Fictitious Meals, Culinary Constraints: The Recipe Form in Four Oulipian Texts

This article looks into fictitious meals and the use of culinary recipe form in experimental and procedural literature, namely, works of constrained writing associated with OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). The recipe form is first scrutinized from the procedural, structural, and historical viewpoints, also concerning its lesser-known imaginative and esoteric genealogy. In addition, its connections to the notions of narrativity and fiction are discussed. The recipe's relationship to action is depicted by a simple procedural model. There is a metaphorical and conceptual, but also formal and operational, similarity between the coded procedures of cooking and writing. A recipe is a procedure, a script for an infinity of possible meals, and a literary procedure is a recipe for writing. It is not surprising, then, that Oulipian writers have utilized the recipe form in their food-related works. Four such literary recipes (by Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Harry Mathews, and Alastair Brotchie) are closely examined, after discussion of key concepts of Oulipian poetics from the culinary viewpoint. The article's special point of reference is the parodic, satirical, absurd, and other humorous meanings that literary recipes often seem to produce, which is linked to the operational and structural dimensions of the recipe—its comically posited procedural form.

Where Is This Now, Now?: Gertrude Stein's Literary Innovations and New Sound Media

This article addresses the largely unexplored relationship between Stein's literary innovations and the new sound media of her time. By examining these connections, this article looks at Stein's compositional techniques—in particular her concept of the continuous present and her lifelong interest in speech and dialogue—to examine how new media technologies intersected with her attempt to change the way writing was written, read, and heard. By focusing on sound, and looking specifically at her final work Brewsie and Willie (1946), this article reads Stein's innovative poetics against the backdrop of concurrent changes to audio technologies during her career. Finally, the article argues that by paying attention to the ongoing shifts in media ecologies in relation to modernist innovations, we might gain insight into the larger phenomenological and sensorial sphere that formed the backdrop to modernism.

Canon Studies in China: Traditions, Modernization, and Revisions in the Global Context

Though particular texts have long held culturally foundational authority, debates over the idea of a canon and the texts that are to compose it are a much more recent phenomenon, one that originated in the United States and quickly spread to other countries. The present article situates China in the international trend of canon studies by tracing how the Chinese conceptualization of the canon was modernized in the 1990s by Western ideas when canon studies were introduced to China by Dutch scholar Douwe W. Fokkema. While embracing the Western notion of the canon as always in a dynamic process of change that involves aesthetic qualities as well as a power mechanism, Chinese scholars, under the influence of culturally specific practices of literary criticism, the Confucian principle of the golden mean, and the more recent Marxist teaching of dialectical thinking, refuse to replicate Western discourses, instead adhering to a more dialectical treatment of the mutually antagonistic positions. Moreover, China's rising international status and its pursuit of wider global influence have led Chinese scholars to approach literary (re)historiography as an opportunity to showcase Chinese scholarship and to enhance China's national image.

The Affective Dominant: Affective Crisis and Contemporary Fiction

Contemporary developments in fiction have so far primarily been interpreted as an attempt to move beyond postmodernism toward a renewed sense of realism and communication. This article suggests an alternative conceptualization and puts forward the hypothesis that contemporary fiction marks a shift toward an affective dominant. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale defines the dominant as a structure that brings order and hierarchy in a diversity of techniques and motifs in a literary text. Whereas in modernism the dominant is epistemological and in postmodernism it is ontological, in contemporary literature we contend this dominant is affective. The prevailing questions are “How can I feel reality (myself, the other, the past, the present, etc.)?”; “How can I feel to belong to reality?”; and “How can I feel reality to be real?” This affective dominant manifests itself in motifs such as desire, attachment, fantasy, and identification. Formal and narrative devices that in modernist or postmodernist fiction contributed to an epistemological or ontological dominant tend to foreground questions of affectivity in contemporary fiction. Through the analysis of novels by Ben Lerner, Alejandro Zambra, and Zadie Smith this article substantiates this hypothesis. This approach allows us to study contemporary fiction both diachronically, in relation to postmodernism, and synchronically, in relation to its social and ideological context.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus as Poetic Philosophy and Philosophical Poetics

This article argues that it is helpful to discuss the logico-philosophical contents of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in terms that confront the poetic and literary qualities of its form and style. To begin with, it analyzes Wittgenstein's short remarks about expression as manifested in the “tone” of Georg Trakl's poetry and the “ineffability” of Ludwig Uhland's poem “Count Eberhard's Hawthorn.” Then it proceeds to consider his exchange of letters with Gottlob Frege about the form and style of the Tractatus. The final part of the article considers such Tractarian metaphors as “showing and saying,” “logical space,” “reflecting the world as in a mirror,” “ineffability,” and “climbing and throwing away a ladder.” The proposed examination concentrates mainly on the distinction—but also the connection—between what, through language as used in both philosophy and poetry, can be said and what can be shown, this being one of the central themes of the Tractatus itself. It is then claimed that the roots of Wittgenstein's later understanding of both “ordinary language” and the connection between philosophy, poetry, and the ethical form of one's life are already present in his first period of creativity.

Poiesis as Decision Making: Shklovsky, Tynianov, Bakhtin

This article deals with the theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Iurii Tynianov from the perspective of decision science. It outlines how these two members of the Petersburg Society for the Study of Poetic Language (OPOIAZ) conceived of the writer as a rational agent pursuing a specific goal, and of the means at his or her disposal to attain it. Their approaches, the article illustrates, correspond closely with two specific types of rationality: “instrumental” and “bounded.” To conclude, the essay juxtaposes the formalists’ conceptualization of poetic creativity with Mikhail Bakhtin's view on the subject, arguing that the way he conceives of the strategies available to the literary author fits the label of “interactive rationality.”