Poetics Today recent issues

Shelley's Theory of Mind: From Radical Empiricism to Cognitive Romanticism

Bruhn, M. J. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

This essay reconstructs Percy Shelley's theory of mind from his letters and many unfinished essays as well as his Defence of Poetry (1821), emphasizing his radical insistence on the formal and teleological roles of analogy in human cognition, communication, and culture. Adopting the assumptions, method, and terminology he inherited from the vigorous associationist tradition in eighteenth-century British philosophy and psychology, Shelley sought to demonstrate the innate and thus indefeasible foundations of human morality, especially its master principle of social equity. His analysis took him at once to the heart of a range of psychosocial issues that are today studied under the cognitive scientific rubric of "theory of mind," including the developmental interrelations of, and motivations for, social imitation, language acquisition, and mental representation. Taking first a historical and then a theoretical view, I argue that Shelley's elegant solution to one of the major philosophical problems of the empirical age remains surprisingly relevant to central issues in contemporary science of mind.

The Visual Experience of Image Metaphor: Cognitive Insights into Imagist Figures

Gleason, D. W. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

In this essay I investigate how image metaphors—metaphors that link one concrete object to another, such as "her spread hand was a starfish"—promote visualization in the reader. Focusing on image metaphors in Imagist poetry, I assert that the two terms (e.g., the hand and the starfish) of many of these metaphors are similar in shape and that this "structural correspondence" encourages the reader to visualize those metaphors. Readers may spontaneously form a "visual template," a schematic middle ground that mediates between those similar shapes, in order to smoothly move between the two images within each metaphor. The structural correspondence and the mediating visual template allow readers to mentally shift back and forth between the two images, yet readers cannot fuse the two terms through visual imagery. Research supports these claims: reader reports have demonstrated that subjects understand image metaphors primarily through their physical features, and work on the visual interpretation of ambiguous figures suggests that though one cannot fuse images together, one may switch back and forth between multiple images of a figure, especially if the images share the same frame of reference. These findings indicate that readers may be particularly likely to understand image metaphor through visual imagery, especially when the terms of the metaphor correspond physically. This essay is drawn from a larger project on the "poetics of literary visualization"—a part-by-part investigation of the formal features of texts that elicit visual imagery. Such an account helps reveal the workings of the visual imagination and restore critical attention to this neglected aspect of the reading experience.

The (Neuro)-Aesthetics of Caricature: Representations of Reality in Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park

Baker, T. C. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

Recent research by V. S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki has used neuroscientific methods to investigate the nature of aesthetic response. By situating their work in the context of post-Kantian aesthetic discourse, this essay demonstrates that such research provides an opportunity to bridge cognitive and artistic approaches to aesthetic experience and offers a provisional theory of art that incorporates both empirical and philosophical traditions. These theories will be considered in relation to Bret Easton Ellis's recent novel Lunar Park (2005), which focuses explicitly on questions of representation and reality. Through a juxtaposition of Ramachandran's emphasis on caricature as a central principle of art and Ellis's focus on distorted and questionable realities, this essay suggests new possibilities for the integration of cognitive science with literary and philosophical criticism.

The Languages of Art: How Representational and Abstract Painters Conceptualize Their Work in Terms of Language

Sullivan, K. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

Representational and nonrepresentational (abstract) artists exhibit different conceptual processes when they describe their work. Data from ekphrastic texts written by artists to accompany their artwork show that, although both kinds of painters refer metaphorically to their art using terms such as language, vocabulary, conversation, and narrative, the two use these words in different ways and with different meanings. For example, representational painters refer to "languages" that consist of the systems of represented objects, people, or landscapes that they depict, whereas nonrepresentational painters write about "languages" composed of sets of colors or shapes. Moreover, representational artists claim to engage in a "conversation" with the viewers of their works, whereas nonrepresentational artists prefer to "converse" with their materials or canvases. In general, representational painters use metaphorical terms such as language to describe their subject matter and their artwork's effect on potential viewers, whereas nonrepresentational painters use the same words to describe colors, shapes, and their own artistic process. Artists that combine representation and abstraction in the same artwork (here termed "partly representational" artists) use some of the metaphors preferred by the purely representational artists and some of the metaphors of the nonrepresentational artists, suggesting that the presence/absence of both representation and abstraction affect the metaphors that artists use to describe their work.

