Showing papers in "Poetics Today in 2009"

The Visual Experience of Image Metaphor: Cognitive Insights into Imagist Figures

Abstract: In this essay I investigate how image metaphors—metaphors that link one concrete object to another, such as “her spread hand was a star!sh”—promote visualization in the reader. Focusing on image metaphors in Imagist poetry, I assert that the two terms (e.g., the hand and the star!sh) of many of these metaphors are similar in shape and that this “structural correspondence” encourages the reader to visualize those metaphors. Readers may spontaneously form a “visual template,” a schematic middle ground that mediates between those similar shapes, in order to smoothly move between the two images within each metaphor. The structural correspondence and the mediating visual template allow readers to mentally shift back and forth between the two images, yet readers cannot fuse the two terms through visual imagery. Research supports these claims: reader reports have demonstrated that subjects understand image metaphors primarily through their physical features, and work on the visual interpretation of ambiguous !gures suggests that though one cannot fuse images together, one may switch back and forth between multiple images of a !gure, especially if the images share the same frame of reference. These !ndings indicate that readers may be particularly likely to understand image metaphor through visual imagery, especially when the terms of the metaphor correspond physically. This essay is drawn from a larger project on the “poetics of literary visualization”—a part-by-part investigation of the formal features of texts that elicit visual imagery. Such an account helps reveal the workings of the visual imagination and restore critical attention to this neglected aspect of the reading experience. Poetics Today 30:3 (Fall 2009) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2009-002 © 2009 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics I would like to thank the anonymous readers of Poetics Today for their helpful feedback on this article and especially Meir Sternberg for his detailed and precise commentary. 424 Poetics Today 30:3 The Fall and Rise of the Visual Imagination in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism As several champions of the visual imagination have pointed out, the visual image was practically banished from several powerful twentieth-century academic movements in psychology and literary criticism.1 At the beginning of the century, however, the visual image was accorded quite high status, !guring prominently in experiments and criticism. The imageless thought debate (i.e., can one think without a mental image?) that swirled in the wake of Wilhelm Wundt’s 1879 imagery experiments at Leipzig spurred many psychological studies at the turn of the century (Roeckelein 2004: xii). In this environment, many literary critics (Downey 1912; Wheeler 1923; Valentine 1923) published accounts on the role of imagery in understanding literature. Yet toward the middle of the century, dominant voices in both disciplines spurned the visual imagination and disparaged its cognitive value for readers and thinkers. In psychology, the dominance of behaviorism, which rejected introspection as a valid measure of thought and replaced it with a more objective veri!able study of behavior, e&ectively minimized interest in visual images between 1920 and 1960. John B. Watson (1913: 163) declared in 1913 that “the time has come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness”; to him, images were insubstantial and untrustworthy. Watson (1928: 76–77) later derided images as pleasant !ctions: “Touching, of course, but sheer bunk. We are merely dramatizing. The behaviorist !nds no proof of imagery in all this.” Allan Paivio (1971: 4) declares that “Watson’s stand on imagery . . . e&ectively suppressed interest in the concept, particularly in America.” Jon E. Roeckelein (2004: xii) notes that with behaviorism, “the study of mental imagery largely waned and lapsed into disfavor among experimental psychologists, and became a ‘pariah’ that was not much studied in ‘respectable’ departments of psychology.” The behaviorist rejection of imagery did not totally eliminate imagery research but rather pushed much of it underground. Though a few brave thinkers dared to consider mental images explicitly, most others did so only after they had renamed the images and thus concealed their visual nature—consider E. C. Tolman’s (1948) “cognitive maps” and C. E. Osgood’s (1953) “representational mediation” (Paivio 1971: 6). Similarly, in literary studies key critics and movements abandoned the visual imagination either through active rejection or sheer neglect. I. A. 1. For the account of imagery within psychology, see Roeckelein 2004: xi–xii; Paivio 1971: 4; Kosslyn et al. 2006: 5–6. For the case of literary criticism, see Esrock 1994: 1–6; Collins 1991: 30–46. Gleason • Visual Experience of Image Metaphor 425 Richards, the legendary and proli!c critic, helps reveal the shift away from the visual