Rimbaud Research Articles

Диалог «Language School» и метареализма: поэмы Sun Майкла Палмера и «Нефть» Алексея Парщикова

In this article the author analyzes the interaction and mutual influence of such ways of speaking, which we call Language Writing and metarealism, which he reveals on the example of the poems Sun (1987) by Michael Palmer and Oil (1999) by Aleksei Parshchikov. Palmer's poem is a decentralized statement in which syntactic interruptions, complex symbolism, and an abundance of references create an embodied heteroglossia. The catastrophe of the meaning and the assembly of voices here are somehow structured by the central symbol — the Sun — from the headline of The Sun newspaper of July 22, 1986 (“A headless man walks, lives / for four hours”) to the artificial light of consumption centers. And the semantics of dying, references to Baudelaire in the poem, as well as Palmer's separate “Baudelaire Series” somehow admit that one of the many overtones of Sun poem is “The Voyage”, the final text of Fleurs du mal. Marjorie Perloff points out the difference between the approaches of Palmer and Parshchikov in the article “Russian Postmodernism: An Oxymoron?”, where, comparing their texts, she writes that the approach of the second is closer to Arthur Rimbaud, not the split subject Language Poetry. However, the similarity and differences between the approaches of Palmer and Parshchikov are similar to the similarity and differences between Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, when both use the mythopoetics of swimming as death, but incomplete, or rather incompleting. But if the first include it in the context of criticism of commodity fetishism and the subversive power of allegory (according to Benjamin), then the second in the context of “clairvoyance” and observation of the “black and cold” waters of capitalistic Europe. So the poem Oil by Parshchikov is close to the poem Sun by Palmer both in the depiction of the world in a frozen catastrophe, in the collapse of the language, and in the political dimension. And as in the poem Sun through heteroglossia, the symbolism of the crisis meaning, a permanent apocalypse Palmer creates political criticism of the symbolic order of the consumption society, including intellectual commodity fetishism, as in the poem Oil with a multilayered image of raw materials, including as an ideological concept, Parshchikov opens up new ways for analytical political poetry.

Simbolist’uri kalakis mxat’vrul-msoplmxedvelobrivi ret’rosp’ekt’iva Sandro cirekidzis miniat’urebshi /სიმბოლისტური ქალაქის მხატვრულ-მსოფლმხედველობრივი რეტროსპექტივა სანდრო ცირეკიძის მინიატურებში [Artistic-Worldview Retrospective of Symbolist Сity in Miniatures by Sandro Tsirekidze

In literary studies, there is a firmly rooted idea that generally the genre specificity of the symbolist creative thought is merely poetic imagology, however, the genre area in the European history of Symbolism has also embraced prose, fiction, drama, miniature literature as well as essays. In this regard, the Georgian Symbolist school which represents a creative variation of the European narrative is consistent. Sandro Tsirekidze’s name is unquestionably associated with the history of the Georgian Symbolist prose; he, all the way through his life and work, fully embraced the destiny of the so-called “cursed poets” and the fate of the “forgotten artists”, although, back then, he along with others from the Blue Horns was constructing the new history of the Georgian literature. Sandro Tsirekidze’s ideas about literature and art serve as another analogue of the assessment of creative events, performed professionally with a then-innovative and modern approach. These attitudes have been demonstrated in his miniatures in which the Georgian reflection of the creative and worldview discourse of Paul Verlaine, Émile Verhaeren, Arthur Rimbaud, Georges Rodenbach, Valery Bryusov, and other Symbolists becomes fully conscious. For the character of Sandro Tsirekidze’s miniatures, the city is the space for action as well as the space for thinking; the city which, at the same time, is a symbolic binary essence, and an artistic and creative stepping stone. Here, the author’s subjective opinions and attitudes undergo a certain artistic transformation, when the author rather proceeds along the “footbridge” of literature positioned between the emotion and analysis, where the author’s genuine emotional experiences are explicitly identified. The city text by Sandro Tsirekidze is related to the conceptual symbolist perception. It is the complex of concepts, motifs and plots, which covers the author’s model of city life – both generally and in its private manifestations.

