scholarly journals In search of the text generating structure: Jakobson’s theory of the poetic function of language

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yulia A. Govorukhina

The classic work of Roman Jakobson,“The Newest Russian Poetry. Sketch One. Ap­proaches to Khlebnikov”, is invariably referred to in the works on the history of structuralism, formalism and the history of the methodology of humanities. This article aims to address sev­eral questions: what are the epistemological attitudes of Jakobson and how are they imple­mented in his work? Can this 'disorganised' and 'sketchy' text be interpreted in context of the future attitudes of the scholar? The avant-garde literature of the early twentieth century not only created new methods of text generation but also required a new epistemological approach and a change in the recep­tive perspective. Jakobson's work is one of the first experiments in describing a new aesthetic phenomenon. Analysing language through shifts, Jakobson explores it in a structuralist way. In “The Newest Russian Poetry” the scholar summarises the ideas that became fundamental for him in the 1960s-1970s: the ideas of the teleological nature of poetry, a close connection between mental and language structures, and the relevance of the identification of text struc­ture as a relatively stable set of relations for the analysis of sense-making and text generation. Exploring the concept of literariness, Jakobson reveals a system of universal and interlevel methods of generating poetic speech. These observations have not lost their relevance and can be applied to the analysis of both avant-garde and classical texts.

1999 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-382
Author(s):  
Cristina Altman

Summary When mention is made of Brazil in connection with American linguistics, it usually amounts to a reference to the Linguistic Circle of New York, where Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), who had come from Brazil where he had done ethnological work, met and exchanged ideas. This singular event has cast a shadow on other contacts between Brazil and American linguistics, of which, the one between Jakobson and the Brazilian linguist Joaquim Mattoso Câmara (1904–1970) was much more consequential, at least as far as the implementation of structural linguistics in Brazil and in South America generally during the 1950s and the 1960s is concerned. Mattoso Câmara came to the United States and spent most of his time in New York City (September 1943 till April 1944), where he got exposure to Praguean type structuralism, notably through Jakobson’s lectures he attended at Columbia University and at the École Libre of New York, which had been established by European refugees at the time. He also participated in the first meetings of the Linguistic Circle of New York in 1943 as one of its co-founders. Following his return to Rio de Janeiro, Mattoso Câmara proposed, in 1949, as his doctoral thesis a phonemic description of Brazilian Portuguese. The work was published a few years later, in 1953. His most influential work, Princípios de Lingüística Gerai, first published in 1954, had two more revised and updated editions (1958, 1967) and served to introduce several generations of Brazilian as well as other South American students to structural linguistics during the 1950s and 1960s.


Author(s):  
Christopher T. Keaveney

Chapter 3 examines the long history of baseball films in Japan, a tradition nearly as old as the history of Japanese cinema itself. After a brief survey of the early history of cinema in Japan, a tradition whose history parallels that of the game of baseball chronologically, the study focuses on early shomingeki films and explores how baseball became an important marker of domesticity and middle class respectability in this genre of film in the 1930s. The chapter then examines several pivotal films in the postwar era, examining how baseball was used alternately to perpetuate a national hero in Suzuki Hideo’s Immortal Pitcher (1955) or to chart the corruption and greed surrounding professional baseball as in Kobayashi Masaki’s I Will Buy You (1956). In the 1960s and 1970s, as young filmmakers arose to challenge the dominance of the great postwar filmmakers and to produce often avant-garde and politically charged films that reflected an international challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood films, the baseball film was again adopted as a means to offer that challenge. Ōshima Nagisa’s Ceremonies, in a film that contests the very concept of the baseball film, uses baseball as a metaphor for the Japan’s abandonment of its citizens during the war. The recent splatter comedy baseball films of Yamaguchi Yūdai likewise play with the familiar tropes of Japanese baseball and of the baseball hero as antihero in problematizing the very concept of the baseball film.


