The Politics of Dramatic Form

In this blog, I will (attempt to) summarize and analyze Isobel Armstrong's 'The Politics of Dramatic Form'. 

Summary: 

Isobel Armstrong's "Polictics of Dramatic Form," begins by talking about Browning's 'Prophyria's Lover' and 'Johannas Agricola' and how he has a running dialogue throughout them both. Armstrong mentions Mill's 'What is poetry?' and 'The two kinds of poetry', which both make the distinction between the two kinds of knowledge: knowledge granted by expressive feeling and phycological experience and the knowledge granted by the scientist. Armstrong then goes on in the next paragraph to say, "the purest form of expressive lyric is feeling dramatized as 'soliloquy' but this drama is not a public transition between actor and audience," (558) . She emphasizes this point later by discussing Browning's 'Propheria' and 'Johannas' and the different realities each speaker is living. Neither speaker is interacting with an audience or even acknowledges there is anyone listening to their dialogue. Armstrong explains how, in the context of each poem, the real world does not exist. In 'Propheria', it is as if the speaker has created his lover in his own imagination as a fantasy, rather than the women being a real life person. In 'Johannas', she explains how the speaker has an odd relationship with God (his listener?) and how it is as if time has stopped. So in each poem, it is as if the real world does not exist. 

The next half of the essay is 'The Dramatic Poem and the Theory of Finction'. One section of this half of the essay that made the most sense is the paragraph that starts by Armstrong quoting Bentham, "To be spoken of at all, ever fictitious entity must be spoken of as if it were real,"  and "Ficticious entity bears some relation to some real entity," (571). Armstrong relates these ideas to words such as, "God, love, [and] soul," (571). Armstrong also discusses the ways in which Browning does and doesn't use the different ideas of Mill and Fox throughout his poetry. She concluded her essay by stating, "Browning's poetry becomes a dare with the status of the fiction, an analytical process which ceaselessly investigates the nature of utterance and its representations and their cultural meaning," (575).

Analysis:

I realize that my detail in the summery are a little bit lacking but  had an extremely difficult time understanding anything the essay was talking about. Even after reading through the essay twice, I could not really figure out what Armstrong was actually trying to say. To me, I felt like she kept talking about things that did not really connect (although I am sure they do connect in. I just don't understand how). As I said above, the only part of the essay that actually made sense to me was the one about fiction and how it always related to something in real life. It seems to relate to Browning because, as we have discussed in class, he tends to take already existing monologues and uses a character within them to create something new. Also, I just really love to read fiction so it was very interesting to read that quote. In conclusion, I could really use some clarification of this essay and how it connects.