Graph Coverings for Investigating Non Local Structures in Proteins, Music and Poems

We explore the structural similarities in three different languages, first in the protein language whose primary letters are the amino acids, second in the musical language whose primary letters are the notes, and third in the poetry language whose primary letters are the alphabet. For proteins, the non local (secondary) letters are the types of foldings in space (α-helices, β-sheets, etc.); for music, one is dealing with clear-cut repetition units called musical forms and for poems the structure consists of grammatical forms (names, verbs, etc.). We show in this paper that the mathematics of such secondary structures relies on finitely presented groups fp on r letters, where r counts the number of types of such secondary non local segments. The number of conjugacy classes of a given index (also the number of graph coverings over a base graph) of a group fp is found to be close to the number of conjugacy classes of the same index in the free group Fr−1 on r−1 generators. In a concrete way, we explore the group structure of a variant of the SARS-Cov-2 spike protein and the group structure of apolipoprotein-H, passing from the primary code with amino acids to the secondary structure organizing the foldings. Then, we look at the musical forms employed in the classical and contemporary periods. Finally, we investigate in much detail the group structure of a small poem in prose by Charles Baudelaire and that of the Bateau Ivre by Arthur Rimbaud.

Contre les tendances déformantes : ouvrir la langue italienne aux poèmes de Rimbaud

In his book La Traduction et la Lettre ou l’auberge du lointain, Antoine Berman states that literary translation must respect the “Strangeness” of the source-text to produce an “ethical translation”. Using the expression of the troubadour poet Jaufré Rudel, the author proposes to consider the translational space as a place of welcome for the strangeness of the source-text; translating the “letter” of the text thus means respecting this strangeness. In order to achieve this goal, Berman outlines thirteen “deforming tendencies”, i.e. tendencies to be avoided because they would destroy the “letter” of the text: the Rationalisation; the Clarification; the Expansion; the Ennoblement and the Vulgarization; the Qualitative impoverishment; the Quantitative impoverishment; the Destruction of rhythms; the Destruction of underlying networks of signification; the Destruction of linguistic patternings; the Destruction of vernacular network or their exoticization; the Destruction of expressions and idioms; the Effacement of the superimposition of languages. In this article, we will focus on the analysis and discussion of three deforming tendencies – the rationalisation, the clarification, and the destruction of linguistic patternings – identified in Ivos Margoni’s Italian translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Roman, and will try to show how this alters the “letter” of the text.

Suggestioni rimbaudiane nell’opera di Elsa Morante: un’ipotesi di lettura

The paper intends to analyse the influence of Arthur Rimbaud's works on Elsa Morante's texts and, specifically, on Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini, a book published in 1968 that stands out for its remarkable heterogeneity, multiformity and complexity. Starting from the reading marks (annotations, underlinings, reminders) found in the writer’s volumes of the Oeuvres (now availables for consultation), the aim is therefore to reconstruct the traces of a dialogue that is not only based on some extracts of verses or intertextual references, but also on shared experiences (ecstatic and hallucinatory journeys), models (Baudelaire, Nerval, Michelet, the texts of oriental spirituality)languages and theoretical conceptions. The paper will then observe, always by making references to Rimbaud, how it can actually be possible to trace a path in Morante's vision of art and its role in reality from the book under examination – Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini – to Aracoeli, her last apocalyptic novel.

‘I like to think of my comics adaptations as my own recitations … ’: in conversation with Julian Peters

ABSTRACT Julian Peters is a comic book artist and illustrator living in Montreal, Canada. In the last few years, he has focused on adapting classic works of English, French and Italian literature into comics. His works have been featured in anthologies, magazines, and school textbooks. Poems to See by: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry (2020) is his recently published book featuring comics adaptation of 24 classic poems. His adaptations of poems by Arthur Rimbaud and François Villon were included in The Graphic Canon (Seven Stories Press, 2012), and his adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was featured in Slate Magazine. In spring 2015, he was ‘Cartoonist in Residence’ at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Julian holds a master’s degree in Art History from Concordia University and takes his creative inspiration from the great and minor masters of all artistic periods. In this interview, Julian Peters discusses his creative process, his love for classic poetry, and his comics adaptation of his beloved poems.

Translation of Charles Cros, ‘process for recording and reproducing colors, forms and movements’ (1867) with an introduction

ABSTRACT This 1867 document, akin to a patent application for the US Patent Office, is among the first to describe processes for producing both motion and color photography. It precedes by 20 years Edison’s 1888 kinetograph/kinetoscope design, the earliest working prototype of cinema. Its author is Charles Cros, who also outlined a phonograph system in 1877, a few months before Edison displayed his working phonograph. Cros is mostly known as a poet, fiction writer and playwright associated with members of the French Symbolist and Decadent movements (Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam). Yet he was an accomplished technician and inspired media innovator who deserves reconsideration in media history. Evidence of his status comes for instance from his close collaboration with Jules-Adrien Carpentier, the very engineer the Lumière Brothers tasked with constructing their Cinématographe camera. Sent to and received by the French Academy of Sciences, this document is in three parts. The first describes with prescient specificity the photographic synthesis of motion. The second offers several ways of achieving the photographic synthesis of color using filters and projection (rather than pigment and print, as later achieved in the 1890s). The last and more cryptic section concerns an ambitious theory of perception. Unpublished in French until 1970, this document will be of wide interest to scholars of media history, cinema and photography studies, literary studies, and modernist studies. The introductory essay makes a strong case for rehabilitating Charles Cros as a key inceptor of modern audiovisual media.

Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material by Robert St. Clair

Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material by Robert St. Clair

Поэма Юрия Сопова «Артюр Рембо» (1919): текст и контексты

The article introduces publication of the full text of the narrative poem “Arthur Rimbaud” by the Omsk poet Yuri (Pyotr Ivanovich) Sopov (1897–1919), written shortly before his tragic death in the explosion at A.V. Kolchak’s residence on August 25 (or 26), 1919. The text previously had been known by fragments only, by virtue of quotations included in the newspaper obituary by the poet Georgy Maslov, who briefly survived Sopov. A number of details allow us to conclude that Sopov is fairly accurate when rendering facts of Rimbaud’s life and must have been familiar with the French poet’s biography, not just with echoes of the legend. Therefore, the numerous occasions in the poem, where he prefers fiction over fact, should be considered as the result of a deliberate choice. In the perception of contemporaries, the image of the author of the poem partially merged with the mythologized image of its hero. First of all, this concerns poets of the circle of the Omsk literary and artistic association “Chervonnaya Troika” and writers close to the group “Pamir” (“Siberian brigade”). The poet Leonid Martynov (1905–1980) repeatedly turned to the image of Rimbaud, translated his poems, compared his image, biography and character to his own, in poetry and in prose. The article shows that the perception of the French poet in Martynov’s creative laboratory during his long career was mediated by the memory of Yuri Sopov’s poem.

Epilogue: Forty Days

Epilogue: Forty Days Cristina García (bio) Let it come, let it come,The season we can love … —Arthur Rimbaud Spring 2020 Pilar Puente Marin County, CA Day 1: March 18 It’s impossible to concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time—rushing here and there with mundane tasks half-done, my anxiety spiking through the roof. It’s worst when I binge on the news; best when I switch on the classical music station. Yesterday, the Brandenburg concertos brought a fleeting sense of peace. I think of the billions of variables it took for a viral transmission from one live animal (a bat, apparently) to one human in a wet market in Wuhan, China. And now? We’re all trying to figure out how to survive. Is there anything more contagious than fear? I consider other places in the world—Italy, in particular, which is at the height of contagion— and I’m supposed to understand that this is where the rest of us will be in a few weeks. Flatten the curve. It’s the phrase on everyone’s lips. It means slowing down the virus enough to enable our broken medical system to handle the incoming sick. But people will die, possibly a million in the US alone. It isn’t war but it feels like war. Sixty-one years old. That adds up to a complete life. If I died tomorrow, nobody could say I was cut off in my prime. Day 2: March 19 Striving is everything, isn’t it? Striving for normalcy in extreme times. Striving to stay calm when your internal regulators go haywire. The [End Page 181] effort of navigating papered-over realities, personally and politically: camouflage, gas lighting, denial. Hardest of all? Acknowledging our compliance in the destruction. Day 3: March 20 Even in bucolic Marin County, the dread is palpable. California is in lockdown but my ophthalmologist husband is performing an upper and lower blepharoplasty on a patient who’s decided that a global pandemic is a fine time to get a little eyelid work done. I beg him to get tested but he isn’t entitled without full-on symptoms—even at his own hospital. Finally, he promises to work in fresh scrubs daily, wear a mask and gloves at all times, require his patients to sanitize their hands, and regularly disinfect the receptionist’s counter. In the evening we begin flirting outrageously. I whisper a quote from Didion in his ear: If we knew exactly how much time we had left, what would we do differently? Day 4: March 21 Was it just last week that I was happily in New York City with my son? We went to the theater—Cambodian Rock Band and Jagged Little Pill—and I got to meet his first official boyfriend since he came out two years ago. Our last day together was Wednesday, March 11. My gallerist and I met for lunch and she told me a crazy story about Mike Bloomberg. How before his ill-advised run for the presidency, he grabbed a handful of French fries right off her plate at a fancy midtown restaurant. He’d been meeting with Henry Kissinger (he’s alive?!), who had the minimal decency to keep his hands off her food. Afterwards I headed to the Whitney to see the Mexican mural-ist exhibit, then met Azul for a quick dinner. He arrived flushed and overheated, fearing these might be coronavirus symptoms. I stayed calm for a change, felt his forehead, led him to a nearby restaurant. He drank copious amounts of liquids and cooled down. We both ordered salads. The next day, everything shut down: theaters, museums, schools, restaurants, all nonessential businesses. I didn’t leave my apartment. The anxiety was three-dimensional—in the streets, the stores, elevators. Panicked buying was underway—hand [End Page 182] sanitizer, toilet paper, frozen foods, anything with bleach. I flew back to San Francisco on Friday, March 13, the day the first person died of the coronavirus in New York. Day 5: March 22 I’ve been teaching two graduate classes at a private university in San Francisco. We’ve been forced...