1988 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-263
Author(s):  
Dirk Hoerder

John Bodnar’s Study—which I consider “the standard survey on the history of migration to the United States, which for many years will remain unsurpassed” (Hoerder, 1987)—also merits a controversial and lively discussion. A synthesis of the immigrant experience has long been called for. Beginning in the 1960s, Rudolph J. Vecoli’s penetrating critique (1964) and Victor Greene’s detailed study of east European miners (1968) dismantled Oscar Handlin’s paradigm (1951). The two decades since the end of the old paradigm witnessed the introduction of new methods, new approaches, and a new sensitivity to the roots of the migrants in their old cultures. I will first place Bodnar’s study in the context of two other recent syntheses and then raise some conceptual questions; in a third section I will take up issues related to the culture of origin and to the role of female migrants in community formation.


Author(s):  
Ulf Olsson

Throughout the history of the Grateful Dead, their musical practice was marked by avant-garde impulses. But the band was also performing rock standards, electrified folk music, cowboy songs, blues, et cetera. The band’s basic aesthetics were formed in this tension between tradition and avant-garde. At the same time, the band was generating a form of counter-public, reminiscent of the communities formed around bluegrass and avant-garde jazz. Self-organization became fundamental both for the band (in the form of improvisation), and for the community-building the band engaged in. In this way, the band also became part of the cultural and political dislocations going on in the Western world of the 1960s.


Author(s):  
Dilnoza Ulugbekovna Yuldasheva

In this article has been expressed condition of ancient material culture memorials in Uzbekistan during the 1960-1970s of Soviet government and also their guarding processes by the helping archive materials and historical literatures as well. In this research investigated that in the 1960s ideas was introduced into the socio-political life. Besides, author showed that the memorial museum has exhibited photos, photographs, historical sites, industrial enterprises, which reflect the biography and activities of the statesman, over 90,000 visitors visited the museum during this time, with over 300 thematic tours, since the 1960s, museums in Uzbekistan have laid the groundwork for new methods of mass cultural work. In particular, on the basis of the Museum of the History of Peoples of Uzbekistan a “traveling museum” was established, its employees visited the state, collective farms and also showed the audience the unique treasures and material resources of the museum, valuable exhibits and revolutionary monuments. KEY WORDS: Material culture memorials, Historical museum, historical literatures, culture, expedition, ethnographical branch, ideology, exposition, Uzbekistan.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Kosick

Chapter 2 discusses the 1960s interdisciplinary movement known as neoconcretism. It argues for a relational poetics in which language is plastic and what’s plastic is language. Analysing examples of poetry and art that either calls itself poetry or makes use of the book form – including poet Ferreira Gullar’s ‘Buried Poem’ (an underground poem-room that invites the ‘reader’ to enter), artist Lygia Pape’s Book of Creation (a language without words which the ‘reader’ can order) and artist Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics (a lyric that stills the sensible for the ‘reader’ to perceive) – this chapter shows that language powerfully shapes the history of what neoconcrete artist Lygia Clark calls the ‘relational object’. Not just a score which would guide, from the outside, the co-creation of an object, language, in a relational poetics, joins the creator and participant in becoming the object created. This conclusion also points towards one way in which avant-garde experimentation (often accused of being apolitical) can engage the political sphere – by creating the opportunity for an engagé poetics that takes shape inside sensory engagement itself.


2020 ◽  
pp. 439-521
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley

Chapter 6 considers works of expanded cinema that could be called “conceptual cinema.” “Conceptual,” here, refers to the belief that cinema among many avant-garde/experimental filmmakers and critics that cinema was ultimately a conceptual phenomenon, even when it took forms that seemed decidedly material. The term, or variants of it, was used in the 1960s and 1970s, often to refer to “imaginary” films, films planned or written but purposely never executed, and unprojected or unprojectable films. There are parallels between such conceptual cinematic works and conceptual art. In both cases, concepts, intentions, imagination, and discourse are taken to be as constitutive as art works as materials and physical processes. The objects of the film medium were, and continue to be, de-centered in favor of these less tangible, conceptual, or discursive dimensions of cinematic practice. While conceptual art will be a point of reference, chapter 6 will also show that a concept-based ontology of cinema emerged organically from within the history of avant-garde/experimental film. That is, it should not be thought of simply as a delayed response by filmmakers to prior art world developments, as if playing catch-up with their fellow artists.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Galina Golynets

