Poetics Today recent issues

Narrative and Emergent Behavior

Abbott, H. P. — 2008-05-01

The difficulty of understanding emergent behavior is usually attributed to our need to see in it the operation of some kind of centralized control where there is in fact none (Keller 1985, Resnick 1994). Yet as a species, we seem to have little difficulty with complex narratives in which there is no centralized control and in which chance often plays a major role (tragedies, comedies, most novels and films). I argue that the principal reason for the incompatibility of emergent behavior with narrative understanding is its massive distribution of causal agents—a complexity of causation so acute that it disallows any perceptible chain of causation that could serve as a narrative thread. Narrative can and does play a limited role in our understanding of emergent behavior but does so only at the micro level of individual agents (the horse ancestor) and the macro level of the whole (the evolution of the horse). The perils of our weakness for narrative templates in trying to understand emergent behavior arise when understanding the internal nature of the process of emergence is critical to our choice-making behavior. This is especially the case when our health and well-being depend on emergent behaviors to which we contribute. Notable examples are the common efforts to narrativize the behaviors of the stock market and human evolution.

The Wall Is Down: New Openings in the Study of Poetry

Brisman, L. — 2008-05-01

The question considered here is not what are the most interesting or most discussed recent movements in literary criticism, but what are the methodological innovations that might actually contribute to a better understanding of a specific poem? I look in two directions, the one attempting to enrich a poem's setting in its cultural context, the other attempting to complicate a poem's relation to its literary background. For the former, I attempt to read Donne's "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" with the combination of attention to nonliterary texts contemporaneous with the poem and analysis of cultural bias that has characterized New Historical readings. For the latter, I attempt to read Stevens's "Puella Parvula" as a crisis lyric and battleground for the anxieties of influence as elaborated by Harold Bloom. I conclude by comparing the two modes of "unknowing" that these methods invoke—Donne's culturally determined sense of female anatomy (his obliviousness to the fundamental difference between male and female genitalia, which we take for granted), and Stevens's repression of the human cry at the core of his interest in imagination. The article acknowledges that the great masters of older methodologies, here represented by John Freccero and Helen Vendler, may have more to tell us than any methodological innovation as such could hope to convey.

Suture and the Narration of Subjectivity in Film

Butte, G. — 2008-05-01

To begin with, the essay identifies shortcomings in classical suture theory's approach to film's narration of consciousness. This approach, which has been widely influential in film theory, grew out of work by Jean-Pierre Oudart, Jacques-Alain Miller, Daniel Dayan, Stephen Heath, and Kaja Silverman and emphasizes a Lacanian drama of absence. This model of suture has also been the focus of important criticism by scholars like David Bordwell and Noel Carroll. My alternative paradigm of embodiment and multiple consciousnesses, what I call deep intersubjectivity, emerges from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, with contributions from Oudart's own phenomenological observations, and seeks to return the body (including its politics) to suture and to film narrative. The fundamental image drawn from Merleau-Ponty is the chiasmus, the film version of which is the shot/reverse shot sequence. I conclude with close readings of two moments from Michael Roemer's 1964 film about African American life, Nothing but a Man: they illustrate how suture enables the narration of intersubjectivity in film, in its embodiments (including the political) from violation and humiliation to evasion, opacity, and sometimes a recuperation, even if incomplete, of community, however temporary or partial.

Narrative Use and the Practice of Fiction in The Book of Sindibad and The Tale of Beryn

Bolens, G. — 2008-05-01

This essay considers David Rudrum's claim that narrative is a type of language act that needs to be construed with regard to its use. Here this claim is related to one of the most influential literary traditions in the history of fiction: the Eastern Book of Sindibad and its Western offshoot, the Seven Sages of Rome, in which narrative use is of central significance. I focus more particularly on a tale embedded in the Eastern Book of Sindibad, "The Merchant and the Rogues," which was adapted and translated into Middle English in the form of the fifteenth-century Tale of Beryn, an anonymous continuation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Sindibad tale and the Tale of Beryn thematize narrative use in the context of a trial, in which the pleas and counterpleas highlight the function of fictionalizing acts. Fiction in these narratives is conceptualized as a practice. Finally, I argue that the production and reception of the Tale of Beryn must be linked to the socioprofessional milieu and cultural activities of late medieval law students.