Cavafy among the Modernists

Placing C. P. Cavafy among the modernists raises interesting questions. Which century can claim Cavafy? What does it mean to claim Cavafy for modernism? What space do we need to make for Cavafy in an approach to modernism that shapes and is shaped by his work? What re- and disorientations might that positioning require? Which nineteenth-century filiations does Cavafy carry over into his modernism? Is courage rather than contemporaneity a better guide in these orienteering exercises? This essay fleshes out these questions, asks a few more in the process, and attempts a set of triangulations and mediations between Cavafian and early twentieth-century words and worlds. This is not to trace influences or deep affinities but to deploy Cavafy as the “century's interlocutor,” in Paul's immodest but resonant phrase. Among the mediating or triangulated figures are F. T. Marinetti, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, George Seferis, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Vernon Lee, and Pierre Louÿs, with cameo appearances by Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Rimbaud, and Eugène Marsan.

Polski Rimbaud albo poeta zaginiony

Bronisław Kamiński is rather unknown as a poet in Poland. In France, however, he was called the “Polish Rimbaud.” This paper attempts to describe Kamiński’s surprising, poetic path and analyze his poetic debut, published in Cracow in 1937. It aims at comparing its two versions, focusing on the means Durocher uses to express his youthful rebellion à la Arthur Rimbaud.

Poétique gravitationnelle. Artaud véloce

Isn’t Earth the matrix of the human species, in all of its creations and re-creations? This “essay-fiction” offers a reflection on the concept of planetarity. It sparks a debate on the aftermath of economic globalism and commercial borders (free trade treaties, the return of bilateralism during the Trump era among several other questions). The evocation of the oeuvres of Antonin Artaud and Arthur Rimbaud allows us to describe what is gravitational poetics, where the texts seem to feel the power of terrestrial attraction. The planetary humanity raises the question of the uniqueness of the human subject, following the abolition of all physical frontiers.