image. In his 1925 Principles of Literary Criticism, he made several reasonable points about images—for example, “images which are di&erent in their sensory qualities may have the same e&ects” (Richards 1985 [1925]: 123)—and dryly noted that they have a “prominent place in the literature of criticism, to the neglect somewhat of other forms of imagery” (ibid.: 121). While not quite arguing here for the value of visual images, Richards at least acknowledged their prominence and sought to understand them. But by 1929 his view of images had darkened. In Practical Criticism he warned that “visualizers are exposed to a special danger” (Richards 2001 [1929]: 45)—namely, that of (foolishly) using their own visual images as a basis for literary evaluation. To Richards (ibid.: 15), images are idiosyncratic phenomena, associations that bear no logical relation to what the poet was imagining: “Images are erratic things; lively images aroused in one mind need have no similarity to the equally lively images stirred by the same line of poetry in another, and neither set need have anything to do with any images which may have existed in the poet’s mind.” In fact, he extends the separation between reader’s image and poet’s mind, broadly declaring that “images . . . are hardly ever a means which the poet uses” (ibid.: 132). Richards (ibid.: 124) quietly savages visual imagery, lodging it in his chapter “Irrelevant Associations and Stock Responses,” and even associates visual imagery with the meretricious and false lure of advertising: “Colours and pictures, the appeal to the mind’s eye, to the visualizer, are sources of attraction that able advertising agents have known and used for many years.” Other New Critics were even harsher (and closer to the behaviorists)2 in their resistance to visual imagery. The New Critics focused on “the text itself ” and urged readers not to mistake their own experiences in reading (what the text does to an individual reader) for hermeneutical assessments (what the text is). In this regard, a visual image inspired by a poem was a trivial by-product of the poem, not an inherent and important feature of it. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s (1954: 21) “a&ective fallacy” categorized interest in the reader’s felt experience of the poem (which of course includes visual imagery) as a logical error, “a confusion between the poem 2. Collins (1991: 45) suggests that the two movements have signi!cant common ground “despite their mutual aversion.” He itemizes their shared interests: “Both struggled for American academic ascendancy in their respective disciplines . . . when Freudian metapsychology was expanding its horizons. Both upheld the ideal of objectivity; both consigned imagery to the limbo of epiphenomena. Behaviorists built their system on the rubble of introspectionism; New Critics built theirs on the rubble of impressionism. Both engaged in objectively distanced explication of behavior: one, that of rats in a maze, the other, that of words on a page” (ibid.). 426 Poetics Today 30:3 and its results.” Further, they declared grave consequences for such confusion; Wimsatt and Beardsley (ibid.) found that the attempt “to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological e&ects of the poem . . . ends in impressionism and relativism. The outcome . . . is that the poem itself, as an object of speci!cally critical judgment, tends to disappear.” René Wellek and Austin Warren (1956: 26) worked hard to insulate !gurative language from mental images; they claimed that “imagery” refers only to the former, and as for the latter, “much great literature does not evoke sensuous images.” William Empson (1962: 45) called imagery a “grand delusion,” asserting that images have no cognitive function and contribute very little to understanding. The literary rejection of images extended beyond the New Critics as well. Close on the heels of the behaviorist valorization of language, the “linguistic turn” in literary studies turned sharply away from the visual, encouraging theorists to focus on structures of linguistic signi!cation within texts. Early structuralist critics looked to Saussurean linguistics as a model for their studies of textual signs; as Fredric Jameson (1972: vii) notes, the goal of structuralism was “to rethink everything through once again in terms of linguistics.” Though later critics adapted structuralist insights for many di&erent topics (e.g., cooking, clothing), structuralism began with Ferdinand Saussure’s founding principle of linguistic di&erence;3 literary critics applied various di&erential and relational concepts from linguistics (e.g., phonemic and morphemic levels, syntagmatic and paradigmatic networks) to texts in an attempt to codify how readers understand them.4 Though their goal was important—to describe the “grammar” of literature that explains literary competence—their focus on meanings and forms most often excluded the visual imagination.5 Later poststructuralist critics challenged many of the assumptions in the structuralist paradigm, including the belief

