Poetic Diction and Standard Language: Predictive Aspect

The article deals with the interdiction convergence on the example of evolutionary changes in lexical semantics of poetic language. The current study contributes to the development of the methodology for studying the language evolutionary processes. The paper describes certain trends of dynamic changes and their specifics; it gives some prediction about the further lexis convergence of different types of functional styles. The findings contribute to the development of lexicography which is going to reflect not only static but also dynamic characteristics of lexical units including stylistic ones. The subjectivity of labeling poetic vocabulary in dictionaries can be partially removed through the analysis of corpus data by comparing frequency indices in different subsections, however this method is not always accurate, moreover, it doesnt effectively trace evolutionary changes. The data from the psycholinguistic experiments can help reveal the dynamics of changes. On the one hand, the results of scaling show the extent of poetry in connotative meanings; on the other hand, the open-response associative experiment allows us to calculate the archaization index of a lexeme through summing up the numerical values of certain selected parameters. The research gives obvious evidence of active archaization of some specific poetic lexemes. The findings also prove that the dynamic changes in stylistic connotation are not synchronous with the changes in the denotative layer of a lexical unit.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Socio-Psychological Factors in Taufiq Rafat’s “Wedding in the Flood”

People use language for different social practices in different contexts and perspectives, and discourse analysts examine these social practices for a better understanding of the discourse. The language used by a poet is different from the language used by common people; the poetic diction helps to understand a poet’s literary style, his ideology, and the use of descriptive language. This article focuses on exposing the socio-psychological factors through examining the use of language in a free verse poem ‘Wedding in the Flood’ by Taufiq Rafat who tried to present different aspects of Pakistani culture in the poem. The socio-psychological factors combine the social (family, society, wealth, religion) and the psychological factors (feelings, thoughts, actions, beliefs) that play an important role in shaping the personality of an individual, and the characters in the poem are the best examples of it. This analysis is based on Fairclough’s conceptions in CDA that claims of an inter-link between ideologies and texts, and this link cannot be separated because there are many ways to interpret texts, and the Socio-Psychological Theory (20121) also combines many social and psychological factors of human life. Many researchers did the stylistic analysis of the poem, but nothing has been done to highlight its socio-psychological factors through CDA.

Écriture Feminine and the Poetry of Langston Hughes

This paper attempts to locate Hughes’s poetic diction as Ecriture feminine since like feminist poetry the diction of his poetry is rebellious and questions the hierarchical structure of society where White people hold more power and promote the idea of racial superiority. His desire to express the angst of the Blacks finds currency in the definition and explication of feminine writing. The focus of this paper will be on analysis of the poetry of Langston Hughes in the light of ecriture feminine in order to show how Hughes counters hegemony’s repressive rhetoric, challenges the loss of agency through the language of the dominant class and recreates another symbolic order.

Law and Love in Ovid

In classical scholarship, the presence of legal language in love poetry is commonly interpreted as absurd and incongruous. Ovid’s legalisms have been described as frivolous, humorous, and ornamental. This book challenges this widespread, but ill-informed view. Legal discourse in Latin love poetry is not incidental, but fundamental. Inspired by recent work in the interdisciplinary field of law and literature, the book argues that the Roman elegiac poets point to love as the site of law’s emergence. The Latin elegiac poets may say ‘make love, not law’, but in order to make love, they have to make law. Drawing on Agamben, Foucault, and Butler, the book explores the juridico-discursive nature of Ovid’s love poetry, constructions of sovereignty, imperialism, authority, biopolitics, and the ways in which poetic diction has the force of law. The book is methodologically ambitious, combining legal theory with historically informed closed readings of numerous primary sources. It aims to restore Ovid to his rightful position in the history of legal humanism. The Roman poet draws on a long tradition that goes back to Hesiod and Solon, in which poetic justice is pitted against corrupt rulers. Ovid’s amatory jurisprudence is examined vis-à-vis Paul’s letter to the Romans. The juridical nature of Ovid’s poetry lies at the heart of his reception in the Middle Ages, from Boccaccio’s Decameron to Forcadel’s Cupido iurisperitus. The current trend to simultaneously study and marginalize legal discourse in Ovid is a modern construction that this book aims to demolish.

