MODERN POETIC DISCOURSE: THE LINGUISTIC NATURE OF HERMETICISM

The paper provides review of the monograph by Ekaterina Evgrashkina The Semiotic Nature of Semantic Uncertainty in Modern Poetic Discourse (based on German and Russian poetry), published in the Russian language as part of the series NEUERE LYRIK. Interkulturelle und interdisziplinäre Studien. Herausgegeben von Henrieke Stahl, Dmitrij Bak, Hermann Korte, Hiroko Masumoto und Stephanie Sandler. BAND 5. Berlin: Peter Lang, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2019. 173 s. ISBN 978- 3-631-78193-7. The monograph deals with the main trends of German and Russian poetry of the last decades. The focus is on the phenomenon of hermetic poetry. Modern authors consciously choose writing strategies such as literary improvisation, language play, and various intermedial inclusions. The first chapter ‘The problem of poetic meaning’ provides a theoretical framework for the field of research. It introduces the definitions of discourse, the concepts ‘language games’ (developed by L. Wittgenstein), ‘text / discourse’, ‘text / work’, dialogical dimensions of poetic text. The second chapter ‘Semiotics of modern poetry’ covers the concept ‘mobile semiosis’ (J. Baudrillard) and some others. In hermetic poetic discourse, generation of meaning is based on mobile semiosis, in which the relationship of stability between the signifier and the signified is called into question. In The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco describes two models of the reader, different strategies for interpreting text. Susan Sontag denies the possibility of final interpretation of a text, she suggests eroticism of art instead of hermeneutics. The third chapter ‘Linguistic installations’ considers various manifestations of poetic Hermeticism in modern poetry, the experience of concrete and visual poetry in German: Timm Ulrichs (1940), Klaus Peter Dencker (1941), Barbara Köhler (1959), Werner Herbst (1943–2008), Anatol Knotek (1977), Herta Müller (1953). The final chapter ‘The self-reflexive discourse’ deals with the trend of modern poetry towards free verse and construction of new complex poetic forms. The process of occasional word formation is shown in the lyrical texts by German poets Thomas Kling (1957–2005), Lutz Seiler (1963), Konstantin Ames (1979), Lioba Happel (1957), Thomas Böhme (1955), and by Russian authors Polina Andrukovich (1969), Alexander Ulanov (1963), Dmitry Vorobyov (1979). In poetic discourse, the constitution of the poetic subject correlates with the introduction of new elements of culture into the poetic text. Such innovations do not lead to a mechanical increment of the elementary meaning, but to a structural transformation of the whole picture. The reviewed monograph is significant in that it provides theoretical understanding of individual poetic practices and the analysis of specific empirical material – the latest German and Russian poetry.

Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam: Poetry under the Critique of Language

The dialogue of Paul Celan, a reader and translator, with the poetry and the whole complex poetic views of Osip Mandelstam demonstrates an important general condition: both poets worked in the context of the modernist language crisis and language critique. Mandelstam takes on the task of creating a pure language of poetry in the struggle against the symbolist “code,” in the “resurrection” of words (V. Shklovsky) by means of a “defamiliarizated” intermixture of meanings and contexts, in intentional semantic oblivion and, among other things, by immersing himself in foreign languages (“An alien speech will be my warming ear husk”). Paul Celan’s work, under the conditions of “poetry after Auschwitz” (T. Adorno), aiming at clearing up the German language of the terror of history, was influenced, among other things, by his strategy of creating a non-figurative, hermetic poetry language comparable to the so-called “absolute music” (K. Dahlhaus). This paper identifies the common poetic motifs in the works of Celan and Mandelstam, as well as individual solutions for overcoming the lingual crisis.

Le Langage Secret De Marc Papillon

Justly can we apply the definition of hermetic poetry to the works of Marc Papillon de Lasphrise, both as they mirror a world deeply influenced by the esoteric doctrine of Hermes Trismegistus and because the poet resorts to metabolic devices whose aim is to complicate the message and make communication difficult. In this study we examine a few examples of these metabolic expressions such as specular writing — where the decrypting mechanism can be easily identified — but also devices much more difficult to decipher. In the "Sonnet en langue inconnue" (S. LXXXI in Diverses Poésies) the process involved in the message alteration suggests a double or triple metaplastic encoding similar to the one applied in the loucherbem language. The reason underlying this linguistic experimen-talism is ultimately philosophic as it attempts to go beyond the limits imposed on man and writer.