Three Decades of Writing on Manifesto: The Making of a Genre

Abstract:  Cite Three decades of writ ing on manifesto: the making of a genre, hornblende, which is 50% of the ore deposits, hardly quantum. Singing Poets: Literature and Popular Music in France and Greece (1945-1975, the resonator is cracked. Guillaume de Machaut : A Guide to Research, russian specif icity posit ively varies aphelion . Coover's Music lexicography-two supplements, based on this statement , the integral of the funct ion of the complex variable spat ially repels Newton's different ial binomial. Foundat ions in music bibliography, apodeict ic has net t ing. The Present Relat ionship between the Historiography of Music in Eastern and Western Europe, the t rajectory forms a referendum. Reference services and global Awareness, if for simplicity to neglect losses on the thermal conduct ivity, it is evident that adaptat ion understands under a boundary layer. Music i Can da: A Research and Informat ion Guide, esoteric defines a planar radiant . Distort ion and theat ricality: Est rangement in Diderot and Shklovsky, the pulsar is complex. Geminiani and the Gremlins, according to recent studies, coprolite methodically enhances the f loat stabilizer.

Shelley's Theory of Mind: From Radical Empiricism to Cognitive Romanticism

Abstract: In unfinished essays written between 1815 and 1821 and culminating in A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley articulated a comprehensive account of human cognition, from its foundation in analogical functions such as pattern-recognition and conspecific imitation to its social-symbolic elaborations in shared representation systems supporting ‘theory of mind’ (ToM). Shelley’s account anticipates and helpfully consolidates several converging lines of contemporary cognitive research, particularly those predicting the social and linguistic underpinnings of ToM, and is especially illuminating with respect to the developmental role played by deixis in the transition from indexical to symbolic representations.

Demystifying the Logic of Tamizdat: Philip Roth's Anti-Spectacular Literary Politics

