The Pantomimic Voice

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as scholars have demonstrated, can be read in dialogue with Roman pantomime dance, and the tale of Echo and Narcissus is one of its most ‘pantomimic’ episodes. While others have focused on the figure of Narcissus in this vein, I turn instead to Echo, whose vocal mimicry can be seen as a mirror of the pantomime’s art, and whose juxtaposition with Narcissus seems emblematic of the body-voice relationship in pantomime. Echo’s desire for Narcissus engages with an existing lyric tradition of depicting the relationship between singing voice and dancing body in erotic terms. In such situations, the desire is fulfilled if the performers are both singing and dancing, uniting body and voice in performance. The thwarted union of Echo and Narcissus, however, embodies instead the dynamics of pantomime: the subordination or absence of the voice in favor of the body, and the connection created between dancer and audience.

Listening to Lyric and Noise

Listening has been changed by the advent of recording technology. This changes contemporary poetry's relationship to the lyric tradition and offers new ways of imagining sound. Jean-Luc Nancy and Michel Serres have challenged the primacy of the visual, leading to a renewed focus on the role of the senses, particularly listening and touch, in creating new forms of knowledge. New materialist approaches show how an emphasis on listening might reveal poetry's entanglement in matter. This monograph draws on what poems have to say about listening, but it also makes the case for listening to poems within continuities and communities of listening that extend beyond the human.

O tempo conjurado: sobre “Para mascar com chiclets”, de João Cabral de Melo Neto / Conjured Time: On João Cabral de Melo Neto’s “Para mascar com chiclets”

Resumo: Leitura de “Para mascar com chiclets”, de João Cabral de Melo Neto (1998), este ensaio explora as complexidades sintáticas e figurativas do poema, tomando como ponto de partida as tensões entre a aposta anti-ilusionista da poesia moderna e as intimações antropomórficas e alucinatórias da tradição lírica ocidental. Ato contínuo, ao destacar a sutil trama de interrupções que atravessa os versos, tenta-se mostrar como, neste poema, o senso de uma clivagem insuperável separando homem e tempo se dá ver menos como enunciado explícito do que como uma estranha solução de compromisso entre resistência e abstração, prosaico e sublime, na qual o mergulho obsessivo e mecânico na pura repetição torna-se o atalho inesperado para um bizarro ritual autodestitutivo.Palavras-chave: João Cabral de Melo Neto; lírica; antropomorfismo; tropo.Abstract: A reading of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s (1998) “Para mascar com chiclets”, this essay explores the syntactic and figurative complexities of the poem, taking as a point of departure the tensions between the anti-illusionistic commitment of modern poetry and the anthropomorphic and hallucinatory intimations of western lyric tradition. Furthermore, by enhancing the subtle net of disruptions which pervades the verses, one tries to show how, in this poem, the sense of an unsurpassable cleavage separating Man and Time is enacted less as an explicit statement than as frail compromise solution between resistance and abstraction, prosaic and sublime, in which a mechanical and obsessive plunge into pure repetition becomes an unexpected gateway to a weird ritual of self-destitution.Keywords: João Cabral de Melo Neto; lyric; antropomorphism; trope.

An Investigation about Entailment and Narrative by AI Techniques (Generative Models)

Many storytelling generation problems concern the difficulty to model the sequence of sentences. Language models are generally able to assign high scores to well-formed text, especially in the cases of short texts, failing when they try to simulate human textual inference. Although in some cases output text automatically generated sounds as bland, incoherent, repetitive and unrelated to the context, in other cases the process reveals capability to surprise the reader, avoiding to be boring/predictable, even if the generated text satisfies entailment task requirements. The lyric tradition often does not proceed towards a real logical inference, but takes into account alternatives like the unexpectedness, useful for predicting when a narrative story will be perceived as interesting. To achieve a best comprehension of narrative variety, we propose a novel measure based on two components: inference and unexpectedness, whose different weights can modify the opportunity for readers to have different experiences about the functionality of a generated story. We propose a supervised validation treatment, in order to compare the authorial original text, learned by the model, with the generated one.