Showing papers in "Poetics Today in 1989"
TL;DR: Ovid's declaration of principles is inspired by the same general rule that Horace too, in his Ars poetica (v. 86), had thought important: "Descriptas seruare uices operumque colores"-respect for the distinctions among the various literary genres and the appropriate use of expressive and stylistic devices as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: At a prominent point in the middle of the Remedia amoris, Ovid momentarily interrupts his series of therapeutic lessons to make room for a statement of poetics. Such statements are customary in the register of literary polemics; some evil-minded people had criticized Ovid for his daring teachings in the Ars amatoria, and the polemic tradition (of Callimachean origin) requires that the poet, in justifying the literary techniques he has chosen, also attack the envy of his critics (v. 389 livor) and vaunt his own title of author, indeed hope for ever greater successes. Ovid's declaration of principles is inspired by the same general rule that Horace too, in his Ars poetica (v. 86), had thought important: "Descriptas seruare uices operumque colores"-respect for the distinctions among the various literary genres and the appropriate use of expressive and stylistic devices. This is a simplified form of the theory of the prepon: Every genre has its own "competence," each should do its own job. For the wrath of Achilles there is the solemn hexameter of Homer, for the loves of Cydippe the elegiac distich of Callimachus, never has stern Andromache played the part of the courtesan Thais. Thais is the character who symbolizes Ovid's poetry (the Amores, the Ars, and now the Remedia). Ovid has made no mistake; the Musa proterva who sings in distichs the free loves of women like Thais is a perfect image for his elegiac intention. If a text's intention is considered as an active tension between vir-
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TL;DR: Vance's Mervelous Signals as discussed by the authors is one of the very few books that can be seen as a monument and exemplar to other medievalists, as well as providing inspiration for years to come.
Abstract: \"As one of the very few books that competently span the millennium of the Middle Ages as well as the spectrum of modem critical approaches, Vance's Mervelous Signals should stand as a monument and exemplar to fellow medievalists, as well as providing inspiration for years to come.\"--Envoi. \"A highly valuable contribution to medieval literary studies in its individual readings as well as in its illumination of literary theory.\"--Style. \"Often brilliant, and always stimulating.\"--Studies in the Age of Chaucer. The investigation of language, of how (and what and why) signifiers signify, is prominent in modern critical work, but the questions being asked are by no means new. In Mervelous Signals, Eugene Vance asserts that \"there is scarcely a term, practice, or concept in contemporary theory that does not have some rich antecedent in medieval thought.\" He goes on to illustrate the complexity and depth of medieval speculations about language and literature. Vance's study of the link between the poetics and semiotics of the Middle Ages takes both a critical and a historical view as he brings today's insights to bear on the contemporary perspectives of such works as St. Augustine's Confessions, the Chanson de Roland, Chretien's Yvain, Aucassin and Nicolette, Spenser's The Faerie Queen, and certain aspects of the works of Dante and Chaucer and of French medieval theater. Eugene Vance, a professor of comparative literature at Emory Uni-versity, is the author of Reading the Song of Roland (1970) and From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrative in the Middle Ages (1986).
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TL;DR: There is a great and quickly increasing number of studies on word and image relations, but few efforts have been made as yet to make explicit the general problems underlying this kind of research.
Abstract: There is a great and quickly increasing number of studies on wordand-image relations, but few efforts have been made as yet to make explicit the general problems underlying this kind of research. I see at least two central problems, one methodological and one taxonomic. The former concerns the legitimacy of composing verbal and visual artifacts or transferring methods used in one field to the other field, the identity or difference in the meaning of our critical idiom when it is applied, simultaneously or separately, in both fields, and so on.' The methodological approach requires a well-chosen point of departure; thus Wendy Steiner (1982) picks up the historical "ut pictura poesis" tradition and tries to examine it in the light of modern, especially semiotic, criticism, whereas Manfred Muckenhaupt (1986) examines the current methods of comparing words and images from the point of view of modern linguistics, Gottfried Boehm (1978, 1986) and Oskar Batschmann (1977) from that of modern philosophy (especially aesthetics and hermeneutics). The second general problem is more practical. Facing the tremendous variety of phenomena which belong to word-and-image research, one would like to find some very general categories or headings which would allow a clear and comprehensive classification of all these phe-
43 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a major revision is made to the triadic typology of focalization based on a diminishing degree of access to the psychology of the characters, which has been the subject of a great deal of debate within the pages of Poetics Today.