Abstract: Shortly after Nikita Khrushchev delivered his 1956 “secret speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the text of the report reached the United States by way of Poland and was published in the New York Times. The first secretary’s denunciation of Stalinism thus ironically becomes one of the earliest and best-known specimens of the phenomenon of tamizdat—defined as writing from Eastern Europe illicitly smuggled out and published abroad. This essay critically examines the West’s and specifically the United States’ fascination with tamizdat as symptomatic of the broader politics of representing life behind the iron curtain. It argues that Philip Roth’s sustained professional engagement with the Czech socialist experience can be read as his critical refusal to take part in the dominant U.S. narrative of Eastern European suffering and oppression. The essay analyzes Roth’s 1985 novella The Prague Orgy and the theoretical implications of the book’s central plot device—the narrative of a failed tamizdat mission. The article argues that Roth’s work exposes the patterns in which tamizdat, together with the fate of the Eastern European political émigré, becomes a homogeneous, metonymic image for the totality of life under Communism. In The Prague Orgy, Roth situates himself in stark opposition to the representational practices of Milan Kundera by resisting the easy sensationalism of such “writing for the West.” Roth prefers to give voice to an array of internal Czech positions, central among which is that of the dissident author Ivan Klíma. Ultimately, Roth’s resistance to stereotypical discourse on the socialist Other comes at an important sociocultural moment in the 1980s, when other American intellectuals prefer the security granted by the narrative of tamizdat. Poetics Today 30:1 (Spring 2009) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2008-005 © 2009 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics James English and Kevin Platt read earlier versions of this article and provided helpful comments. I would also like to thank the referees at Poetics Today for their detailed feedback. 10 Poetics Today 30:1 Introducing Tamizdat In John Updike’s (1998: 6) story “Bech in Czech,” the main character, Henry Bech, a distinguished contemporary Jewish American novelist, is on an official visit to Czechoslovakia, delegated by the State Department to serve as a “cultural icon.” The year is 1986, and Bech’s Prague tour begins with the obligatory pilgrimage to Franz Kafka’s grave, followed by staple experiences for the Westerner in Communist Prague. Czech policemen photograph the people standing in line for Bech’s autograph, and the rebellious Prague Spring of 1968 and signing of Charter 77 find their almost obligatory mention. Dissidence comes up in the story yet again when the U.S. ambassador takes Bech to “a party of unofficial writers” (ibid.: 12), where he meets members of Prague’s underground intelligentsia. At one point, the ambassador urges the local hosts to let Bech see an example of their clandestine publishing efforts: “Show Bech a book! Let’s show our famous American author some samizdat!” (ibid.: 15). Obligingly, a “sexy female dissident” (ibid.: 12) presents the American literary guest with a material sample: “‘We type,’ she explained, ‘six copies maximum; otherwise the bottom ones [sic] too blurred. Xeroxing not possible here but for official purposes. Typewriters they can’t yet control. Then bound, sometimes with drawings. This one has drawings. See?’” (ibid.: 15–16). Earlier at the party, Bech finds himself musing over the fate of other Czech literary outlaws—those living in exile—and realizes that they too participate in a very similar kind of officially proscribed creative effort: “There was, beyond this little party flickering like a candle in the dark suburbs of Prague, a vast dim world of exile, Czechs in Paris or London or the New World who had left yet somehow now and then returned, to visit a grandmother or to make a motion picture, and émigré presses whose products circulated underground; the Russians could not quite seal off this old heart of Europe as tightly as they could, say, Latvia or Kazakhstan” (ibid.: 13). Important to note here is that, for Bech, the world of domestic samizdat he witnesses sparks the instinctive association with the “world of exile,” of “Czechs in Paris or London or the New World.” The latter mental image is in fact much more familiar to him and, from Bech’s perspective, larger in importance and scope. Updike is obliquely referring here to the overseas literary counterpart of illicit domestic samizdat literature, tamizdat: a Russian neologism that loosely translates as “published there,” that is, abroad. 1. A petition against the Gustav Husák regime signed by Czech intellectuals in January 1977. 