Narrative Structuring of Sympathetic Response: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Toni Cade Bambara's "The Hammer Man"

Sklar, H. — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

This essay examines some of the ways that narratives produce sympathy in readers. First, I compare several models that have been proposed to explain how fictional texts structure readers' emotional responses. In this connection, I highlight some of the ways that narratological analyses of fictional narratives can complement approaches to the study of reader response that rely exclusively, or heavily, on psychological assumptions. I demonstrate some of the advantages of a narratologically based approach by analyzing in detail Toni Cade Bambara's short story "The Hammer Man." I contend that Bambara's story systematically moves readers from dislike to sympathy for the story's protagonist. In order to verify my claims about the story's effect on readers, I also review the results of tests that I conducted to measure subjects' levels of sympathy at the beginning and the end of the story. Finally, I discuss some of the implications of the test results for literary studies.

Notes on Contributors

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:48:03 PDT

Just What Word Did Mandel'shtam Forget? A Mnemopoetic Solution to the Problem of Saussure's Anagrams

Gronas, M. — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:21 PDT

To the extent that memorability is one of the poet's chief (even if unconscious) concerns, poetic composition may be seen as a kind of mnemonic "reverse engineering" that utilizes the very operating procedures of verbal memory. In this article, I focus on the similarities between the cognitive operations involved in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (a frustrating failure to retrieve a known but temporarily unavailable word) and those involved in creating the anagram, a poetic device discovered by Ferdinand de Saussure, in which the phonemes of the important theme word of a poem are dispersed throughout the body of the poem, while the word itself remains unsaid. Both the retrieval of a word on the tip of one's tongue and the (re)construction of an anagram involve sorting through the phonetic and semantic cues that hint at the absent target word. I suggest that these similarities may be due to the fact that both phenomena are subserved by a common cognitive mechanism: semantic and perceptual priming. On the basis of this analogy, I argue that in both ancient and modern literary traditions the anagram, whose origin puzzled Saussure, may have served a mnemonic function. The case study is provided by Osip Mandel'shtam's poem "I have forgotten the word that I wanted to say"—which both contains an anagram and presents an introspective analysis of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

Tete-a-tete, Face-a-face: Brodsky, Levinas, and the Ethics of Poetry

Williams, D.-A. — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:21 PDT

Two decades have passed since Joseph Brodsky used his Nobel address to advance the idea that "aesthetics is the mother of ethics." Yet despite the increasing prominence of ethics in literary studies during this time, very little has been written to elucidate his claim. One thing the "turn to ethics" in literary studies has produced is a rise in popularity of Emmanuel Levinas among critics. The invocation of Levinasian responsibility, with its refusal to entertain a practical or normative ethics, demonstrates, among other things, how far some streams of ethical criticism have traveled from the politically inflected theory of earlier decades. In this article I place Levinas's writings alongside the critical prose of Brodsky, whose radical commitment to poetry—what Seamus Heaney called his "peremptory trust in words"—is set at a similar theoretical distance from the idea that the didactic, the deontological, or the political may be constitutive of ethics. To admit from the outset that Brodsky's maxim is inimical to Levinas's project—which is to establish ethics as the mother of philosophy, as it were—is to acknowledge that the rapprochement intended here cannot be in any sense final. Instead, in collocating Levinasian reflection on encounter, the originary, and the face-à-face with Brodsky's writings on poetry, I want to give philosophical substance to Brodsky's musings on the ethics of aesthetic encounter while simultaneously demonstrating one way Levinas can inform literary criticism.

Narratorial Border Crossings in Major Early-Twentieth-Century English Novels

Daleski, H. M. — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:21 PDT

The point of departure for the article is Gérard Genette's distinction between "the world in which one tells" and "the world of which one tells," the division between the worlds being referred to as a "boundary" and a "frontier." I propose to discuss the crossing of four kinds of narratorial border: a third-person movement into first-person territory; a shift from the impersonal domain to the personal; a crossing of the line between the consistent and the inconsistent in the use of free indirect discourse; and a movement beyond the restricted area of a monologic code in interior monologue. The article concentrates on a detailed analysis of examples in novels by D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.

Three Decades of Writing on Manifesto: The Making of a Genre

Yanoshevsky, G. — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:21 PDT

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it aims to survey the abundant writings on manifesto. The study of existing definitions reflects the diffuse frontiers, even the confusion, among the political, the artistic, and the literary manifesto to a point where, besides attributing to it certain generic characteristics, it is difficult to speak of an evolution of the manifesto. Second, this article seeks to show the relationship between scholarly work on manifesto and the position of the researcher in the academic field. The researcher's position in the field of literary criticism is determined by the subject matter of his or her research. Hence manifesto, though a subversive, marginal writing, helps him or her "move toward the center." Marginal academic domains and peripheral research groups gain notice and centrality by advocating a new research program. Studies of manifestos played such a role for French Canadian literary scholars.