Abstract: Ever since Gerard Genette coined the term in 1972, the concept of focalization has been the subject of a great deal of debate, some of which has appeared within the pages of Poetics Today. Focalization is defined by Genette as a restriction imposed on the information provided by a narrator about his characters. His well-known triadic typology (zero, internal, and external) is based on a diminishing degree of access to the psychology of the characters. In the terminology of Mieke Bal, internal and external focalization refer instead to the intraor extradiegetic locus of the focalizer, and have nothing to do with psychological penetration.l If we examine these and other theories with an eye toward retrospective personal narration, however, we find that a major revision is in order. Little attention has been paid to the problem of focalization in texts in which narrator and character are the same individual. Traditional studies on point of view have often failed to take into account the many possibilities open to the first-person narrator (FPN), who is of course a fictional creation and not a true autobiographer.2 Even modern theory is often inadequate
40 citations
TL;DR: Under Hui-tsung, the last emperor of the Northern Sung whose reign ended in 1126, candidates for admission to the Imperial Painting Academy were habitually asked to compose a brush-and-ink painting that rendered in visual images a given line of verse as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Under Hui-tsung, the last emperor of the Northern Sung whose reign ended in 1126, candidates for admission to the Imperial Painting Academy were habitually asked to compose a brush-and-ink painting that rendered in visual images a given line of verse. One of the most famous paintings, which exists only in legend, was executed in response to the following line from Wang Wei's (699?-761) eight-line poem "Visiting the Temple of Accumulated Fragrance":
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed a new approach to study the problem of the author, the textual work of art, and the sociohistorical context of a text and its socio-economic context.
Abstract: 1.1. Hermeneutics on understanding. The majority of recent studies in the understanding of literature still follow the hermeneutic spirals of the circle of understanding. This spiral approach has produced at least as many problems as hermeneutic readings have been constructed. Investigating and pondering literary discourse, hermeneutics quite naturally asks of the texts what they mean or symbolize or what they intend. This self-induced dialogue between the text and the scholar has been rather productive in terms of answers to questions of textual meaning, which, in fact, is not really surprising, since that very dialogue depends on the personalities and attitudes of the interpreters themselves. Some scholars who are sensitive to the intersubjectivity of science have therefore suggested that hermeneutic understanding should be abandoned. They have urged members of the scientific community to relate their personal understanding to a kind of metareflection or metadiscourse about sociohistorically acquired frames, presuppositions, and interests that shape the process of personal understanding. Nevertheless, those hermeneuticians who first took such a critical attitude towards their understanding of a text and its sociohistorical context have not yet provided any plausible solution to the central problem of the adequate, correct, objective reconstruction of the meaning of a text (provided first that the meaning of the text exists). About a decade ago, several scientists proposed a new approach to studying the problem of the author, the textual work of art, and the
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TL;DR: In this article, a series of transformations undergone by the concept of flower personification from classical times to the end of the nineteenth century is studied. But the focus of this paper is not on flowers only; trees would be another, quite different subject for semiotic analysis.
Abstract: Throughout the history of Western literature, plants of all kinds have been personified as men and women. Trees and flowers are the two most common categories of such plants. This paper concerns flowers only; trees would be another, quite different subject for semiotic analysis. Flowers have their biological role in the lives of plants (as studied by botanists), but their role in the cultures of the people who appreciate them is an interesting and complex example of sign-function. The codes of flower usage in cultures of both East and West have often been studied by anthropologists and folklorists, especially popular folklorists of the late nineteenth century (Cooke 1882; Folkard 1884; Friend 1884; Gubernatis 1878; Thistelton-Dyer 1889). Most of us are familiar with the particular flower customs of our own culture, typically relating to holidays or ceremonies such as weddings and funerals. Such customs would be a fruitful subject for a semiotic investigation, but this study does not concern them. Rather, my subject is the series of transformations undergone by the concept of flower personification from classical times to the end of the nineteenth century. By flower personification I mean any signification in any form that brings together flowers and human beings. Included are figures such as metaphor and simile, metonymy, symbol, and allegory, as well as narrative elements and personification in its narrow sense. I do not
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TL;DR: Kuspit as discussed by the authors argued that art history has resisted, more than the study of the other, non-visual arts, the new interdisciplinarianism most evident in literary criticism.
