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Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 2004

Poetics Today, vol. 25, no. 3, Fall 2004

Publié le par Julien Desrochers

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 3, Fall 2004

Contents:

- Dannenberg, Hilary P. : A Poetics of Coincidence in Narrative Fiction

Abstract: In the major form of the traditional coincidence plot, estranged relatives meet in remarkable circumstances. In complex representations, the central aspect is cognitive and involves a recognition scene in which the estranged characters discover each other's identity. An analysis of this narrative core of the coincidence plot centers on the depiction of the characters' cognitive processes and the suspense generated by the reader's anticipation of a recognition scene. Beyond this, the narrative explanation of coincidence is a key feature: a variety of explanatory patterns, frequently involving causality, are invoked to naturalize the narrative strategy and conceal the authorial manipulation that lies behind it. The traditional coincidence plot is a key plot feature in varying manifestations from the Renaissance to the postmodernist novel; however, modernist and postmodernist fictions also developed their own specific forms of coincidence involving analogical relationships of correspondence. Both in the question of recognition and explanation, this new form of literary coincidence differs substantially from traditional coincidence, notably because of its subversion of the causal explanatory systems and of linear patterns of origin which form a central part of the traditional coincidence plot.

- Cosgrove, Peter, 1945-  : Hopkins's "The Windhover": Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself

Abstract: This article analyzes some of the problematics of allegorical reading and suggests a method of reading poetry by paying attention to the impenetrable "thingness" of tropes and figures, using as an example a poem notorious for the prevalence of allegory in the history of its interpretations, "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Contending that the variety of the interpretations of this sonnet reveal the inconsistency and arbitrariness of the allegorical method, I also draw attention to commentators' lack of rigorous understanding of the allegorical pretext, the failure to distinguish between allegory and symbol, allegoresis, and typology. A study of the lability of the terms used to advance the Christological reading reveals that they do not sustain a reference to a single emblematic figure and, extrapolating more broadly from this discovery, that allegorical readings in general have severe drawbacks. In conclusion, I propose that the "ungrammaticality" of "The Windhover"'s tropes and the importance of the notion of "thing" puts Hopkins in proximity to the problems of the later modernist poets, such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, who struggle with the paradoxical ability of the conceptualizing power of mind to simultaneously apprehend an external object and to distance us further from it.

- Berensmeyer, Ingo :  "Twofold Vibration": Samuel Beckett's Laws of Form

Abstract: The formal specifics of Samuel Beckett's writing have so far been redescribed in terms of mysticism, ordinary language philosophy, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Expanding on but also departing from these descriptions, this article tests the capability of a different heuristic vocabulary, derived from systems theory and second-order cybernetics, to reconstruct the formal dynamics of Beckett's writing and to reveal the structural principle that determines the generation of form in Beckett's work. The argument assumes that George Spencer Brown's dynamic (operative) concept of form can be used as a conceptual basis for describing the complex and baffling operation performed by Beckett's writing, and it proposes that this literary technique is best understood as a double recursion that envisages the unpresentable generativity of the literary text. These hypotheses are developed by drawing on a wide range of Beckett's work, including major plays, prose, Film, work for television, and critical writings.

- Levinson, Joshua : Dialogical Reading in the Rabbinic Exegetical Narrative

Abstract: This article investigates the reading dynamics of the rewritten Bible or the exegetical narrative in rabbinic literature of late antiquity. The exegetical narrative is composed of a story which simultaneously represents and interprets its biblical counterpart. Its singularity resides precisely in this synergy of narrative and exegesis. As exegesis, it creates new meanings from the biblical verses, and as narrative, it dramatizes those meanings by means of the biblical story world. The concurrent presence of two distinct voices, biblical and rabbinic, as well as two distinct types of discourse, narrative and exegetical, that navigate between these voices, creates a unique type of reading dynamic that I call dialogical reading. It is this dynamic that enables the midrashic text to create new meanings from old and highlights the challenge this genre presents to the theory of reading.

REVIEW ARTICLE:

- Brisman, LeslieNew Criticism for the Twenty-First Century

REVIEW:

- Herman, David, 1962- : On the Notion "Post-Deconstructive Narrative": Text Type or Textual Condition?

NEW BOOKS AT GLANCE:

- Segal, Eyal: The Cambridge Companion to Kafka (review)

- Segal, Eyal: The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz Kafka (review)

- Edwards, Brian J. : The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust (review)

- Sacks, Glenda : British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (review)