scholarly journals Literary Speech as a Medium of Contact

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-193
Author(s):  
T. D. Venediktova
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Multiple Relationships ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Language Play ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Textual Strategy

An intersubjective event, a text comprises the medium of contact between subjects of literary discourse. Within texts the conventionality of speech serves to enable us to express ourselves, while at the same time it-owing to conventionality itself-makes shared individual expe rience at least difficult, if not impossible, a condition of which modern literary culture is painfully aware. Epitomizing this paradox of the uniquely personal and the formulaic/ impersonal is the literary discourse of love. In post-Romantic literary culture this paradox reveals itself in the shift of authors’ and readers’ attention from accepted rhetorical forms to those “transitive parts” of thought and speech that (according to William James) pass largely unrecognized in everyday language practice. Precisely these “transitive parts” activate the fleeting “feelings of relation” (as opposed to conventional meanings) that connote extended and multiple relationships “between the larger objects of our thought.” We argue that this authorreader pact-evinced, variously, by Flaubert’s search for “absolute style” and Barthes’ exploration of the aesthetic potential of lovers’ discourse-heightens attention to the materiality of language and to the mimetic, collaborative, performative aspects of literary communication. “The zealous practice of a perfect reception” invokes enhanced pleasure and the empathic effect that (post)modern readers learn to derive from language play by locating the subtle subjectivity of expression in the seemingly style-less banality of everyday speech. In this article this textual strategy of literary modernism is analyzed by way of selfreflexive love speech in the prose of Gustav Flaubert and the poetry of William Carlos Williams.

scholarly journals Oppen's Pragmatism

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
LEE SPINKS
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
William James ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
American Intellectual History ◽  
The Relationship

This article offers a revisionist reading of the aesthetic of the American modernist poet George Oppen. It seeks, in the first instance, to supplement those established readings of Oppen that have concluded that his work is most profitably understood in the discursive contexts of American literary modernism and modern European Continental philosophy by arguing that such approaches overlook a key indigenous intellectual influence upon his corpus: that body of philosophical inquiry and cultural self-reflection that has come to be known as American pragmatism. The article attempts to rectify this omission by making two simultaneous and complementary suggestions: first, that pragmatic thought opens up a number of formal and semantic questions – indeed, a number of questions about the relationship between form and meaning – that have been too little considered in recent work on American poetry; and second, that something crucial to Oppen's poetry remains unthinkable without sustained attention to the questions and claims that pragmatism places at the very heart of its endeavour. While the relationship between pragmatist thought and Oppen's poetics helps to illuminate a set of concerns that lies at the very core of his aesthetic, the paper will argue, it also reciprocally exposes the limitations of an influential genealogical vision of American literary modernism. To support this contention it examines the ways in which a certain literary version of American intellectual history has reinterpreted the pragmatism of William James in the image of an Emersonian linguistic scepticism in order to establish the historical centrality of a broadly Romantic genealogy of American modernism. The paper concludes by suggesting that a renewed attention to the specific forms and modalities of Oppen's poetry demonstrates not only the inadequacy of this version of literary history to a particular tradition of American poetics, but also promises to recover the force and distinctiveness of the American pragmatist inheritance for succeeding generations of writers.

Carter vs. Poets (Round 2)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schiff
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Marianne Moore ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Instrumental Works ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas

Alongside the lucid, transparent instrumental works of his last years, Carter composed seven works for voice and ensemble that set poetry by the founding generation of American literary modernism: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and e.e. cummings. Though contemporaries, these poets differed widely in their aesthetic and political stances. Carter’s settings connect with each of them in different ways. Some of these works revive the darker, more troubling explorations of Carter’s middle years. Taken as a whole though, they can be heard as a legacy project, a monument to and critique of the aesthetic ideas Carter first encountered in his teens.

scholarly journals Neo-Fascisme, norme, literatuur: Oor Pieter Stoffberg se Die hart van ’n bond

Literator ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92
Author(s):  
M. De Jong
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
New South ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Decision Taking ◽  
The Revolution

In this article it is argued that Pieter Stoffberg's collection of stories, Die hart van ’n hond, forces the reader to constitute racist frames in order to interpret. Furthermore the author proposes that Kristeva's formalisation of the 'negation of negation', developed in The Revolution of Poetic Language, can theorise the textual process in these stories as a transgression in which the taboo on political rightist conservatism in a "New South Africa' is broken. To produce this transgression, the text places the reader in the position of the other, a position in which normative decision-taking is precluded. This itself could, however, constitute an ethical moment. On the basis of the Neo-Fascist aspects of Die hart van ’n hond, the article proposes a re-introduction of the ethical in literary’ discourse and critically comments on Afrikaans literary culture in this respect.