Abstract: Speaking Pictures? At a recent professional forum on the possibility of an art(s) discourse for the 1980s, one prominent art historian suggested that criticism of the visual arts had, if anything, already too much to do with discourse. "Why is it," he asked, "that art history has resisted, more than the study of the other, non-visual arts, the new interdisciplinarianism most evident in literary criticism?" (Kuspit 1986: 1). The virtue of resistance is implied in the question, for behind the peaceful overtures of the "new interdisciplinarianism" lurk "the colonizing, consumerist tendencies of English Studies, eagerly reducing art to text, visual art into linguistic art, vision into sign, in effect arguing the case for Derrida's [1973] assertion that 'the collusion between painting ... and writing is constant' "-if not for an even more insidious Derridean "attempt to bury painting in writing, or to suggest that painting is bad writing" (Kuspit 1986: 3). The "new interdisciplinarianism" turns out to be a new imperialism in disguise, and-as was to a large extent also true of the old imperialism-its weapon for colonizing, reducing, and ultimately burying the natives of the visual realm is language. Insofar as the speaker's views represent a current position among art historians, those of us in English studies may find in them a curious replay of the battle over theory in our own camp, now staged as a contest for dominion between two disciplines. In fact, the paragone between the arts, here reflected in the turf disputes of their academic exponents, is a venerable topos. As W. J. T. Mitchell (1986: 43)
TL;DR: The first thing to say about the notion of space from a literary point of view is that it does not exist, or should not exist as mentioned in this paper, and the dominant tendency in Western literary theory is resolutely iconoclastic, that is, antipictorial, antivisual, antispatial, even, at the most general level, antimimetic.
Abstract: The first thing to say about the notion of space from a literary point of view is that it does not exist, or should not exist. Literature, as we have been told at least since Lessing's Laocoon, is a temporal art. Space enters into literature only as a dubious fiction, as a phantom in the minds of overimaginative readers, as an invasion from alien and rival art forms like painting, or as a necessary evil in the transmission of verbal art by the spatial, visible traces of writing. Despite a long tradition of literary pictorialism which stresses the visual, spatial aspects of literary representation, the dominant tendency in Western literary theory is resolutely iconoclastic, that is, antipictorial, antivisual, antispatial, even, at the most general level, antimimetic. Aristotle makes it clear that, despite the obvious analogies between poetic and graphic mimesis, the truly distinctive feature of poetry is plot, the arrangement of incidents in time. "The spectacular effect," which would seem empirically to be a crucial part of at least dramatic literature, is, for Aristotle, "quite foreign to the art" of poetry, belonging instead to "the art of the costumier." "The plot should be so constructed," says Aristotle (1932 [1927]: 29, 49),
TL;DR: The play with a play-within-the-play phenomenon has been studied extensively in the literature as discussed by the authors, but not comprehensively or theoretically not only in the context of play-with-a-play.
Abstract: Speaking of the play with a play-within-the-play, Dieter Mehl (1965: 42) once said that there had "hardly [been] any attempt to treat the subject comprehensively," and that he was "not even sure whether it would be possible at all, because such a bewildering variety would have to be included [and because the subject] is ... much more complex and less easily defined than many other conventions." The same holds true of the whole of the structural category to which the play with a play-within-the-play belongs, namely, what may be called "embeddingembedded objects," which also includes phenomena such as novels with novels-within-the-novel, paintings with paintings-within-the-painting, and films with films-within-the-film (or with paintings or plays-withinthe-film), Chinese boxes and Russian dolls, paradoxes, quotations and free indirect speech, mise en abyme (in some usages of the term), and many other things.' Nevertheless, the present paper, taking Mehl's words as a challenge, constitutes an attempt to treat "comprehensively" or theoretically not only the play with a play-within-the-play
TL;DR: For instance, the authors pointed out that the dynamics of theatrical experience are more complicated, more fluid and volatile than in the emblem, and this fact has important consequences for the isolation and discussion of verbal and visual elements.
