scholarly journals Reading the Genotext in Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge: “Sapphire’s lyre styles…”

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 32-42
Author(s):  
William Scott
Keyword(s):  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
The Way

In her early work on Modernist poetry and avant-garde poetics, Julia Kristeva proposed a bifurcated view of the poetic text as simultaneously constituted by both a “genotext” and a “phenotext.”  Reading the “genotext” of any given poem might start by “pointing out the transfers of drive energy that can be detected in phonematic devices (such as the accumulation and repetition of phonemes or rhyme) and melodic devices (such as intonation or rhythm)”; and, in her words, it would also need to take into consideration “the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic and logical features.” This essay seeks to demonstrate how Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge might be analyzed at the level of its genotext, taking (arbitrarily) as its primary example the first of the book’s eighty poems to illustrate how a straightforwardly genotextual analysis might proceed. The essay contends that, by closely observing the genotext of Mullen’s poetry in Muse & Drudge, one may eventually arrive at a more comprehensive understanding of the “polyvocal” and “polymorphous” nature of the language and poetic design of the poems in this enigmatic collection.

scholarly journals B.S. Johnson’s Liberatic Cityscape in Albert Angelo

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Biela
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Visual Sensitivity ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Way

For Bryan Stanley Johnson, a British post-war avant-garde author, space was a crucial aspect of a literary work. Inspired by architects and film makers, he was convinced that “form follows function” (“Introduction” to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs) and exercised the book as a material object, thus anticipating liberature – a literary genre defined in 1999 by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik, which encompasses works whose authors purposefully fuse the content with the form. The goal of this paper is to analyse the cityscape theme in Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo (1964), in which London is presented as space that accompanies the character in his everyday life and becomes a witness of the formation of his identity. The protagonist is an architect by profession, so special attention is paid to his visual sensitivity and the way the cityscape is reflected in his memories. Furthermore, Johnson’s formal exploitation of the book as an object and its correspondence to the content is analysed with reference to the metaphor of “[t]he book as an architectural structure” discussed by Bazarnik in Liberature. A Book-bound Genre.

scholarly journals Exclusive language: The tool to empower and create identity

2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ananda Geyser-Fouche
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
South African Context ◽  
Literary Theories ◽  
African Context ◽  
Qumran Community ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
The Way

This article used some postmodern literary theories of philosophers such as Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva to scrutinise a selection of texts from the post-exilic period with regard to the exclusive language employed in these texts. Lyotard�s insights relate to and complement Foucault�s concept of �counter-memory�. Foucault also focuses on the network of discursive powers that operate behind texts and reproduce them, arguing that it is important to have a look from behind so as to see which voices were silenced by the specific powers behind texts. The author briefly looked at different post-exilic texts within identity-finding contexts, focusing especially on Chronicles and a few Qumran texts, to examine the way in which they used language to create identity and to empower the community in their different contexts. It is generally accepted that both the author(s) of 1 & 2 Chronicles and the Qumran community used texts selectively, with their own nuances, omissions and additions. This study scrutinised the way the author(s) of Chronicles and the Qumran community used documents selectively, focusing on the way in which they used exclusive language. It is clear that all communities used such language in certain circumstances to strengthen a certain group�s identity, to empower them and to legitimise this group�s conduct, behaviour and claims � and thereby exclude other groups.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: Based on postmodern literary theories, this article compares the exclusive language used in Chronicles and in the texts of the Qumran community, pointing to the practice of creating identity and empowering through discourse. In conclusion, the article reflects on what is necessary in a South African context, post-1994, to be a truly democratic country.Keywords: Exclusive language; inclusive; Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu; Derrida; Qumran Chronicles

Terre's Brilliant Mines

Exterranean ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 41-56
Author(s):  
Phillip John Usher
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Pierre De Ronsard ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
French Author ◽  
The Way

This chapter turns to a mid-sixteenth-century poetic text, the “Hymne de l’or” (Hymn to Gold) by French author Pierre de Ronsard. The poem is read here—recuperating in particular its “vision” of Terre that generations of critics have written off as a mere aside—as a poem ever conscious about gold’s exterranean origins and as a kind of poetic counterpart to nonpoetic texts about mining such as Georgius Agricola’s Bermannus (1500) and Vannoccio Biringuccio’s metallurgical treatise De la Pirotechnia (1540). After analyzing the “vision” of Terre in some detail, especially the way that Terre is described as always already containing not just gold, but mines, the chapter explores how Ronsard juxtaposes (in somewhat problematic ways) specific sites of extraction.

The word among stones

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Barry
Keyword(s):  
Close Collaboration ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Urban Settings ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Special Regard ◽  
Artistic Heritage ◽  
Interpretive Scheme

In this chapter Peter Barry explores poems about stones, on stones and as stones. He shows how our ancestors had a special regard for stones particularly those that seemed out of place, such as glacial erratics. The Ringing Stone on Tiree is one such, bearing numerous cup marks from Neolithic times. He considers how poems have been placed in the environment on trails and paths, sometimes with a didactic purpose as part of an environmentalist interpretive scheme. Some of these have taken advantage of the expressive potential of the stones themselves, and of letter carvers who blend this with their own artistic heritage. Collaborations between carver and poet can make best use of the space between the words that come closest to Barry’s interest in avant-gardeorneo-modernist poetry(especially ‘concrete’ and ‘visual’ poetries). Barry also considers poems in urban settings, in projects involving close collaboration with councils, NGOs and communities, where the words have been incised on bridges, monuments, paths, or pavements, as by Alyson Hallett in Bath, Lemn Sissay in Manchester, Bill Herbert near Darlington, and Menna Elfyn and Gillian Clarke in Tonypandy.

