Vom Problem einer demokratischen Ästhetik zur Ästhetik einer problematischen Demokratie

From the Problems of a Democratic Aesthetic to the Aesthetics of a Problematic Democracy In analyses of poems from the 18th, 20th and 21st century, this article juxtaposes different degrees of trust in a democratic political order and the role of poetry in it. Philip Freneau, who supported a radical interpretation of the American Revolution as initiating a new and better social order, searched for a democratic poetics commensurate with the value placed on common people. For Muriel Rukeyser and even more so, Langston Hughes in the 1930s, democracy felt threatened not only by fascism abroad but by racism and exploitation at home. In 2014, Claudia Rankines Citizen: An American Lyric registers, like Rukeyser and Hughes, the difficulties in constructing a consensual reality and pushes this notion much further; surprisingly, perhaps, her work continues to see art as important to alert us to this difficulty of modern democracies and divers societies.

Stories without Plots

This chapter explains how the eighteenth-century genre of the periodical essay describes the modern economy as a complex system. Specifically distinguishing itself from the novel, the periodical (or Addisonian) essay narrates economic causality as multiplex and contingent: economic relations cannot be plotted around individual protagonists. The chapter offers a history of the importance of the periodical essay in American literature, and specifically focuses on the examples of the genre by Philip Freneau, Judith Sargent Murray, and Charles Brockden Brown. Although these writers represent very different ideological positions, they each use the generic affordances of the periodical essay to depict the intricate dependencies that constitute global capitalism. The periodical essay thus presents a belletristic form that functions similarly to Hamilton’s policy writing: speculative fictions that narrate the possible consequences that descend from individual moments of production, exchange, and consumption.

The Difficulty of Translating Literary Texts

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (a) to show that translating literature is different from translating other texts, simply because literary texts contain features that are not common to ordinary texts. (b) to illustrate and more importantly highlight these issues for the translator in general and the Arabic translator in particular in order to show complexities resulting from translating literary texts. To this effect, an extract from a poem by Philip Freneau was presented for the sake of exposition; this extract was interpreted, analyzed, and then translated in two different ways to show how effective a translation strategy can be in translating poetry. Résumé Le but du présent article est double: (a) indiquer que la traduction de textes littéraires se distingue de la traduction d'autres textes à cause des caractéristiques particuliers à ces textes; (b) illustrer et souligner ces aspects à l'intention des traducteurs en général et des traducteurs arabes en particulier afin de faire apparaître la complexité qu'implique la traduction de textes littéraires. Aussi l'auteur présente-t-il un extrait d'un poème de Philip Freneau en guise d'illustration. Cet extrait est interprété et analysé pour être ensuite traduit de différentes manières en vue de démontrer dans quelle mesure une stratégie de traduction peut être efficace pour traduire de la littérature.

The urge to begin anew: Visions of America in some American long poems

The basic purpose of this article is to survey the visions of America embodied in a number of American long poems from different literary periods. Since there have been a considerable number of long poems written in America during its almost 350-year history, it has been necessary to make some stringent selections. The texts used here have been chosen for their literary-historical importance. Starting with Michael Wigglesworth's 1662 poem, The Day of Doom, the article proceeds to the work of Joel Barlow and, to a lesser extent, Philip Freneau from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before approaching Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass from the late nineteenth century, and Alien Ginsberg's poem. Howl, from the mid-twentieth century.

Philip Freneau, chantre et observateur des révolutions

Le fils aîné de Pierre Freneau, marchand new yorkais et huguenot, et d’Agnès Watson, elle-même fille d’immigrés écossais presbytériens, faillit devenir pasteur calviniste. Son degré d’instruction lui valut d’entrer comme sophomore à Nassau Hall en 1768. Il eut pour camarades de chambre Hugh Henry Brackenridge et James Madison. C’était l’époque où le nouveau président venu d’Ecosse, John Witherspoon, ministre presbytérien libéral, rénovait l’enseignement. Retint-il la maxime du futur signataire de la Déclaration d’indépendance « Liberty either cannot, or ought not to be given up in the social state »? Sur ce point comme sur la stimulation qu’il aurait trouvée à la lecture des idées de Rousseau sur la nature et le gouvernement nous sommes réduits à des conjectures.