Fact and Fiction in Autoconfession: A Theoretical Confrontation

The formulation of the topic fact and fiction in auto-confession is a result of earlier research in which the greatest theoretical confrontation takes place in the area of autobiographical prose. This paper investigates and explores issues with which contemporary poetics is faced regarding the concepts in question, especially when they coexist within a work concerned either with genre codification or with undefined status (i.e. hybrid genre). Such discussions are often accompanied by great dilemmas on whether auto-confessional texts such as autobiography or autobiographical prose should be considered fact or fiction. Being a fierce confrontation, especially for a genre that is considered a compromising genre in which the facts are weaved according to the fictional practice, this paper proposes that a double reading (fact-fiction) will highlight issues that are essential to interpret and decode a text of autoconfessional premises and, beyond that, a codification of the genre when dilemmas grow and become even larger: in fiction, nonfiction, novel, autobiographical novel, autobiography, etc. Received: 27 January 2021 / Accepted: 2 September 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021

Emphasis: Category of sublime in contemporary aesthetic culture

The text has the aspiration to sketch a frame of reference for understanding the concept of the sublime today, as it is used in the context of art. The basic idea is to investigate how the category of the sublime appears in the modern age, both within aesthetic theories and with regard to certain poetics and specific works of art. The key difference in the perception of the sublime in relation to the earlier phases of capitalism and the present one consists in the connection that the sublime establishes with new technologies, which is also reflected in the world of art. The exploitation of the category of the sublime through new technologies, embedded in some of the contemporary poetics, is characteristic of our time, which is determined through the primacy of profit in relation to any aesthetic/artistic quality manifested by contemporary art.

Unfit for History: Race, Reparation and the Reconstruction of American Lyric

This article explores how contemporary US black poetics evidences the entanglement of the history of lyric with the history of race. Through readings of the work of Claudia Rankine, Evie Shockley, Tyehimba Jess and Terrance Hayes, I make the case that this poetics situates American lyric within the violence of Reconstruction to imagine how Black Reconstruction may be enacted in cultural form. My contention is that this poetics makes lyric “unfit for history” and thus exposes the racialization processes embedded in poetry's modern life forms. I show how this poetics does not simply recuperate lyric subjectivity but presents a different model of subjectivity altogether, one that is rooted in a fugitive idea of blackness. I locate this lyric from the publication of Shockley's the new black (2011), as a reckoning with the failures of representation that were pronounced in the colour-blind politics of the Obama era and chart it to Hayes's engagement with Trumpian politics in his sonnet sequence American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018). I argue that this contemporary poetics, which makes its argument through a destabilization of genre, unravels the racialization processes embedded in the form of reading poetry that Virginia Jackson refers to as “lyricization.”

Recreating the Creation:

Recreating the creation is on the trail of a theory of remix. Using the example of the debut album of the Icelandic band Sigur Ros, the question is asked how nature sounds and pop songs relate to each other and in the tension between production, composition and sampling. In doing so, contemporary poetics and techniques of music production are historically and aesthetically contextualized with the practice of a music that not only wants to reinvent itself, but refers to existing music and sounds.

A Bricolagem como forma poética e improvisada: uma visão de vivências do MC dançarino

