Showing papers in "Poetics Today in 2013"

Narrative across Versions: Narratology Meets Genetic Criticism

Abstract: What can narrative theory and analysis learn from the study of sketches, notes, and manuscripts? Leading narratologists, such as Dorrit Cohn, Gerard Genette, and Franz K. Stanzel, have visited the factory of the text, as Genette calls it, to corroborate an argument about the nature of narrative in general or the composition of a particular narrative. However, these excursions have not led to a principled dialogue between genetic criticism and narrative theory. By following major narratologists on their paths to versions of narratives, this essay investigates the possibilities of combining narrative theory and narratological analysis, on the one hand, with manuscript studies and genetic criticism, on the other hand. To specify our claims about this interdisciplinary combination of approaches—the study of narrative across versions—we analyze two works that challenge narrative conventions, “Lessness” and The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett. This two-part case study focuses on the levels of “narrative” and “narration,” respectively, and shows how, on the one hand, genetic criticism can provide data to corroborate a narratological analysis and how, on the other hand, narratology can serve as an aid to the genetic examination of the narrative’s development across versions.

The Structure of Repetition in the Cinema: Three Hollywood Genres

Abstract: Thestructureofrepetition,asMeirSternberg(1978)definesit,consistsinthe repeatedpresentationofafabulaiceventalongthetextcontinuum.Ithasthreetypesof component members: (1) forecast (e.g., command, scenario); (2) enactment (represent- ing the forecast's objective realization, as communicated by an authorized narrator); and (3)report (about an enactment, a forecast, or another report, all delivered by some character). This research examines the repetition structure in cinematic narrative: specifically, in heist, adventure, and military operation films. Throughout, the argu- mentproceedswithspecialreferencetothesegenres,aswellastothecinema'smedium, practice, and conventions in general, often citing literary parallels or precedents for comparison.It examines thedifferent elements that serveto (re)compose therepetition structure for certain ends; the types of member brought together within the structure; their size, number, forms of transmission, order of appearance, representational pro- portion, and possible interrelations (overlap, partial overlap, contradiction, expansion or summary of a previous member). Above all, the analysis relates these interplays themselves to the structure's functions at the level of plot, meaning, and rhetoric, notably including their generic variations, as exemplified by the three focal genres.

The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy: Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium”

Abstract: This essay undertakes a close analysis of Leo Strauss’s remarkable but undertreated Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium,” reading it as opening a privileged purview of his own (and his students’) wider understandings of philosophy, poetry, and politics. The essay begins by drawing out Strauss’s three framing justifications for his manner of reading the Symposium as a document in the “ancient quarrel” of philosophy and poetry concerning which of the two should rightly shape the culture and ethical ideals of the Greeks (part 1). Then, following the course of Plato’s Symposium, the essay ascends through Strauss’s readings of the first five speeches in Plato’s dialogue (part 2) toward the highlight of Strauss’s reading, namely, his three remarkable sessions on Socrates’s speech. Part 3 analyses Strauss’s reading of this speech up to its climax, which Strauss argues involves the philosophical “demotion of poetry”: a criticism of poets as motivated by the Eros of fame and of tragic poetry as at its best creating captivating images of gods and heroes which reflect their creators’ self-love and patriotic love of “one’s own,”as against any transpolitical truth. Part 4 then looks at Strauss’s unusual reading of the culmination of Socrates’s great speech (Diotima on the “higher mysteries”) alongside Alkibiades’s speech in the Symposium as representing Plato’s “poetic presentation of philosophy.” The essay becomes more critical as it proceeds. Strauss’s reading of the Symposium, like his reading of the Republic, is remarkable for its own “demotion of metaphysics” in Plato, and in my concluding remarks, I will question this status, or disappearance, of metaphysics in Strauss’s Platonism and whether this disappearance compromises Strauss' ability to differentiate philosophy as he sees it from poetry.