Elliott Carter's Late Music

The first comprehensive study of the late music of one of the most influential composers of the last half century, this book places Elliott Carter's music from 1995 to 2012 in the broader context of post-war contemporary concert music, including his own earlier work. It addresses Carter's reception history, his aesthetics, and his harmonic and rhythmic practice, and includes detailed essays on all of Carter's major works after 1995. Special emphasis is placed on Carter's settings of contemporary modernist poetry from John Ashbery to Louis Zukofsky. In readable and engaging prose, Elliott Carter's Late Music illuminates a body of late work that stands at the forefront of the composer's achievements.

The Dialogical Quality of the Russian Poetry of the Silver Age: A Case Study of Poems about Don Juan

The article brings a discussion of three poems of Russian modernist poets that undertake the theme of Don Juan – written by Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov and Nikolai Gumilyov. The purpose is to elucidate the characteristics of the artistic dialogue in the discourse of modernist poetry. Two types of dialogue are discussed: macro- and microdialogue. The former is realised through intertextual forms, the latter – by means of intersubjective forms. When poets refer to the image of Don Juan, one variety of dialogue may well transform into the other. The author of the paper indicates emphatically that the poems under discussion constitute a chain of transformations of the image of Don Juan: the image as proposed by Balmont is then developed by Bryusov and revaluated by Gumilyov. The semantic core of all the three texts is the image of Don Juan as a wanderer who yields to temptations of transient delights.

«EVERYDAY LIFE» IN THE WORKS BY W. C. WILLIAMS AND J. JARMUSCH: FROM POETRY TO POETICS. INTERMEDIALITY

The article examines William Carlos Williams’ works that focus on the everyday, mundanity, and poetize daily life which was common in modernist literature. In our time, Williams’ poetry inspired director Jim Jarmusch to make a poetic film «Paterson» about everyday life and the poetic potential of ordinary routine life. The director reinterprets Williams’ ideas and makes a complex, postmodern film about everyday life in the small town Paterson, where he depicts the routine life of his main character, a bus driver. This life, despite its external simplicity and triviality, encourages the hero named Paterson to read modernist literature and write his own poems whose themes and images are intertwined with the work of the well-known Paterson resident, William Carlos Williams himself. In particular, we examine the intermedial interaction of Williams’ works («Paterson» and «This Is Just To Say») with the film and the indirect transition of one sign system into another. In addition to the more or less direct and explicit influence of literature on film through allusions or quotations from the work of the American modernist poet, Williams’ poetry becomes a precedent for the stylized poems of the film’s main character, written by a contemporary American poet Ron Padgett («Another One», «The Run», «Love Poem») and Jarmusch himself («Water Falls»). In this article, we also compare Padgett’s and Jarmusch’s poetry with some of Williams’ poems («Blizzard», «To A Poor Old Woman»), to demonstrate the similarity of motifs and imagery. Thedirector’s work can be interpreted as a manifestation of the idea of looking for poetry in the everyday, or that everyday life is already poetry. Jarmusch’s film about everyday life provides a possible answer to the question of literary anthropology «why is literature as a medium important in people’s lives» – creativity is the very meaning of life. This penetration of one art form (poetry) into another (cinema) gives grounds for speaking about the relevance of the themes of modernist poetry in the context of modernity and about the meaning and value of simplicity for creativity in general.

The reception of French symbolism in Georgian Literature

The comparative study of Georgian modernist poetry in the context of French poetry reveals that Georgian poetry of the early XXth ventury is not an epigenetic appendage or periphery of European poetry. It creates its original invariant, which in a way expands and expands the mythohraphic discourse and mythological character of French poetry, chronotopes, cultural and landscape spaces.At the beginning of the XXth century the blueroks could not hide their amdiration for the work of French Symbolists, which they considered to be evidence that the path of Georgian literature was directed towards Europe. They had adored poets: Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire,Rimbaud, Verlaine… However, I think the announcement of the Blue roks as Georgian symbolists is very controversial… Therefore, I consider it important to establish the basic principles of French symbolism and, consequently, to connect it with the Georgian poets of the XX century, ib paerticular with the poetry of Galaktioni.

”Dette skulle bli et dikt som noen skulle huske en stund”

”This was supposed to become a poem which someone would remember for a while”: Stage Art as Poetry for Children in the Theatre Performance Snutebiller, stankelben Abstract: Norwegian author Rolf Jacobsen’s (1907–1994) modernist poetry, originally published for adults, has been celebrated for its boldness and innovativeness. In the stage performance Snutebiller, stankelben (Snout Beetle, Crane Fly) by the Norwegian theatre group Fleece & Rouge, four poems by Jacobsen are performed on stage with children as the target audience. This article studies the realization of Jacobsen’s poetry as stage art for children. Transferring the poems from book to stage involves several obvious medial transformations due to the theatre’s specific devices. By drawing theoretical inspiration from Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric poem’s ritualistic and fictional qualities, we ask to what degree the performance preserves the poetic qualities in the poems for the child audience. Or rather, does the theatre frame impose dramatic effects on the poems by expanding their element of fiction? The inquiry is also inspired by Margaret Meek’s and Kornej Tjukovskij’s perspectives on the relationship between children and poetic language. There is an amount of risk involved in the task of transferring poetry to the stage. In order to succeed, the actors must embrace the expressive possibilities of the theatre, which in one sense means replacing one genre with another and thus leaving the poetry behind. However, as the analysis of Snutebiller, stankelben demonstrates, the poetic may resurrect in the scenic expression, given that the performance’s embeddedness in and obligation towards the poems are strong enough.

