• Going Back and Going On: The Uses of Re-encounter
• Dominique Gracia (bio) and Fergus McGhee (bio)

The world,” wrote Robert Browning, “is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned.”¹ Browning’s words insist on the enduring interest of the disowned objects of our encounters, but they also hint at the value of re- encounter itself: in his “Essay on Shelley” (1852), he urges his readers to repeated engagement with a world which— forlornly, conceitedly, at any rate unimaginatively— they think they know all too well. Browning’s point has lost nothing of its force to the passage of time, but it is still worth wondering why a Victorian audience in particular needed to hear it, and why it should have been a poet that made it. One of the things that distinguishes re- encounter from other varieties of repetition is its grounding in first- person experience, and hence its self- conscious temporal relation to past and prospective engagements with the same object: be it a person, place, thing, idea, or (as Browning’s metaphor suggests) a text. As such it may carry significant ethical implications, which might involve coming to see the world (and its constituents) as neither fully knowable nor casually disposable, and one’s own experience as vitally provisional. A re- encounter, to borrow a suggestive pairing of Stanley Cavell’s, is a way of both going back and going on.²

As the essays that follow reveal, there are many possible moods, styles, and methods of re- encounter. This special issue explores both how re- encounters are represented in Victorian poems and how structures of re- encounter shape the composition and reception of poetry in the period— through the dynamics of literary influence, the translation of earlier texts, the revision of manuscripts, and the creative reconstruction of tropes, myths, and images. Unsurprisingly, then, our chosen term often brushes up against others that bear certain family resemblances, including: representation, remediation, refashioning, recounting, revising, revisiting, revisioning, and recursion.³ Such attention lends weight to Rita Felski’s recent observation that “we shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the ‘de’ prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the ‘re’ prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception.” ⁴ Our contributors offer us many different routes into the concept of re- encounter as a resource for thinking about [End Page 133] Victorian poetry and culture. While we have not been prescriptive about its definition, we nonetheless want to make a case for carefully scrutinizing our critical terms: all the following essays think hard about what makes “re- encounter” distinctive, as a structure of experience and as a critical idiom.

An example from one of the most well- known poems of the period gives a sense of the stakes and possibilities. Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. (1850) pursues a re- encounter with a place hallowed by memory when the poet returns to Arthur Hallam’s house in Wimpole Street:

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beatSo quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasped no more – Behold me, for I cannot sleep, And like a guilty thing I creepAt earliest morning to the door.⁵

The syntax of Tennyson’s lyric ambiguates between surveying and apostrophizing the physical objects re- encountered: the dark house and its barred doors. “Behold me” could be read as indicative (taking the house and the doors as the sentence’s subject), but it sounds more like an address, whose intended audience could be the reader, or Hallam, or perhaps even the house itself, along the lines of the classical genre of paraclausithyron (in which the excluded lover “addresses the door and holds it responsible for his rejection”).⁶ In this last case, the house’s unresponsiveness becomes an eerie figure for the devastating failure of the poet’s address to his departed friend. While Hallam’s gloomy abode might seem to share sympathetically in the colors of mourning, the poet finds himself disturbed by its vacancy: not only its emptiness...

• 回去并继续：重逢的用途
• 多米尼克·格拉西亚（简介）和弗格斯·麦吉（简介）

罗伯特·勃朗宁写道：“这个世界不是用来学习和抛弃的，而是要回归并重新学习的。” ¹布朗宁的话坚持我们对遭遇中不承认的对象的持久兴趣，但它们也暗示了重新遭遇本身的价值：在他的“雪莱散文”（1852）中，他敦促读者反复接触一个——凄凉、自负，至少缺乏想象力——他们认为自己知道得太多了。勃朗宁的观点并没有随着时间的流逝而失去其力量，但仍然值得思考为什么维多利亚时代的观众特别需要听到它，以及为什么它应该是一位诗人提出的。重遇与其他类型的重复的区别之一是它以第一人称经验为基础，因此它与过去和未来对同一对象的自觉时间关系：无论是人、地点、事物、主意，或（正如勃朗宁的比喻所暗示的）文本。因此，它可能会带来重大的伦理影响，这可能涉及到将世界（及其组成部分）视为既不是完全可知的也不是可以随意处置的，并且一个人自己的经验是至关重要的临时性的。借用斯坦利·卡维尔（Stanley Cavell）的暗示性配对，重逢是双方的一种方式回去并继续。²

正如接下来的文章所揭示的那样，重逢的心情、风格和方法有很多种。本期特刊探讨了维多利亚时代诗歌中重逢的表现方式，以及重逢的结构如何塑造这一时期诗歌的创作和接受——通过文学影响的动态、早期文本的翻译、手稿的修订、以及比喻、神话和图像的创造性重建。因此，毫不奇怪，我们选择的术语经常与具有某些家族相似性的其他术语相冲突，包括：表示、补救、重塑、重新叙述、修订、重新审视、修订和递归。³这种关注增强了丽塔·菲尔斯基（Rita Felski）最近的观察：“我们通过关注“de”前缀（它的去神秘化、不稳定、去自然化的力量）而忽视了“re”前缀：它重新语境化的能力，从而缩短了艺术的重要性。重新配置，或者重新充电感知。” ⁴我们的贡献者为我们提供了许多不同的途径来理解重逢的概念，作为思考[结束第133页]维多利亚时代诗歌和文化的资源。虽然我们没有对其定义做出规定，但我们仍然希望仔细审查我们的批评术语：以下所有文章都认真思考了“重遇”作为一种经验结构和批评习语的独特之处。 。

这一时期最著名的一首诗中的一个例子让人了解其中的利害关系和可能性。丁尼生的《悼念 AH H》。（1850）当诗人回到温波尔街阿瑟·哈勒姆的家时，追寻与记忆神圣之地的重逢：

黑暗的房子，我再次站在它旁边，在这条漫长的、不可爱的街道上，门，我的心曾经在那里跳动得如此之快，等待着一只手，

一只再也无法紧握的手——看我，因为我睡不着，像一个有罪的人一样，我一大早就爬到了门口。⁵

丁尼生抒情诗的语法在审视和省略所遇到的物理对象：黑暗的房子和它的铁栅栏门之间存在着歧义。“看我”可以被理解为指示性的（将房子和门作为句子的主语），但它听起来更像是一个地址，其目标受众可以是读者，或哈勒姆，甚至可能是房子本身，沿着古典风格的paraclausithyron（其中被排除在外的情人“对着门说话，并认为门对他的拒绝负责”）。⁶在最后一个例子中，房子的反应迟钝成为诗人对他已故朋友的演讲毁灭性失败的一个令人毛骨悚然的数字。虽然哈勒姆阴暗的住所似乎充满了哀悼的色彩，但诗人发现自己对它的空缺感到不安：不仅仅是它的空虚……