Waiting in Line, Moving in Circles : Spaces of Instability in Christian Petzold’s Transit

Loosely based on a 1944 novel by German writer Anna Seghers and set in present-day France, Christian Petzold’s Transit is a story of fateful migration, in which conflicting agencies and shifting identities are translated into an aesthetic principle. Its fluctuating interrelations between images, texts, and temporalities transform the film into an ultimate “non-place,” which, except for a few hints at fascism and a refugee crisis, provides no explanation or overview of its political implications. Alongside the characters, spectators are thrown into a world defined by fragile image spaces and zones of exclusion, always haunted by fragments of the past and glimpses of an uncertain future.

The “Better Judgement” behind the “Walk on Air”

This essay examines the influence of Elizabeth Bishop on Seamus Heaney’s poetics in the 1980s and 1990s as he became a global poet. She stands as a unique and overlooked exemplar in Heaney’s poetic pantheon. His reading of Bishop’s work, for all its limitations, nonetheless enables some of his most celebrated poetry of “home.” Since the 1990s, Bishop’s reputation has grown considerably, and recent critical assessments of newly published work have led to new ways of reading her older collections, so that the “reticence” for which she was famed now appears less as an aesthetic principle—as Heaney understands it—than as a concession to a repressive environment. Through intertextual close-readings alongside an examination of Heaney’s literarycritical responses to her work, this essay argues Heaney’s view of Bishop is often refracted through the lens of his own concerns. Ultimately, however, that view helps Heaney develop a poetics where form itself—the essential border-making and border-crossing apparatus—is emblematic of a solution to political crisis, making his misreading a highly productive one.

“The Very Music of the Name”

Chris Townsend, “‘The Very Music of the Name’: Uncertainty as Aesthetic Principle in Keats’s Endymion” (pp. 441–472) It is well known that John Keats thought that true poets were those who are capable of being in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts” without feeling the need to reach after solid facts. And “uncertainty” is a recurrent term in his 1818 poem Endymion and its preface. But what does it mean for the figure of Endymion to follow an “uncertain path,” and what role do experimental poetics play in that experience of not knowing? This essay reflects on three aspects of the rhythms of Endymion—the relation of line to sentence, the transformative quality of the poem’s rhymes, and the rhythmical malleability of the name “Endymion” itself—to argue that what Keats’s early critics were hostile to in his poem was precisely what he strove to produce: a poetics of uncertainty. By turning close attention to the local effects of Keats’s rhythms, and by mounting an argument about the structure of his thinking that concerns the shape of his verses, I also want to reopen a perennial question in both Formalist and New Historicist branches of Keats scholarship: whether it makes sense to think of Keats as a “political” or “ideological” poet, and of what that might mean in relation to his aesthetics.

Poetic Updates In Uzbek Literature (On The Example Of Prose Masterpiece)

As a result of the renewal of national thinking, the events of life and the principles of the approach to the human person in Uzbek prose also changed and began to take on new forms. In a number of prose works, we find images of courageous people who have not lost their identity and faith over the years. At the same time, we are confronted with those who, under ideological pressure, have turned to "modernity", apostatized, deceived and become servants of a deceptive and violent ideology. We see that the hypocrisy inherent in such images is portrayed in all its horrors. It can be seen that in Uzbek prose works the attempt to reflect the unique nature, unique world, past and feelings of the nation has become a certain aesthetic principle, and such positive research serves as a basis for significant growth in prose. The works we have analyzed not only renew epic thinking in one way or another, but also serve as a basis for the emergence of new trends, currents and directions in literary life. As a result, it influences the development of socio-spiritual and artistic aesthetic thinking.

Michel Butor’s “Improvisations sur Rimbaud”: interpretation of the poet’s works and language

This article discusses one relatively unknown aspect of the French writer and philosopher, Michel Butor’s works — his literary criticism through the example of “Improvisations sur Rimbaud”. Poet’s works are investigated by Butor unattainable apart from the stages of his life, and the most significant poems — in the context of the epistolary heritage of Rimbaud. Most attention is paid to the chapter “Improvisations”, dedicated to the collection of Rimbaud’s “Illuminations”: to the development of the theme of the city and its transformation, the role of structural rhyme and reprise at the beginning of the line overturning the classical system of versification, the appearance in the texts of Rimbaud mathematical structure. The new poetic language, the innovative artistic techniques of the poet , which are used in the composition of a number of texts in the collection, comprehensively explored by Butor, had an undeniable influence on the direction of the research for new literary forms in the works of Butor: his novel “Degrès”, which uses the numerical structure as a method of total description of reality as well as a number of texts written in the genre of experimental prose in which fragmentation is elevated to an aesthetic principle, the idea of synthesizing the arts is implemented and endless intertextual interactions are created.

ON THE ISSUE OF THE BYLINA PLOTS’ FUNCTIONAL CLASSIFICATION

The classification of epic plots proposed by the Pudoga bylina narrator F.A. Konashkov still remains largely undefined in scholarly literature, though its analysis is important for historical functional appreciation of the Russian epic folklore. According to A.M. Linevskii, F.A. Konashkov selected his bylinas taking into account the gender-and-age, family, professional, and social status of his listeners (i.e., there are bylinas for young people, married couples, the military, the Heads, the merchants, etc.) and that principle, however plain in some aspects, implies a special understanding by the bylina narrator of his repertoire. Since it is inconceivable that the bylinas being intended for one class of listeners turned out to be – in terms of their language or composition – difficult for another, it seems only logical to conclude that the division in question is based on a certain extra-aesthetic principle. As shown by a comparative axiological analysis of each bylina group, all epic songs here are united by a similar didactic moral intent, an affirmation of comparable spiritual values and, consequently, a denial of categories and notions opposed to them. Therefore, F.A. Konashkov’s classification indicates those spiritual therapeutic tasks that could challenge Russian bylina narrators in a situation of the oral text’s “natural” existence – and, accordingly, can be applied to the whole corpus of national epic folklore.

“Texte des Versuchens”: un’analisi della raccolta di collages Und. Überhaupt. Stop. di Marlene Streeruwitz

This book is the first published analysis and interpretation of the collection of literary collages Und. Überhaupt. Stop. Collagen. 1996-2000. by Austrian writer Marlene Streeruwitz. It presents the author and body of her narrative work, analyses her programmatic poetics and investigates the collage as a technique, aesthetic principle and mode of thought, before moving on to the examination of the primary text. It thus addresses a noticeable gap in the reception of Streeruwitz’ work (as this collection has been virtually ignored, also internationally) and provides methodological and aesthetic insights relevant to the analysis of other literary collages, while also providing a comprehensive resource for the study of Streeruwitz and her oeuvre.

‘Introduction: Photography’ and ‘Basic Concepts’, from Theory of Film (Kracauer 1960)

This chapter is a close analysis of the two chapters from Kracauer’s 1960 book Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. The chapter covers Kracauer’s increasing influence by phenomenology and outlines his key notion of the ‘basic aesthetic principle’ of film and photography, the ‘cinematic approach’, and the ‘realist’ and ‘formative’ stages of the aesthetic process in both film and photography. Kracauer’s contention that film is ‘uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality’ is discussed.