Revisiting/Revisioning the Icon through Metaphor

Freeman, M. H. — 2008-05-01

Reasons for Action

Pavel, T. — 2008-05-01

Emotions Induced by Narratives

Kafalenos, E. — 2008-05-01

Notes on Contributors

2008-05-01

Introduction: Photographic Interventions

Horstkotte, S., Pedri, N. — 2008-03-10

Photography as Critical Idiom and Intermedial Criticism

Louvel, L. — 2008-03-10

Although numerous studies have been devoted to the relations between painting and literature, surprisingly few have focused on the photography/text relationship. Photography-in-text is a hybrid product that gives rise to a hybrid textual genre and so renews the iconotext. The specific characteristics of photography have left their mark upon fiction: they have generated new ways of seeing and, consequently, of reading. This essay explores how photography has renewed fiction and continues to do so through its specific properties. In addition, its particular position within word and image studies is examined. As a result, one can envisage a poetics of the photographic visual and, conversely, lay the foundations for a critical idiom: a metatextual practice and intermedial criticism resting on the image as a means whereby to study fiction through the lens of what may be called the "pictorial third."

Photo-Text Topographies: Photography and the Representation of Space in W. G. Sebald and Monika Maron

Horstkotte, S. — 2008-03-10

This essay considers the role of layout in intermedial photo-texts, arguing that the scrapbooking of visual material and printed text constitutes an integral aspect to these texts' rhetoric and semantics. Through a close reading of novels by W. G. Sebald and Monika Maron, I show how photographic inserts can be used to connect distant or incommensurate spaces: the represented space inside the photograph; the space of representation (of the photograph itself); and the extratextual space of the reader. However, the establishment of such a connection crucially depends on the imagination of the beholder of photographs, and the more skeptical photographic readings in Maron's novel illustrate that photos can also be used to block off incommensurate times and spaces. The meaningful layout pattern established by both authors is broken up in the English translation of their works, and the essay closes by considering the problematic nature of translated photo-texts.

Imaginary Encounters: Walter Benjamin and the Aura of Photography

Duttlinger, C. — 2008-03-10

This article explores Walter Benjamin's famous concept of the aura in relation to his writings on photography. Although Benjamin's "Artwork" essay charges photography with the decline of the aura of the traditional artwork, his essay on photography complicates this historical narrative, associating aura with early portrait photography but also with its successor, the commercial studio portrait. The childhood photograph of Franz Kafka, whose melancholy air serves Benjamin as an example of a paradoxical, post-auratic aura, recurs in his childhood memoirs, where the narrator projects himself into this picture. Benjamin's writings on photography thus develop an alternative concept of aura, one which transcends fixed historical or technological categories through the model of an imaginary encounter between viewer and image. This conception has far-reaching consequences not only for the theory of photography but also for its role within literature, as is suggested by Benjamin's empathetic engagement with the Kafka photograph and its incorporation into his own life story.

The Generation of Postmemory

Hirsch, M. — 2008-03-10

Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance.

Documents, Photography, Postmemory: Alexander Kluge, W. G. Sebald, and the German Family

Anderson, M. M. — 2008-03-10

The article examines two major German writers of documentary fiction, Alexander Kluge and W. G. Sebald, who incorporate photographs into their work as part of a complex strategy of realism. Both authors are strongly marked by the legacy of Nazi propaganda and its manipulation of photographic images; both authors reflect on the relationship between trauma, war, memory, and representation, especially with regard to family histories. Kluge's emotionally flat documentary account of the Allied bombing of his hometown reveals a problematic deadening of personal and familial relations. Sebald's semiautobiographical fictions, whose German narrators are riven by their disrupted family histories, can only be partially understood through Marianne Hirsch's notion of "postmemory." Despite common political and stylistic traits, the writings of Kluge and Sebald ultimately forge quite different literary esthetics.

Documenting the Fictions of Reality

Pedri, N. — 2008-03-10

An examination of the use of photography in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes sheds light on how the photographic documentary is secured in life writing. I argue that photographs in life writing invite readers to look beyond what is imaged to their own private experiences rather than to some sort of universal reality. When photographs are reproduced in literature, the subjective and not the objective is paramount in determining their evidential value. In other words, the photograph's evidential value is secured through a transformative process that is put into play by an active engagement, a stepping into the visual, on the part of the reader.