From Menshevik to Bolshevik: The Legacies of Georgian Modernism

Slavonic and East European Review, 98, 1, 2020 REVIEW ESSAY From Menshevik to Bolshevik: The Legacies of Georgian Modernism HARSHA RAM Papashvili, Giorgi (ed.). K’ult’ura da mkhat’vruli tskhovreba Sakartvelos p’irvel respublik’ashi (1918–1921) / Culture and Artistic Life in the First Georgian Republic (1918–1921). Chubinashvili National Research Centre for Georgian Art History, Tbilisi, 2018. 171 pp. Illustrations. Annotations. Sources. Price unknown. Chepyzhov, Pavel. New Georgian Book Design, 1920s–30s / Novyi gruzinskii knizhnyi dizain 1920-kh–1930-kh godov / Kartuli ts’ignis akhali dizaini 1920–1930-ian ts’lebshi. Edited by Ketevan Kintsurashvili. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warsaw and Bookvica, Moscow, 2018. 311 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Biographies of artists. Bibliography. List of books. $60.00: €52.00:£45.00 (paperback). It is by now well-established that the Georgian capital Tiflis — as Tbilisi was then widely known — became a major regional centre of modernist cultural production in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. At once the administrative capital of Russian Transcaucasia and a trading hub linking Iran to Russia and Europe, Tiflis harboured an ethnically diverse population deeply engaged in the production, circulation and consumption of goods, fashions and ideas. In 1918 the city became the capital of the Georgian Democratic Republic (1918–21) which, under the aegis of the Georgian Mensheviks — moderate rivals to Lenin’s Bolsheviks — gave rise to the first social-democratic experiment in history on a national scale. Offering provisional respite from the Russian civil war raging north of the Caucasus mountains, Menshevik Tiflis allowed Russian artists to mingle with their Georgian and Armenian counterparts in conditions of relative Harsha Ram is Associate Professor in Slavic and Comparative Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. HARSHA RAM 140 material abundance and cultural freedom during a short-lived but significant historical cycle which came to an abrupt end with the Bolshevik military annexation of Georgia on 25 February 1921. In few other cities of the Russian empire (one thinks of Kyiv as a rare point of comparison)1 did modernist cultural production evolve under such distinct political regimes — tsarist, Menshevik and Bolshevik — conflicting cultural ideologies — cosmopolitan as well as nativist — and literary sensibilities — symbolist, futurist, acmeist, dada and constructivist. One of the earliest writers to mythologize the cultural efflorescence of Menshevik Tiflis was Grigol Robakidze, doyen of Georgian modernism and arguably the most erudite literary intellectual of his generation. Composed during the 1920s, his unfinished novel, Falestra, evoked a recent past that — in the wake of Sovietization — seemed hauntingly remote: A strange city, Tiflis became stranger still in the years 1919 to 1920. Fugitive Russians found shelter here […]. Who wasn’t to be found in Tiflis at this time? […] It was here that the [Russian] futurists took their initial step towards dada. […] Tiflis became a city of poets. In the Café Internationale people exclaimed that henceforth only in Tiflis was poetry at all possible. [Georgian poet] Paolo Iashvili conquered the city at precisely this time, just as Arthur Rimbaud had once vanquished Paris. Scarcely did Iashvili suspect that the bohemian conquest of Tiflis would prove a greater challenge than the taking of Paris. The country was truly going to rack and ruin [iktseoda], but Tiflis was the sole city to greet this ‘collapse’ with poetic song (a manifestation, surely, of the carefree oriental or Georgian spirit?). Tiflis became a fantastical city.2 Eliding the political question of Menshevism into a diffuse intimation of impending collapse, Robakidze here sketches out the primary artistic orientations at play in revolutionary Tiflis: a cosmopolitan outlook tilted towards European — specifically Parisian — modes of bohemian sociability, a cacophony of avant-garde orientations shrilly proclaiming the primacy of poetic experimentation and a vaguely expressed but far from insignificant acknowledgement of a native ‘oriental’ sensibility. To date scholarly studies of this era have served principally to extend and detail Robakidze’s account. Overtly citing Robakidze in its very 1 See the collected volume, Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation, eds Irena R. Makaryk and Virlana Tkacz, Toronto, 2010. 2 Grigol Robakidze, Falestra [uploaded 3 December 2019]. FROM MENSHEVIK TO BOLSHEVIK 141 title, Tat´iana Nikol´skaia’s ‘Fantasticheskii gorod’ elaborated the cultural contours of Menshevik Tiflis as an ‘oasis’ for artists and writers...

Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics by Maaheen Ahmed

Reviewed by: Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics by Maaheen Ahmed Alisia Chase (bio) Maaheen Ahmed, Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 235 pp, $30, $90. Maaheen Ahmed begins Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics with a quote from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleur des Mal: “Aux objets repugnants nous trouvons des appas . . .” (21). The line is from “Au Lecteur (To the Reader),” in which Baudelaire opines that humanity is compelled to seek out monstrous vices “. . . swayed / By noisome things and their repugnant spell.” In being lured by deviance, humankind steps ever downward, into hell. Ahmed mistakenly attributes the line to “Las Phares (The Beacons)” from the same collection, in which Baudelaire lionizes seven artists whose visions will be “re-echoed through a thousand megaphones” until eternity. But given that Francisco de Goya is one of the painters Baudelaire exalts, and that Ahmed posits comic monsters as remediations of Romantic tropes, her conflation of the two poems is fitting. One merely has to glance at the myriad choices in Netflix’s horror category to see that humankind’s obsession with repugnant monsters as mirrors for our depravities is alive and thriving. Ahmed structures her ambitious text into five chapters, bookended by an introduction and a conclusion. Her first chapter contextualizes the dominant features of the nineteenth-century European movement known as Romanticism, and outlines the major characteristics of the monstrous archetype that emerged from the art and literature of this period. Ahmed postulates that the Romantic monster foremost embodies an imperfect version of humanity. Due to its ambiguous and often terrifying form, the monster becomes a spectacle that generates both fear and fascination and, as such, is eventually exiled by mainstream society. In forced solitude, the monster undergoes an internalized quest, rebelling against said society once it recognizes why it has been rejected. Ahmed’s remaining chapters are devoted to singular examinations of the monstrous but sympathetic comic protagonists in whom this Romantic legacy lives on: Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, Monstre by Enki Bilal, Hellboy by Mike Mignola, and The Crow by James O’Barr. Her motivation for exploring this inheritance is well justified. As Ahmed asserts, the Romantic imaginary has been extensively researched in other disciplines but has not yet been explored in comics. Furthermore, little scholarly attention has been paid to the comics she analyzes here. Within each chapter, Ahmed deploys close textual analysis to great effect and illustrates how each comic manifests various facets of the Romantic imaginary. In the chapter devoted to Moore’s Swamp Thing, she makes connections between Goethe’s Faust, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Francisco de Goya’s demonic, disfigured forms. In the next, dedicated to Monstre, Ahmed finds echoes of Baudelaire’s ennui-laden modernity, interplay of opposites, and love of the counterpastoral. In chapter four, she shows how Mignola’s Hellboy intertextualizes Goya, Edgar Allan Poe, and the era’s dark nostalgia. Ahmed’s last analysis, of The Crow, explicates how O’Barr’s use of fragmentation and extreme emotionality resurrects the Romantic spirit, collaging the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, [End Page 361] the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, New Wave music, and postpunk aesthetics into one spectacular character. The most notorious and most remediated monster from the Romantic period is in-arguably the antagonist of Frankenstein. Accordingly, Ahmed demonstrates how Shelley’s creature lives on, both conceptually and aesthetically, in comic form. Frankenstein’s monster is the obvious model for Abigail’s father, Patchwork Man, in Swamp Thing and shares much with him in his solitude and sorrow at being perpetually misunderstood. But one of Ahmed’s more nuanced theorizations proposes that the formal qualities of Shelley’s composite monster are similar to the structure of comics. In the same way that Victor Frankenstein synthesizes his creature out of various cadavers—essentially “patchworking” multiple dead bodies into one new life-form (a form both fascinating and repulsive)—so, too, does a comic artist piece together a textual and visual narrative. Additionally, comics themselves are comprised of ostensibly disparate art forms: literature, drawing, printmaking, and graphic design. A skilled artist like O’Barr can fuse these incongruent pieces...

Сенсорный семантический компонент как основа для формирования синестезии в тексте (на материале стихотворения А. Рембо «Пьяный корабль» и его русских переводов)

The current article considers the phenomenon of synaesthesia in a literary text on the material of the Russian and French languages. Our study proposes a new approach to a linguistic analysis of synaesthesia at the levels of words and word combinations. It introduces a systemic model describing groups of words related to sensory perception which serve as a basis for synaesthetic word combinations’ formation. The units of analysis were selected from a manually prepared author’s corpus of parallel texts including Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Le Bateau ivre” and its 15 Russian translations. In order to classify the types of words related to sensory perception the notion of sensory semantic component (SSC) was introduced. The words were classified according to a number of criteria: the component criterion (number of SSCs within a word); the modal criterion (correlation with a sensory modality); the structural criterion (morphological structure of a word); and the criterion of semantic representation (the place of an SSC within a word’s semantics). At for the component criterion, all the words were classified by the number of SSCs as monocomponent (90 %) or multicomponent (10 %). If a word is classified as multicomponent, its SSCs can either belong to the same modality (and so, it is characterized as monosensory), or refer to different modalities (multisensory). The words from our corpus are generally monocomponent, i.e. they contain no more than one SSC. However, 10 % of the preselected words contain more than one SSC and are characterized by a complex morphological structure, representing, in fact, compounds. Multicomponent and complex words are typical only of the Russian part of the corpus. As far as the modal criterion is concerned, the French and Russian parts of the corpus provide similar results: sight appears to be the dominant modality for all the texts analyzed, whereas the sense of smell is the least common. As for the semantic representation of SSCs within a word’s meaning, this component is essential and determinant for 90 % of the units analyzed. The words containing SSCs belong to different parts of speech. In the French part of the corpus, the most common are adjectives (55 %), followed by nouns (27 %), verbs (9 %), participles I and II (9 %). As for the Russian texts, adjectives are also the most common (43 %), followed by nouns (35 %), verbs (14 %), participles I and II (5 %), gerunds (2 %), and adverbs (1 %).

