D. B. Ruderman | Ohio State University (original) (raw)

Papers by D. B. Ruderman

The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

The Wordsworth Circle, 2021

Although they theorized the relationshipdifferently,Wordsworth andColeridge each regarded poetry’... more Although they theorized the relationshipdifferently,Wordsworth andColeridge each regarded poetry’s meter as inseparable from its meaning (Wordsworth and Coleridge 162–65; Coleridge,Major Works 317). For Coleridge, meter is a regulating and necessary artifice. While “passion and will” are interpenetrating, meter works to “hold in check the workings of passion” (350). Furthermore, Coleridge suggests that meter has a structural and socializing function (351). It acts, hewrites, as a “medicated atmosphere.”Coleridge’s figuration (meter as environment) suggests containment as well as expansion and foregrounds meter’s spatial/extensive as well as temporal/ intensive dimension. Coleridge’s insistence that metered temporality is a necessary corollary to lived acts of passion and will extends beyond his writings on poetics. Elsewhere in the Biographia Literaria, he attacks what he takes to be the problematic temporal premises of associationist philosophy, namely the problem of absolute conte...

The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

European Romantic Review

aghan asserts that these poems “represent the pinnacle of Shelley’s poetic achievements” (236). C... more aghan asserts that these poems “represent the pinnacle of Shelley’s poetic achievements” (236). Citing the exchanged letters between Keats and Shelley, Callaghan makes the case that Shelley, like Keats, “is an enfeebled though impassioned hero-poet” (244) and that Shelley is more concerned with commemorating Keats as a poet than as a man. Again, as is the case throughout Callaghan’s book, there is an insistence that the personal cannot be separated from the poetic and that Adonais “embeds the self carefully in the lines, momentarily harmonizing the dissonance of self and poetry” (246). Shelley’s Living Artistrymaintains its gaze on Romanticism and Shelley as monumental and stable constructions. There is no visible need in her work to reassess or rethink the terms of Romanticism. LeGette, on the other hand, “drives context into text” and in the words of Levinson, exposes “history in tension with ideology” (“What is New Formalism?” 565).

Essays in Romanticism

This essay brings together Keats’s theory of soul-making with his prosody in order to argue for t... more This essay brings together Keats’s theory of soul-making with his prosody in order to argue for the continued use and usefulness of the concept of lyric subjectivity. Given the instability and recent disfavor imputed to both of these terms (lyric and subject), this might seem a problematic endeavor. Yet I argue, along with Keats, that the process of constructing a soul is not only ineluctably wrapped up with the process of poetic production and reception, but also inextricably tied to the process of first imagining and then constructing new forms of sociality and subjectivity. Through an examination of M. H. Abrams’s theory of the “greater romantic lyric,” I show how a specific form of dialecticism has been read back over the entire canon of romantic and post-romantic poetry, with, as writers associated with the Historical Poetics group have pointed out, deleterious effects. Applying the post-Marxist dialectical theories of the Russian Formalists to targeted close readings of Keats’s poems and letters, I ...

The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

Political Geography, 2016

Abstract Phrases from Robert Frost's well-known poem “Mending Wall” are often used to frame d... more Abstract Phrases from Robert Frost's well-known poem “Mending Wall” are often used to frame discussions of borders in academic and political discourse. Used by some to justify the construction of physical barriers, others have used excerpts from the poem to fundamentally question the truism it appears to project. In light of recent interest in borders, our paper returns to Frost's full poem and its contexts in order to define, theorize, and critically mobilize what we take to be a useful ambivalence regarding fences. We use Frost's formulations to address the universal difficulty of moving beyond the borders of our daily lives, whether imposed at the edges of the nation-state, inscribed in our social relations, or inferred within the formal dimensions of a poem. Working at the crossroads of political geography, psychoanalytic theory, and literary analysis we argue that addressing the central role of borders in our lives and Frost's deep ambivalence about fences and borders is a useful step in any political and aesthetic movement forward. We cannot be “good neighbors” in other words or even good co-inhabitants until and unless we acknowledge that we are ambivalent not only toward the Other, but also about the very concept of borders and boundaries itself. Ideas presented about ambivalence provide border scholars and political geographers with an opportunity to re-evaluate our positionality and recognize how our own humanity intersects with that of others.