PLATO'S REPUBLIC AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN PENTADIC IDEOLOGY

Similarities between ancient Greek philosophy and Indian philosophy have long been recognized and are usually ascribed to East-West contact. However, when similarities are recognized between Greek and Indian poetic diction or, more generally, between the myths and the poetry of the two cultures, they are often ascribed to Indo-European common origin; and one asks whether the same explanation could apply in philosophy. The two types of explanation are not incompatible, for a remote common origin could have been followed by one or more periods of interaction. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing how far an explanation of common origin can be pressed before falling back on the explanation of contact.

Prose Poetry, Rhythm, and the City

The chapter examines the rhythms of prose poetry, which are different from those found in metered verse, and vary, too, from the rhythms of free verse. The main differences relate to what has sometimes been understood as a deficiency in prose poetry — namely, that prose poets do not have meter or the poetic line when they try to achieve effects of cadence or musicality. But because of the English language's grammatical flexibility, these resources allow for an almost infinite rhythmic variety in prose poems. Such variety is a crucial part of the prose poetry tradition, notwithstanding the deliberately fractured rhythms or flat tonality of some works. William Wordsworth wrote lineated poetry, but in expressing a view that prose and poetry ought to be written in the same kind of language, and in repudiating what he understood to be “poetic diction,” Wordsworth opened the way for English-language poets to explicitly recognize the connections between poetry and prose. In other words, he helped to lay the ground not only for English-language free verse but for English-language prose poetry, too.

Clare's Poetic Binomials

John Clare's confessed preference for the ‘vulgar’ names of flowers and his apparent dismissal of the sexual system as ‘darkness visible’ seems to keeps the taint of Linnaean influence at a distance. His enumeration of flowers in ‘The Wild Flower Nosgay’, however, looks very much like two eighteenth-century descriptive procedures: poetic diction and binomial nomenclature. Dryden's popular translation of Virgil's Georgics modified a classical inheritance of compound epithets into phrases later recognised as poetic diction. This inheritance finds an unexpected consonance in the binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus, who loved the Georgics and referred to them in his work. By comparing poetic diction and binomial nomenclature, this essay investigates the resources of compression or visibility which either procedure might offer to a bookish and keen-sighted poet like Clare. In doing so, it reiterates the case for Clare's immersion in eighteenth-century poetic procedure.

Human No-Go Zones: Theatricalizing Unintentional and Intentional Wildlife Sanctuaries

Some recent performances have addressed events that created ‘human no-go zones’ such as Chernobyl (CEZ), Fukushima (FEZ) and the Korean DMZ. In the wake of the destruction that results in the absence of humans, non-human residents begin the process of recuperation, and the ‘no-go zones’ become inadvertent sanctuaries for wild and abandoned domestic animals. Each of the following productions takes a different view of what occurs when both the norms of nature and the practices of human societies and economies are profoundly disrupted. In addition, one play has depicted a community exercising a new restraint to establish an intentional ‘no-go zone’ to ensure its own survival. When confronted with catastrophes that threaten the existence of all life, as well as the surprising possibilities of renewal, dramatists employ heightened poetic diction and resort to mythical precedents in the attempt to capture the immensity of both the event and its aftermath.

Imagism and Imagery in the Selected Poems of Major Imagist Poets

This paper explores imagism and studies the intrinsic literary features of some poems to show how the authors combine all the elements such as style, sentence structure, figures of speech and poetic diction to paint concrete and abstract images in the mind of the readers. Imagism was an early 20th century literary movement and a reaction against the Romantic and Victorian mainstreams. Imagism is known as an Anglo-American literary movement since it borrows from the English and American verse style of modern poetry. The leaders of the movement set some rules for writing imagist poems. The authors of the group believed that poets are like painters; what the painters can do with brush and dye, poets can do it with language i.e. painting pictures with words. The poems are descriptive; the poets capture the images they experience with one or more of the five senses. They believed that readers could see the realities from their eyes because the texts are like a painting. In this paper, six poems by six prominent leaders of the movement will be scrutinized according to the main principles of the formalistic approach which is the interpretation and analysis of the literary devices pertained to the concrete and abstract images drawn by the poets. The poems are: In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound, Autumn by T. E. Hulme, November by Amy Lowell, Oread by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), and Bombardment by Richard Aldington