Kinesthetic Empathy in Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Theory

2020 ◽  
pp. 175-235
Author(s):  
Ana Hedberg Olenina
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Soviet Psychology ◽  
Kinesthetic Empathy ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Brain

Chapter 4 explores Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of the audience’s corporeal empathy, evoked by actors’ movements and graphical, nonhuman “gestures”—that is, “movements” implied by the structure of the shot composition, editing, and other formal devices. In scrutinizing Eisenstein’s theory that spectatorship is, fundamentally, an enactive experience, this chapter traces the roots of his ideas and evaluates the aesthetic and political implications of his position. First, I analyze the filmmaker’s engagement with psychological theories of William James, William Carpenter, Vladimir Bekhterev, Alexander Luria, and Lev Vygotsky, as well as the 19th-century German theorists of empathy (Einfühlung). Special attention is devoted to one of Eisenstein’s major sources: Vladimir Bekhterev’s Collective Reflexology (1921), a seminal work of early Soviet psychology, which discussed nonverbal communication in crowds and argued that the processing of visual sensations by the brain instantaneously impacts motor networks. I argue that although Eisenstein’s model of spectatorship appears manipulative, it is also potentially emancipatory. Embracing the utopian spirit of the avant-garde, he was willing to subject himself and his audience to radical experimentation aimed at testing the sensory properties of cinema and demystifying the mass production of emotions.

The Art of Retreat

2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 431-456
Author(s):  
Laurel V. Hankins
Keyword(s):  
Gender Difference ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Domestic Labor ◽  
Social Critique ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Collaborative Relationship ◽  
American Romanticism ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Market Pressures

Laurel V. Hankins, “The Art of Retreat: Salmagundi’s Elbow-Chair Domesticity” (pp. 431–456) James Kirke Paulding and William and Washington Irving’s literary periodical Salmagundi; or, the Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. and Others (1807) has been incorporated into accounts of Washington Irving’s protoromanticism that define American romanticism through an oppositional relationship between the aesthetic retreat of the artist and the consensus-driven consumerism of a feminized reading public. This essay argues that through the self-conscious assumption of bachelor pseudonyms, the Salmagundi editors’ aggressively masculine domestic retreat can be read as a reaction to the insufficiently reductive categories of a literary culture increasingly organized by gender difference. Even as the Salmagundi bachelor-editors mock the performative virtue of feminine domesticity, their own humorous social critique works to reestablish the possibility of making reform feel in tune with natural impulses. The bachelors locate the source of their imaginative whimsy within the domestic sphere’s supposed transcendence of social artifice and market pressures, but they also claim authorship by distinguishing their imaginative output from the termagant’s domestic labor. Because the editors’ reformative project depends on readers recognizing the alienated bachelor as a humorous literary type, the hostile relationship to its readers that has earned Salmagundi a place in narratives of Irving’s protoromanticism actually signals a collaborative relationship with readers who are repeatedly forced to acknowledge the editors’ authorial design.

scholarly journals VOLODYMYR VINNICHENKO IN THE DISCOURSE OF FRENCH MODERNISM

2020 ◽  
pp. 253-270
Author(s):  
G. Syvachenko
Keyword(s):  
French Literature ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Literary Process ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
Public Responsibility ◽  
The Aesthetic

The article explores the works of the famous Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko in the context of French literature of the first half of the twentieth century, and modernist trends in particular. The Ukrainian writer, philosopher, and public figure arrived in France in the mid-1920s to live there for almost three decades. He was interested in French literature, corresponded with A. France, A. Gide, co-translated with his wife his own works into French. His late-1940s translation of the novel Nova Zapovid (The New Commandment ) marked his engagement with the French literary process. The novel was awarded a prize by a literary clubs, and demonstrated resemblance to the major trends in French modernism. The article focuses on defining the typological correspondences in the interpretation by Vynnychenko and M. Proust of such components as subjective consciousness, mixed impressionism, memoir discourse. The author’s attention has been turned towards the specifics of the typological similarity of Vynnychenko and A. Gide’s aesthetic views, their assertion of the ideas of individualism, the quest for harmonization of the self, and symbolic “artistry.” Vynnychenko’s works are also analyzed in the context of French existentialism, including the study of such typological similarities of the aesthetic and philosophical views of the Ukrainian writer and A. Camus as undisguised moralizing, a claim to be perceived as teachers of life in solving practical ethical problems of the human condition. The author examines the methods and aesthetic constructions of such concepts of existentialism as freedom, choice, death, anxiety, relationships between the self and the Other in the works of Vynnychenko, J.P. Sartre, and S. de Beauvoir. The correlation between the works of Vynnychenko and A. de Saint-Exupéry is separately studied within the paradigm of existentialism, including “honesty with oneself” and honesty with others; the idea of community and the instinct of public responsibility. The critical optics of research combines the historical specificity of the development of French modernism, its philosophical foundations, the ethnic identity of the Ukrainian writer, and the inherent incorporation of his poetics into the paradigm of French modernism. For researchers, teachers, students of philology and those interested in V. Vynnychenko’s oeuvres and problems of literary modernism.

