Lyric Words, not Worlds

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Culler
Keyword(s):  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Classical Concept ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Default Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Lyric Sequences

AbstractThe notion that a lyric poem generates a world seems derived from the analysis of narrative fiction and risks setting the study of lyric poetry on the wrong track. Although lyrics often contain fictional elements – minimally sketched characters and incident – it is best to start from the presumption that they are at bottom not fiction. One can then analyze the tension between what one might call fiction and song, or fictional elements and ritualistic elements, as in Roland Greene’s analysis of lyric sequences. The positing of a fictional world created by a lyric poem and including a fictional speaker or persona risks trivializing lyric poems by relativizing their claims to the situation of a particular individual instead of granting them the authority of poetic form. Even lyrics that do create a fictional speaker often make claims about the world – our world and not a special fictional world – that are authorized by the poet. A superior default model for thinking about lyric, then is the classical concept of lyric as epideictic discourse, closer to oratory than to mimesis. The lyric characteristically strives to be itself an event rather than a representation of an event.

Some Thoughts About Genre in Old Javanese Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter John Worsley
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Poetic Work

Robson in 1983 and 1988 in his reconsideration of the poetics of kakawin epics and Javanese philology drew readers’ attention to the importance of genre for the history of ancient Javanese literature. Aoyama in his study of the kakawin Sutasoma in 1992, making judicious use of Hans Jauss’s concept of “horizon of expectation”, offered the first systematic discussion of the genre of Old Javanese literary works. The present essay offers a commentary on the terms which mpu Monaguna and mpu Prapañca, authors of the thirteenth century epic kakawin Sumanasāntaka and the fourteenth century Deśawarṇana, themselves, employ to refer to the generic characteristics of their poems. Mpu Monaguna referred to his epic poem as a narrative work (kathā), written in a prakṛt, Old Javanese, and rendered in the poetic form of a kakawin and finally as a ritual act intended to enable the poet to achieve apotheosis with his tutelary deity and his poem to be the means of transforming the world, in particular to ensure the wellbeing of the readers, listeners, copyists and those who possessed copies of his poetic work. Mpu Prapañca described his Deśawarṇana differently. Also written in Old Javanese and in the poetic form of a kakawin—he refers to his work variously as a narrative work (kathā), a chronicle (śakakāla or śakābda), a praise poem (kastawan) and also as a ritual act designed to enable the author in an ecstatic state of rapture (alangö), and filled with the power and omniscience of his tutelary deity, to ensure the continued prosperity of the realm of Majapahit and to secure the rule of his king Rājasanagara. The essay considers each of these literary categories.

scholarly journals The reality of fiction in a literary world: on an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-107
Author(s):  
Y. Domanskii
Keyword(s):  
Physical Reality ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Higher Order ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Actual Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Using an excerpt from Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, this article explores the idea that, in a literary text, a fictional world and the world of physical reality may interact to form such a reality that can paradoxically turn out to be more real than what we believe to be the actual reality. It is also shown that the fictional world realized in a literary text may bring the reader to certain conclusions about the world in which he or she lives. Thus, even if literature is in­capable of affecting reality, it can change the way the latter is perceived. A fictional world is not just a reality — it is a reality of a higher order.

English and Czech children’s literature: A contrastive corpus-driven phraseological approach

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markéta Malá
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Body Language ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Linguistic Patterns ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
N Gram ◽  
Temporal And Spatial Characteristics

The paper explores the recurrent linguistic patterns in English and Czech children’s narrative fiction and their textual functions. It combines contrastive phraseological research with corpus-driven methods, taking frequency lists and n-grams as its starting points. The analysis focuses on the domains of time, space and body language. The results reveal register-specific recurrent linguistic patterns which play a role in the constitution of the fictional world of children’s literature, specifying its temporal and spatial characteristics, and relating to the communication among the protagonists. The method used also points out typological differences between the patterns employed in the two languages, and the limitations of the n-gram based approach.

Dante's New Life of the Book

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Eisner
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

This study uses the material transmission history of Dante’s innovative first book, the Vita nuova (New Life), to intervene in recent debates about literary history, reconceiving the relationship between the work and its reception, and investigating how different material manifestations and transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations participate in the work. Just as Dante frames his collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, so later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their own interpretations of it. Traveling from Boccaccio’s Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson’s Cambridge, Rossetti’s London, Nerval’s Paris, Mandelstam’s Russia, De Campos’s Brazil, and Pamuk’s Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante’s strange poetic forms continue to challenge readers. In contrast to a conventional reception history’s chronological march, each chapter analyzes how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante’s love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman, while highlighting Dante’s concern with the future, as he experiments with new ways to keep Beatrice alive for later readers. Deploying numerous illustrations to show the entanglement of the work’s poetic form and its material survival, Dante’s New Life of the Book offers a fresh reading of Dante’s innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work’s survival in the world.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Lipson Freed
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Specificity

The Conclusion explores how the logic of haunting might recast the stakes, if not the substance, of the World Literature/Comparative Literature debate. Briefly tracing some of the most influential arguments in favor of sameness—in the form of translation, literary circulation and critical expansiveness—and difference—in the form of singularity, historical specificity and untranslatability—the conclusion suggests that these two opposing positions are both valid and fundamentally irreconcilable. Recognizing that encounters with works of fiction, like encounters with ghosts, are only temporary allows for this kind of instability; ultimately, it is not the text, but the reader who is responsible for acting ethically toward others in the non-fictional world.

