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Poetics Today, vol. 28, no 4 (hiver 2007)

Poetics Today, vol. 28, no 4 (hiver 2007)

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la revue)

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. 28, no 4 (hiver 2007)


Gian Balsamo
The Fiction of Marcel Proust's Autobiography
This essay discusses the literary genre of Proust's In Search of Lost Time as analogous with the genre peculiar to Dante's Commedia and Augustine's Confessions. Both Dante and Augustine narrate their autobiography in terms of a writerly vocation pursued by means of a love quest; both authors' success in the affirmation of their respective identity depends on the success of the love quest. Dante's case is especially relevant to this essay insofar as his poem instantiates his authorial identity as coincident with that of his fictional character. Augustine's confessions, however driven by a love quest, belong to the more conventionally autobiographic genre of the personal memoir. The fiction of the Commedia is that the biography of its fictional protagonist is the author's autobiography. The same principle, which challenges the narratological distinction among real author, implied author, and narrator, may be applied to Proust's novel. Marcel, the protagonist, crowns his literary vocation only at the end of a protracted love quest. His success in the love quest coincides with the end of the novel, and it is at this point that the distinction between fictional character and historical author loses its force. After Erich Auerbach on the Commedia, one can argue that Marcel and Marcel Proust come to coincide at the point of intersection of allegory and history; the fictional character is the allegory of the author's historical authenticity. Toward the end, Marcel-the-character, finally equipped with the means and determination to write the novel we have just read, metamorphoses into Proust-the-author: he is Proust's deliberate choice for his own autobiography.

Joshua Landy
A Beatrice for Proust?
How similar is Proust's Recherche to Dante's Commedia? Not very, as it turns out. In the first place, Proust's protagonist does not require an experience of ideal love as a precondition for conversion: Mlle de Saint-Loup is no Beatrice. And in the second, what he produces is not an allegorized rendition of his creator's journey to authorship. Dante the pilgrim may well become Dante the writer, but Marcel does not become Proust, nor does he go on to write the Recherche; quite the contrary, the tantalizing and deliberately tempting set of similarities between author and narrator are an indication of the distance Proust has placed, like Elstir, between his life and his art.

Hervé G. Picherit
The Impossibly Many Loves of Charles Swann: The Myth of Proustian Love and the Reader's "Impression" in Un amour de Swann
Much in Marcel Proust's Un amour de Swann—notably its position in the Recherche and the title itself—suggests that we might derive from the tale of Swann's love for Odette a general "law" about love, applicable throughout the Recherche. Yet far from conveying a clear account of Swann's passion, the story presents nine different falling-in-love scenes, which, it seems, contradict the prevailing view that Swann's tale is a relatively "easy" section of Proust's novel. Indeed, I argue here that the illusive transparency of Un amour de Swann is at the heart of a textual mechanism that elicits from us spontaneous and lasting reactions to the text. Proust in fact withholds a clear characterization of love and, instead, imparts to our subjective impressions about this emotion an illusion of objectivity. When the reader applies what he or she has "discovered" about love in Un amour de Swann to the rest of the Recherche, then, the reader unknowingly becomes inscribed into the novel, making it a reflection of the deepest, most essential parts of his or her being.

Sonia Zyngier, Willie van Peer, and Jèmeljan Hakemulder
Complexity and Foregrounding: In the Eye of the Beholder?
This article approaches from an empirical perspective the interrelation between foregrounding and complexity in the evaluation of literary texts. For this purpose, a reading experiment is reported. Participants from three cultures (Brazil, Egypt, and the Netherlands) read three texts of different degrees of complexity and evaluated them on a number of variables. Subsequently, they re-read and evaluated the texts once more. The hypothesis was that complex texts would be rated higher on a second than on a first reading; the opposite was predicted for the text with the lowest complexity. Results confirmed this hypothesis for only one group of participants, which raises questions about the nature of a "reading culture."

Meir Sternberg
Omniscience in Narrative Construction: Old Challenges and New
Since modernism, narrative omniscience has been much attacked, yet little studied and understood. This in inverse ratio to the central role it actually plays in narrative discourse and metadiscourse alike: the telling, reading, grouping, evolving, conceptualizing of stories, invented (e.g., novelistic) or inspired (biblical, Homeric). Here I review the various old-new critical thrusts against epistemic superprivilege (outright denials, partisan judgments, attempted confinements, impairments, replacements, as well as genuine misunderstandings) arisen since my constructive theory of omniscience appeared, often in response to it. Those neo-modernist challenges meet, multiply, and frequently run to extremes in Jonathan Culler's (2004) antitheistic critique, which accordingly presents an overall mirror-image to how and where and why omniscient narrative is (re)constructed. Nor is this key question of epistemic privilege vs. disprivilege alone at stake. The argument shows afresh its bearings on larger issues yet, especially narrative's open-ended art of relations. Thus the relations between axes of perspective, between perspective and plot, between power and performance, between mimetic and artistic sense-making, between factual and fictional storytelling. Equally involved, at a higher level still, are the relations between part and whole, form and force or function, typology and teleology, theory and history, (meta)discourse and ideology, the realities of literature and the desires of the literati. Throughout, the choice ultimately lies between freezing, even nullifying those relations via package deals and allowing them free play in the spirit of the Proteus Principle.