Understanding
- Question: What is Pastoral?
- Answer: A mode of relation between a speaker and the world, specifically, nobility supported by a pathetic environment.
- Method: Alpers avoids beginning with a definition. Alpers leads with the representative anecdote of Rene Rapin's Dissertatio dei Carmn Pastorati, then develops his idea of mode (as opposed to content-based genre). Alpers develops common connections made through pastoral conventions, signifying an argument for a common human experience. Alpers spends the second half of the book exploring speakers who share the shepherd's mode without being shepherds.
- Assumptions: Alpers acknowledges that the modern pastoral breaks from the classical tradition and the Renaissance, but he argues that the modern perspective towards convention--modernity, emphasizing innovation--can still maintain the convention in its antithesis.
- Sententiae: "[T]he pastoral speaker emerges when formal pastoral, based on Virgilian eclogues, is amalgaated with epic and drama." (223)
Overstanding
- Assessment: A clever approach to a trans-historical definition of genre (or mode, rather). Though the "representative anecdote" is ultimately bewildering, it frontloads a convenient historicism to hedge against ahistorical universalities.
- Synthesis: Alpers takes a more traditional approach than Dubrow's work on the Lyric. Unlike Challenges of Orpheus, What is Pastoral? ultimately accedes to definition, possibly because Alpers wants to think more expansively across time. Unlike Dubrow, Alpers attempts to think across millennia.
- Application: Alpers' main innovation is a theory of pastoral mode that can be easily transported across time periods. The Renaissance, however, still maintains a clear pastoral tradition. Therefore, Alpers' work is best thought of as exemplary methodology. In my own work, I can look to Alpers for an analogy for defining image-text in the Renaissance without importing the overstated semiotic definitions.
No comments:
Post a Comment