ResumoO presente estudo foi elaborado por meio de pesquisas e vivências a partir de um dos elementos do hip-hop, cultura na qual investigamos neste campo de estudo, desde o ano de 2012. As abordagens centrais aqui desenvolvidas partem de uma pesquisa extensa, tanto filosófica quanto poética, de experiências e criações, sobretudo a partir das reflexões e contribuições do projeto de pesquisa Poéticas Contemporâneas: Bricolagem coreográfica e improvisação, coordenado pela professora Dra.Waldete Brito, realizado na Escola de Teatro e Dança na Universidade Federal do Pará, em 2017. A partir de discussões neste projeto, buscamos compreender em que medida é possível identificar a bricolagem nas “batalhas” de rimas que ocorrem nas periferias de Belém e no município de Barcarena, localidades de grande crescimento deste movimento artístico. Observamos nas rodas de Freestyle (estilo livre),a velocidade e habilidade que os MC’s, (Mestre de cerimônia) possuem no ato do improviso. Há uma subjetividade criativa de bricolar gestualidade, sonoridade corporal e técnicas, para construir as rimas. O texto constrói-se no diálogo com os autores Lévi-Strauss, Fayga Ostrower, Joe Kincheloe, dentre outros que contribuem para esta tessitura tramada de bricolagem cênica.AbstractThe present study was elaborated through researches and experiences that I had when entering one of the elements of hip-hop, a culture in which I dive in search and to know since 2012, year in which I had the first contact with this dance genre. The central studies developed here, part of an extensive research, both philosophical and poetic of my experiences, mainly from the reflections and contributions of the Research Project: Contemporary poetics: choreographic bricolage and improvisation, coordinated by Professor Dr Waldete Brito, Theater and Dance at the Federal University of Pará. Based on discussions in the research project, I will investigate to what extent it is possible to identify the choreographic bricolage and the “battles” of rhymes that occur in the peripheries of Belém and in the municipality of Barcarena, localities of great growth of this cultural movement, in which the practitioners who, through the improvisation in the body-rhyme relationship, “battle” each other. It was on the wheels of freestyles that the desire to research and study the “MC’S” (Master of Ceremony) was born, based on observations, improvisation, of their gestures and the way in which they construct their rhymes. There is a creative subjectivity of bricolar gesture, body sound and techniques, to build the rhymes. The text is constructed in the dialogue with the authors Lévi-Strauss, Fayga Ostrower, Joe Kincheloe, among others that contribute to this scenario made of bricolage scenic.

Epic on Stage in the Dutch Republic

This chapter deals with the writing, publishing, and staging of epic drama in the Dutch Republic. In the flourishing cultural climate of the Republic epic poetry was much loved, but ‘epic drama’, as such, is not a category recognized in either modern or contemporary poetics, and thus it is necessary to establish what would have counted as ‘epic’ at this time. The subset constructed here consists of drama based on what seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources consider epic poetry, classical and newly composed, but also drama that takes other subject matter (biblical or historical) and dramatizes this in an ‘epic’ manner. This is illustrated by an analysis of the play Gysbreght van Aemstel (1638) by Joost van den Vondel, which treats subject matter taken from Amsterdam’s medieval history in a Virgilian manner: a new epic drama befitting the Dutch Republic’s new Rome.

EDUCATION BY THEATRE PROJECT (2010 – 2014)

This article summarizes the almost four-year duration of the Vzdelávanie divadlom (Educating through the Theatre) project from 2010 to 2014, which was funded through European structural funds and based at the Faculty of Arts, Constantine the Philosopher University, in Nitra. This project was managed by the author. As part of the project, 27 workshops were held on historical and contemporary poetics in theatre and their application. There were 45 works published (28 monographs, 15 manuals, and 2 electronic publications) and 8 lectures, 1 colloquium, 1 international conference, and 3 school theatre productions. Eleven Slovak theatre companies were hosted and two theatre festivals supported. This article highlights the main aims of the project and its impact at a nationwide level.

Considering the Ontological Premises for Tools in Artists’ Education–on Poiesis and Composition

This article considers the ontological premises for tools in artists’ education, specifically in choreography studies at the master-of-arts level. The topic has proven to be crucial in planning and executing a curriculum of study in the contemporary age of pluralistic aesthetic intentions as any tool, as habitually understood, is ready-to-use according to its disclosed purpose and thus has, in a way, already solved some aspects of the singular research question posed between the artist and the prevailing world. The topic of tools turns out to be a wider question of contemporary poetics (techniques, methods, knowledge) and of ontological considerations of the nature of poiesis and artwork. The topic of contemporary poetics was extensively discussed in a 2011-2013 Erasmus Intensive project, which was an educational collaboration among six European master’s programmes in dance and physically based performance in which the writer took part. This article reports some aspects of that discussion and elaborates on a traditionally widely used concept in choreography education–namely, composition. The article tackles the complex issue of poetics and tools by, firstly, discussing poiesis and the causes to which artwork is indebted and, secondly, by searching in some ontological premises for the notion of composition. The article presents a view of composition derived from Martin Heidegger’s elaborations of logos: Logos is letting something be seen in its togetherness with something–letting it be seen as something. (Heidegger 1962, 56). Following this notion, I propose a view to composition as a certain togetherness in relatedness in which case the concept of composition might serve both as reflective knowledge of construction and as a deep research question in artists’ creative processes.