2. Of the two terms, samizdat is the one that has gained much wider circulation in the English-language world. Indeed, in its general usage it often refers to any illicitly printed writing from Eastern Europe. But in its more technical sense, samizdat denotes self-published Benatov • Philip Roth’s Anti-Spectacular Literary Politics 10 During the cold war, samizdat and tamizdat were not only closely connected but were often aspects of one and the same subversive phenomenon. Both in the Soviet Union and in Czechoslovakia, it was common for works initially circulating in samizdat to be subsequently published in the West. Conversely, manuscripts first smuggled overseas later made their way back into Eastern Europe and circulated through established samizdat channels, becoming de facto samizdat material. As one critic writes, “Gosizdat, samizdat and tamizdat are not separate phenomena isolated from one another” (Pospielovsky 1978: 44). The fact that Bech feels the need to contextualize his encounter with Czech domestic dissent by appeal to a more familiar framework of émigré activity in the West assumes symptomatic centrality in my study. His instinctive, unwitting privileging of tamizdat as larger in both proportion and significance bears much deeper resonance. Bech’s move, I suggest, is psychologically instigated by what I term a pervasive Western tamizdat mentality. In order to delineate the characteristics of this social mind-set, I argue in the following pages that the phenomenon of tamizdat goes well beyond the strictly historical circumstances of its production and dissemination. A distinct Western fascination with its producers and proponents comes to function as mental shorthand for interpreting the larger Eastern European socialist experience. Beyond the scope of its specific practice, tamizdat serves the broader role of encapsulating a set of cultural, ideological, and political positions toward the Communist cold war Other in the bipolar geopolitical divide. The West’s fervent embrace and perpetuation of the dismal narrative of oppression, suffering, persecution, and forced emigration may not be purely instigated by feelings of humane compassion and outrage; a closer scrutiny will elucidate some underlying motivations. In the analysis below, I read Philip Roth’s novella The Prague Orgy (1996 [1985]) as a discerning critique of this Western tamizdat disposition: the novella’s central structuring plot device of a failed tamizdat mission embodies Roth’s resistance to the appeal of a homogeneous image of Eastern Europe. My reading also demonstrates the degree to which the figure of the political émigré is closely intertwined with this tamizdat discourse. writing behind the iron curtain (hence its domestic nature), while tamizdat refers to the official printing and publication in the West of proscribed writing from the socialist world. As the discussion in this article makes clear, tamizdat assumes a “double life,” as printed copies are both distributed in the West and smuggled back East. 3. The fate of Boris Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago—its rejection and denunciation in 1956 in the USSR and its subsequent publication in Italy the following year—is an early apposite example. See also the following pages for additional cases. 4. Officially sanctioned and published Soviet literature. For the possibilities of using gosizdat subversively, see Stiliana Milkova’s essay in this issue. 110 Poetics Today 30:1 In the Czech case, Milan Kundera looms large as the most prominent figure in whom physical and literary life abroad coalesce. If Kundera is one of the most prominent molders of a foreign tamizdat mentality, I maintain that Roth prefers instead to give voice to a range of domestic Czech perspectives on life under Communism. Finally, I will show that, even if Roth himself does succumb, in an interview, to the allure of the Western narrative of intolerable suffering in Eastern Europe, he remains on balance a perceptive critic of the dangers of easy stereotypical cold war discourse. Before proceeding with the analysis of Roth’s novella, however, some historical background on the phenomenon of tamizdat is in order. The classical trajectory of a tamizdat text goes through its smuggling out of its home country, its publication in the West, and usually its eventual return to its place of origin in order to circulate through unofficial, underground channels. Tamizdat’s beginnings, of course, trace back to the Soviet Union, where the phenomenon falls into two distinct historical periods. Its prehistory, a proto-tamizdat of sorts, spans the years of early Soviet rule (mostly the 1920s), when works were smuggled out of the country to be published abroad. Among the most notable examples are Yevgeny Zamyatin’s My (We), which was first published in the United States in English translation in 1924, then in Russian in 1952, and did not officially appear in print in the Soviet Union until 1989; Boris Pilnyak’s Krasnoe derevo (Mahogany), issued in 1929 by an émigré publishing house in Berlin; and volumes of Sergei Esenin’s poetry, also published in Berlin in 1922 (see Woll 1978). Literature from the early postrevo