Photographs on the Walls of the House of Fiction

Adams, T. D. — 2008-03-10

This essay considers the history of photography in fiction, concentrating on issues of genre. Starting with a survey of nineteenth-century novels which included physical photographs, the essay moves to twentieth-century novels, discussing ways in which the generic rules of written narratives influence the relationship between word and image and the fictiveness of photographs within novels. Unlike earlier writers, who used photographs for illustration of place, postmodern novelists frequently use photographs as documentation, both in support of and in opposition to the written narrative. The last section of the essay uses W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, an especially complicated novel which combines fiction and nonfiction, biography and autobiography, as a case study.

Paratextual Profusion: Photography and Text in Bertolt Brecht's War Primer

Long, J. J. — 2008-03-10

Bertolt Brecht's War Primer, first published in 1955, is a collection of what Brecht termed "photo-epigrams." These consist of a photograph—usually one cut from the illustrated press—mounted on a black background and accompanied by a four-line poem by Brecht. The theme of the book is World War II. Critics have tended to view the War Primer as a didactic piece that offers a Marxist corrective to "Western" histories of the war. This article, however, argues against this view. By contextualizing the work in terms of Brecht's and Benjamin's writings on photography in the 1920s and 1930s and taking into account not merely the relationship between photograph and quatrain but all of the numerous paratexts (original newspaper captions, titles, explanatory notes, foreword, jacket copy, title page, and author's signature), the article argues that the diverse modes of address constructed by the text preclude communication of a unitary ideological message.

Notes on Contributors

2008-03-10

The Fiction of Marcel Proust's Autobiography

Balsamo, G. — 2008-02-12

This essay discusses the literary genre of Proust's In Search of Lost Time as analogous with the genre peculiar to Dante's Commedia and Augustine's Confessions. Both Dante and Augustine narrate their autobiography in terms of a writerly vocation pursued by means of a love quest; both authors' success in the affirmation of their respective identity depends on the success of the love quest. Dante's case is especially relevant to this essay insofar as his poem instantiates his authorial identity as coincident with that of his fictional character. Augustine's confessions, however driven by a love quest, belong to the more conventionally autobiographic genre of the personal memoir. The fiction of the Commedia is that the biography of its fictional protagonist is the author's autobiography. The same principle, which challenges the narratological distinction among real author, implied author, and narrator, may be applied to Proust's novel. Marcel, the protagonist, crowns his literary vocation only at the end of a protracted love quest. His success in the love quest coincides with the end of the novel, and it is at this point that the distinction between fictional character and historical author loses its force. After Erich Auerbach on the Commedia, one can argue that Marcel and Marcel Proust come to coincide at the point of intersection of allegory and history; the fictional character is the allegory of the author's historical authenticity. Toward the end, Marcel-the-character, finally equipped with the means and determination to write the novel we have just read, metamorphoses into Proust-the-author: he is Proust's deliberate choice for his own autobiography.

A Beatrice for Proust?

Landy, J. — 2008-02-12

How similar is Proust's Recherche to Dante's Commedia? Not very, as it turns out. In the first place, Proust's protagonist does not require an experience of ideal love as a precondition for conversion: Mlle de Saint-Loup is no Beatrice. And in the second, what he produces is not an allegorized rendition of his creator's journey to authorship. Dante the pilgrim may well become Dante the writer, but Marcel does not become Proust, nor does he go on to write the Recherche; quite the contrary, the tantalizing and deliberately tempting set of similarities between author and narrator are an indication of the distance Proust has placed, like Elstir, between his life and his art.

