ПОНЯТТЯ ЧАСУ В ПОЕЗІЇ РАБІНДРАНАТА ТАГОРА: ЧИТАЦЬКА ІНТЕРПРЕТАЦІЯ

In the current study, readers’ interpretation of the conception of time in Rabindranath Tagore’s nonnarrative poetry is approached from the perspective of schema theory (E. Semino) and Text World Theory (P. Werth, J. Gavins). The analysis shows that in Rabindranath Tagore’s non-narrative poems about time, which were written in or translated into English, a TIME schema is instantiated through (i) linguistic units that refl ect human idea of dividing time into conventional periods – moments, days, months, years, etc.; (ii) a complex web of fi gurative devices, metaphors and similes in particular. In readers’ minds, fi gurative language prompts associative connections between several core, or basic, schemata: TIME, GOD, HUMAN LIFE, LIFE OF NATURE. Basic schemata can contain subordinate ones (TIME: MOMENT, DAY, MONTH; GOD: THY HANDS, SHUT GATE (thy gate be shut); HUMAN LIFE: CLOCK, PARODY, POEM, MEMORY; LIFE OF NATURE: BUTTERFLY, GARDEN, FLOWER, etc.). Connections between schemata on either a level or across levels indicate that the abstract conception of time is objectifi ed through physical processes and entities, which are perceptible by human senses; and that human life and life of nature have some common characteristics determined by time-related processes. Relying on schemata instantiated by the language of a poem, a reader creates his or her mental representation of the text, in other words, builds a poem’s text-world. On the text-world level, the conception of time in Rabindranath Tagore’s non-narrative poetry is presented through the use of all the three types of elements from which text-worlds are constructed: temporal deictic markers (world-building elements), function-advancing propositions (elements that describe actions, events, and states), and intensive relational processes (elements which describe physical characteristics). Text-worlds in Rabindranath Tagore’s non-narrative poems about time can be complex. His texts can contain world-switches – changes in the temporal parameters “present – future” from the perspective of the author and “present – past” from the perspective of a reader, and/or modal worlds that exist as hypothetical ones in the minds of the author and his readers. The latter concerns the poems in which time is associated with the transcendent conception of God. Key words: Rabindranath Tagore, non-narrative poetry, time, schema, text-world.

Narrativity and segmentivity in contemporary Australian and New Zealand long poems and poem sequences

<p>The PhD in creative writing comprises a critical and a creative component. This thesis explores how poets utilise verse form in order to support and/or undermine narrativity in long poems or poem sequences, and asks the question: what possibilities are offered by verse form that distinguish poetry from other literary narrative genres? Using Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s concept of segmentivity, I consider how segmentation at various formal levels, including sections within a book, poems within a sequence, stanzas, line-breaks, and metre, can affect the narrativity of a text. I also consider segmentivity in relation to the ways in which a text may be narrativized, and to the interactions between narrative and other text types such as lyric and argument. The theoretical framework for the critical component involves a synthesis of approaches from within the fields of narrative theory and literary criticism. The methodology used is a close reading and analysis of case study texts by six New Zealand and Australian poets, written in the period 1990-2010: Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and What a Piece of Work (1999); Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers (2008); Tusiata Avia’s Bloodclot (2009); Bill Sewell’s Erebus: A Poem (1999) and The Ballad of Fifty-One (2003); Anna Jackson’s The Gas Leak (2006) and John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008). These texts range in their degree of narrativity from verse novels through narrative sequences to lyric sequences. The local and contemporary context has been chosen for several reasons, including the strong history of narrative poetry in both countries, recent trends towards long narrative poems and poem sequences, a relative lack of scholarship on the poetry of this region and time period, and because of the relevance to my own creative work. This thesis argues that segmentivity can be used with or against narrativity in a long poem or poem sequence, with a range of possible results: from strongly narrative texts such as verse novels through to antinarrative texts and lyric sequences. Different levels of segmentation have different effects on narrativity, the division of a text into individual poems being the most important in the texts under consideration here. It is demonstrated that narrative as a text type can exist alongside other text types, and that segmentivity is important to this interaction, with a bearing on the overall narrativity of a text. The creative component tests and extends the findings of the critical component. It consists of a poem sequence in three parts entitled Flow, on the subject of the Whanganui river. The sequence takes a discontinuous approach to narrative, varies in its approach to temporality, features interplay between narrative and lyric modes, and incorporates underlying arguments on environmental and social themes.</p>

Narrativity and segmentivity in contemporary Australian and New Zealand long poems and poem sequences