6. Roots and rootlessness

‘Roots and rootlessness’ examines the period from the end of World War I to the end of World War II, which was marked by intellectual daring and profound antimodernism. The Roaring Twenties yielded new insights into human nature and experiments in modernist poetry, art, and literature. The decade also witnessed fears about loose sexual mores, racial mongrelization, and deicide. In the aftermath of victory in World War I, American thinkers from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints participated in a common project of finding new terms and modes of expression for understanding America. They examined America’s unfinished revolution for freedom and equality and provided new inspiration for finding unity in its diversity.

Searching for A Feminist Rights: A Postmodernist Analysis of Selected Poems by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is one of those American poets who left their thumbprints on early postmodernist writings in America. Though, she lived a short life concluded by a horrible suicide, she produced a large body of poetry whose importance could have competed with later postmodernist poetry such as that written by Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelo and Harriet Mullen. The form and content of Plath's poetry demonstrated a new way of writing in comparison to the modernist poetry that preceded her time. When postmodernism meant the ultimate end of previous metanarratives and philosophies of form and content of writing and when postmodernism advocated selfgeneration over self-understanding, Plath appeared as a newly generated poet with a feminist message. Her appeal for a feminist position found support in the rapidly developing public sphere, which America witnessed during 1960s, as well as in the artistic and literary postmodernist sphere that accompanied it. To make an account for Sylvia Plath's achievement in this respect, the researcher divides the present paper into an introduction, three sections and a conclusion: The introduction of the paper sets the background of Sylvia Plath's literary rise and significance in her posthumous literary American scene. Section One discusses Plath's fight for a feminist role as it started early inside her family. The researcher selects a couple of poems to define the different sides of this internal struggle. Section Two moves out to the larger social scene which Plath choses to confirm her feminist demand on an external level. Here, she re-introduces the images of the 'bee' and the 'spider' to support her feminist stand. Section Three sheds light upon the theme of suicide and how it allures Plath as a means to define her feminist self. The Conclusion sums up the findings of the paper.

‘Insane Thinking’: The Impressionism of Arthur Symons

This article explores the links between the early verse of Arthur Symons and his definitions of impressionism, particularly as they are outlined in ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’ (1893). It begins by discussing the ideas of ‘unwholeness’ and insanity in which the essay’s conception of impressionism is grounded, as well as its theoretical underpinnings in the writings of Walter Pater and the artworks of James Abbot McNeill Whistler. The article argues that this theory of impressionism – with its emphasis on the partial and the personal – furnished Symons with a rationale for his lyric experiments of the 1890s and early 1900s, which in turn provided models for some of the most recognisable forms of early modernist poetry. But it also draws attention to a hitherto unacknowledged shift in the manner and matter of Symons’s writings in the years leading up to his nervous breakdown in 1908, when a theory of literary form self-consciously preoccupied with the unstable and the fragmentary, and with the breaking open of rigid or outworn forms, seemed to pull apart under the pressure of its own impulse to fracture. The article concludes by considering the causal link Symons retrospectively drew between his conceptions of impressionism and his experience of mental instability.

Clothes, Costume, and Fashion in Russian Modernism

Writers have always been conscious of the contribution that clothes can make to their work—as material objects, as outward signs of inner character, and as metaphors, especially for language itself. In the early 20th century, however, a time of rapid technological change, as well as of industrialization, globalization, and urbanization, literary interrogations and descriptions of dress evolved to respond to the new ways in which garments were designed, made, marketed, and sold, and to fashion’s increasing pervasiveness in society. Particularly sensitive to these changes were many of the writers associated with modernism, who shared with the nascent fashion industry a preoccupation with questions of novelty and the presentation of the self. Russia was no exception, and there poets, playwrights, and novelists explored and exploited the meanings of clothes and fashion in order to address the urgent questions concerning sex, gender, and race that were thrown up by life in the modern city. Moreover, as elsewhere, these explorations were not limited to the page; rather, writers’ own wardrobes played a part, especially among those who styled themselves as dandies. In other ways, however, Russia diverged from the European norm in its relationship to clothes and fashion and, therefore, in their intersection with literature. First, the habit of appropriating motifs and styles from non-European cultures, which was further galvanized by the modernist turn away from 19th-century culture, had a very different significance in Russia. The long history of ambivalence about Russia’s place in European culture meant that Russians were capable of finding the exotic in their own backyard, leading, for instance, to a vogue for peasant poets. Second, Russia experienced a particularly intense craze for masquerades in the first two decades of the century, which was both reflected in contemporary literature and, in part, a product of an obsession with the connection between inner essences and outer appearances that also manifested itself in modernist poetry. Third, Russian writers of the time were more inclined than most to see their work as part of a wider transformative mission; this often took the form of an attempt to overcome the perceived division between life and art by infusing the everyday with creativity. Clothes, both on the page and in the streets, were an important front in this battle. Finally, the upheaval caused by the revolutions of 1917 and the emergence of the socialist state had profound effects on the organization of fashion as both industry and discourse. Some writers responded by imagining the post-fashion future; others by involving themselves in reconfiguring what socialist commodities might look like; still others by criticizing a surprisingly resilient consumer culture, at least until the Stalin-inspired reorganization of many aspects of society, including fashion and literature, in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Two kinds of music in B. Poplavsky’s poem Dark Madonna

The article studies the topic of music and its functioning in the poem by B. Poplavsky Dark Madonna. Its motivational and symbolic structure, as well as its composition and intertextual ties with the modernist poetry are considered. The article focuses on the description of the ‘spirit of music’ concept in the poet’s philosophy and its interpretation in the text of the miniature.