ARTHUR RIMBAUD'UN "SESLİLER" ŞİİRİNDE DUYULAR VE YARATICI BİLİNÇ

In this study, it is aimed to analyze the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Vowels” through senses. Therefore, the borderlines of an approach which is formed in the frame of cognitive stylistics, also including phenomenological and synesthetic perception is defined. Synesthesia is considered as a phenomenon that transcends senses with its effect on altered states of consciousness, as well as the perception which takes place between and through senses. Because of the approach to consciousness from a different perspective in the phenomenology, the factors affecting and building the poet’s consciousness are taken into consideration in the stage of analysis. And the altered states of consciousness of the poet, his conflicting moods, the reflections on the language of his tides between the physical and spiritual universe, and his cognitive difference make it appropriate to employ cognitive stylistics as a method, all of these also provide crucial clues about how the poet interferes with cognitive processes. The figure-ground relationship is considered in cognitive, phenomenological and synesthetic context; when the subject is poetry, it is pointed out that in which area this relationship is revealed and how it is interpreted. As a result, it is shown that a poem can be analyzed through senses, however, it is observed that senses and the relationships between senses affect the language in connection with both consciousness and mood.

Sarah Chihaya Merve Emre Katherine Hill Jill RichardsThe Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism

this same panoply appears as a flourishing garden awaiting an open mind. Even the uninitiated will find that Lababidi extends a friendly hand to guide you through what seems at first to be wildly different ways of understanding the world and humanity’s place within it. In the very first essay, “The Books We Were,” the author gives us a crash course in his eclectic reading habits and how he has absorbed intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual lessons from so many iterations of human creativity. Tracing his evolution through “one Existentialist horror writer after another,” Lababidi finds himself increasingly drawn to poetry and then to the mystical traditions throughout history. Throughout the book, these two philosophical poles frame his discourse, whether reviewing a biography of iconic French poet Arthur Rimbaud or dissecting the seemingly anomalous candidacy of Marianne Williamson within the rapid rise of “so-called spiritual leaders who presume to speak for The Universe” (in contemporary society). Placing himself in the tradition of spiritual seekers, and thus striving to draw wisdom from every available source, Lababidi decries both the fundamentalist adherence to a single belief system as well as the consumerism that treats deeply held spiritual practices more like fashion accessories to be worn when in vogue and cast off when not. Though he has spent decades in the United States, Lababidi’s affinity for his homeland of Egypt underlies much of his writing and appears most poignantly in a number of agonized and beautiful reflections on his country’s democratic revolution and subsequent slide back into dictatorship, written as it happened. As a poet, he notes with obvious pride in “Daring to Care” that poetic slogans and artists of all stripes played a critical role in the emergence of the Arab Spring. As the hopes of democratic revolution gave way to violence and repression, Lababidi does not try to gloss over the sense of betrayal; his tone remains optimistic that the original driving force of the revolution remains alive in the people’s hearts. While the book features its share of social criticism, Lababidi’s overall worldview comes off as overwhelmingly positive throughout. He may worry about the effects of technology on our common humanity, but he also still sees that a simple, honest conversation “can forge a profound human connection with a perfect stranger because, ultimately, there are no strangers.” In several essays on contemporary politics, pornography , and the #MeToo movement, Lababidi provides stark, at times uncomfortable, reflections on the ways that individuals unconsciously assume the values that their leaders—political or cultural—espouse in their words and actions. Still, heartened with centuries of mystical knowledge, despair seems to be the furthest thing from his mind, and he sees clearly that despite the pain such unsparing appraisals of ourselves and our society might cause, this is the very threshold we must cross to take the first step toward wholeness. While Revolutions of the Heart covers an extraordinary range of topics between its covers, in the end this collection clearly shows that it has one true subject: the heart of Yahia Lababidi himself. He may have fought many revolutions within his own mind to develop his distinct style of artistry, but in the mystic’s eye, these struggles are simply part of being a thinking person and just as natural as the revolutions that change the whole world each year. Z. McGrew University of Science & Arts of Oklahoma Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill & Jill Richards The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism New York. Columbia University Press. 2020. 277 pages. HOW APPROPRIATE THAT ONE of the most incisive studies of Elena Ferrante to date has been the outcome of an experiment in criticism. As readers all around the world know, Ferrante herself is somewhat of an experiment in authorship; for nearly thirty years, she has published under a pseudonym, and the stratospheric levels of fame brought on by her Neapolitan novels has only cemented her well-documented need for privacy. This determination to eschew the role of author personality has WORLDLIT.ORG 93 Books in Review Jenny Erpenbeck Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces Trans. Kurt Beals. New York. New Directions. 2020. 212 pages. JENNY ERPENBECK’s fictional...

