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 foreign oeuvre entering and merging with a target literature and to chart the changing conditions of reception in the twentieth-century Dutch polysystem. A critical analysis of available reception and systems theories (those of, inter alia, Jan Mukaovsk, Felix Vodika, Hans Robert Jauss, Pierre Bourdieu, and Itamar Even-Zohar) results in two main research questions that serve as a guideline for further investigation: How do reception processes reflect or relate to social segmentation, stratification, and change, and how do dynamic developments within literary production become manifest in the interplay of new (here, foreign) literature and an existing literary system? To provide a conceptual framework for an empirical approach to these questions, Even-Zohar's repertoire concept is taken as a point of departure. But it is redefined as a "mental equipment" with three components: (1) knowledge of 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 interests that determine selection, classification, and judgment. The components are interconnected in that all are value-laden or interest-driven. Three independent sets of data concerning the reception of Virginia Woolf were collected to bring out different parts of these components and changes therein. Karl Erik Rosengren's mention technique is used to show how Woolf's work evolved as a frame of reference for literary critics and essayists. Woolf's translation and publishing history is analyzed in terms of changing strategies and shifting interests on these fronts. Reconstruction of values that underlie judgments in reviews of Woolf's work shows differences in evaluative patterns between her early and later receptions, due to shifts in both social structure and conceptions of literary value. The quantitative data (numbers of mentions and translations/editions) are compared with other modernist authors from the same "cohort" (Joyce, Mansfield, Musil, Kafka) to detect convergences and divergences. The results disclose a multifaceted complex of social and literary factors and forces in a changing polysystem: traces of confessional segregation before and secularization after the second World War, the advent of the second feminist wave in the 1960s, the changing book market and a changing attitude toward translation, and the growing impact of the modernist cohort on national literary criticism and production. Woolf's oeuvre appears to have figured in two increasingly separable repertoires, one shared by a circle of women writing for and about women, the other by a circle of mainstream writers and critics discussing and reviewing innovative literature. The division between national and international literature remains visible in both subsystems. Correlating the quantitative data of the modernist authors shows patterns that are similar to those found by Rosengren in Swedish culture and indicate historical "laws" in the increase and decrease of a cohort'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 processes of translation working like the "radio" in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children that magically renders all Indian languages intelligible to the children of midnight. It is surprisingly difficult to determine what languages the characters in Rushdie's novel are actually speaking; though there can be found in the novel several of the strategies Meir Sternberg identifies with translational mimesis (the representation of one language within another), the material substance of English is important in much of its dialogue. Arguably, the English language itself is the magic radio by means of which meaning becomes accessible in Midnight's Children—and Rushdie's own comments reveal ultimately that he evaded the issue of the underlying languages the 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 analysis of the narrative structure of Captain Sidney Howes's lion act performed in Gerry Cottle's British circus. I begin by discussing Carmeli's analysis of how the act functions socially and semiotically. According to him, this act plays on a formative underlying nature/culture structural opposition that is then subverted by circus culture only to be shown, in the end, to be part of the very bourgeois order it was supposed to challenge. I sketch out Carmeli's analysis of how the lions, Sidney Howes the trainer, and the circus itself serve as vehicles for a nostalgic spectacle of an exotic world that reformulates nature and culture into an even deeper message about the loss of originality as a discourse that conditions European modernity. My comments are meant to urge Carmeli to extend the work of nostalgia to the circus in ruins and the ever-present nightmare shadows of death, in the midst of dreamworld pleasure and titillation, which hovers over the circus. This means rethinking the role of representation and nostalgia which Carmeli finds underlying the lion act to see how the act, the artist Howes, and the circus may be understood alternatively as spectacle. My discussion ends with a suggestion about how the topic of death and ruins may open the possibility of another line of analysis, which tracks the twists and turns of circus spectacle as dreamworld and nightmare, now caught in the nervous system of postmodern capitalism, its tensions, oppositions, and contradictions.