Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses.

Heather Dubrow has nothing less than epic intentions for her powerful study of the primary form of the Renaissance English lyric, not the least of which is relating criticism to life. If this critical intent seems a reversion to outdated paradigms, Dubrow's essential method of exploring texts from the Henrician Wyatt to the anti-Revolutionary Collop is as au courant as a reader will find: indeterminancy. Whether she is reading the texts of Lady Mary Wroth, Lady Mary's uncle Philip, or Lady Mary's real origin, Shakespeare, or whether Dubrow is boldly going where no Renaissance critic has gone before, examining poems in the whole "ugly beauty" tradition (and using medical and gynaecological theory), she renegotiates old and recent "sacred" interpretations. Her intense readings are closer to Wittgenstein and Julia Kristeva than critics either believing, as she remarks, "the liberal paradigm of gradual and steady progress" or "the radical model of ruptural and millenarian change" (287). Positivism no longer works, whatever the latest apparition, and Dubrow in her command of scholarship seems to know every specter. Dialectic is all. If text beckons as in the discredited (at least in the 1990s) New Criticism, Platonizing realities exist only within more authorized cultural frames of the new critical paradigms (and recent film criticism), the terrible problems of young faculty, and political distortions, among so many other agonizing experiences for the reader in this decade. If this is criticism brought to life, it is also Aristotelianism of a high order for the 1990s. The method of the Poetics has been reinvented sub specie Petrarchismi.

With solid grounding in Petrarch's own texts (pace her second chapter), Dubrow begins her study with a piece of Thomas Watson petrarchismo that pits Author against Echo. In this introductory chapter "Love in the Time of Choler," she sets her primary thesis: "the difficulty of distinguishing the discourses and counterdiscourses" (4) arises from the various "contiguities chronological, ideological, and stylistic - between Petrarchism and its counterdiscourses, one of which is the replication of diacritical desire in those counterdiscourses" (12). Setting up this formulaic dialectic of diacritical inscription within textual genealogy, Dubrow announces her method equally dialectic: "I approach broad questions . . . by focusing close on particular authors and movements and above all on particular texts within the counterdiscourses of Petrarchism" (13). In her conclusion "Criticism in a Time of Choler," she writes: "Grounded in the assumption that literary drives, like so many other kinds, are often multiply determined, this study has traced a range of etiologies for diacritical desire" (255).

So constituted, Dubrow's critical drive has its own blitzkrieg in her challenge to exclusive readings of the famous "cycles" of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney, the newly interpreted lyrics of Wroth, and to the encrusted interpretations of the "resident alien" Donne. In every case, ironic probing explication is toward greater life for the reader onstage and off. As with her own colloquial one-liners that end various units or chapters ("Play it again, Pamphilia"; "if they be two, they are two so, as the sides of a Mobius strip are two'; "O femina certa"), so her own paradoxical circling of a text arises from the culture of the 1990s and nowhere else. If at times this moral earnestness produces a kind of meltdown in interpretive clarity, at its best Dubrow demonstrates that text can exist with a newly won right. It can thrive within a genuine dialectic of indeterminancy that frees the reader toward other acts of reading, onstage and off. This process can only begin and end within an ever-energizing irony (defined from Hutcheon, Graff, and Parker, among others). For Dubrow, reading closely in the 1990s for that life-giving irony is Aristotelian and therapeutic, called for by her beloved readers, caught in their own cultural antimetabole and carrying the burden of interpretation.

W.A. SESSIONS Georgia State University