Frost and Roses
Frost and Roses
The Disenchantment of a Reluctant Modernist
This chapter claims that Robert Frost writes as a reluctant modernist, someone who politely doubts and disapproves of modernity's pursuit of disenchantment. It begins by examining Frost's poem “The Rose Family,” which is an example of apparent redundancy. Frost's initial word talks of the archetypal rose, only a single, individual member of a class. The trick is that there exists a large family of plants bearing the name rosaceae; apple, pear, and plum belong to such family and thus are called “rose” by metonymic transfer from family to species. Frost maintains that the difference in the character of the trope is an effect of the history of classification. He and modernism recognize how linguistics, figures of speech, and systems of signification and reference have always embodied the realities that affect man's behavior and preserve his ideals.
Keywords: Robert Frost, The Rose Family, redundancy, disenchantment, metonymic transfer, linguistics, figure of speech, signification, reference
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