scholarly journals 'Confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought': a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poetry

Literator ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
H. Kruger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Critical Writing ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
Beat Movement ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Beat Poetry

Much critical writing about the Beat Movement has focused on the strong interrelationship between the literary and social discourses within and around the movement. However, the study of Beat literature also necessitates an awareness of its position within the literary discourse of the twentieth century. Beat writing may be seen as standing in the unstable, shifting territory between two equally unstable, shifting literary movements: modernism and postmodernism. Beat poetry pits itself against high modernism and the New Critical tradition, draws upon some aspects of early avant-garde modernism, and simultaneously remoulds these aspects into what may be regarded as the beginnings of postmodernism in the USA. This article presents a reading of Allen Ginsberg’s Beat poetry against this literary-historical background. A brief general overview of some of the key characteristics of Beat poetry is given, followed by a discussion of a number of Beat poems, organised around some salient features of Ginsberg’s Beat poetry that may be linked to Beat poetry’s position in the transition from modernism to postmodernism.

Multisensory Modalities and Modernist Translation

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-306
Author(s):  
Tamara Brzostowska-Tereszkiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reader Response ◽  
Sensory Integration ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Sensory Perception ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
High Modernism ◽  
The Arts

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.

‘Out Past / Self-Dramatization’: Maurice Scully's Several Dances

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-118
Author(s):  
Romana Huk
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
The Self ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Oppen ◽  
American Poets

What has lyric to do with any radical phenomenology's choreography? Maurice Scully in Several Dances asks that question, as he has for years now, alongside other poets of Ireland's avant-garde whose ‘distinguishing (not inhibiting) feature’, as Sarah Bennett writes (acknowledging the work of Alex Davis and Eric Falci before her) is that in it ‘the lyric subject persists’ – in tandem with, this essay argues, what she names ‘an interest in perception … [which] is perhaps the most compelling commonality in these poets' work’. What distinguishes Scully's from the lyric phenomenology of American poets from William Carlos Williams (invoked throughout the volume) to George Oppen (also invoked) is that he queries existentialism's ‘singular’ approach to phenomena, achieved as Heidegger thought through the phenomenological ‘bracketing’ of individual (and communal) preconceptions from the perception of things. Cosmic – even theological – speculation enters in as Scully's poems move out past both self-centered lyric and twentieth-century cancellations of all preconceptions in the ‘limit-thinking’ and being-toward-death that phenomenology proposed for seeing past the self. Yet Scully works with mortality always in his sights too as he sings ‘the Huuuman / Limit-at-tation Blues’ (p.118) and, more vertiginously, considers both the undelimitability and the fragility of us.

Being Numerous

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oren Izenberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Life ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Common ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Practical Question ◽  
Language Poets

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.

Ważyk metafizyczny? / Ważyk – A Metaphysician?

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jerzy Święch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Late Phase ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Sufficiency

Summary Adam Ważyk’s last volume of poems Zdarzenia (Events) (1977) can be read as a resume of the an avant-garde artist’s life that culminated in the discovery of a new truth about the human condition. The poems reveal his longing for a belief that human life, the mystery of life and death, makes sense, ie. that one’s existence is subject to the rule of some overarching necessity, opened onto the last things, rather than a plaything of chance. That entails a rejection of the idea of man’s self-sufficiency as an illusion, even though that kind of individual sovereignty was the cornerstone of modernist art. The art of late modernity, it may be noted, was already increasingly aware of the dangers of putting man’s ‘ontological security’ at risk. Ważyk’s last volume exemplifies this tendency although its poems appear to remain within the confines of a Cubist poetics which he himself helped to establish. In fact, however, as our readings of the key poems from Events make clear, he employs his accustomed techniques for a new purpose. The shift of perspective can be described as ‘metaphysical’, not in any strict sense of the word, but rather as a shorthand indicator of the general mood of these poems, filled with events which seem to trap the characters into a supernatural order of things. The author sees that much, even though he does not look with the eye of a man of faith. It may be just a game - and Ważyk was always fond of playing games - but in this one the stakes are higher than ever. Ultimately, this game is about salvation. Ważyk is drawn into it by a longing for the wholeness of things and a dissatisfaction with all forms of mediation, including the Cubist games of deformation and fragmentation of the object. It seems that the key to Ważyk’s late phase is to be found in his disillusionment with the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Especially the poems of Events contain enough clues to suggest that the promise of Cubism and surrealism - which he sought to fuse in his poetic theory and practice - was short-lived and hollow.