The Literary Manifesto and Related Notions: A Selected Annotated Bibliography

Yanoshevsky, G. — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:21 PDT

Claims of Stable Identity and (Un)reliability in Dissonant Narration

McCormick, P. — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:21 PDT

Self-conscious character narration provides special opportunities for authors to signal (un)reliability. This article focuses on one such opportunity. When narrators like John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier consistently assert moral and cognitive distance from their existences as characters in a story world, they create a pattern that Dorrit Cohn calls dissonant narration. But otherwise dissonant narrators close this distance and deviate from their pattern if they link a character trait to both their narrating- and their experiencing-self, thereby asserting that their claimed character trait is temporally continuous. I refer to these kinds of exceptions within dissonant narration as claims of stable identity and argue for their importance for judgments of (un)reliable narration. After defining the concept in relation to contemporary models of unreliability, the article analyzes particular claims of stable identity made by John Dowell and other narrators to show that authors can use them in different ways to guide readers' understandings in character narration.

The Francophone Appropriation and Continuation of Narrative Criticism Applied to the Bible: The Example of Point of View

Mirguet, F. — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:21 PDT

Gambling on Love

Massey, I. — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:21 PDT

Notes on Contributors

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:21 PDT

The Types and Functions of Samizdat Publications in Czechoslovakia, 1948-1989

Machovec, M. — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:32:13 PDT

The term samizdat, now widespread, denotes the unofficial dissemination of any variety of text (book, magazine, leaflet, etc.) within "totalitarian" political systems, especially those after World War II. Such publishing, though often not explicitly forbidden by law, was always punishable through the misuse of a variety of laws under various pretexts. It occurred first in the Soviet Union as early as the 1920s, before the term was used, and then, labeled as such, from the 1950s onward. While samizdat publication occurred in Czechoslovakia after 1948, the word itself was used there only from the 1970s on. This article seeks to clarify the term and the phenomenon of samizdat with regard to the Czech literary scene to trace its historical limits and the justification for it. I will first describe the functions of Czech samizdat during the four decades of the totalitarian regime (1948–89), that is, examine it as a nonstatic, developing phenomenon, and then I will offer criteria by which to classify it. Such texts are classifiable by motivations for publishing and distributing samizdat; the originator; traditionally recognized types of printed material; date of production and of issuance, if different; textual content; occurrence in the chronology of political and cultural events under the totalitarian regime; and type of technology used in production. The applicability of such criteria is tested against the varied samizdat activities of the Czech poet and philosopher Egon Bondy.

"Sonic Samizdat": Situating Unofficial Recording in the Post-Stalinist Soviet Union

Daughtry, J. M. — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:32:13 PDT

Magnitizdat was the slyly humorous nickname for the unofficial practice of dubbing and distributing reel-to-reel audio tapes in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union. In this article I reflect on magnitizdat's cultural significance through an examination of several amateur reel-to-reel recordings of avtorskaia pesnia, the musical genre most closely associated with the first generation of magnitizdat dubbers in the 1960s. After drawing parallels between the rhizomic, uncensored distribution of reel-to-reel tapes and samizdat's dissemination of uncensored texts, I move on to consider the differences—in scale, ideological charge, and ontological status—between the two practices. After outlining the similarities that link magnitizdat (and, by implication, samizdat) to contemporary practices of Internet file-sharing, I conclude by suggesting that we might profitably reimagine the relationship between the Soviet underground and the post-Soviet grassroots as one where continuities overwhelm disjunctures.

Reading Games/Games of Reading: Iurii Trifonov's House on the Embankment and Forms of Play beyond Samizdat

Milkova, S. — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:32:13 PDT

Iurii Trifonov (1925–1981) was a successful Soviet writer and sports journalist. He did not belong to samizdat print culture. But like other officially published Soviet literature, his works enacted an Aesopian game of hide-and-seek with the censor and the reader, whereby meaning was concealed throughout the text and marked by subtle hints. In this essay, I explore the implications of game playing as elaborated in Trifonov's most subversive, though officially published and uncensored, text, the novella House on the Embankment (Dom na Naberezhnoi, 1976). In analyzing Trifonov's novella, I examine different forms of "actual" play among author, censor, and reader, on the one hand, and rhetorical game playing in the narrative, on the other. More specifically, the essay analyzes children's games in the text to suggest that games become an Aesopian mechanism for addressing the Stalinist past and a metaphor for Aesopian language itself. The essay also suggests that game playing as an extratextual practice and rhetorical mode can be seen as bridging the gap between samizdat (underground publishing enterprises) and Gosizdat (the state publishing house).

