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.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Volume 26, Number 1, Spring 2005
CONTENTS:
Friedberg, Harris - Prose and Poetry: Wimsatt's Verbal Icon and the Romantic Poetics of New Criticism
Abstract: Foremost theorist of the New Criticism, W. K. Wimsatt, inherits from the Romantics the desire to differentiate poetry from prose on essentialist rather than formal grounds. In I. A. Richards, a new antithesis between the symbolic or referential use of language and its emotive use replaces the old one of prose and poetry. Wimsatt also recognizes two kingdoms of discourse, but for him, a formal or functional difference—the complementary distribution of the logical and counterlogical figures—confirms that poetry and prose really do differ: “the difference between prose and verse is the difference between homoeoteleuton and rhyme.” Neither prose nor poetry, however, observes the divide between logical and counterlogical figures with anything like the regularity claimed by Wimsatt. Examples of rhyme in prose and homoeoteleuton in verse weaken his case, as does the example of John Milton's enjambed blank verse, with the sense variously drawn out, which emulates the periodic syntax of Milton's own prose. The attempt to differentiate the logical language of prose from the emotive, counterlogical language of poetry, which the New Critics silently adopt from the Romantics, fails, and, historically, the project of finding the essential difference gives way to Roman Jakobson's notion of the poetic function, dominant in poetry but available to prose as well.
Damsteegt, Theo - The Present Tense and Internal Focalization of Awareness
Abstract: It is argued that in internal focalization (e.g., interior monologue or internal sensory perception), the present tense serves to establish a seemingly direct, unmediated link with a character's mind. In reports of actions, too, the present tense may have this effect of providing a link with a character's mind, in the sense that an action reported by the narrator in the present tense may be taken to be internally focalized by the character performing the action. Expressing awareness on the character's part of the action being performed, this type of internal focalization is called Internal Focalization of Awareness (IFA). IFA is found in homodiegetic as well as heterodiegetic texts, whether they feature the present tense throughout or exhibit tense alternation. It is further argued that in all forms of internal focalization, including IFA, the present tense tends to be used in situations that are emotionally important to the focalizing character.
Larkin Galiñanes, Cristina - Funny Fiction; or, Jokes and Their Relation to the Humorous Novel
Abstract: This article aims to put forward some ideas as to the narrative characteristics of funny novels. Since the chief common denominator of this kind of work is the goal to make the reader laugh, one would suppose that these works have a lot in common with other forms of verbal humor, such as jokes. Here I look into incongruity-resolution theories of humor and certain linguistically based accounts of joking as well as the insights provided by Sperber and Wilson's theory of relevance into the type of pragmatic processing attendant on the appreciation of humor. Jokes appear to be characterized by an increased demand in processing effort for the attainment of maximum contextual effects, but this increase is limited to the resolution of incongruities typical of this sort of utterance. Also, social-behavioral theories of humor relate the effect of jokes to the establishment of a climate of normative sympathy between teller and receiver. Humorous novels, far longer and more complex than jokes, largely base the process of incongruity-resolution on an interplay of, on the one hand, text-internal coherence established by the persistent use of strong implicature in the creation of character and, on the other, text-external incongruity established by the narrator's appeal to the reader's encyclopedic knowledge. Although it is probably true of most novels, it seems particularly important for the humorous effect of “funny” novels that their discourse should be based on moral, social, cultural, aesthetic, and even generic assumptions shared with the reader: these allow the latter either to see the narrator as “reliable” and to develop a feeling of rapport with him or her or to easily assume the existence of an implied author who manipulates the narrator for his or her own purposes. The use of strong implicature, which characterizes these works and seems necessary for the sustained creation of humor, explains the air of inevitability that permeates their plots and, finally, would also seem to explain the fact that they are intuitively and almost invariably considered low-class literature. For “good” literature, according to Relevance Theory, is characterized by a complexity and multiplicity of contextual effects produced fundamentally by way of weak implicature.
Punday, Daniel - Creative Accounting: Role-playing Games, Possible-World Theory, and the Agency of Imagination
Abstract: Role-playing games have many qualities of narrative (character, plot, setting), yet they have received virtually no attention from narratologists. This essay discusses the way that role-playing games construct narrative worlds and compares that to recent theories of fiction based on possible-world models. In both, emphasis is placed on the objects that make up this world. In role-playing games and recent theories of fictional world, this essay argues, emphasis on objects makes possible intertextual comparisons, which in turn help to define and rejuvenate the agency of readers and critics against the backdrop of challenges to that agency by market culture and structuralist literary theory.
REVIEWS:
Spolsky, Ellen - Recruiting (Once Again) Wittgenstein and Cavell for Reading Literary Texts (Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost, eds., Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein)
Folkenflik, Robert - Who Knew? What Anonymity Tells Us (Robert J. Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century)
Landy, Joshua - The Paradox of Perfection (Thomas G. Pavel, La pensée du roman)