Redemption Song

This article explores how Steve McQueen’s acclaimed 2020 pentalogy Small Axe (BBC) appears paradoxically to swerve away from Black British history in the very act of retrieving it. By examining key moments in Mangrove, Red, White and Blue, and Alex Wheatley, it argues that the constant tension between a push toward history and the pull of the aesthetic is the result of McQueen’s reformulation of “racial uplift” aesthetics that privileges exceptional acts over collective experience. Yet in striking contrast to his poetic license with history, McQueen presents Black masculinity and male self-expression within standard social and sexual norms. There are, however, more experimental, stylized moments in Small Axe where the historical and the aesthetic come together, notably in the highly physical dancing sequences of Lovers Rock. While not without limitations, such scenes reveal fresh, liberatory forms of Black space and time, and forge transformative and redemptive moments of Black reality.

Toward a Theory of Poetic License

In a supposedly enlightened and disenchanted age, why has lyric poetry continued to make claims and perform gestures that are now otherwise inadmissible or even unimaginable? Animation, invocation, and unmotivated praise, apparently artificially imposed (dis)order, and spurious gnomic and vatic sayings that pretend to universal or transcendent knowledge are marks of the lyric as a genre. Sketching a theory of poetic license, this article addresses the lyrical entanglement of enchantment and embarrassment. The author argues for a concept of the lyric as a medium for regulating the balance between enchantment and disenchantment in an always imbalanced environment. Engaging other scholars and using examples from modern French and German poetry, the article also ventures a new understanding of lyric modernity. Rather than naming a historical event to be lamented, disenchantment unveils a risk inherent to the lyric whose regulatory function it makes explicit.

Pot, kettle: Nonliteral titles aren’t (natural) science

Researchers may be tempted to attract attention through poetic titles for their publications, but would this be mistaken in some fields? Although poetic titles are known to be common in medicine, it is not clear whether the practice is widespread elsewhere. This article investigates the prevalence of poetic expressions in journal article titles from 1996–2019 in 3.3 million articles from all 27 Scopus broad fields. Expressions were identified by manually checking all phrases with at least five words that occurred at least 25 times, finding 149 stock phrases, idioms, sayings, literary allusions, film names, and song titles or lyrics. The expressions found are most common in the social sciences and the humanities. They are also relatively common in medicine, but almost absent from engineering and the natural and formal sciences. The differences may reflect the less hierarchical and more varied nature of the social sciences and humanities, where interesting titles may attract an audience. In engineering, natural science, and formal science fields, authors should take extra care with poetic expressions in case their choice is judged inappropriate. This includes interdisciplinary research overlapping these areas. Conversely, reviewers of interdisciplinary research involving the social sciences should be more tolerant of poetic license.

Empirical Aesthetics of Poetry

Poetry enjoys greater liberties (“poetic license”) than all other uses of language to depart from a variety of grammatical and discourse-semantic constraints that typically shape verbal messages. At the same time, poetry frequently conforms to additional formal constraints on the selection and combination of linguistic elements, e.g., meter, rhyme, and other types of parallelism. Surveying empirical research into the cognitive, stylistic, and aesthetic effects of parallelistic features and poetic license, we argue that both types of deviation affect processing fluency in distinct ways and on distinct levels of processing. Poetic license renders verse cognitively more challenging, i.e., harder to comprehend and more ambiguous, but also more “poetic.” Parallelistic diction, by contrast, increases predictability and perceptual processing fluency; it underlies the rhythmical and melodic properties that link poetry and music. Sound parallelism has further been shown to enhance the memorability of verse, and to render humoristic verse more humorous and emotionally moving poems more moving, beautiful, melodic, and vivid, but also richer in meaning. We further survey investigations of the sound-iconic properties of verse, semantic figures (most notably, poetic metaphor), and mood representation, as well as of readers’ dispositions favoring poetry reading. We conclude by identifying directions for future research.

The Poet’s Mistake

This introductory chapter describes how the temptation to justify errors in poetry has grown stronger during the last hundred years, perhaps owing to Sigmund Freud's groundbreaking and systematic account of mistakes at the beginning of the century and perhaps also because of the academy's adoption of modernist-inspired ways of thinking about and encountering texts. Today, one nearly always begin reading poetry by assuming that what is questionable or irreconcilable in its language, history, or grammar must be integral to its fabric of meaning, not a snag or a loose end. However, while attitudes toward mistake have tended to shift according to readers' own notions of propriety and its value, the broader question of how to distinguish error from poetic license is nearly as old as poetry itself. Aristotle poses it at length in the Poetics. The nub for Aristotle seems to lie in whether or not the mistake could have been avoided without laying waste to the work itself. Ultimately, error had become a natural and expected element of both a poet's encounter with his process and a reader's encounter with the text. The object was nearly always to slay it—by confessing, or correcting, or both—but there was little shame in the confrontation.

A criação do personagem cinebiográfico para o cinema: os desafios do roteirista para criar ou recriar

The proposal is a research update where part of this research is to discuss the care to the writer needs to have in re-creating characters for a biopic in the construction of a screenplay. As a corpus, we will work with the writer Machado de Assis, who will guide us as a character in a writing proposal for his biopic. What are the main challenges of the writer: choosing a single biographical cut or keeping true to the facts? do we need to use poetic license? These are some of the questions that we intend to address, as well as the production adjustments for the realization of an audiovisual product.