Samizdat according to Andropov

Gribanov, A., Kowell, M. — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:32:13 PDT

Among the many documents released one way or another during the early 1990s, there are two that open the window into the perception of samizdat by the top Soviet authorities. The first of them was signed by Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB, in the last days of December 1970. It was a memo addressed to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union reporting on the status of samizdat in the country and suggesting some practical steps that would diminish the spread and impact of uncontrolled publications in the USSR. The second document, dated in the last days of April 1971, was compiled in response to Andropov's memo. It was a statement by the Central Committee regarding samizdat. The Central Committee document for the most part accepted the KGB recommendations but took a broader view of the samizdat phenomenon and for the first time offered a definition of samizdat, which was missing in the KGB memo. The differences between the two documents allow a glimpse of their respective institutional thinking about samizdat. Andropov's document implied that the samizdat phenomenon was so widespread that the repressive apparatus could not cope with it in the framework of its current charter. In response, the Central Committee document expanded the responsibility of the party apparatus with respect to suppression of uncontrolled publications.

Demystifying the Logic of Tamizdat: Philip Roth's Anti-Spectacular Literary Politics

Benatov, J. — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:32:13 PDT

Shortly after Nikita Khrushchev delivered his 1956 "secret speech" at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the text of the report reached the United States by way of Poland and was published in the New York Times. The first secretary's denunciation of Stalinism thus ironically becomes one of the earliest and best-known specimens of the phenomenon of tamizdat—defined as writing from Eastern Europe illicitly smuggled out and published abroad. This essay critically examines the West's and specifically the United States' fascination with tamizdat as symptomatic of the broader politics of representing life behind the iron curtain. It argues that Philip Roth's sustained professional engagement with the Czech socialist experience can be read as his critical refusal to take part in the dominant U.S. narrative of Eastern European suffering and oppression. The essay analyzes Roth's 1985 novella The Prague Orgy and the theoretical implications of the book's central plot device—the narrative of a failed tamizdat mission. The article argues that Roth's work exposes the patterns in which tamizdat, together with the fate of the Eastern European political émigré, becomes a homogeneous, metonymic image for the totality of life under Communism. In The Prague Orgy, Roth situates himself in stark opposition to the representational practices of Milan Kundera by resisting the easy sensationalism of such "writing for the West." Roth prefers to give voice to an array of internal Czech positions, central among which is that of the dissident author Ivan Klíma. Ultimately, Roth's resistance to stereotypical discourse on the socialist Other comes at an important sociocultural moment in the 1980s, when other American intellectuals prefer the security granted by the narrative of tamizdat.

Spoken Revolutions: Discursive Resistance in Bulgarian Late Communist Culture

Lutzkanova-Vassileva, A. — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:32:13 PDT

The article focuses on the brief history of Bulgarian samizdat and its attempts to challenge the regime through written discourse as well as on two forms of oral discursive resistance: the Seminar, a mode of discourse rather than any organized and rigid structure, and the group Synthesis, a more coherent formation that had a longer and more turbulent history. I explore the uniqueness of Bulgarian late Communist culture that, unlike its Soviet bloc counterparts, was never truly dissident in character. I seek to reveal why Bulgarian intelligentsia proved incapable of creating the kind of alternative samizdat literature that appeared in other former Communist countries.

While it appears questionable that such semiofficial formations as samizdat, the Seminar, or Synthesis brought down the totalitarian system in Bulgaria, the resistance that they offered played a role in Communism's breakdown. The article's main goal is thus to elucidate the peculiar nature of this resistance—to explicate the role of discourse in undermining the political order. Why did the end of totalitarian terror in Bulgaria take a theoretical turn? Is it fair to say that the breakdown of the regime was discursive? If so, how can we explain the enigma of a large political machine demolished by discourse? The article discusses the premise that what made possible the termination of a regime by theory (if this is what happened) was the very structure of the regime as total discursive control. It explores the hypothesis that, since totalitarianism was a purely linguistic phenomenon, a linguistic act would be the most efficient means to subvert and finally destroy it.