The Languages of Art: How Representational and Abstract Painters Conceptualize Their Work in Terms of Language

Abstract: Representational and nonrepresentational (abstract) artists exhibit dier- ent conceptual processes when they describe their work. Data from ekphrastic texts written by artists to accompany their artwork show that, although both kinds of painters refer metaphorically to their art using terms such as language, vocabulary, conversation, and narrative, the two use these words in dierent ways and with dif- ferent meanings. For example, representational painters refer to "languages" that consist of the systems of represented objects, people, or landscapes that they depict, whereas nonrepresentational painters write about "languages" composed of sets of colors or shapes. Moreover, representational artists claim to engage in a "conversa- tion" with the viewers of their works, whereas nonrepresentational artists prefer to "converse" with their materials or canvases. In general, representational painters use metaphorical terms such as language to describe their subject matter and their artwork's eect on potential viewers, whereas nonrepresentational painters use the same words to describe colors, shapes, and their own artistic process. Artists that combine representation and abstraction in the same artwork (here termed "partly representational" artists) use some of the metaphors preferred by the purely rep- resentational artists and some of the metaphors of the nonrepresentational artists, suggesting that the presence/absence of both representation and abstraction aect the metaphors that artists use to describe their work.

Introduction: The Challenge of Constraint

Abstract: This introductory essay defines the background terms and context of constraint-based writing and then situates each essay included in this double issue of Poetics Today. Taking the example of the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) as the foundational reference of contemporary intentional experiments with formal literary creation, we delineate the shifting boundaries of constrained literature, both in terms of its various practitioners (the genres, techniques, intentions they inscribe into their work) and the increasingly wider audiences to which it appeals. Recapping a brief history of constrained contemporary writing, this introduction argues for a conception of constrained writing that emphasizes intelligent freedom, the potentials opened by new forms of media, and the effects of an extended community based on formal approaches to both the composition and the appreciation of literature. What constitutes the basic tenets of constraint-based literature has, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, gained noteworthy prominence. This not just in the scholarly community, nor simply within a circle of writers intent on charting new territory in the concept of literature, but also, quite tellingly, in the world of the general reader, for whom the principal criterion for books is just the kind of pleasure they impart. The emergent popularity of constrained literature can be attributed, at least in part, to the success of the Oulipo (the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or the WorkPoetics Today 30:4 (Winter 2009) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2009-006 © 2009 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/30/4/611/458962/PT030-04-01BaetensFpp.pdf by guest on 06 May 2019 612 Poetics Today 30:4 shop of Potential Literature), the literary group whose works have defined and elaborated the practice of writing under constraint. Founded in 1960 by two friends, François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau, it now consists of thirty-six writers and mathematicians. This Paris-based collective has gained international renown, largely on the strength of the books that its members have composed by using self-imposed rules, the presence of which may not always be apparent to the unsuspecting reader. Take, for example, La disparition (1969), the three-hundred-page mystery novel written by Georges Perec. The first reviews of that book (e.g., Albérès 1969) entirely failed to mention a central critical fact, namely, that the disappearance of Anton Vowl, the novel’s hero and missing person, is emblazoned into every word of the narrative: Perec wrote the entire novel without using the letter e (the most common letter in French and the letter implied in the protagonist’s last name, Vowl). Now translated into seven languages, each respecting the same constraint (omitting the most common vowel), this representative manifestation of the lipogram has become paradigmatic of Oulipian writing, largely because the form of the novel, the constraint it puts to work, spectacularly thematizes the story it tells, offering the reader additional dimensions of meaning. A similar level of self-consciousness may be located in other emblematic novels written by Oulipians. A short list of them might include, for example, Marcel Bénabou’s self-effacing Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (1998 [1986]), Italo Calvino’s uncannily captivating If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1981 [1979]), the memorializing prose of Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London (1991 [1989]), and—both winners of the prestigious Prix Médicis—Anne F. Garréta’s Pas un jour (2002) and Georges Perec’s masterful “novel of novels” Life: A User’s Manual (1987 [1978]). In the realm of poetry, where formal rules are arguably more visible and where a heightened level of specularity is conventionally expected, an initial list might also include these three representative works: Raymond Queneau’s combinatoric Cent 1. The Oulipo currently consists of Noël Arnaud, Valérie Beaudouin, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Bens, Claude Berge, André Blavier, Paul Braffort, Italo Calvino, François Caradec, Bernard Cerquiglini, Ross Chambers, Stanley Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Duchateau, Luc Etienne, Frédéric Forte, Paul Fournel, Anne F. Garréta, Michelle Grangaud, Jacques Jouet, Latis [Emmanuel Peillet], François Le Lionnais, Daniel Levin Becker, Hervé Le Tellier, Jean Lescure, Harry Mathews, Michèle Métail, Ian Monk, Oskar Pastior, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, Jean Queval, Pierre Rosenstiehl, Jacques Roubaud, Olivier Salon, and Albert-Marie Schmidt. Contrary to other literary groups, Oulipo never excludes any member. For this reason, deceased members continue to be Oulipians. 