Embodied Reconciliation

2019 ◽  
pp. 272-301
Author(s):  
Lydia L. Moland
Keyword(s):  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Consideration ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual

Hegel’s analysis of poetry’s genres begins with epic poetry, which is the action-based articulation of a nation’s dawning self-awareness. Lyric poetry, by contrast, allows poets to express their deepest subjectivity and interpret the world through their own experience. Drama brings action back into art, allowing actors themselves to emerge as artists and correcting for the vanishing subjectivity in painting and music. Drama also incorporates the two other poetic genres, as well as the other arts. Because it achieves these syntheses, it is, according to Hegel, the highest art. Hegel gives special consideration to tragedy and comedy, assessing both in their ancient and modern forms. His conclusion is that although both subgenres are more difficult to achieve in the modern world, successful examples are possible, ensuring that poetry will continue. With these poetic subgenres, the individual arts reach their conceptual end.

The Inescapable Intertextuality of Blade Runner: The Video Game

2016 ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Clara Fernandez-Vara
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Digital Games ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Traditional Media ◽  
Transmedia Storytelling ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
The World ◽  
Digital Environments ◽  
Source Materials

The video game adaptation of Blade Runner (1997) exemplifies the challenges of adapting narrative from traditional media into digital games. The key to the process of adaptation is the fictional world, which it borrows both from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982). Each of these works provides different access points to the world, creating an intertextual relationship that can be qualified as transmedia storytelling, as defined by Jenkins (2006). The game utilizes the properties of digital environments (Murray, 2001) in order to create a world that the player can explore and participate in; for this world to have the sort of complexity and richness that gives way to engaging interactions, the game resorts to the film to create a visual representation, and to the themes of the novel. Thus the game is inescapably intertextual, since it needs of both source materials in order to make the best of the medium of the video game.

Mourning and Melancholia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Dalziell
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Work Of Mourning ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Mourning And Melancholia

Mourning and melancholia are among the primary concepts that have come to interest and structure late-20th- and early-21st-century literary theory. The terms are not new to this historical moment—Hippocrates (460–379 bce) believed that an excess of black bile caused melancholia and its symptoms of fear and sadness—but they have taken on an urgent charge as theories respond to both the world around them and shifts in theory itself. With the 20th century viewed as a historical period marked by cataclysmic events, and literary theory characterized by the collapse of the transcendental signified, attention has turned to mourning and melancholia, and questions of how to respond to and represent loss. The work of Sigmund Freud has been a touchstone in this regard. Since the publication in 1917 of his essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” theorists have been applying and critiquing the ideas Freud formulated, and examining how literature might register them. The elegy has been singled out for particular scrutiny given that this poetic form is conventionally a lament for the dead that offers solace to the survivors. Yet, focus has expanded to include other literary modes and to query both the ethics of coming to terms with loss, which is the ostensible work of mourning, and the affective and political desirability of melancholia.

scholarly journals Enlightened state versus millenarian vision: A comparison between two historical novels

Literator ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Z. Roelofse-Campbell
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Latin American ◽  
The Other ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
Historical Novels ◽  
The World ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Ruling Elites ◽  
Historical Truth

Two millenarian events, one in Brazil (Canudos Rebellion, 1897) and the other in South Africa (Bulhoek Massacre, 1921) have inspired two works of narrative fiction: Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World (1981) and Mike Nicol’s This Day and Age (1992). In both novels the events are presented from the perspectives of both the oppressed landless peasants and the oppressors, who were the ruling élites. In both instances, governments which purported to be models of enlightenment and modernity resorted to violence and repression in order to uphold their authority. Vargas Llosa's novel was written in the Latin American tradition where truth and fiction mingle indistinguishably while in the South African novel fictional elements override historical truth.

scholarly journals An Analysis into the Travels of the Translated Self in V.S Naipaul’s Half A Life

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Gora Chand Das
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Life Form ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
The West ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World

V.S.Naipaul expertly exhibited a great craftsmanship in literary pieces like fiction, travel and journalistic writing. His fictional world reveals a critical look on the world and also utilizes its traditions, customs and cultures. Naipaul’s writing express the ambivalence of the exile, a feature of his own experience as an Indian in the West Indies, a West Indies in England, and a nomadic intellectual in a post colonial world. Naipaul adhered to the form of the traditional narrative, and by doing away with the technical devices of the stream of consciousness; he exhibits his power of writing by making his readers share the inevitable irony and paradox of modern life form by its quintessential self-division and inner conflict. The protagonist of Naipaul’s fiction may be different persons but there may be sensed a thread of continuity in their fate and there “limbotic” status. He has described the theme of a quest for identity, a sense of displacement, alienation, exile of an individual in the backdrop of colonial and postcolonial period. The act of displacement, his trying efforts to organize his experience, and his gazing back to know about his roots and his continuing search for the desirable self can be clearly stated in his novel Half A Life (2001). In the novel Half A Life, Willie Chandran is a migrant from one place to another and then to another. And he keeps on doing that through both Half A Life, and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004).  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document