Literature as discursive interstice

Dumitru Tucan

doi:10.17684/i5a79en

Abstract

Starting with a famously popular case of literary genesis, which is the rewriting of the theatre play English Without a Teacher in the new variant of The Bald Soprano, this paper aims at analysing the complex relationship between textual objects of literary pretension and the literary space. The paper’s assumed perspective derives from the pragmatics of literary discourse (cf. Maingueneau, 2007), while at the same time it is concerned with analysing the processual features of literary phenomena. It seems that these features can only be analysed in relation to the metamorphoses of the social and cultural imaginary. Emphasizing these relational features of the notion of literature across history and also emphasizing the capacity of literature to remain in a process of continual metamorphosis while being in close contact with the textual objects which seek to challenge its stability, and at the same time, emphasizing the status of literature as ‘discursive interstice’ or as ‘self-constituting discourse’, the paper sets out to show the fact that textual objects which aim at transgressing the ‘literary space’ are in fact the signals released from the pressure history and the cultural metamorphoses it has generated exercises on the literary phenomenon. This pressure seems to have offered literature a transgressive dimension.

Highlights

Teacher into the French play La cantatrice chauve [The Bald Soprano] represents a famous case of literary genesis, which can be a starting point for a clarifying discussion regarding the works of the RomanianFrench playwright, and for a discussion concerning the relationship between textual objects of literary pretension and the literary space
As shown by the history of Western literature, texts that seek to achieve validation in the region of the self-constituting discourse of literature are prepared to assume challenges leading to the metamorphosis of language, to inter-discursive metamorphoses, or to cultural metamorphoses
Literary texts can achieve full validation in the literary system by exposing their linguistic, inter-discursive and cultural practices and by showing how these practices establish relationships with the general literary norms dominating the space of critical reception, i.e. the ordinary linguistic, inter-discursive and cultural practices of the historical context

Summary

Introduction

In the recent history of literature (theatre), the change of the Romanian theatre play English Without a Teacher into the French play La cantatrice chauve [The Bald Soprano] represents a famous case of literary genesis, which can be a starting point for a clarifying discussion regarding the works of the RomanianFrench playwright, and for a discussion concerning the relationship between textual objects of literary pretension and the literary space. As one of the most important voices of the generation of the ‘30s, the young playwright had been one of the iconoclast voices of the Romanian literary criticism in his Romanian period, his ‘creative’ work (his volume of poems Elegii pentru ființe mici) had not been an acclaimed ‘literary event’ in the period between the two world wars His genuinely irreverent attitude present in Nu (1934) and in his chronicles published in the press was targeting against the Romanian literary tradition and against the big names from the interwar literature, and against a particular idea of ‘literature’, namely the one rooted in a cultural continuum, teeming with culture and rhetoric and lacking authenticity. Pour marquer le caractère interchangeable des personnages, j’eus simplement l’idée de remplacer, dans le recommencement, les Smith par les Martins In this way, under the pressure of the theatre agents, Ionescu’s act of self-pedagogy became an innovative and a strikingly new theatrical or literary act which was going to resonate with his sympathetically responsive audience. It is only possible to describe the idea of literature in relation to its processual character

Literature as discursive interstice

Literature as self-constituting discourse

Concluding remarks