Abstract: The emblem and the theater are forms par excellence where the verbal and visual cohabit. Not surprisingly, therefore, the study of that moment of English theater when it achieved new heights, new sophistication, under the genius of Shakespeare and a cluster of other dramatists has recently been much concerned with invoking emblems, which also enjoyed prominence in late-sixteenth-century Europe.' Yet the invocation of emblems as a means of elucidating the crucial but elusive conjunction of word and image in the theater is by no means satisfactory. The dynamics of theatrical experience are more complicated, more fluid and volatile, than in the emblem, 2 and this fact has important consequences for the isolation and discussion of verbal and visual elements. Indeed, the methodological concerns of verbal-visual criticism seem (understandably) to get submerged in the historical scholarship of the emblem, and the assumptions that word and image
TL;DR: Literary critics engaged in the interdisciplinary study of art and literature have cause to feel considerable pride and satisfaction at the distance we have come since an earlier special issue on the interart comparison, in 1972, in New Literary History as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Literary critics engaged in the interdisciplinary study of art and literature have cause to feel considerable pride and satisfaction at the distance we have come since an earlier special issue on the interart comparison, in 1972, in New Literary History. Then the interdisciplinary study of art and literature had to justify itself, explain itself, theorize itself. It still staggered under the burden of zeitgeist and the damage done to interart study by the vagueness of work guided by such dubious notions. We needed to prove we were not dilettantes, and that literary critics had important things to say about art history. We needed to get beyond narrow fact-finding, or hunting for artistfigures in literature, or other methods that had made our interests seem esoteric or self-contained. The position of interart study is now very different. The flowering of literary theory and the variety of dynamic new approaches within literary studies have made it clear that literary critics and theorists can This essay was written for Poetics Today in the fall of 1986. The long delay in publication makes some of its statements about William Rubin and aspects of its tone out of date. In 1988, Rubin was made director emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), and his position as director was filled by Kirk Varnedoe. Varnedoe worked with Rubin on the "'Primitivism"' show discussed below but is associated with postmodern art rather than with earlier modernist traditions, and he is expected to move MOMA more firmly out of modernist values than Rubin was willing to do. Were I writing this essay today, I would problematize the term primitive art more fully. I would also distinguish more clearly between the terms primitive and third world, which are not synonymous.
TL;DR: In this paper, the theoretical positions of two major figures in postwar French and European intellectual history, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, in light of current debates over the "crisis of modernism" and the much-heralded supersession of the latter by a still amorphous entity known as postmodernism are investigated.
Abstract: In this essay* I will inquire into the theoretical positions of two major figures in postwar French and European intellectual history, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, in light of current debates over the "crisis of modernism" and the much-heralded supersession of the latter by a still amorphous entity known as postmodernism. I will argue that Althusser's work and the structural Marxist school which derives
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TL;DR: In this article, a woman marrying a farmer that does make a woman a farmer's wife is described as an intentional paradox, with a second, consistent interpretation, and it is shown that the hearers must have done some rapid processing which led them to view it as a paradox.
Abstract: Clearly, on the purely literal level, this statement must count as selfcontradictory: It is marrying a farmer that does make a woman a farmer's wife. Now, in order to laugh appreciatively about the apparent contradiction, the hearers must have done some rapid processing which led them to view it as an intentional paradox, with a second, consistent interpretation. Yet neither traditional rhetoric nor recent pragmatic and poetic descriptions of paradox illuminate this sort of processing in any interesting way. Some rhetorical treatments (e.g., Dubois et al. 1970) associate paradox with wordplay, which may be correct in many instances but certainly not always, and which needs further explication in any case,
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce the poem-about-painting, a kind of poetry that places itself in relation to a painting as if having painted it, where the dependence on painting or world may be ambiguous.
Abstract: Because it closely associates modern poetry and modern painting, the challenging thesis that we can place relation before substance as the basis of similarity (Steiner 1982) calls for energetic testing. Beginning such a test, we move with new competence past the descriptive poem, a work that places itself in relation to a thing or scene as if having painted it. This is the familiar case of the poem talking "like" a painting while otherwise conventionally pointing to things in the world as referents. Testing further, we come across a more interesting second case, the poem-about-painting, placing itself apparently in relation to a worldly thing or scene and also in relation to a painting modeled on the "same" thing or scene-where, that is, the dependence on painting or world may be ambiguous. This is the poem "about" a specific paint-
TL;DR: The text, however, as we possess it today, will tell us enough about its own vicissitudes as mentioned in this paper to reveal noticeable gaps, disturbing repetitions and obvious contradictions, which reveal that the text has been subjected to revisions which have falsified it in the sense of their secret aims, mutilated it and amplified it and even changed it into its reverse.
Abstract: The text, however, as we possess it today, will tell us enough about its own vicissitudes. Two mutually opposed treatments have left their traces on it. On the one hand it has been subjected to revisions which have falsified it in the sense of their secret aims, have mutilated it and amplified it and have even changed it into its reverse; on the other hand a solicitous piety has presided over it and has sought to preserve everything as it was, no matter whether it was consistent or contradicted itself. Thus almost everywhere noticeable gaps, disturbing repetitions and obvious contradictions have come about-indications which reveal
TL;DR: In this article, the role of ekphrasis in the novelistic clash between capitalist and aristocratic ideals is explored, in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth as elsewhere, through two opposed plot structures: the rags-to-riches story epitomized in the Horatio Alger books and the chivalric romance, with its roots in fairy tale and myth.
Abstract: Ekphrasis, from one point of view, is the aesthetician's topos par excellence. In it, one art contemplates another and in the process defines its own limits. In ekphrastic poems such as Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," a literary work compares its temporality to the still moment of the visual arts, yearns for an atemporal transcendence made impossible by its own medium, yet wins out over time through rhetorical sleight of hand (Steiner 1982: 41-42). But this purely aesthetic function of ekphrasis is just one of many that the topos serves. In this paper I would like to explore another: the role of ekphrasis in the novelistic clash between capitalist and aristocratic ideals. This conflict is expressed, in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth as elsewhere, through two opposed plot structures: on the one hand, the rags-to-riches story epitomized in the Horatio Alger books, and on the other, the chivalric romance, with its roots in fairy tale and myth. In the first, value arises from hard work, and causeand-effect relations are crucial. In the second, value is associated with the transcendent and eternal sphere, and the aim is to escape the world of causality into a purer realm. Ekphrasis, as the topos of the still, transcendent moment, opposes the contingency of plot flow and temporal progression in the novel and hence plays a signal role in the confrontation between contextual and acontextual value.
TL;DR: In recent years, many of our own artists, literary as well as visual, have explored the potentials of the intermedia sound poetry, the happening, concrete and postconcrete poetry, and so on-and, in due course, attention has been given to earlier intermedial works, suggesting a fairly widespread taste for such forms at present as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: From roughly the eighteenth century until the 1970s, pattern poetry, that is, poetry in which a visual image is formed by the placement of words or letters, when it received any attention at all, was strongly under attack by almost all critics and observers. This was not because of its mimesis, since until the early twentieth century most visual art was itself mimetic. Rather, the feeling was that the pattern poem was intermedial, that it lay conceptually between the literary and visual art media, and that it was therefore unable to stand on its own and was thus inherently mediocre. In recent years, however, many of our own artists, literary as well as visual, have explored the potentials of the intermedia-sound poetry, the happening, concrete and postconcrete poetry, and so on-and, in due course, attention has been given to earlier intermedial works, suggesting a fairly widespread taste for such forms at present. Emblem poetry, previously ignored or denigrated by most observers up to the 1950s, was reevaluated by Mario Praz (1964) and others in the 1960s and since (see, e.g., Hatherly 1983 and Pozzi 1981). The same appears to be happening with pattern poetry. Just to describe the situation in the United States, when I wrote a little monograph on George Herbert's pattern poems (Higgins 1977), I could find almost nothing on pattern poetry as such in Englisha chapter here or there (Hollander 1975), but nothing substantial. A little book by Kenneth Newell (1976) had been published, but by an extremely obscure press; it was unlisted in the usual sources, and I knew of it only later when I found a copy of it in the New York Pub-
TL;DR: The role of the architect is to make tangible what is intangible, and in the present state of architectural production, too many anomalies in the relationship of theory and practice have obscured this fundamental role.
Abstract: The role of the architect is to make tangible what is intangible. In the present state of architectural production, too many anomalies in the relationship of theory and practice have obscured this fundamental role. The result is a vision of architecture as a corrupt abstract art coping with technical and pragmatic requirements whose theoretical basis depends on theoretical and critical frameworks developed in other fields of human knowledge.' Architectural doctrine is not "normal" anymore. Most architects are playing "solitary" games. They are playing with the puzzle of architecture without following the rules of the game, merely using the pieces of the puzzle as construction blocks. Although architects can make the pieces fit together-indeed, one of the requirements for practicing the profession is that designed buildings must stand up when they are constructed-the results of solitary play are solipsistic compositions in which the image has been sacrificed to the concept.2 Current professional and academic inter-
TL;DR: Shakespeare's plays contain many narratives as mentioned in this paper, and they are often punctuated by embedded narratives, and there are moments in the dramatic action when that action is a narrative in itself.
Abstract: Shakespeare's plays contain many narratives; indeed, in several important respects, they are narrative. Recent scholarship has emphasized the general understanding in the Renaissance both of narrative techniques and of the overwhelming power that stories possess when they have been skillfully told.1 For a Renaissance writer, narrative would have been deeply woven into his cultural background, inscribed in the dominant rhetorical tradition, and rooted in the humanistic view of education. Narrative, whether classical or biblical, seems largely to have been what children studied (Joseph 1947; Baldwin 1944). It seems also to have been, as Stephen Greenblatt (1980) has made clear, what society taught to, in countless hidden ways, and what it expected from, its members. Narrative was the root of education, rhetoric, literature, religion, law, history: culture. Shakespeare's plays are frequently punctuated by embedded narratives. There are moments in the dramatic action when that action is