Poetics Today, vol. 27, no. 3, Fall 2006

 

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.

 

Volume 27, Number 3, Fall 2006   

 

CONTENTS:

 

ELS ANDRINGA -  Penetrating the Dutch Polysystem: The Reception of Virginia Woolf, 1920-2000 

Abstract:This case study sets out to capture the processes of a foreignoeuvre entering and merging with a target literature and tochart the changing conditions of reception in the twentieth-centuryDutch polysystem. A critical analysis of available receptionand systems theories (those of, inter alia, Jan Mukaovsk, FelixVodika, Hans Robert Jauss, Pierre Bourdieu, and Itamar Even-Zohar)results in two main research questions that serve as a guidelinefor further investigation: How do reception processes reflector relate to social segmentation, stratification, and change,and how do dynamic developments within literary production becomemanifest in the interplay of new (here, foreign) literatureand an existing literary system? To provide a conceptual frameworkfor an empirical approach to these questions, Even-Zohar's repertoireconcept is taken as a point of departure. But it is redefinedas a "mental equipment" with three components: (1) knowledgeof works and oeuvres that serve as models and frames of reference;(2) internalized strategies and conventions that govern production,reception, and communication; and (3) sets of values and intereststhat determine selection, classification, and judgment. Thecomponents are interconnected in that all are value-laden orinterest-driven. Three independent sets of data concerning thereception of Virginia Woolf were collected to bring out differentparts of these components and changes therein. Karl Erik Rosengren'smention technique is used to show how Woolf's work evolved asa frame of reference for literary critics and essayists. Woolf'stranslation and publishing history is analyzed in terms of changingstrategies and shifting interests on these fronts. Reconstructionof values that underlie judgments in reviews of Woolf's workshows differences in evaluative patterns between her early andlater receptions, due to shifts in both social structure andconceptions of literary value. The quantitative data (numbersof mentions and translations/editions) are compared with othermodernist authors from the same "cohort" (Joyce, Mansfield,Musil, Kafka) to detect convergences and divergences. The resultsdisclose a multifaceted complex of social and literary factorsand forces in a changing polysystem: traces of confessionalsegregation before and secularization after the second WorldWar, the advent of the second feminist wave in the 1960s, thechanging book market and a changing attitude toward translation,and the growing impact of the modernist cohort on national literarycriticism and production. Woolf's oeuvre appears to have figuredin two increasingly separable repertoires, one shared by a circleof women writing for and about women, the other by a circleof mainstream writers and critics discussing and reviewing innovativeliterature. The division between national and internationalliterature remains visible in both subsystems. Correlating thequantitative data of the modernist authors shows patterns thatare similar to those found by Rosengren in Swedish culture andindicate historical "laws" in the increase and decrease of acohort's presence in a repertoire. 

 

GILLIAN GANE -  Postcolonial Literature and the Magic Radio: The Language of Rushdie's Midnight's Children 

Abstract: Much postcolonial literature depends on unacknowledged processesof translation working like the "radio" in Salman Rushdie'sMidnight's Children that magically renders all Indian languagesintelligible to the children of midnight. It is surprisinglydifficult to determine what languages the characters in Rushdie'snovel are actually speaking; though there can be found in thenovel several of the strategies Meir Sternberg identifies withtranslational mimesis (the representation of one language withinanother), the material substance of English is important inmuch of its dialogue. Arguably, the English language itselfis the magic radio by means of which meaning becomes accessiblein Midnight's Children—and Rushdie's own comments revealultimately that he evaded the issue of the underlying languagesthe characters are speaking. 

 

KENNETH LITTLE -  The Circus in Ruins: A Comment on "Lion on Display: Culture, Nature, and Totality in a Circus Performance," by Yoram Carmeli 

Abstract : This article comments on Yoram Carmeli's stimulating analysisof the narrative structure of Captain Sidney Howes's lion actperformed in Gerry Cottle's British circus. I begin by discussingCarmeli's analysis of how the act functions socially and semiotically.According to him, this act plays on a formative underlying nature/culturestructural opposition that is then subverted by circus cultureonly to be shown, in the end, to be part of the very bourgeoisorder it was supposed to challenge. I sketch out Carmeli's analysisof how the lions, Sidney Howes the trainer, and the circus itselfserve as vehicles for a nostalgic spectacle of an exotic worldthat reformulates nature and culture into an even deeper messageabout the loss of originality as a discourse that conditionsEuropean modernity. My comments are meant to urge Carmeli toextend the work of nostalgia to the circus in ruins and theever-present nightmare shadows of death, in the midst of dreamworldpleasure and titillation, which hovers over the circus. Thismeans rethinking the role of representation and nostalgia whichCarmeli finds underlying the lion act to see how the act, theartist Howes, and the circus may be understood alternativelyas spectacle. My discussion ends with a suggestion about howthe topic of death and ruins may open the possibility of anotherline of analysis, which tracks the twists and turns of circusspectacle as dreamworld and nightmare, now caught in the nervoussystem of postmodern capitalism, its tensions, oppositions,and contradictions. 

 

YORAM S. CARMELI - Spectacle, Death, and a European Traveling One-Ring Circus: A Response to Kenneth Little      REVIEW:   GERALD PRINCE -  Disturbing Frames: Métalepses: Entorses au pacte de la représentation