Between Utopia and Dystopia in Marrakech

2018 ◽  
pp. 165-185
Author(s):  
Gretchen Head
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
Biographical Dictionary ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Arabic Speaking

This chapter considers the literary culture of Morocco from the first half of the 20th-century, where the example of Ibn al-Muwaqqit reveals some of the aesthetic consequences of the country’s encounter with modernity. It interprets the contrast between Al-Muwaqqit’s early rhetorical staging of his hometown of Marrakech in his Sufi biographical dictionary Al-Saʻāda al-abadīyya fī al-taʻrīf bi-mashāhīr al-ḥaḍrah al-Marrākushiyya (Eternal Happiness in the Identification of Marrakech’s Notables) published as a lithograph in Fez in 1918, and the satiric al-Riḥla al-Marrākushiyya (Travels in Marrakech), a text that speaks against Morocco’s indigenous genres, published in 1930 by a press in Cairo. It ultimately suggests that the difference between these two texts is linked to the shift in orientation from Fez to Cairo, pointing to the need to consider patterns of circulation within the Arabic speaking world rather than only those between East and West.

An Israel of the Imagination

2020 ◽  
pp. 20-37
Author(s):  
Amy Feinstein
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
William James ◽  
Mental Disease ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Otto Weininger

Chapter 1 traces Stein’s writing about empirical and abstract Jewish racialism. It looks at her 1896 essay on intermarriage and the preservation of modern Jewish identity, titled “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation.” Stein wrote the work at Harvard when she was both a Jewish racialist and an undergraduate scientist. Like many of her generation, Stein took inspiration from Arnold’s critical yet glorified depiction of a Jewish force shaping civilization and the psyche. In his book Culture and Anarchy, Arnold had, in part, developed his ideas from racialist thinkers who often saw intellectual and creative “excesses,” such as genius or virtuosity, as signs of a Jewish mental disease. The infamous Otto Weininger would follow Arnold in this vein. Dissenters to this position included William James, who taught Stein at Harvard. Stein’s participation in Arnoldian and racialist debates over culture and “the Jewish question” resulted in her ethical and aesthetic interest in the experimental practices that would come to characterize literary modernism.

III.—Some Phases of Tennyson's in Memoriam

PMLA ◽  
1891 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-51
Author(s):  
Henry E. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Special Investigation ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Arthur Hugh Clough ◽  
In Memoriam ◽  
The Aesthetic

The trend of the Modern Language Association has been, thus far, almost exclusively in the direction of grammatical criticism and philological exegesis. The literary side of language has been subordinated or retired until it is almost faded out of memory, in the confusion of tongues and the strife of phonetics. Nearly all of the illustrating power, the æsthetic brilliance of literary culture, is lost upon the philological devotee. As an attempt to counteract this tendency, I purpose a special investigation of some points suggested by the study of one of the noblest works through which the spiritual genius and the artistic sense of our age has expressed itself—I mean Tennyson's “In Memoriam.” As is well known to students of our literature, “In Memoriam “appeared in 1850, the year of Wordsworth's death and of Tennyson's succession to the office of Laureate. It is one of the five or six supreme elegiac poems of our language, “Lycidas “standing first in point of time (1637), then Dryden's “Ode on Mrs. Killigrew” (1686), then Shelley's “Adonais “(1822), suggested by the death of Keats and “In Memoriam “which was occasioned by the death of Arthur Hallam at Vienna in September, 1833—in 1850. Matthew Arnold's “Thyrsis,” evoked by the death of his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, in point of grace and tenderness is entitled to most honorable recognition, but as it is subsequent by several years to the appearance of “In Memoriam,”

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