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Poetics Today, Spring 2007

Poetics Today, Spring 2007

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Poetics Today website)

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. Several thematic review sections or special issues are published in each volume, and each issue contains a book review section, with article-length review essays.


Vol. XXVIII, no 1 (Spring 2007)


ARTICLES

Scott MacDONALD, « Poetry and Avant-Garde Film: Three Recent Contributions »
This article begins with an overview of the relationship of poetry and independent film. It proceeds to focus on three independent films that use the cinematic apparatus as a means of publishing poetry. Waterworx, a film by Canadian Rick Hancox, recycles Wallace Stevens's "A Clear Day and No Memories" in a manner that confirms the accomplishment of the original poem while embedding it, subtly as well as evocatively, within the filmmaker's personal context. nebel (mist), by German filmmaker Matthias Müller, re-presents a cycle of poems by Ernst Jandl, Gedichte an die kindheit (Poems to Childhood). Müller's film carefully weaves a recitation of the Jandl poems together with a variety of "found" visual images, including shots from The Wizard of Oz and home movies made during the 1960s by the filmmaker's father, in a manner that provides evocative confirmations and counterpoints to Jandl's text. Canadian Clive Holden's Trains of Winnipeg republishes a set of the filmmaker's own poems from a book by the same name; it is the first feature film I am aware of that is entirely devoted to the presentation of poetic texts.

Dan SHEN and Dejin XU, « Intratextuality, Extratextuality, Intertextuality: Unreliability in Autobiography versus Fiction »
This essay attempts to define unreliability in autobiography and explore its major forms and features in relation to unreliability in fiction. It starts with the construction of a narratological framework for autobiography, especially in terms of the narrative communicative situation. Then it goes on to discuss two contrasting approaches to fictional unreliability, the rhetorical and the cognitivist or constructivist. The rhetorical approach deals, in an idealized way, with the gap between the narrator and the implied author and is only concerned with the "implied" or "authorial" reader (critics who try to enter that position). The constructivist approach, by contrast, is also concerned with how actual readers try to resolve textual problems with different integration mechanisms. The present study defines and explores autobiographical unreliability in relation to both the rhetorical model and the constructivist model in fiction studies. To illustrate autobiographical unreliability, this essay analyzes two autobiographies by Frederick Douglass in terms of intertextual unreliability and a recent Chinese autobiography in terms of extratextual (un)reliability. In both cases, the divergent responses highlight the functioning of different integration mechanisms. The analysis brings to light certain integration mechanisms peculiar to the interpretation of autobiography and, moreover, shows how the same integration mechanism can be used to opposed effects.

Jo LABANYI, « Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War »
The essay argues that modernity is best understood not as the cultural expression of capitalist modernization, but as a particular set of relations of present to past. It examines the varying attitudes toward the violent past of the civil war that have characterized Spain since the Franco dictatorship and continuing to the present day. The obsessive memorialization of the Nationalist war dead throughout the Franco dictatorship led, at the time of the transition to democracy, to a desire to break with the past; it was not, as is often argued, a determination to forget, but a decision not to let the past affect the future. Thus attempts toward the end of the Franco dictatorship to deal cinematically with this violent heritage were followed by a ten-year gap, until the appearance in the mid-1980s of a number of novels and films representing the civil war and their escalation since the late 1990s to create a memory boom, which has resulted in the publication of a large number of testimonies. The essay questions whether trauma theory, which has been so important in Holocaust studies, provides an adequate model for understanding the belated appearance of these memories, arguing that the reason is more likely to be a previous lack of willing interlocutors. Nevertheless, it concludes that the present urge to recount every detail of the past is less effective in communicating the horror of the war and its repression than are those accounts—in film at the end of the dictatorship and in fiction in the mid-1980s, with occasional more recent examples—which acknowledge the difficulty of narrativizing the violent past as well as the importance of transgenerational transmission.

Nadine KUPERTY-TSUR, « The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre and Baroque Tendencies in France: The Impact of Religious Turmoils on the Aesthetics of the French Renaissance »
This essay considers the aesthetic changes in French poetry and painting as a result of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre in August 1572. By the end of the same year, the formal purity and striving for detailed perfection that defined mannerism were no longer relevant goals. The artist henceforth ceased to attempt to move an audience with formalist perfection, which, despite its potential for great beauty, might be considered devoid of meaning. Rather, artists and writers set out to draw their audience's attention by the strength of an argument, by a clearly oriented view of the world, whose imperfection and sometimes roughness accurately revealed a new relation to historical events. The new aesthetic that emerged after 1572 is one of violence. In the current study, I intend to demonstrate this last point through works that are emblematic of the baroque. These include Agrippa d'Aubigné's epic poem and artists' paintings from the École de Fontainebleau. Two portraits of the central characters responsible for the massacre, Catherine de Médicis and Henry, duc de Guise, will be compared to Diana's portrait in order to illustrate the transition from mannerism to baroque.

Ruben BORG, « Neologizing in Finnegans Wake: Beyond a Typology of the Wakean Portmanteau  »
This essay discusses the portmanteau as a privileged rhetorical figure in Finnegans Wake. It illustrates the manner in which Joyce's use of the portmanteau enables him to establish a nonmathematical and nondialectical relation between the work's minimal structural element and the structure as a whole. The essay draws on Gilles Deleuze's concept of "the virtual" and on Jacques Derrida's notion of "invention" in order to theorize this relation. After reviewing previous discussions of Joyce's technique of word combination, it proceeds to consider the Wakean portmanteau as a textual event, an utterly new object that irrupts within the fabric of language to suspend conventional protocols of interpretation. Within this theoretical framework, the text's minimal structural element is charged with a radically inventive potential. The claim of this essay is that such potential pertains to a movement of thought that unfolds in excess of received hermeneutic paradigms.


REVIEW

Ellen ESROCK,
Tendencies toward Embodiment in Word and Image Studies: Iconotropism: Turning toward Pictures