Book•
Les Chants de Maldoror
01 Jan 1868-
TL;DR: In this article, the lecteur, enhardi and devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu’ il lit, trouve, without se désorienter, son chemin abrupt and sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres and pleines de poison.
Abstract: Plût au ciel que le lecteur, enhardi et devenu momentanément féroce comme ce qu’ il lit, trouve, sans se désorienter, son chemin abrupt et sauvage, à travers les marécages désolés de ces pages sombres et pleines de poison ; car, à moins qu’ il n’ apporte dans sa lecture une logique rigoureuse et une tension d’ esprit égale au moins à sa défiance, les émanations mortelles de ce livre imbiberont son âme comme l’ eau le sucre. Il n’ est pas bon que tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre ; quelques-uns seuls savoureront ce fruit amer sans danger. Par conséquent, âme timide, avant de pénétrer plus loin dans de pareilles landes inexplorées, dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant. écoute bien ce que je te dis : dirige tes talons en arrière et non en avant, comme les yeux d’ un fils qui se détourne respectueusement de la contemplation auguste de la face maternelle ; ou, plutôt, comme un angle à perte de vue de grues frileuses méditant beaucoup, qui, pendant l’ hiver, vole puissamment à travers le silence, toutes voiles tendues, vers un point déterminé de l’ horizon, d’ où tout à coup part un vent étrange et fort, précurseur de la tempête. La grue la plus vieille et qui forme à elle seule l’ avant-garde, voyant cela, branle la tête comme une personne raisonnable, conséquemment son bec aussi qu’ elle fait p 24
Citations
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01 Jan 2011
2 citations
01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: The hall of the 1986 Venice Biennale dedicated to Art and Science opened with works by Lucio Saffaro (the artist whose works are featured on all the covers of books in the Imagine Math book series), along with Felice Ragazzo's reconstruction of Kepler's model of how the universe works, when Kepler still believed that the orbits of the planets were circular and circumscribed by the regular solids first described by Plato.
Abstract: The hall of the 1986 Venice Biennale dedicated to Art and Science opened with works by Lucio Saffaro (the artist whose works are featured on all the covers of books in the Imagine Math book series), along with Felice Ragazzo’s reconstruction of Kepler’s model of how the universe works, when Kepler still believed that the orbits of the planets were circular and circumscribed by the regular solids first described by Plato [27, 5, 28, 6, 8, 9].
2 citations
2 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The authors examine how Raymond Roussel and Fernando Pessoa extract a poetics of nonsense from the limitations of language's signifying potential from the peculiar self-reflexive rhythm(s) of their work.
Abstract: In this essay I examine how Raymond Roussel and Fernando Pessoa extract a poetics of nonsense from the limitations of language's signifying potential. From the peculiar self-reflexive rhythm(s) of their work I draw the speculation that meaning and thinking are contagious matters. Rats are rhizomes. Burrows are too, in all of their functions of shelter, supply, movement, evasion, and breakout. The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers. When rats swarm over each other. --Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus There is rhythm in writing, rhythm in reading, rhythm in thinking. Rhythm relates all of our acts of speaking, listening, and knowing to a metaphysical dimension that is "sense," which it turns out is an expression of no particular sense--nonsense. For instance, imagine the sound of my voice and hear the intervals of my speech as a series of feints and lunges that articulate words with things, ideas with concepts, and sensations with emotions. What is heard is the movement of sense and the infection of words with the fantasy of meaning and import. "Rhythm" can be understood here as a vector of sense in the way that a mosquito is a vector for the transmission of malaria whose proliferation throughout a population expresses the sense of malaria as an "epidemic." As such, rhythm, which itself has no particular sense but instead transmits a pattern of relation that promotes more and less remote associations between words and things, generates patterns of significance that can be likened to an epidemiology of sense. The poetics of this "rhythming" is thus a poetics of non/sense. In this essay I interrogate the poetics of French writer Raymond Roussel to draw out the mechanics of non/sense and show how signification functions like a virus. But Roussel's work emphasizes a particular strain of non/sense that contracts the difference that language traverses. To enrich this poetics and to demonstrate its paradoxical logic, I draw on Fernando Pessoa, a contemporary of Roussel's, to show that language's capacity to endlessly reiterate its finite material can be expressed in contrary modes: whereas Roussel's work can be construed as a convocation of linguistic and ontological excesses, Pessoa's writing shows a tendency in language to multiple difference, to say more about more. Pessoa's appearance in this study should not, however, be taken as a foil to Roussel, whose work occupies the bulk of this essay. Instead, Pessoa's more topically expansive and plurivalent style illustrates the poetics of non/sense's invertibility--its capacity to make too much sense. Lastly, this essay does not attempt an exhaustive account of either author's contribution to the broader aesthetics of modernism, but rather aims to use their writing as a lens, or, depending on how you see it, a ruse by which to obliquely focus on the movement--rhythm--immanent to a reflexive poetics and to extract from this a speculation on the psychological and epistemological consequences of nonsense and obscurity. Roussel writes a story that begins and ends with the same sentence, or, rather, the same sentence with one letter changed. "Parmi les noirs" ("Among the Blacks"), a short story published in Roussel's posthumous Comment j'ai ecrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of My Books), commences "Les lettres de blanc sur les bandes de vieux billard [the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table]" and concludes accordingly: "les lettres de blanc sur les bandes de vieux pillard [the white man's letters on the hordes of the old plunderer]" (3). The story is a mise en abyme of word puzzles that recounts a party game in which each participant is asked a question, to which he or she must reply in the form of a riddle. When the narrator of the story's turn comes and he is asked the question about what he believes is the most impressive book published that year, he thinks of "Among the Blacks," a work that describes the adventures of a mariner named White who secretly writes letters to his wife after becoming shipwrecked somewhere in Africa and being forced to serve as counsel to a pillaging chieftain named Bootable. …
2 citations
Dissertation•
01 Jan 1976
2 citations
References
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01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine how the water motif is used in Marguerite Duras's literary work and show that water has multiple functions in these texts: it is linked to major themes and creates an enigmatic atmosphere by its association with the unknown, the inexplicable and the unconscious.
