CONCEPTUAL INTEGRATIONS IN LA PROSE DU TRANSSIBÉRIEN ET DE LA PETITE JEANNE DE FRANCE BY BLAISE CENDRARS

In this paper, I discuss La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France by Blaise Cendrars, a narrative poem first published in French in Paris in 1913. The poem has raised seemingly intractable questions for many years, given its status as one of the most important modernist poems, and one of the most important poems in 20th century French poetry. As I argue, considering some of the issues from the perspective of cognitive stylistics, especially the theory of conceptual integration, may help explain how readers make sense of this complicated poem.

The Exordium of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s Poetry

The background of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí (1921 – 2017) was steeped in the Ọyọ̀ ́ Yorùbá culture. He had a princely connection to the throne of Ọyọ̀ ́ having been born by Dúrówadé Àyìnkẹ, a granddaughter of Prince Adé ́ ṣọ̀kàn, Bàbá Ìdódẹ, Aláàfin Àtìbà’s son, to Àkànbí Fálétí. Àkànbí Fálétí was a royal oral artist in the palace of Aláàfin Ṣiyanbọ́lá Oníkẹẹ̀ pé Ládìgbòlù (1911 – ́ 1944). He later practiced outside the palace, leading his own band, going about Ìlọrin and its environs and parts of Northern Yorùbáland. The late Pa David Adéníji of Ìwó, we reliably learnt, was one of his followers. Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí spent his early life in Ọyọ̀ ́ villages such as Àgbóóyè, Ọbanàǹkò and Kúrańgà (Ọlátúnji 1982a). Adébáyọ Fálétí learnt many Yorùbá tales and garnered other ̀ native wisdom from his father and other relations. Such relations include Jímọ̀ Ọládẹ̀jọ, who was adept in proverbs, and his childless aunt, an oríkì (charcterizational) poetry exponent. The western education he acquired and the Christianity he embraced were also part and parcel of his background. His primary school education was at Ọyọ̀ ́ (1939 – 1945), his secondary school education at Ìbàdàn Boys High school, Ìbàdàn, (1951 – 1955) and his University education at the University of Ìbàdàn (1965 – 1968). He took a bachelor’s degree in English with a subsidiary in French. There is no doubt that Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí would have been influenced by Yorùbá literary artists of his time, all of whom he studied in school. Among such Yorùbá literary precursors were A. K. Ajíṣafẹ, D. A. Ọbasá and D. ́ O. Fágúnwà. Adébáyọ Fálétí collected and transcribed oral poetic forms such ̀ as proverbs and oríkì following Obasá’s example before venturing into writing 110 Adedotun Ogundeji his own compositions. Though he had been writing before 1955, he did not come into the limelight until 1955, when his 719 lines long poem, “Ẹ̀dá Kò Láròpin” won the Festival of Arts award. This time may conveniently be considered the beginning of his poetic career. The poem also marked the direction which Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s important contributions to Yorùbá poetry was leaning. He adapted many traditional stories for his poetic compositions. There are 35 poems in the two collections of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s Yorùbá poems (Ọlátúnjí 1984 b & 1984c), 13 in the first and 22 in the second. Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s poems, can conveniently be classified into two: the narrative and non-narrative. The narratives tell interesting stories, some of which are adapted from the Ifá corpus and other stories collected from his father, co-hunters and other sources. The non-narrative ones are made up of poetic discourses on various social and philosophical topics. There are eleven narrative poems in the two collections. The first contains ten, the second only one. It could therefore be safely concluded that the first is dedicated to narrative poems because only four of the thirteen poems in it are non-narrative. Since there is also only one narrative poem in the second, one could also assert that it is dedicated to non-narrative poems. Four of the eleven narrative poems, (‘Ẹ̀là Lọrọ̀ ’, ‘̀ Ṣàṣọrẹ’, ‘Alágbára Ilé àti Alágbára Oko’, and ‘Agbódóro ́ - gun’) are adapted from the Ifá corpus and there are strong evidences that ìjálá (Ogun poetry/hunter’s) is the original source of the story retold in ‘Adébímpé Ojẹ̀dòkun’. The poet was reported to have collected it from his father who informed him it was a true-life story (Ọlátúnjí 1982a). In our examination of the exordiums of Adébáyọ̀ Fálétí’s poems, we shall dwell more on his narrative poems than on his non-narrative poems and limit ourselves to the aforementioned two collections (Olatunji 1982b & 1982c).

Jealousy and Domestic Violence by Women in Early and Medieval China

Beginning in the early imperial era, Chinese texts recorded instances of domestic violence perpetrated by women living in polygynous households. These acts of abuse were commonly understood to be the result of sexual jealousy. Marital disharmony was a cause of great concern to the elite, as a result of which legal and historical texts, as well as the literature of the period, provide a rich vein of evidence concerning domestic violence perpetrated by women. Furthermore, there are some surprisingly sympathetic accounts of the psychological pressures that led to such abuse by wives. As the importance of this material in the history of marital relationships and domestic life in China has been neglected, this study provides an overview of some of the key sources, particularly the recently discovered Han dynasty narrative poem, Wang Ji 妄稽.