Essays in Romanticism, 2008

Victorian Poetry, 2009

In April 1851, on Easter Sunday, Alfred Tennyson's first child was stillborn. The child, a bo... more In April 1851, on Easter Sunday, Alfred Tennyson's first child was stillborn. The child, a boy, was apparently strangled by the umbilical cord. Christopher Ricks reports that the poet never forgot this "'great grief.'" (1) Rather than send a death notice to the newspaper, Tennyson took it upon himself to "write some 60 letters" to inform friends and family of the news. What follows is representative: My dear Robert, I am quite sure you will feel with me. My poor little boy got strangled in being born.... I have suffered more than ever I thought I could have done for a child still born.... [H]e was the grandest-looking child I have ever seen. Pardon my saying this. I do hOt speak only as a father but as an Artist.... [H]e looked ... majestic in his mysterious silence. (2) Those accustomed to the poet's guarded epistolary style may be surprised to read such a direct and open expression of grief: "I have suffered more that ever I thought I could have done." Tennyson speaks as an artist and a father perhaps in order to justify the intensity of his attachment to the child, but his claim also suggests an inchoate aesthetic judgment, itself in the process of being born. According to this aesthetic, it is neither character nor action that determines the beauty of the stillborn child, but rather his arrested and unrealizable potential. Tennyson's need to apologize--"Pardon my saying this"--is complicated. While he seems anxious on one hand to control the perception that parental bias may have skewed his evaluative judgment, there is also a sense in which his speech risks shattering the "mysterious silence" that uniquely marks the child's majesty. It is as though he feels compelled to speak. This compulsion at once results in and precipitates an intense identification. I say that identification is both cause and effect of a compulsion to speak in order to foreground the ways in which the poetic description of a stillborn infant tends necessarily toward prosopopoeia. Any attempt to grant potential or futurity to the stillborn child breaks down the binaries of living-dead, speaking-silent, and subject-object. And although the grammar suggests a linear relationship between the son's passivity (got strangled) and the father's active and ongoing suffering (he suffers because the son got strangled), the participles describing that relationship--"strangled" and "suffered"--are almost interchangeable. The more or less identical places they occupy in their respective sentences work toward destabilizing the causal, in this case filial, link. Additional mirrorings and reversals, implicit and explicit, occur throughout the passage. The roles of the father (pater, creator, "majestic," sovereign) are hived off and given to the son, whereas the conventional positions of the son (admiration, identification, supplication) are assumed instead by the father. Even the fixed roles of the percipient and the perceived are tenuous, liable to subtle shifts. Thus, the "grandest-looking child" seems capable of looking back at his father--he "looked...." This confusion--this fusing with--reproduces the mutability of object boundaries ascribed both to the state of infancy in nineteenth-century philosophy and natural science, and to the poetry of immediate experience in aesthetic theories from the period. (3) Finally, Tennyson's multiple connections to the child allow the reader an oblique identification--"I am quite sure you will feel with me." In other words, Tennyson's overflow of emotion interrupts and facilitates our empathetic identification with the child, with the result that his mediation (between stillborn child and reader) is at once transparent and thick. Tennyson maintains these slippages and reversals as well as this emotional pitch (a strained and strangely objective subjectivity) in nearly all the extant letters, repeating several times how beautiful the child was, how he kissed his "poor, pale hands," and expressing his open embarrassment at being so moved: "I am foolish [i. …

Victorian Poetry: 2009; 47, 1

The Wordsworth Circle, 2021

This essay develops the concept of the “interval” in order to account for certain psycho-affectiv... more This essay develops the concept of the “interval” in order to account for certain psycho-affective phenomena in Coleridge’s poetry, spatiotemporal openings in thought and feeling, as well as specific formal properties of his verse.2 Although for Coleridge meter and meaning can never be separated—that is, the interval itself is part and parcel of meaning—and although he focused less and less on poetry in the years after 1805, he continues to experiment with meter and temporalization throughout his career. I want to suggest a connection between Coleridge’s metrical experiments—conducted primarily in his notebooks and letters—and his other forms of experimentation—phenomenological observation, obsessive descriptive notation, his use of opium, and his political theorizing. By exploring this connection, I hope to associate the prosodic workings of the poetic line and the movement of thought and feeling more generally. Extending Northrup Frye’s “rhythms of association” (which he opposes with “rhythms of recurrence” [251, 270]), I suggest that what we find in Coleridge’s work are rhythms of dissociation. I hope to show how both forms of movement (metrical and cognitive-affective) rely on spatial and temporal metaphors, notably the concept of the interval or opening, which is, for Coleridge, a figural rather than merely signifying aspect of the imagination.3 Ultimately, I want to argue that Coleridge is interested in using scansion (across these many media) to, as Jerome Christensen puts it in another context, “anchor himself” in meter (18), to use meter as a container for anxiety. In so doing, he offers us a way of understanding the interval as something that allows for distance as well as immediacy, connection as well as autonomy, and timelessness as well as presence.

word for/word, 2018

Another mix-tape poem -- this one about anxiety, Ohio, and climate change -- published in Word fo... more Another mix-tape poem -- this one about anxiety, Ohio, and climate change -- published in Word for/Word: http://www.wordforword.info/vol31/Ruderman.html

A mix-tape poem (a mash-up of music and poetry) about the final days of a relationship, published... more A mix-tape poem (a mash-up of music and poetry) about the final days of a relationship, published in the wonderful Word for/Word.

The Nervous Breakdown, 2017

A mixtape poem...

The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

The Wordsworth Circle, 2021

The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

European Romantic Review

Essays in Romanticism

The Idea of Infancy in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

Political Geography, 2016

Essays in Romanticism, 2008

Victorian Poetry, 2009

Victorian Poetry: 2009; 47, 1

The Wordsworth Circle, 2021

word for/word, 2018

The Nervous Breakdown, 2017

A mixtape poem...

Unlike very fine recent (more historicist) books on romantic childhood, this book specifically tr... more Unlike very fine recent (more historicist) books on romantic childhood, this book specifically treats infancy as its own structure of feeling — subjectively, a site of perpetual beginning, natality, and anamnesis and formally a space of poetic experimentation. I try to uncover in the poems what I take to be presages of 20th- and 21st-century psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and poststructural theorizations of infancy — that is, darker, more complex versions of the “infant babe.” Ultimately, the book explores how our relation to human infancy as imagined and enacted in these poems might help us think an ethical and even political relation to internal and external otherness. It also discovers the ways in which these re-imaginings of the human condition in infancy—fragile, tentative, inchoate—can be directly linked to changes in poetic form and genre in the period, e.g. ballad measure, the romantic and post-romantic ode, pastoral, elegy, etc.

Keats-Shelley Journal, 2021

review of Lacan and Romanticism (ed. Daniela Garofalo and David Sigler)

European Romantic Review, 2019

Book review of new books by Mai-Lin Cheng and Beatrice Turner