Behn, Aphra: Oroonoko | Rose A. Zimbardo (essay date 1989)
Rose A. Zimbardo (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Aphra Behn in Search of the Novel," in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, Vol. 19, 1989, pp. 277–87.
[In the following essay, Zimbardo argues that Behn's skill in using established as well as newly developing styles of discourse is evident in Oroonoko.]
In his brilliant book, The Discourse of Modernism, Timothy J. Reiss traces the development in Western discourse from what he calls "the discourse of patterning" to "analytico-referential discourse," the discourse of modernism that was born in the seventeenth century: "a passage from what we might call a discursive exchange within the world to the expressions of knowledge as reasoning practice upon the world."1 A work of art rendered in the older "discourse of patterning" is what Paul de Man calls a "calligraphy" of emblems "rather than a mimesis."2 That is to say, within the older system of...
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