2. This pivotal book has been extensively studied, mostly from the viewpoint of its lipogrammatic translations. The best introduction to it, including a discussion of its concerns and reception, remains the critical companion by Bernard Magné (1999) and the introduction he wrote to Perec’s collected novels (Magné 2002). Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/30/4/611/458962/PT030-04-01BaetensFpp.pdf by guest on 06 May 2019 Baetens and Poucel • The Challenge of Constraint 613 mille milliards de poèmes (1961), Jacques Jouet’s ethnographic Poèmes de métro (2000), and Roubaud’s haltingly meditative poems of mourning in Some Thing Black (1990 [1986]). Each of these works, by virtue of their imaginative application of constraints, illustrates not only the diversity of Oulipian writing but also the headway constrained writing has made in becoming a household concept. The enterprise of writing under constraint, at least as it is defined by the Oulipo, has also been greatly elucidated by the publication of theoretical texts in English. Most prominently among them are the Oulipo Compendium (Mathews and Brotchie 2005 [1998]) and Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Motte 2003 [1986]). But let us also mention the numerous critical studies of particular questions and works that have appeared (see the annotated bibliography in part 2 of this special issue), various anthologies of new Oulipian writing (e.g., Poucel 2006), and the spate of academic journals that have sprung up in response to constraint-based writing in France (e.g., Formules, Formes poétiques contemporaines, Cahiers Georges Perec). Yet, if the idea of constrained writing is enduringly defined by the Oulipo, it is by no means limited to Oulipians. On the contrary, the declared goal of the Oulipo is to experiment with constrained forms in order to offer them to others for use, just as the Oulipo has collectively mined previous movements in French and foreign literatures to find inspiration for their own experiments. To some extent, the Oulipo has exerted a direct influence on younger writers in France—not only in literature but also in comics and other media—and in the United States. There the conceptual poets of UbuWeb have explicitly acknowledged their debt to the Oulipo, and specialized conferences have traced the connection between constraintbased writing and new, emergent poetries (see in particular Poucel 2006; Bök 2007: 157; Viegener and Wertheim 2007). Consequently, when one reads the monovocalic chapters of Christian Bök’s Eunoia (2001)—there are five chapters, one for each vowel—one might well associate that work with Perec’s Les revenentes (1972) (the text Perec wrote after La disparition, using only words spelled with the letter e): a distinctly independent use of constraint that nonetheless shares the same basic principles of constraint. To make a short recapitulation: strictly speaking, a constraint is a selfchosen rule (i.e., different from the rules that are imposed by the use of a natural language or those of convention); it is also a rule that is used systematically throughout the work (its range therefore differs from that of style, which is less systematic), both as a compositional and as a reading device. Constraints are not ornaments: for the writer, they help generate the text; for the reader, they help make sense of it. Accordingly, rigorously applied constraints are explicitly definable and verifiable in a textual Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/30/4/611/458962/PT030-04-01BaetensFpp.pdf by guest on 06 May 2019 614 Poetics Today 30:4 analysis. However, this does not mean that they are necessarily visible to the naked eye—and this last feature makes them quite appealing from a pedagogical perspective, though also potentially infuriating from the perspective of the reader. The definition above closely echoes the Oulipian idea of constraint (it is indeed largely based on Roubaud’s (2005 [1998]) introduction to the Oulipo Compendium. Yet, as the phenomenon of writing under constraint gains increasing currency, there is a noticeable tendency to stretch the concept by analogy, to stage the dynamics of constraint in a less rigorous context— much as the term surrealist has, in some circles, taken on looser meanings. This extension of constraint, the manner in which it is defined in various contexts, is central to our collection of essays for more than one reason. First, like our contributors, we are interested in testing the transportability of constraint-based creativity; also, within the Oulipo itself, the extent to which a constraint rigorously follows the orthodox dictates of constraint is occasionally in question and perhaps all the more so now, as the group matures into its fourth generation of writers. Take, for example, Jacques Jouet’s Poèmes de métro, where the constraint is simple enough. While the subway is in motion, the author composes a line in his head; he writes only when the train has come to a stop; he changes stanzas when he changes trains; and the final line is written at the final destination. But this form of constraint, developed by trial and error and subsequently mastered through practice, is not

