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter" --Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Poe: Etude psychanalytique At the moment of the letter's furthest trajectory -- at the precise moment, that is, when Dupin substitutes his facsimile for the Minister's stolen letter -- the Minister rushes to the window, drawn by a diversion of Dupin's. In his Seminar on "The Purloined Letter," Jacques Lacan refers to this diversion as "an incident in the street," but Poe is more explicit about the distraction through which the entire circuit of the letter is itself diverted: At this moment, Dupin reports, "I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile." Then the scene outdoors again in a kind of secondary revision: For Lacan and many subsequent readers, the letter changes hands according to the repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang) developed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, but I want to suggest now that the entire compulsion repeats the historical violence staged, in Poe's story, by the man with a musket, and even earlier by the shoutings of a mob. To read the story in this way is also to repeat it, not by imitating its various transformations but by suggesting that its power to transform is really too plain -- that is, hidden in the diversion. In privileging the scene of exchange at the desk over the moment of diversion in the street, psychoanalytic readings of the story like those by Lacan and Marie Bonaparte understandably emphasize inside over outside, but the scene outside very much restages, and a moment earlier, the same psychoanalytic drama as the scene inside. In Bonaparte's brief remarks on the letter's purloining, she notes how the momentary presence of Dupin at the Minister's desk serves as an image of Poe the author, but no mention is made -- and this in a book notorious for its emphasis on Poe's dipsomania -- of the man in the street, "suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard" (Poe, 130-31). The movement from inside to outside is also a movement from Poe's most exalted sense of self (Dupin) to his most diminished ("a lunatic or a drunkard"). For Lacan, Dupin's repurloining of the letter from the Minister's dangling "fillagree card-rack" signifies castration, yet in the scene outside the still more phallic musket "proved to have been without ball," in the story but also in the Seminar. For while this purloined "ball" receives no direct commentary by Lacan, it rolls into view anyway, like a repression, at the very moment when the importance of just such an unconscious "remainder," or reminder, is being emphasized, "a remainder that no analyst will neglect, trained as he is to retain whatever is significant, without always knowing what to do with it: the letter, abandoned by the Minister, and which the Queen's hand is now free to roll into a ball [rouler en boule]" (Poe, 34). In the process, the Seminar ably affirms the...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 1988. Includes bibliographical references.