The Purloined Letters of Elizabeth Bishop

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article engages possibly Lacan's most significant, but underread, work on literature, Lituraterre , and, to a lesson extent, the more well-known essay on The Purloined Letter to work through what might be understood to be constructions of the Lacanian letter in the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop is very well chosen - almost spookily/uncannily so - for the shared interest in water, calligraphy, desire, and the disruptive and enabling effects of sound and graphic marks. The author is concerned in charting the various disruptive effects of the letter through a reading that is focused on shifts between what in Bishop's writing is caught up with meaning and what constitutes and resists this - the hole in the symbolic/jouissance.  What emerges is a Lacanian poetics of sound, sense, semblance. The essay is erudite, great at drawing out differences between Lacanian terms, it introduces underread Lacanian texts, and produces an original reading of Bishop. Bishop's work is not simply tacked on here This is a sympathetic and productive reading. In sum: an original reading of Bishop, and a productive overview of later Lacanian literary theory that I can imagine being drawn on especially by scholars of poetry, potentially sympathetic to, but not necessarily completely conversant with, late Lacanian theory., as well as Lacanians keen to explore the possibilities of applied literary theory.

Author Response

I am thankful to reviewer 1 for her/his toughtful remarks. As no revisions were suggested, I have nothing forther to add.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article applies Jacques Lacan's theory of the letter(s) and some commentary on it by Jean-Michel Rabate to deepen the understanding of Elizabeth Bishop's work, or perhaps the other way around, uses Bishop's work to illustrate and concretize, possibly even to locally validate this part of Lacanian theory. 

The application is particularly convincing in the author's reading of Bishop's authobiographical proze "Primer Class," where indeed the joy of (reproducing) the pure shape of the letters and numbers is complementary to, divided by a shoreline from any specific meaning the signs may/will potentially have. 

As for the insights the Lacanian lens elicits from the poems, some of them are more valuable than others, yet many of them seem to be derived by the classical familiar method of close reading (possibly sometimes over-reading), with no significant help from Lacan. In spite of the author's claim that Lacan's text should _illuminate_ Bishop's poetry, in the double sense of the word, I find the illumination to be going mostly in the opposite direction. 

I was also wondering if it wouldn't be important to divide between the _visual and graphic_ aspect of the letter, emphasized by Lacan and Rabate, particulary in the multiple allusions to Chinese and Japanese brush calligraphy - and the _phoneme_, the actual signified of the letter's (as opposed to a hieroplyph's) graphical sign. The sound signified by the letter is in the center of most of the author's readings of the poems, with several significant exceptions (notably the birds in "Large Bad Picture," which I think could be commented on more extensiviely, as this detail seems rather central to the whole argument). Is sound play, repetition and oscillation between non-obvious alternatives the same kind of "litter" as the written letters? 

The comment on the use of the word "behoove" in "The Imaginary Iceberg" (lines 353-61) is important and well-developed, but I would not call Bishop's turn of phrase a _syntactic_ irregularity - I would say she violates the accepted usage restrictions on this verb (restrictions are an important word here too), not the rules of syntax.

The application of the wordplay literal/littoral applied to Bishop is indeed the central organizing highlight of the argument. Yet the bibliography reveals that this specific application has been already made by Zachariah Wells in a conference talk. It is important to position the present article with regard to this earlier contribution and differentiate it from Wells'.

Finally, one technical point that interferes with the reading: the block quotes need to be indented as blocks, to set them visually apart from the author's own text. 

Overall, I think the article fits well with the journal's aims and scope and may appeal to a considerable audience of humanities scholars and students, first of all by its enthusiasm for the text, both poetic and theoretical, and their interweavings. 

Author Response

For revisions suggested by reviewer, please see footnotes vii and xix.

Block quotes have been modified based on reviewer's remarks.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The text appears to be cahotic. It should be reorganised  to give it a clear structure: an introduction where the purpose of the article is clearly stated, a presentation of the author of the poems and of Lacan's theory, followed by an analysis of the poems.

Such a reorganisation would also help the author to make the point of the article emerge in a more distinct way.

The author should consider using full names, at least the first time a person is mentioned.

The author may also want to avoid non-clarified and little contextualised references to works by other authors (e.g: Like Poe’s “Purloined Letter,”) . If such references are useful to develop the argument, they need to be provided in clear ways.

Author Response

As the remarks of Reviewer 1 show, the structure and argument of the paper are quite clear. 

Lacan's reading of Poe is referenced extensively in the paper. Poe's "The Purloined Letter" has been part of the critical conversation for several decades now. It is not the subject of this article.

Reviewer 3 recommends "using full names, at least the first time a person is mentioned." This was done systematically in the first version of the paper.