Isabella in the Marketplace

This chapter begins by distinguishing three modes of the representation of female experience in Romantic literature: conscious feminism; representation of female experience from within the ideological constraints of the dominant order; and representation of female experience without overt consciousness of ideology or social reality. Keats’s narrative poem ‘Isabella or the Pot of Basil’ is considered as working within the third category. The ostensible conventionally Romantic contrast between the idealized lovers and the calculatingly manipulative brothers is analysed as much less straightforward. The oblivion of the lovers to the reality of their social position lays them open to exploitation by the mercantile brothers; the lovers are thus complicit in their own destruction. This complexity is reproduced at the level of the stylistic contrasts within the poem.

Walls Falling & the Drive Inward

T. S. Eliot’s “East Cooker” in 1940 encouraged H.D. as she wrote a vatic and communal antiwar poem, The Walls Do Not Fall. This volume of Trilogy explores survival and “ancient rubrics,” provoking her readers to practice “spiritual realism,” addressing those who need to do their “worm-cycle.” Bryher left Lowndes on jaunts to Trenoweth or Eckington, always inviting H.D., who visited Cornwall twice. Her first “escape” led H.D. to “R.A.F.,” an unusual narrative poem for her, pivoting upon sitting next to a pilot on sick leave on the train from Cornwall to London. She envisioned him at her writing desk. This experience led her to the Institute for Psychical Research; Air Marshall Dowding was himself a member. She met Arthur Bhaduri, a “seer” who would conduct séances for H.D. and Bryher. Perdita worked at Bletchley Park unscrambling codes.

Identificació de dues cançons franceses i el seu context literari al «Procés de Corona d’aur» (c. 1406) de Francesc de la Via

This paper explores the French references in Francesc de la Via’s narrative poem "Procés de Corona d’aur". The French songs mentioned in the poem are close to some rondeaux that were probably sung at the court of King Martin I of Aragon.

Selvinsky’s Ulyalaevshchina in 1924–1927

A detailed reconstruction of the history behind the creation and publication of I. Selvinsky’s Ulyalaevshchina, a narrative poem about the Russian civil war in the Urals, following the 1917 revolution. Composed in 1924, Ulyalaevshchina was first published in 1927 and then underwent numerous alterations by Selvinsky, to a detrimental effect. The 1920s–1930s saw four publications of the poem as a separate book; the poem was considered a masterpiece of Selvinsky’s and of contemporary Soviet poetic output in general. However, its subsequent publications in the 1930s were unofficially vetoed up until the early Thaw years, when, in 1956, the poem was published again upon radical redrafting by the author. The scholar makes a meticulous comparison between various archive versions of Ulyalaevshchina, comments on textual juxtapositions and finds that the poem, conceived as a ‘verse novel’ about the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik pillaging of rural settlements during the food confiscation campaign (prodrazvyorstka), was intentionally rewritten by Selvinsky as an exemplary Soviet epic, which could not but damage the poem’s quality and intonation.

ALAN WALKER’S “LILY” SONG LYRICS TO DEPICT SATANIC TRICKS: A GENERIC STRUCTURE ANALYSIS AS RHETORIC

The current study investigated a song lyric entitled “Lily” in terms of its generic structure to come up with the rhetorical strategies—how satanic tricks influence people through human greed. Lily belongs to a lyric considered a narrative poem. It is theorized that a narrative poem is a poem or possibly a lyric which consists of orientation, complication and resolution. In other words, a lyric is structured as such to produce rhetorical strategies (goals) which were analyzed employing Aristotle’s ethos, logos and pathos. Meanwhile, in the complication analysis of Lily, not only did the study employ psychological theory but was also supported by social contexts to describe how satanic tricks were made use through human greed engineering in achieving the goal of negative thoughts generating. The findings indicate that human minds are in fact guided by both angels and satans. Angels guide any individual (Lily) to stay in track of the positive values while Satan whispers tricks to divert from the positive path toward the negative values by means of human greed. To confirm the findings, a survey was administered to 90 purposefully-selected teenagers in Semarang Municipality only to find that “Lily“ song lyrics failed to give any answer to the question whether or not she (Lily) can be saved despite her frequent calls for help.

Jean Delville’s ‘L’ Allégorie de l’ Enfer’ (c. 1890)—or, Azrael and the Death of Solomon

Jean Delville was one of the most talented artists of his generation, producing a prolific body of paintings, drawings, poetry, and essays. This essay explores the relationship between a previously unknown drawing by the artist, recently come to light, and a long narrative-poem published in one of his earliest anthologies: Les Horizons Hanté (1892), titled ‘Azrael’. These early works reveal themes that were to become a mainstay of the artist’s oeuvre concerning the mystery of death, transcendence, and the path of the Initiate.

Going Beyond the Lyrical: A.E. Stallings’s Engagement with Don Juan

A.E. Stallings has long shown an interest in the poetry of Lord Byron. When invited to contribute to A Modern Don Juan (edited by Andy Croft and N.S. Thompson, 2014) she accepted with alacrity; the experiment in writing ottava rima proved extremely fruitful, not only providing her with a new metrical technique but also expanding her sense of what it was possible to treat in verse. This article examines the canto she contributed to Croft and Thompson’s 2014 volume and also another narrative poem in ottava rima, ‘Lost and Found’, written around the same time. As Stallings has herself observed, her engagement with Byron and Don Juan prepared her for new ways to write about contemporary events. This article examines this development, showing the impact of Byron’s epic on her shorter poems and lyrics as well as on her longer narrative works.