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Poetics Today, vol. 29, no 2 (été 2008)

Poetics Today, vol. 29, no 2 (été 2008)

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. 29, no 2 (été 2008)


H. Porter Abbott
Narrative and Emergent Behavior
The difficulty of understanding emergent behavior is usually attributed to our need to see in it the operation of some kind of centralized control where there is in fact none (Keller 1985, Resnick 1994). Yet as a species, we seem to have little difficulty with complex narratives in which there is no centralized control and in which chance often plays a major role (tragedies, comedies, most novels and films). I argue that the principal reason for the incompatibility of emergent behavior with narrative understanding is its massive distribution of causal agents—a complexity of causation so acute that it disallows any perceptible chain of causation that could serve as a narrative thread. Narrative can and does play a limited role in our understanding of emergent behavior but does so only at the micro level of individual agents (the horse ancestor) and the macro level of the whole (the evolution of the horse). The perils of our weakness for narrative templates in trying to understand emergent behavior arise when understanding the internal nature of the process of emergence is critical to our choice-making behavior. This is especially the case when our health and well-being depend on emergent behaviors to which we contribute. Notable examples are the common efforts to narrativize the behaviors of the stock market and human evolution.

Leslie Brisman
The Wall Is Down: New Openings in the Study of Poetry
The question considered here is not what are the most interesting or most discussed recent movements in literary criticism, but what are the methodological innovations that might actually contribute to a better understanding of a specific poem? I look in two directions, the one attempting to enrich a poem's setting in its cultural context, the other attempting to complicate a poem's relation to its literary background. For the former, I attempt to read Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" with the combination of attention to nonliterary texts contemporaneous with the poem and analysis of cultural bias that has characterized New Historical readings. For the latter, I attempt to read Stevens's "Puella Parvula" as a crisis lyric and battleground for the anxieties of influence as elaborated by Harold Bloom. I conclude by comparing the two modes of "unknowing" that these methods invoke—Donne's culturally determined sense of female anatomy (his obliviousness to the fundamental difference between male and female genitalia, which we take for granted), and Stevens's repression of the human cry at the core of his interest in imagination. The article acknowledges that the great masters of older methodologies, here represented by John Freccero and Helen Vendler, may have more to tell us than any methodological innovation as such could hope to convey.

George Butte
Suture and the Narration of Subjectivity in Film
To begin with, the essay identifies shortcomings in classical suture theory's approach to film's narration of consciousness. This approach, which has been widely influential in film theory, grew out of work by Jean-Pierre Oudart, Jacques-Alain Miller, Daniel Dayan, Stephen Heath, and Kaja Silverman and emphasizes a Lacanian drama of absence. This model of suture has also been the focus of important criticism by scholars like David Bordwell and Noel Carroll. My alternative paradigm of embodiment and multiple consciousnesses, what I call deep intersubjectivity, emerges from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, with contributions from Oudart's own phenomenological observations, and seeks to return the body (including its politics) to suture and to film narrative. The fundamental image drawn from Merleau-Ponty is the chiasmus, the film version of which is the shot/reverse shot sequence. I conclude with close readings of two moments from Michael Roemer's 1964 film about African American life, Nothing but a Man: they illustrate how suture enables the narration of intersubjectivity in film, in its embodiments (including the political) from violation and humiliation to evasion, opacity, and sometimes a recuperation, even if incomplete, of community, however temporary or partial.

Guillemette Bolens
Narrative Use and the Practice of Fiction in The Book of Sindibad and The Tale of Beryn
This essay considers David Rudrum's claim that narrative is a type of language act that needs to be construed with regard to its use. Here this claim is related to one of the most influential literary traditions in the history of fiction: the Eastern Book of Sindibad and its Western offshoot, the Seven Sages of Rome, in which narrative use is of central significance. I focus more particularly on a tale embedded in the Eastern Book of Sindibad, "The Merchant and the Rogues," which was adapted and translated into Middle English in the form of the fifteenth-century Tale of Beryn, an anonymous continuation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Sindibad tale and the Tale of Beryn thematize narrative use in the context of a trial, in which the pleas and counterpleas highlight the function of fictionalizing acts. Fiction in these narratives is conceptualized as a practice. Finally, I argue that the production and reception of the Tale of Beryn must be linked to the socioprofessional milieu and cultural activities of late medieval law students.