Scelsi, Giacinto (1905–1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Drott
Keyword(s):  
Musical Training ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Piano Lessons ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Way

Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian avant-garde composer best known for the single-note style he developed during the 1950s and 1960s, which minimizes harmonic and melodic activity in order to allow microtonal fluctuations and subtle transformations in timbre, intonation, dynamics, and articulation to come to the fore. Although his works were little known and infrequently performed during his lifetime, they gained considerable acclaim in the 1980s. Scelsi’s œuvre has proven extremely influential, and is generally regarded as a precursor to the spectral movement. Many of the elements of Scelsi’s biography remain uncertain, due in part to the composer’s penchant for self-mythologization. His family belonged to the southern Italian nobility, and it was in their ancestral chateau in Irpinie that Scelsi’s interest in music first manifested itself. He had little in the way of formal musical training, apart from receiving private piano lessons in his youth. Scelsi spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad, principally in France and Switzerland. It was during this period that he composed his first pieces, most notably Rotativa for pianos, strings, brass and percussion (1930). His early music was stylistically eclectic, embracing post-impressionist, neo-classical and twelve-tone idioms at various points in his life.

scholarly journals Ideology and intertextuality: Intertextual allusions in Judith 16

2011 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Philip Nolte ◽  
Pierre J. Jordaan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Religious Texts ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
The Way

This article utilised the theory of intertextuality to investigate the way in which religious texts, specifically Judith 16, generate meaning in the act of the production of texts. The groundbreaking work on intertextuality done by Julia Kristeva served as the theoretical point of departure. Kristeva utilised Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary theory to develop her own views on intertextuality. According to the theory of intertextuality, all texts are intersections of different texts and are therefore polyvalent. The article argued that the ideology (or ideologies) of author(s) of texts underpin the ways in which other texts are used and alluded to. The purpose of the investigation was to illustrate how intertextual allusions in Judith 16 are used to describe ‘God/the Lord’ as a God of war and, thereby, to maintain an already existing ideology of war:We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (Barthes, cited in Beal 1992:27)

scholarly journals (Re)framing Movement in Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation N°1

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Emőke Simon
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Short Films ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
The Way

Abstract Considered as one of the main figures of the avant-garde lyrical cinema, Stan Brakhage questions perception. His language of inquiry constantly confronts the spectator with the limits of visual experience of the world and the multiple possibilities of their transgression. Critically addressing one of his short films, Visions in Meditation n°l (1989),1 this analysis aims to discuss the way movement may become a principle of perception, that is to say, according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition - a mode of transgressing the frame of representation. Reappropriating the cinematographic grammar and submitting it to a vibrating movement, Brakhage invents a rhythm which paves the way for a transcendental experience, meanwhile proposing a reflection on the meditative possibilities of the film in terms of the image in meditation. Gilles Deleuze’s way of thinking of cinema in Cinema 1: Movement-image, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cinema, allows one to consider movement in its cinematographic and philosophical meaning, a project which in Brakhage’s case seems to be primordial

scholarly journals Senses of Echo Lake: Michael Palmer, Stanley Cavell, and the Moods of an American Philosophical Tradition

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Richard Deming
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Active Reading ◽  
Moral Perfectionism ◽  
The Way

This essay explores a philosophical tradition that Stanley Cavell has traced out and which he emphasizes as being American inasmuch as it is arises out of the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It then investigates how the poems of the avant-garde poet Michael Palmer link with, overlap with, this strain of American philosophy in terms of how it enacts an understanding of what we might call “philosophical mood,” on outlook based on the navigation of representation, generative self-consciousness, and doubt that amounts to a form of epistemology. The essay does not trace the influence—direct or otherwise of Cavell and his arguments for philosophy on the poems, despite a biographical connection between Cavell and Palmer, his former student. Instead it brings out the way that one might fruitfully locate Palmer’s work within an American literary/philosophical continuum. The article shows how that context opens up the work to a range of important existential and ethical implications. I endeavor to show that Notes for Echo Lake, Palmer’s most important collection, locates itself, its language, within such a frame so as to provide a place for readerly encounters with the limitations of language. These encounters then are presented as an opportunity for a deeper understanding of subjectivity and for attuning oneself to the role that active reading and interpretation might play in moral perfectionism.

Richard Hooker: Invention and Re-invention

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

This study traces the way in which a typical Elizabethan Reformed Protestant became something slightly different during a ministerial career prematurely terminated by death in his forties, and what he became in the centuries that followed. It explains the background of divided theologies in the national Church of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the emergence of ‘avant-garde conformism’, and the way in which Hooker was used by opposing sides to justify their positions, particularly after the Restoration of 1660, when the term ‘Anglicanism’ first becomes fully appropriate for the life and thought of the Church of England. As the Church moved from national monopoly to established status, Hooker became of use in different ways to both Tories and Whigs, though in the nineteenth century the Oxford Movement largely monopolised his memory. His views on the construction of authority may still help Anglicanism find its theological way forward.

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