JOURNAL ARTICLE

Trauma and Literature: The Case of Christopher Smart.

Published In: Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2024, v. 57, n. 4. P. 531 1 of 3
Database: Academic Search Ultimate 2 of 3
Authored By: Hartman, Geoffrey 3 of 3

Abstract

This essay explores how Jubilate Agno responds to a situation analogous to trauma and mania—although its coordinates are as much historical and linguistic as psychological—in which poetic self-presentation is so thwarted as to verge on aphasia. Smart's poem circumvents social and other curtailments of speech by finding undeveloped expressive powers in language and the semiotic process: a mode of representation that Smart called "sound reasoning." Hartman traces this sound reasoning through key sequences on language in Jubilate Agno , showing how it turns coprolalia and other dysphemic utterances into euphasia, or perpetual praising. His argument locates Smart's breakthrough in relation to eighteenth-century and more recent literary and critical developments, especially thought about linguistic "purity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Additional Information

Source:Eighteenth-Century Studies. 2024/07, Vol. 57, Issue 4, p531
Document Type:Article
Subject Area:History
Publication Date:2024
ISSN:0013-2586
DOI:10.1353/ecs.2024.a931696
Accession Number:178852006
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