The Impossibly Many Loves of Charles Swann: The Myth of Proustian Love and the Reader's "Impression" in Un amour de Swann

Picherit, H. G. — 2008-02-12

Much in Marcel Proust's Un amour de Swann—notably its position in the Recherche and the title itself—suggests that we might derive from the tale of Swann's love for Odette a general "law" about love, applicable throughout the Recherche. Yet far from conveying a clear account of Swann's passion, the story presents nine different falling-in-love scenes, which, it seems, contradict the prevailing view that Swann's tale is a relatively "easy" section of Proust's novel. Indeed, I argue here that the illusive transparency of Un amour de Swann is at the heart of a textual mechanism that elicits from us spontaneous and lasting reactions to the text. Proust in fact withholds a clear characterization of love and, instead, imparts to our subjective impressions about this emotion an illusion of objectivity. When the reader applies what he or she has "discovered" about love in Un amour de Swann to the rest of the Recherche, then, the reader unknowingly becomes inscribed into the novel, making it a reflection of the deepest, most essential parts of his or her being.

Complexity and Foregrounding: In the Eye of the Beholder?

Zyngier, S., van Peer, W., Hakemulder, J. — 2008-02-12

This article approaches from an empirical perspective the interrelation between foregrounding and complexity in the evaluation of literary texts. For this purpose, a reading experiment is reported. Participants from three cultures (Brazil, Egypt, and the Netherlands) read three texts of different degrees of complexity and evaluated them on a number of variables. Subsequently, they re-read and evaluated the texts once more. The hypothesis was that complex texts would be rated higher on a second than on a first reading; the opposite was predicted for the text with the lowest complexity. Results confirmed this hypothesis for only one group of participants, which raises questions about the nature of a "reading culture."

Omniscience in Narrative Construction: Old Challenges and New

Sternberg, M. — 2008-02-12

Since modernism, narrative omniscience has been much attacked, yet little studied and understood. This in inverse ratio to the central role it actually plays in narrative discourse and metadiscourse alike: the telling, reading, grouping, evolving, conceptualizing of stories, invented (e.g., novelistic) or inspired (biblical, Homeric). Here I review the various old-new critical thrusts against epistemic superprivilege (outright denials, partisan judgments, attempted confinements, impairments, replacements, as well as genuine misunderstandings) arisen since my constructive theory of omniscience appeared, often in response to it. Those neo-modernist challenges meet, multiply, and frequently run to extremes in Jonathan Culler's (2004) antitheistic critique, which accordingly presents an overall mirror-image to how and where and why omniscient narrative is (re)constructed. Nor is this key question of epistemic privilege vs. disprivilege alone at stake. The argument shows afresh its bearings on larger issues yet, especially narrative's open-ended art of relations. Thus the relations between axes of perspective, between perspective and plot, between power and performance, between mimetic and artistic sense-making, between factual and fictional storytelling. Equally involved, at a higher level still, are the relations between part and whole, form and force or function, typology and teleology, theory and history, (meta)discourse and ideology, the realities of literature and the desires of the literati. Throughout, the choice ultimately lies between freezing, even nullifying those relations via package deals and allowing them free play in the spirit of the Proteus Principle.

Narratology Made User-friendly: Rhetoric, Ethics, Storytelling

Eskin, M. — 2008-02-12

Frozen in Time?

Spolsky, E. — 2008-02-12

Notes on Contributors

2008-02-12

Justus Lipsius's De Constantia: A Stoic Spiritual Exercise

Sellars, J. — 2007-11-26

This essay offers an introduction to Justus Lipsius's dialogue De Constantia, first published in 1584. Although the dialogue bears a superficial similarity to philosophical works of consolation, I suggest that it should be approached as a spiritual exercise written by Lipsius primarily for his own benefit.

Rhetoric and Philosophical Discourse in Giordano Bruno's Italian Dialogues

Canone, E., Spruit, L. — 2007-11-26

The Renaissance writers adapted the dialogue form to represent the culture they were creating, using it for numerous subjects: philosophy, ethics, politics, religion, the arts, the study of language, and literature. The dialogue was an appropriate form for works which are at once serious, ironical, and critical. Giordano Bruno's Italian dialogues are a case in point. This essay scrutinizes the structure of these works, with special attention to the role of the interlocutors in his rhetoric.