The Order and the Material is the Message

The Order and the Material is the Message Alex Wermer-Colan (bio) Perhaps the most under-examined, yet voluminous and multifaceted cut-up works in William S. Burroughs's oeuvre remain his innumerable scrapbooks. Produced over nearly half a century, from 1963-64, when he first began to intentionally create "scrapbooks," to the last years of his life, in the late '80s and early '90s, Burroughs's scrapbooks arguably amount to his most important contribution to the history of collage, and his most complex application of what he called the "cut-up" method. Nevertheless, Burroughs's scrapbooks, numbering in the dozens, if not hundreds, have yet to be catalogued comprehensively. They also are rarely discussed in scholarship on Burroughs, much less in studies of avant-garde aesthetics, or literary and art history scholarship more generally. This is not least because none of Burroughs's scrapbooks have yet to be published as works unto themselves. Since the 1994 Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit and the publication of its companion book, Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts (1996), Burroughs's scrapbooks have slowly become recognized for their significance to his cut-up practice and the history of collage. These enigmatic works, however, have only become available to the public as excerpts, with decontextualized pages presented individually, evocative fragments of a larger, but inaccessible whole. This essay, insofar as it attempts to review a set of such books, requires a caveat: it's difficult to write about a multitude of "books" that were never published and probably never will be, at least not in print. As a negative outline of what could be read or viewed, this essay's second-hand form is actually quite fitting for a series of works whose potential and purpose remain speculative. After a critical turning point in Burroughs's cut-up practice, his scrapbooks were rarely created to be published or shared. As outsider art, the scrapbooks are still waiting to be re-contextualized, to be understood not just as "derivative" notations for Burroughs's published novels, but as multimedia, collage narratives, in a uniquely impressionable form, capable of retaining material traces of their sources in a way his cut-up novels and poems never could. Burroughs's wide-ranging cut-up practice, from poems to audiobooks, newspapers to films, inevitably blurs what counts as a "scrapbook." The Oxford English Dictionary offers a straightforward definition: "A blank book in which pictures, newspaper cuttings, and the like are pasted for preservation. Hence occasionally as the title of a printed book of miscellaneous contents." As recounted in The Scrapbook of American Life (2006), the practice of scrapbooking in the West can trace its conceptual roots to ancient Greek "koinoi topoi"—for Aristotle, models of places and things that serve as souvenirs or "memory aids." For the editors of The Scrapbook of American Life, the modernist art of scrapbooking is comparable to early modern commonplace books: they are flip-sides of the same coin, personal anthologies with miscellaneous materials, useful for recalling quotes, information, places, and objects, while serving as a means of "constructing an identity outside" the "formalized and authoritative records" contained in "bureaucratic files and databanks." By the late nineteenth-century, like cabinets of curiosities and albums of art prints, scrapbooking had even become a popular practice transcending traditional gender norms. But by Burroughs's era of the Cold War, the practice of scrapbooking was typically regarded as [End Page 6] a marginalized, minoritarian practice, usually as a feminist or queer counterpoint to patriarchal and heteronormative Western culture. An early use of the word as a verb occurs in Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924): "He usually postponed the scrap-booking until Sunday." Unlike Twain, for Burroughs, scrapbooking was often a daily practice, like his routine of noting down his dreams. His scrapbooking also served diverse purposes, from the creation of collage art-books and "dream calendars" to the archiving of grey literature, travel souvenirs, and ephemera. Burroughs's scrapbooks arguably represent his most anti-canonical set of works, evocative of Arthur Rimbaud's affinity for cultural detritus in the "Alchemy of the Word" section of A Season in Hell (1873). Burroughs made a...

Synesthete Spies, Detectives and Outlaws: Unsettling Truths Uncovered Through (an Equally Unsettling) Synesthetic Process

This article focuses on portrayals of fictional characters with neurological synesthesia in seven selected 20th and 21st century English-language novels in the detective-spy genre. Characters are discussed in terms of the five categories of literacy depiction of synesthete characters as outlined in the chapter, “Synesthesia and Literature” in the Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia (Oxford University Press, 2013). I will suggest that depictions of synesthete characters in the detective genre link synesthetic perceptions with glimpses of ultimate truth, and trace these tendencies back to descriptions of synesthesia in 19th century seminal European works (written during a very fertile period of research into audition colorée), including Arthur Rimbaud’s “Letter of a Seer” and Max Nordau’s Degeneration. Novels included in this study: Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov, The Synesthete by Brent Kiernan, Top Ten by Gene Ha and Alan Moore, The Fallen by T. Jefferson Parker, Miracle Myx by Dave Diotalevi, Still Waters by Nigel McCrery, Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews.