The Voice of Rapture

With Wilde's "Salome" (1893) as an exemplary text, this book examines the conditions under which speech -constructs- ecstatic experience. The author considers Wilde's text as a complex Symbolist -system- of relations between rhetorical devices and attitudes toward language. By identifying the components of the system, the book provides a theoretical model for understanding the power of language to -construct- specific emotional states. The dramatic nature of Wilde's play further indicates that, contrary to popular perception, ecstasy is not -beyond- language but "in" it. Rapture possesses a -voice-, but this voice emanates from a communication system which is actually -outside- of the body which speaks it. Movement toward ecstasy is therefore not a release from system but a supreme manifestation of it."