This paper is devoted to the first domestic international conference Avant-Garde Movements in the Soviet Fine Arts: History and Modernity organised by the Department of the Art History of the Ural State University, by the Regional Department of Culture and by the White Gallery under the direction V.A. Malinov. The conference took place on January 19–21, 1990 in Sverdlovsk in the Cinema House. This event, which united art critics of the Urals, Siberia, Moscow, Kiev and Sofia, was one of the first sophisticated attempts to consider the issues faced by art movements which were not officially recognized and, therefore, existed “in the underground”. Due to various objective and subjective circumstances, local cultural strivings of that time were expressed more fully in painting and graphics than in other art forms. Sverdlovsk visual arts became well-known far beyond the region and played a special role in the city’s artistic life. The exhibition focused on the members of the art partnership ”Surikova, 31”. Almost two hundred artists and over six hundred works were presented in the 1987 exhibition. The exhibition stunned the public due to the age range of the artists, the explosion of movements and styles, and most of all the freedom of expression. Since then, exhibition activity has emerged from the basements and become public. Materials from the Ural conference 1990 are still interesting and relevant as part of the history of non-official art both in Sverdlovsk/Yekaterinburg and Russia in general. Keywords: modernism, avant-garde, Artists’ Union, socialist realism, underground, the second avant-garde, nonconformism, postmodernism.


PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (2) ◽  
pp. 351-358
Author(s):  
Otakar Zich ◽  
Emil Volek ◽  
Andrés Pérez-Simón

Otakar Zich (1879–1934) is a striking figure in modern czech aesthetics and art theory. A gifted librettist and opera composer and a professor at Charles University in Prague, his place in the history of aesthetics is still controversial. His Aesthetics of Dramatic Art (Estetika dramatického umění [1931]) came out at a time of paradigmatic change in the humanities (the emergence in the 1930s of functional structuralism through the Prague linguistic circle). Also, it was only in the 1930s that the Czech theatrical avant-garde got into full swing. Zich's work apparently “fell short” both of the new scientific paradigm, imposed by the tandem of Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) and Jan Mukařovský (1891–1975), and of the expectations of the students of theater coming from Mukařovský's seminars, some of them already distinguished avant-garde directors (Veltruský 67). Zich's untimely death precluded the development of his project, as well as fruitful debate about it. Mukařovský, as Zich'fs protégé, felt obliged to address the work of his mentor, but his early semiotic reading was avowedly partial and tentative and barely concealed his puzzlement. This marginal inclusion in the new paradigm without real assimilation left Zich's complex and comprehensive undertaking out in the cold.


Prospects ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 21-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guenter H. Lenz

During the last years scholars in American Studies have become more conscious of the methodological problems of their work and have made wide-ranging use of the developments in various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. They have also discovered the importance of a critical perspective on the history of their “discipline.” But there clearly is the feeling of a loss of direction, an uneasiness about the purposes and objectives of American Studies. Often the appropriation of new methods and approaches was pursued under the old premises, and awareness of the history of the field reduced to a stereotypical periodization of “phases” characterized by dominant “key concepts” or “methods.” Whereas during the late 1960s and early 1970s the work of the so-called myth-symbol school (from H. N. Smith to Leo Marx) was criticized as methodologically unsound (by B. Kuklick) and politically conservative (or reactionary) (by Lasch et al.), more recently some of its work, particularly by Leo Marx and Richard Slotkin, has been condemned (by Kenneth Lynn) as “regressive,” “reductionist,” or simply “anti-American Studies.” This confusion about the origin, the objectives, the political implications, and the “legacy” of the early period of American Studies, from the 1930s to the 1960s, and the development and changes in literary and cultural criticism and in historiography during these decades is, it seems to me, one reason for the precarious relationship between “history” and “theory” in American Studies today.


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