<p>The PhD in creative writing comprises a critical and a creative component. This thesis explores how poets utilise verse form in order to support and/or undermine narrativity in long poems or poem sequences, and asks the question: what possibilities are offered by verse form that distinguish poetry from other literary narrative genres? Using Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s concept of segmentivity, I consider how segmentation at various formal levels, including sections within a book, poems within a sequence, stanzas, line-breaks, and metre, can affect the narrativity of a text. I also consider segmentivity in relation to the ways in which a text may be narrativized, and to the interactions between narrative and other text types such as lyric and argument. The theoretical framework for the critical component involves a synthesis of approaches from within the fields of narrative theory and literary criticism. The methodology used is a close reading and analysis of case study texts by six New Zealand and Australian poets, written in the period 1990-2010: Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994) and What a Piece of Work (1999); Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers (2008); Tusiata Avia’s Bloodclot (2009); Bill Sewell’s Erebus: A Poem (1999) and The Ballad of Fifty-One (2003); Anna Jackson’s The Gas Leak (2006) and John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008). These texts range in their degree of narrativity from verse novels through narrative sequences to lyric sequences. The local and contemporary context has been chosen for several reasons, including the strong history of narrative poetry in both countries, recent trends towards long narrative poems and poem sequences, a relative lack of scholarship on the poetry of this region and time period, and because of the relevance to my own creative work. This thesis argues that segmentivity can be used with or against narrativity in a long poem or poem sequence, with a range of possible results: from strongly narrative texts such as verse novels through to antinarrative texts and lyric sequences. Different levels of segmentation have different effects on narrativity, the division of a text into individual poems being the most important in the texts under consideration here. It is demonstrated that narrative as a text type can exist alongside other text types, and that segmentivity is important to this interaction, with a bearing on the overall narrativity of a text. The creative component tests and extends the findings of the critical component. It consists of a poem sequence in three parts entitled Flow, on the subject of the Whanganui river. The sequence takes a discontinuous approach to narrative, varies in its approach to temporality, features interplay between narrative and lyric modes, and incorporates underlying arguments on environmental and social themes.</p>

“My Unwritten Novel”: The Long Poems of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh between Genre and Form

The long poems of the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–64) present a series of fantastic narratives, in which a nameless speaker journeys through a fantastic landscape. These works, often analyzed solely in terms of a supposed mythic, romantic structure, should be considered as a response to formal problems of the novel and the lyric in midcentury Hindi literature. Despite acknowledging these long poems as his most important contribution, literary critics display a marked discomfort with what they see as their excesses. Muktibodh’s writings, however, reflect his substantive consideration of the problems of narrative poetry. In Muktibodh’s most famous work, “Aṁdhere meṁ” (“In the Dark”), the long poem’s distinct formal structure is deployed to produce the disjointed paratactic narratives that typify Muktibodh’s work. Furthermore, this poetic structure is crucially influenced by free verse poetics in Marathi, making clear that any consideration of modern Hindi literature must take into account the complex interrelationships of literary cultures in South Asia. Thus, Muktibodh’s long poem prompts a reconsideration of the role of genre and form in our understanding of South Asian literary cultures and their engagements with the world.

Carnivalizing Imoinda’s Silence

In this essay, I analyze Joan Anim-Addo’s libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008) and illustrate how its narrative poetry generates a speculative, gendered history around the slave past. Informed by Srinivas Aravamudan’s observation of parodic subversion in the afterlives of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), I return to Anim-Addo’s oeuvre in order to read Imoinda as a work that counter-writes the colonial gaze of “Western” knowledge. By centering on Caribbean carnival as the performance context for the libretto, I examine how histories of rebellion and survival carried out by enslaved Africans and their descendants unfold through the libretto’s narrative poetry. I argue that Imoinda, under the guise of artistic forms associated with “the West,” breaks from Eurocentric perspectives that misrepresented subaltern struggles while ushering forth the question of “who speaks?” in critical discourses. I conclude by aligning Anim-Addo’s Imoinda in relation to Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of “demonic grounds” to highlight a transformative epistemic space of Caribbean women’s literature.

Coda: “IS THIS A NOVEL?”

In the fall of 2018 the British press went into a tizzy over the revelation that the committee for the Man Booker Prize was considering a book of narrative poetry, The Long Take by Scottish writer Robin Robertson. “This year’s best novel might just be a poem, according to the Booker judges, who have shortlisted one for the first time,” reported Tristram Saunders in ...

Experiments in Methodology: Sensory and Poetic Threads of Inquiry, Resistance, and Transformation

Undertaking a practice-led, qualitative research inquiry, I forged an alternate methodology where narrative inquiry, sensory ethnography, and ethnographically based poetry intersect and open a space “in-between.” I call these intersections between narrative approaches and experiments in ethnography “Sensory Poetic Relationship Mapping” (SPRM). I discovered that metaphorical spaces, places, gateways, sites of inquiry and “counter-factual spaces” can come into being. The process of SPRM enabled “hidden” community-based narratives to be revealed through dialogue, narrative, poetry, metaphor, and handmade relationship maps. As an act of creative resistance, this offered alternate voices to the dominant narratives communicated by interconnected institutions of power. SPRM cracked open the metaphorical landscape in which these marginalized stories had been relegated to the periphery, so they could flow. These narratives rewoven to the center unexpectedly interconnected and revealed new sites for future inquiry.

ON GILGAMESH AND HOMER: ISHTAR, APHRODITE AND THE MEANING OF A PARALLEL

This article reconsiders the similarities between Aphrodite's ascent to Olympus and Ishtar's ascent to heaven in Iliad Book 5 and the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Tablet VI respectively. The widely accepted hypothesis of an Iliadic reception of the Mesopotamian poem is questioned, and the consonance explained as part of a vast stream of tradition encompassing ancient Near Eastern and early Greek narrative poetry. Compositional and conceptual patterns common to the two scenes are first analyzed in a broader early Greek context, and then across further Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic and Hurro-Hittite sources. The shared compositional techniques at work in Mesopotamia and the Eastern Mediterranean can be seen as a function of the largely performative nature of narrative poetry. This contributes to explaining literary transmission within the Near East and onto Greece.