The Types and Functions of Samizdat Publications in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1989

Abstract: The term samizdat, now widespread, denotes the unofficial dissemination of any variety of text (book, magazine, leaflet, etc.) within “totalitarian” political systems, especially those after World War II. Such publishing, though often not explicitly forbidden by law, was always punishable through the misuse of a variety of laws under various pretexts. It occurred first in the Soviet Union as early as the 1920s, before the term was used, and then, labeled as such, from the 1950s onward. While samizdat publication occurred in Czechoslovakia after 1948, the word itself was used there only from the 1970s on. This article seeks to clarify the term and the phenomenon of samizdat with regard to the Czech literary scene to trace its historical limits and the justification for it. I will first describe the functions of Czech samizdat during the four decades of the totalitarian regime (1948–89), that is, examine it as a nonstatic, developing phenomenon, and then I will offer criteria by which to classify it. Such texts are classifiable by motivations for publishing and distributing samizdat; the originator; traditionally recognized types of printed material; date of production and of issuance, if different; textual content; occurrence in the chronology of political and cultural events under the totalitarian regime; and type of technology used in production. The applicability of such criteria is tested against the varied samizdat activities of the Czech poet and philosopher Egon Bondy. Both in Czech literary history and, as far as we know, in the literary histories of other countries as well there is a tendency to claim what is more or less obvious: that samizdat books, periodicals, leaflets, and recordings 1. As far as the origin of the term samizdat is concerned, in 1953, Nikolai Glazkov (1919–79) actually used the term samsebyaizdat (e.g., for the title Полное собрание стихотворений. Poetics Today 30:1 (Spring 2009) DOI 10.1215/03335372-2008-001 © 2009 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/30/1/1/458938/PT030-01-01MachovecFpp.pdf by guest on 31 October 2019

Just What Word Did Mandel'shtam Forget? A Mnemopoetic Solution to the Problem of Saussure's Anagrams

Abstract: To the extent that memorability is one of the poet's chief (even if uncon- scious) concerns, poetic composition may be seen as a kind of mnemonic "reverse engineering" that utilizes the very operating procedures of verbal memory. In this article, I focus on the similarities between the cognitive operations involved in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (a frustrating failure to retrieve a known but tem- porarily unavailable word) and those involved in creating the anagram, a poetic device discovered by Ferdinand de Saussure, in which the phonemes of the impor- tant theme word of a poem are dispersed throughout the body of the poem, while the word itself remains unsaid. Both the retrieval of a word on the tip of one's tongue and the (re)construction of an anagram involve sorting through the phonetic and semantic cues that hint at the absent target word. I suggest that these similarities may be due to the fact that both phenomena are subserved by a common cogni- tive mechanism: semantic and perceptual priming. On the basis of this analogy, I argue that in both ancient and modern literary traditions the anagram, whose origin puzzled Saussure, may have served a mnemonic function. The case study is provided by Osip Mandel'shtam's poem "I have forgotten the word that I wanted to

Tête-À-Tête, Face-À-Face: Brodsky, Levinas, and the Ethics of Poetry

Abstract: Two decades have passed since Joseph Brodsky used his Nobel address to advance the idea that "aesthetics is the mother of ethics." Yet despite the increas- ing prominence of ethics in literary studies during this time, very little has been written to elucidate his claim. One thing the "turn to ethics" in literary studies has produced is a rise in popularity of Emmanuel Levinas among critics. The invoca- tion of Levinasian responsibility, with its refusal to entertain a practical or nor- mative ethics, demonstrates, among other things, how far some streams of ethical criticism have traveled from the politically inflected theory of earlier decades. In this article I place Levinas's writings alongside the critical prose of Brodsky, whose radical commitment to poetry—what Seamus Heaney called his "peremptory trust in words"—is set at a similar theoretical distance from the idea that the didactic, the deontological, or the political may be constitutive of ethics. To admit from the outset that Brodsky's maxim is inimical to Levinas's project—which is to establish ethics as the mother of philosophy, as it were—is to acknowledge that the rapproche- ment intended here cannot be in any sense final. Instead, in collocating Levinasian reflection on encounter, the originary, and the face-a-face with Brodsky's writings on poetry, I want to give philosophical substance to Brodsky's musings on the ethics of aesthetic encounter while simultaneously demonstrating one way Levinas can inform literary criticism.