Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. Poetics Today presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics.
Volume 25, Number 1, Spring 2004
Special Issue: Between Thing and Theory: or, The Reflective Turn (II)
Edited by James A. Knapp and Jeffrey Pence
CONTENTS:
Part II: The Nature of Theory
- Laden, Sonja. Recuperating the Archive: Anecdotal Evidence and Questions of "Historical Realism"
Abstract: This essay argues that the critical practice of New Historicism is a mode of "literary" history whose "literariness" lies in bringing imaginative operations closer to the surface of nonliterary texts and briefly describes some of the practice's leading literary features and strategies. I further point out that the ostensible "arbitrary connectedness" (Cohen 1987) of New Historicist writing is in fact aesthetically coded and patterned, both stylistically and in terms of potential semantic correspondences between various representations of the past. I then move on to address the question of why anecdotal evidence features centrally and has come to play a key role in New Historicist writing. Here, I contend that, as components of narrative discourse, anecdotal materials are central in enabling New Historicists to make discernible on the surface of their discourse procedures of meaning production typically found in literary forms. In particular, anecdotal materials are the fragmented "stuff" of historical narratization: they facilitate the shaping of historical events into stories and more or less formalized "facts." This essay examines how the New Historicist anecdote remodels historical reality "as it might have been," reviving the way history is experienced and concretely reproduced by contemporary readers of literary history. Finally, the essay confirms how the textual reproduction of anecdotal evidence also enables the New Historicist mode of "literary" history to secure its links to literary artifacts, literary scholarship, and conventional historical discourse.
- Pence, Jeffrey. Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineffable
Abstract: Cinema's power to represent animate life, and produce a profound impression of reality, warrants and supports its other fascinating capacity, namely, to fabricate frank yet appealing illusions. In certain instances, audiences may respond to the fantastic creations as if to a new reality. Cinematic realism thus raises questions about the nature of belief and reality that are of perennial, yet acutely contemporary, interest in film history. A genre of the spiritual film—distinct from religious films that rely on traditional sources of religious authority—explores these questions of being and the limits of the knowable. Recent film criticism has inadequately responded to this genre. Film studies has aligned itself in various ways behind Walter Benjamin's call for an iconoclasm that would sever art's connections with cultic traditions and contribute to social progress. The consequent suppression, or translation to secular terms, of films' spiritual aspirations comes at great cost. Complex works that address spiritual topics in form and content, such as Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996), are treated as evidence by a self-affirming and secularizing critical method. In neglecting the central concerns of such films, critics are complicit with the worst features of modernity. A criticism that evades an open engagement with the limits of the knowable becomes instrumental; a criticism geared exclusively toward demystification ultimately produces reification. A more proper analytic response is to attend to the ways in which such films produce experiences, and call for responses, at the edge of the knowable. Such an approach begins with abandoning methodological certainty; the spiritual film demands an alignment of perception that cannot be contained by a predetermined goal. This aesthetic response may contribute to an open-ended ethical self-fashioning and may protect critical discourse from itself by preventing the standardization of cultural experience.
- Hayles, N. Katherine. Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis
Abstract: Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary analysis should awaken to the importance of media-specific analysis, a mode of critical attention which recognizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated matters. Central to repositioning critical inquiry, so it can attend to the specificity of the medium, is a more robust notion of materiality. Materiality is reconceptualized as the interplay between a text's physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset. This definition opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still maintaining a central focus on interpretation. It makes materiality an emergent property, so that it cannot be specified in advance, as if it were a pre-given entity. Rather, materiality is open to debate and interpretation, ensuring that discussions about the text's "meaning" will also take into account its physical specificity as well.
Following the emphasis on media-specific analysis, nine points can be made about the specificities of electronic hypertext: they are dynamic images; they include both analogue resemblance and digital coding; they are generated through fragmentation and recombination; they have depth and operate in three dimensions; they are written in code as well as natural language; they are mutable and transformable; they are spaces to navigate; they are written and read in distributed cognitive environments; and they initiate and demand cyborg reading practices.
Articles
- Landy, Joshua, 1965- Proust, His Narrator, and the Importance of the Distinction
Abstract: Although it is, in principle, almost universally accepted today that authors and narrators must be rigorously demarcated, somehow scholars of Marcel Proust seem—whether wittingly or unwittingly—to make an exception for In Search of Lost Time. Because it is written in the first person and because it incorporates scenes borrowed from Proust's own life, the fictional narrative is routinely read as his thinly veiled autobiography, if not as evidence for any number of psychiatric disorders. At the very least, critics tend to have no hesitation in taking theses put forward by the narrator as Proust's own vision of the world and the narrator's future masterpiece as the Search itself. Now these are not only mistakes, as evidence both internal and external clearly shows, but also consequential mistakes: they prevent us, that is, from understanding how the novel functions and from taking advantage of all it has to offer. For above and beyond the dry, theoretical insights it presents for our consideration, it grants us the opportunity to train ourselves, both in the complicated art of self-fashioning and in the related art of self-deception. And it is only because the narrator's insights do not entirely add up—a weakness, so long as one treats the Search as a treatise—that the implied author can produce the training effect, one which gives his novel its ultimate strength.
- Freind, Bill. Deferral of the Author: Impossible Witness and the Yasusada Poems
Abstract: This essay argues that the work of Araki Yasusada, an alleged Hiroshima survivor and poet who was later discovered to be an invention, offers an important example of the potential of heteronyms to satisfy the reader's desire for an author figure behind the text while simultaneously highlighting the fictive status of this figure. Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada does this by first building up the heteronym of Yasusada, then systematically effacing him as he himself adopts a variety of other voices and personae. The Yasusada poems also serve to expand the range of what has been called the poetry of witness or trauma literature. Critics of those subgenres have suggested that literature need not be historically accurate, nor even refer directly to those traumatic events. Yasusada takes that a step further, offering an example of how heteronyms can be used to offer testimony about events that the actual author has not witnessed.