Weekly Response #1

Emily Schmitt

ENG 280

Natalie M. Phillips

9/2/12

Weekly Response #1

Quote; Emily Dickenson: “ Nods from the Gilded pointers-/ Nods from the Seconds slim-/ Decades of Arrogance between/ The Dial life-/ And Him-/” (4. 14-19.).

Quote; Julie Rikvin and Michael Ryan: “While practical speech facilitates access to information by making language as transparent as possible, poetic speech contorts and roughens up ordinary language and submits it to what Roman Jakobson called “organized violence,” and it is this roughening up of ordinary language into tortuous “formed speech” that makes poetry poetry rather than a weather report” (Rikvin, Ryan 4).

Question: Does “organized violence” only take place in poetry? Or do some of its elements come through in standard prose?

            Looking at this theory, I have to wonder if what the authours say about the “roughening up” of language is so exclusive to poetry. Looking back at some of the elements in the poems we were assigned I can’t help but note that I’ve seen some of this “roughening up” in standard prose as well as poetry. If you take Dickenson for example, the choppy way she refers to persons or ideas with multiple names and expects us to know what or whom she is talking about at each instance isn’t unfamiliar to me in standard prose. Words or passages with more than one meaning don’t just occur in poetry. Foreshadowing and symbolism are present very strongly in standard prose, and those are both expressions of literature that carry two or more meanings. 

Works Cited

Rikvin, Julie; Ryan, Michael. “Introduction: Formalisms.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed.

            Julie Rikvin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 4. Print.

Dickenson, Emily. “The Soul Selects her own Society”