Notes on Contributors

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 14:32:13 PDT

Introduction: On Samizdat, Tamizdat, Magnitizdat, and Other Strange Words That Are Difficult to Pronounce

Steiner, P. — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:07:43 PST

Samizdat as Extra-Gutenberg Phenomenon

Komaromi, A. — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:07:43 PST

This article proposes to treat samizdat in terms of a textual culture opposed to modern print culture. The choice to cast samizdat as an "extra-Gutenberg" phenomenon represents a way of extending the observation that samizdat can no longer simply be defined as the mouthpiece of dissident opposition. Beyond binary oppositions of truth vs. falsehood, and dissidents vs. state, on which previous perceptions of samizdat have depended, we might now see the essential quality of samizdat to be its exemplification of epistemic instability, inasmuch as samizdat texts are not automatically invested with authority. From this perspective, new questions about the production, distribution, and reproduction of samizdat texts with varying types of content turn on a central issue: how was the trustworthiness or value of such texts established? This article explores these issues through personal testimony about the production and circulation of samizdat in the USSR and in the West. Juxtaposing the theory of gift giving with new critical approaches to book history, textual culture, and bibliography, the article aims to highlight the interest of personal testimony and material texts in a critical analysis of samizdat history. Finally, as a striking example of an epistemically unstable textual culture, samizdat represents not merely opposition to a defunct political system: it also exemplifies issues relevant to a global Internet culture today.

From Dispersed to Distributed Archives: The Past and the Present of Samizdat Material

Zaslavskaya, O. — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:07:43 PST

Historians turn to archives for historical evidence, the availability of which is not to be taken for granted. In many cases, archival practice excludes a significant part of documentation from archival solicitation.1 This can be applied to the history of the samizdat documents, which were excluded from the long-term preservation policy of state archival authorities in the Soviet bloc countries. At the same time, the singularity of the historical context that had motivated the emergence and spread of samizdat also engendered the peculiar logic of its circulation. A significant share of samizdat documents were smuggled out of the communist countries to the West, ending up in numerous organizations and private collections abroad. The dispersed character of samizdat archival sources has a negative effect on the quality of research in this area. One of the main objectives of the International Samizdat [Research] Association is to find and work out possible solutions to overcome the decay of samizdat materials both physically and "virtually"—in the collective memory of the present and for the cultural memory of future generations.

Suspending the Political: Late Soviet Artistic Experiments on the Margins of the State

Yurchak, A. — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:07:43 PST

The Russian term samizdat originally referred to self-published literature that was forbidden by or at least unavailable in the Soviet state, circulated through unofficial channels, and represented certain views that were alternative to the official ideology of that state. Sometimes, in the Soviet Union itself, the term samizdat was used in a broader sense, to mean diverse phenomena of unofficial cultural production—not necessarily of literary origin or dissident politics. In this broader sense, the term may be used to describe music samizdat (also known as magnitizdat), cinematic samizdat (also known as parallel'noe kino—parallel cinema), artistic samizdat, and so forth. This essay considers samizdat in this broader sense, focusing on two examples of cinematic and artistic samizdat that emerged in Leningrad in the early 1980s. Although these cases in point existed unofficially and represented alternative political views, they cannot be qualified as oppositional or "dissident" in the traditional sense of the term. In the early 1980s, when these unofficial artistic groups first emerged, they were relatively small and unknown. However, by the end of the decade, when the Soviet state experienced political crisis and suddenly collapsed, these two groups achieved phenomenal fame in Russia. They became popularly associated with the period of "late socialism" in the 1970s–1980s, before the collapse of the Soviet state was yet imaginable. This is why the essay first describes a certain new attitude to Soviet life that was emerging in the early 1980s among young urbanites in Leningrad and then proceeds to discuss the two artistic groups that developed in that context.

Samizdat and the Problem of Authorial Control: The Case of Varlam Shalamov

Toker, L. — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:07:43 PST

The article offers an explanation of Varlam Shalamov's negative attitude to the samizdat in the 1970s, particularly puzzling in view of the samizdat's role in making him unofficially famous in the 1960s. It explains the change in Shalamov's views by his struggle for authorial control of the accuracy, structure, and accessibility of his work. Lack of such control was, in a sense, an extension of the Gulag prisoners' inability, despite their best-laid plans, to rule their own fate—a theme explored in Shalamov's story "A Piece of Meat." One of Shalamov's last acts in the struggle for the control of the fate of his works was his 1972 letter to Literaturnaia gazeta protesting against the piecemeal publication of his work in foreign journals. Contemporaries tended to read that document as a recantation letter renouncing Kolyma Tales; as a result, Shalamov's status was transformed into that of a fallen idol. Yet if one reads the letter with close attention to its composite language, in which current clichés combine with the lexis of the twenties, as well as in the context of Shalamov's predicament in the 1970s (when a work that had appeared in the samizdat had practically no chance of getting into the official press), one may see a message about the importance of Kolyma Tales hidden in plain view. Ultimately, however, it was the samizdat dissemination that, more than anything else, ensured the preservation and the early as well as the future impact of Shalamov's Gulag prose.

Notes on Contributors

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:07:43 PST