Abstract: The aim of this thematic study is to examine how the water motif is used in Marguerite Duras’s literary work. The study shows that water has multiple functions in these texts: it is linked to major themes and creates an enigmatic atmosphere by its association with the unknown, the inexplicable and the unconscious. The strong presence of water in Duras’s texts is striking. References to the water element can be found in several titles throughout her career, from early works such as Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950) to La mer ecrite (1996), published just after her death. Almost all of her fiction take place near water – and the rain or the sound of waves serve as leitmotifs in specific novels. The water motif can play a metonymic as well as a metaphoric role in the texts and it sometimes takes on human or animalistic characteristics (Chapter 4). Several emblematic Durassian characters (e.g. the beggar-woman, Anne-Marie Stretter and Lol V. Stein) have a close relationship to water (Chapter 5). The water motif is linked to many major Durassian themes, and illustrates themes with positive connotations, for example, creation, fecundity, maternity, liberty and desire, as well as themes with negative connotations such as destruction and death (Chapter 6). A close reading of three novels, La vie tranquille (1944), L’apres-midi de Monsieur Andesmas (1962) and La maladie de la mort (1982), shows that the realism of the first novel is replaced by intriguing evocations of the sea and the pond in the second text, motifs which resist straightforward interpretation. The enigmatic feeling persists in the last novel, in which the sea illustrates the overall sombre mood of the story (Chapter 7). Finally, the role of the water element in psychoanalytic theory is discussed (Chapter 8), and a parallel is drawn between the Jungian concept of the mother archetype and the water motif in Duras’s texts. The suggestion is made in this last chapter that water is used to illustrate an oriental influence (Taoist or Buddhist) of some of the female characters in Duras’s work.
24 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the Batman's Joker as a descendant of a specifically violent circus tradition and its reflection in literature, and they describe the aesthetic of violence characteristic of these circus pantomime clowns as the essence of modernity.
Abstract: Besides the doltishly clumsy, amusingly simple and happily idiotic type of clown, there is the evil violent clown. Violent clowns can be traced back to the (circus-)pantomimes of the nineteenth century, to circus tradition and circus literature. Thus, on the basis of the popular corpo-eccentric clown-theatre presented by the French Theâtre des Funambules between 1819 and 1846, as well as the pantomimes of the brothers Hanlon-Lee, this article presents Batman’s Joker as descendant of a specifically violent circus tradition and its reflection in literature. Baudelaire and Adorno understand the aesthetic of violence characteristic of these circus pantomime clowns as the essence of modernity. The appearance and playful rearrangement, montage and reinterpretation of historical (circus) clown elements are typical for Batman’s Joker. Thus, he can be described as a neo-modern clown of violence.
22 citations
Dissertation•
01 Feb 2014
TL;DR: The authors argue that the heterotopia was never intended as a tool for the study of real urban places, but rather pertains to fictional representations of these sites, which allow authors to open up unthinkable configurations of space.
Abstract: This thesis looks to restore Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia to its literary origins, and to examine its changing status as a literary motif through the course of twentieth-century fiction. Initially described as an impossible space, representable only in language, the term has found a wider audience in its definition as a kind of real place that exists outside of all other space. Examples of these semi-mythical sites include the prison, the theatre, the garden, the library, the museum, the brothel, the ship, and the mirror. Here, however, I argue that the heterotopia was never intended as a tool for the study of real urban places, but rather pertains to fictional representations of these sites, which allow authors to open up unthinkable configurations of space.
Specifically, I focus on three writers whose work contains numerous examples of these places, and who shared the circumstance of spending the majority of their lives in exile: James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and W.G. Sebald. In each case, I argue that these sites figure the experience of exteriority constituted by exile, providing these authors with an alternative perspective from which to perform a particular kind of contestation. In Ulysses, I argue, they allow Joyce to interrogate the notion of a unified Irish identity by bringing into question the space that constitutes the common locus upon which the nation is founded. In Nabokov’s Ada, they help the author to create a world that transcends the discontinuities of his transnational biography, but also serve to contest this unreal world. In Sebald’s fiction, finally, we find a critique of Foucault’s concept. In relation to the Holocaust, he questions the validity of the heterotopia by bringing into doubt the equation of space and thought upon which it is established.
19 citations