ALTRUISTIC AND EGOISTIC AGON IN THE EMOTIONAL CRISIS OF SUŠIĆ'S DRAMATIC PERSONS

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 2361-2365
Author(s):  
Almedina Čengić
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Modern Process ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
Dramatic Characters ◽  
The One

The second half of the 20th century in Bosnian literature is marked by the new tendencies of avant-garde writers, who will create their work through a different form of artistic creation, compared to the one that was presented at the beginning of this period. It is important to clarify the specificity of the various procedures that have positively directed dramatic creativity towards the modern lines of European literary circles. Derviš Sušić (1925-1990.), the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tradition and the reality of images, presented in a completely new artistic vision, make oscillation, in the writer's creation, between the determinants of historical facts and the legacy of oral tradition. Derviš Sušić Within the avant-garde tendencies of contemporary writers of the regional region, which appear in the mid-20th century, Sušić dominates in his virtuous creations of dramatic situations and dilemmas, in which his protagonists act. In a specific presentation of crucial culmination points, within the framework of the process of "drama of the flow of consciousness," a modern process in the conduct of drama, this writer analytically approaches the individual's dialectical duplication. Through artistically shaped fragments taken from historical records, this literary virtuoso presents in his texts a culmination point of Bosnian survival, very picturesque dramatic shaped historical characters and crucial events. It is symptomatic that Susić's characters become prototypes of stage characters, without temporal or location restrictions, transmitting a universal message of a unique attitude about the value of human activity and existence, outperform stereotypical models recognizable in the additional drama literature. Through the colorful of seeing and a range of specific dramatic characters, without the diversity of their differentiation in national status or sociopolitical affiliation, this writer creates a special ambient effect in the construction of his poetic fabrics based on historical background. The task of this paper is to prove the causality and conditionality of altruistic (social) and egoistic (individual) agonies in the actions and actions of Sušić's characters, in the examples of dramatic texts "Veliki vezir" (1969) and "Posljednja ljubav Hasana Kaimija "(1973), as well as the influence of emotional indicators on the concrete initiation of the dramatic conflict. It is therefore very interesting to explore and verify the models that will dominantly dominate the regional scene for almost half a century and be accepted as models in the way of writing its contemporaries, among the readers' population, but also at the same time with very successful placement in the theater audience.

Emergent and Adaptive Spiritualities in the Twentieth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Lord
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Church Life ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Uk

This chapter points to the ‘pluralization of the lifeworld’ involved in globalization as a key context for changing dissenting spiritualities through the twentieth century. These have included a remarkable upsurge in Spirit-movements that fall under categories such as Pentecostal, charismatic, neo-charismatic, ‘renewalist’, and indigenous Churches. Spirit language is not only adaptive to globalized settings, but brings with it eschatological assumptions. New spiritualities emerge to disrupt existing assumptions with prophetic and often critical voices that condemn aspects of the existing culture, state, and church life. This chapter outlines this process of disruption of the mainstream in case studies drawn from the USA, the UK, India, Africa, and Indonesia, where charismaticized Christianity has emerged and grown strongly in often quite resistant broader cultures.

EPISTEMOLOGY OF TONE: AN OBITUARY FOR JULIEN JALÂL ED-DINE WEISS

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (281) ◽  
pp. 71-79
Author(s):  
Stefan Pohlit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Modal System ◽  
Helpful Tool ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Major Discrepancy

AbstractDuring the 1980s, Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, founder of the Al-Kindi ensemble of Aleppo, invented a qānūn in just intonation with which he attempted to solve a major discrepancy between the theory and practice of maqām-scales. Weiss objected to the introduction of Western standards, observing that they distort the significance of interval ratios and prevent a comparative understanding of the modal system as a transnational phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the implementation of equal-semitone temperament emerged simultaneously with a notable invasion of sociological criteria into musical inquiry. The polarity observed between westernisation and tradition can be seen most visibly in the present search for identity amongst Middle- and Near-Eastern musicians, but this schismogenic process can also be observed in the history of the Western avant-garde, where microtonal explorations have been halted in favour of extra-musical conceptuality. While cross-cultural musicians are faced with a new climate of distrust, it seems most likely that the principles that draw us apart may originate in the very patterns of thought in which our notion of culture operates. Weiss's tuning system may serve as a helpful tool to foster a new and universal epistemology of tone, bridging and transcending the apparent contradictions between the two spheres.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

"Us" vs. "Them". Communist Dialectical Images from Interwar Europe and Soviet Russia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adri Kácsor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Interwar Europe

Brawny male workers vs. bulging bourgeois men. Working-class mothers burdened by the hardship of poverty and childcare vs. elegant upper-class women enjoying a lifestyle of privilege. Such juxtaposed images of workers and the rich were prevalent in the visual culture of communism throughout the twentieth century, appearing on posters, illustrations, and other genres of political propaganda across countries and continents. Although these didactic propaganda images have rarely been considered in histories of modernism and the avant-garde, this article argues that they were among the key visual inventions of twentieth-century communist visual culture given their highly innovative aesthetics and juxtaposed structure that provided them a potential to become dialectical. Drawing on examples from interwar Europe and Soviet Russia, this article examines how didactic juxtapositions could become dialectical images, triggering political transformations while also making revolutionary class consciousness visible for the viewer.

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