Philosophy as Inspiration: Blaise Pascal and the Epistemology of Aphorisms

Groarke, L. — 2007-11-26

In five stages, this essay works out an account of the aphorism as a philosophical genre. First, I outline a preliminary, general strategy for elucidating the aphorism as an expression of "aphoristic consciousness." Then I discuss Blaise Pascal's aphoristic style, concentrating on exegetical issues surrounding his Pensées. Next, I demonstrate that aphoristic consciousness (understood in an appropriately epistemological sense) has been a constant (though now largely unrecognized) theme in the history of Western philosophy. Following this survey of Pascal's predecessors, I show how Pascal's own epistemological account of the aphorism reiterates and encapsulates this traditional understanding in its own distinctive way. And finally, I provide a new theoretical account of the aphorism as a literary and philosophical form, for which Pascal's thought provides both a theoretical framework and an excellent example.

The Geometrical Method in Spinoza's Ethics

Byrne, L. — 2007-11-26

While the goal of Spinoza's Ethics has strong affinities with the Aristotelian goal of eudaimonia, structurally the text itself is modeled on Euclid's Elements. Does Spinoza think that the precision and certainty of mathematics can be extended to moral philosophy? To answer this question, I discuss the relation between the geometrical method of the Ethics and its content and goal. Arguing that the deductive structure of the Ethics mirrors the causal necessity by which all of nature follows from God, I conclude that Spinoza applies the geometrical method to ethics because nothing, including human life and well-being, is exempt from this causal necessity. Furthermore, I discuss the role the geometrical method plays in an aspect of the argument of the Ethics which can best be described as dialectical, in the Aristotelian sense of the word: Spinoza hoped to persuade the members of his circle of theologically radical yet devout friends, and others intellectually similar to them, of the truth of his philosophy by beginning with Cartesian principles they would accept. Finally, I argue that certain nongeometrical portions of the Ethics are directed at the emotions of these readers.

Kierkegaard and Genre

Pattison, G. — 2007-11-26

Noting the apparent chaos of Søren Kierkegaard's writing, the essay shows that Kierkegaard did, nevertheless, have a highly self-conscious relation to issues of genre, which was a central concern in the aesthetic theory of his critical role model, J. L. Heiberg. Salient features of Heiberg's aesthetics are discussed and their echoes in Kierkegaard's writing illustrated. Kierkegaard is also aware that Heiberg's schema of genres breaks down in the face of modernity and such modern art forms as the novel. Here Mikhail Bakhtin (a reader of Kierkegaard) can help us see a carnivalistic transgression of classical genre definitions at work in Kierkegaard's writing. This, in turn, can be shown to relate to Kierkegaard's fundamental religious concerns and to reflect the carnivalesque destabilization of social, cultural, and artistic forms enacted in the paradoxical figure of the God-man.

Wittgenstein's Voice: Reading, Self-Understanding, and the Genre of Philosophical Investigations

Hagberg, G. L. — 2007-11-26

Since the time of Socrates and perhaps even that of Heraclitus, philosophical reflection has found expression in some form of autobiographical or selfinterrogative work; one of the outstanding exemplars of this mode of philosophical engagement was Augustine's Confessions. This mode and that book particularly exerted a profound influence on Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in a fairly self-contained sector of his masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, we see a modernized version of such self-interrogation in action. In his remarks on the experience of reading—a familiar experience that we all too easily take to conform to a Cartesian model—we witness a mind confronting its own temptations to simplify, to adopt misleading philosophical "pictures" or conceptual templates, to hypothesize phantom mental events to fulfill the needs of an unwittingly adopted explanatory schema. And those pictures of reading, as we see here, generate corollary pictures of "self-reading," of autobiographical writing. A close look at Wittgenstein's self-monitoring analysis, however, reveals the conceptual intricacies of reading and, by extension, some of the parallel intricacies of self-understanding.

Life without Theory: Biography as an Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding

Monk, R. — 2007-11-26

This article discusses recent attempts to provide the genre of biography with a philosophical, theoretical foundation and attempts to show that such efforts are fundamentally misguided. Biography is, I argue, a profoundly nontheoretical activity, and this, precisely, makes it philosophically interesting. Instead of looking to philosophy to provide a theory of biography, we should, I maintain, look to biography to provide a crucially important example and model of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections." This kind of understanding stands in sharp contrast to the theoretical understanding provided by science and is, Wittgenstein maintained, what we as philosophers are, or should be, striving for.

Notes on Contributors

2007-11-26