Poetics Today, Spring 2007

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 autobiographyand explore its major forms and features in relation to unreliabilityin fiction. It starts with the construction of a narratologicalframework for autobiography, especially in terms of the narrativecommunicative situation. Then it goes on to discuss two contrastingapproaches to fictional unreliability, the rhetorical and thecognitivist or constructivist. The rhetorical approach deals,in an idealized way, with the gap between the narrator and theimplied author and is only concerned with the "implied" or "authorial"reader (critics who try to enter that position). The constructivistapproach, by contrast, is also concerned with how actual readerstry to resolve textual problems with different integration mechanisms.The present study defines and explores autobiographical unreliabilityin relation to both the rhetorical model and the constructivistmodel in fiction studies. To illustrate autobiographical unreliability,this essay analyzes two autobiographies by Frederick Douglassin terms of intertextual unreliability and a recent Chineseautobiography in terms of extratextual (un)reliability. In bothcases, the divergent responses highlight the functioning ofdifferent integration mechanisms. The analysis brings to lightcertain integration mechanisms peculiar to the interpretationof autobiography and, moreover, shows how the same integrationmechanism 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 thecultural expression of capitalist modernization, but as a particularset of relations of present to past. It examines the varyingattitudes toward the violent past of the civil war that havecharacterized Spain since the Franco dictatorship and continuingto the present day. The obsessive memorialization of the Nationalistwar dead throughout the Franco dictatorship led, at the timeof the transition to democracy, to a desire to break with thepast; it was not, as is often argued, a determination to forget,but a decision not to let the past affect the future. Thus attemptstoward the end of the Franco dictatorship to deal cinematicallywith this violent heritage were followed by a ten-year gap,until the appearance in the mid-1980s of a number of novelsand films representing the civil war and their escalation sincethe late 1990s to create a memory boom, which has resulted inthe publication of a large number of testimonies. The essayquestions whether trauma theory, which has been so importantin Holocaust studies, provides an adequate model for understandingthe belated appearance of these memories, arguing that the reasonis more likely to be a previous lack of willing interlocutors.Nevertheless, it concludes that the present urge to recountevery detail of the past is less effective in communicatingthe horror of the war and its repression than are those accounts—infilm at the end of the dictatorship and in fiction in the mid-1980s,with occasional more recent examples—which acknowledgethe difficulty of narrativizing the violent past as well asthe 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 poetryand painting as a result of the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacrein August 1572. By the end of the same year, the formal purityand striving for detailed perfection that defined mannerismwere no longer relevant goals. The artist henceforth ceasedto attempt to move an audience with formalist perfection, which,despite its potential for great beauty, might be considereddevoid of meaning. Rather, artists and writers set out to drawtheir audience's attention by the strength of an argument, bya clearly oriented view of the world, whose imperfection andsometimes roughness accurately revealed a new relation to historicalevents. The new aesthetic that emerged after 1572 is one ofviolence. In the current study, I intend to demonstrate thislast 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 portraitsof the central characters responsible for the massacre, Catherinede Médicis and Henry, duc de Guise, will be comparedto Diana's portrait in order to illustrate the transition frommannerism to baroque.

Ruben BORG, « Neologizing in Finnegans Wake: Beyond a Typology of the Wakean Portmanteau  »
This essay discusses the portmanteau as a privileged rhetoricalfigure in Finnegans Wake. It illustrates the manner in whichJoyce's use of the portmanteau enables him to establish a nonmathematicaland nondialectical relation between the work's minimal structuralelement and the structure as a whole. The essay draws on GillesDeleuze's concept of "the virtual" and on Jacques Derrida'snotion of "invention" in order to theorize this relation. Afterreviewing previous discussions of Joyce's technique of wordcombination, it proceeds to consider the Wakean portmanteauas a textual event, an utterly new object that irrupts withinthe fabric of language to suspend conventional protocols ofinterpretation. Within this theoretical framework, the text'sminimal structural element is charged with a radically inventivepotential. The claim of this essay is that such potential pertainsto a movement of thought that unfolds in excess of receivedhermeneutic paradigms.


REVIEW

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