We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Semiotic Theories in Conflict
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 June 2020
What do Dickinson’s habitual composition strategies indicate about her poetics? I argue that Dickinson and her peers wrote the way they did, generating variants and saving their writings in hand-bound booklets, because of the education they received in composition and rhetoric. This chapter draws on archival evidence to argue that many of Dickinson’s contemporaries composed in similar ways because of ideas about the importance of diction in the New Rhetoric. Dickinson’s training in varieties of skeptical, realist, and nominalist semiotic theory derived from Locke contribute to her persistent doubt and fragile faith in language. In a reading of several of Dickinson’s poems reflecting upon the composition process, I demonstrate both the presence of these rhetorical theories and their consequences in repeatedly staged crises of reference and articulation. This chapter lays the groundwork for subsequent chapters by depicting Dickinson’s poetics as evolving out of conflicts in a particular philosophical milieu.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
