Canonical Poem Research Articles

Clear enigmas and hidden meanings: the perpetuum mobile of the ‘machine of the world’ motif in recent interartistic activity in Brazil

Out of its European Renaissance origins in the writings of Dante and Camões, the metaphor of the machina mundi first came to the fore in Brazilian literature in the canonical poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade: the quintessential work of Brazilian modernism in its broadest sense, “A Máquina do Mundo”. The aim of this article is to explore the multiple, shifting possibilities inherent in the complex literary-cultural motif of the ‘machine of the world’ in current Brazilian art and literature. The text begins by looking at the comic epic poem Por mares nunca dantes by Geraldo Carneiro, before focusing on the different creative practices and appropriations of a series of paradigmatic variations on the theme from the opening decades of the 21st century: hybridity and interdisciplinarity in the poems A máquina do mundo repensada by Haroldo de Campos and “A quarta parede” by Marco Lucchesi; and interartistic intersectionality and creative duality in Laura Vinci’s verbal-visual sculptural installation “A máquina do mundo”, and Nuno Ramos’s photo-illustrated poetry collection Junco. The aim of this exploration is to interpret each of the works within the discursive historical-cultural context of the motif, and to analyse critically its presence in these rewritten and reconceptualised forms.

TRACING BHAVNA (FEELING/EMOTION) AND VICHAR (THOUGHT) IN INDIAN AND WESTERN POETICS

This research paper investigates the nuanced concepts of bhavna (feeling/emotion) and vichar (thought) in Indian and Western literature and poetics. Drawing upon classical Indian writings of Abhinavgupta, Bhartruhari, Mamata, Bharat Muni and canonical poems by William Wordsworth, Coleridge, John Keats, Matthew Arnold, and Robert Browning, the paper analyzes how these two cultural traditions approach the portrayal and integration of emotion and thought in artistic expression. By examining representative excerpts from these Western poets alongside examples from classical Indian texts, this study aims to elucidate the similarities, differences, and unique characteristics of bhavna and vichar in shaping the aesthetic experience across cultural traditions.

Peace and war themes in canonical poems included in literature anthologies for junior high schools in Israel

Purpose The purpose of this research was to study the manifestation of peace and war in the poems included in the new literature curriculum for the junior high school students in Israel. Design/methodology/approach Content analysis. Findings The results of the research, comprised by the content analysis methodology, showed that only three poems could be attributed to the category of war theme. Most of the poems fit to the category of didactic war motif; namely, they describe and refer to wars but are aimed at socializing the readers to peace by presenting them the vainness of wars. Research limitations/implications The brief review addresses only canonic poems and not popular songs. Practical implications The brief review will be directed to decision-makers in author’s country. Social implications Literary works have the ability to play a key role in peace education. Political behavior studies show that patterns of political behavior, such as support for a certain political party, tolerance of minorities and support for human rights are formed and internalized by the individual during childhood and adolescence. Originality/value This research produces a new and sophisticated approach towards the process of political socialization. This brief paper also conveys the new term of “didactic war theme”.

Student Translations of Korean Poetry: A Retrospective Study

In a collaboration between student translators and teachers, they worked to produce Arabic translations of the canonical poems by the Korean poet, Yoon Dong-Joo. In this retrospective study, the revisions to the student translations are classified, explained and justified. Both the translation process and translation product are scrutinized in order to assess the students’ work and to provide an understanding of the translation journey, the aim of which was to produce a poetic work in Arabic that aspires to echo the original text.

1820: Poetics “In the Spirit of Outlawry”

ABSTRACT Far from simply a miscellany of what are now canonical poems, Keats's 1820 volume (1820) puts forward a consistent program of radical poetics. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” I argue that 1820 unfolds a theory and practice that experiment with what poetry refusing a “palpable design” might look like. The romances in 1820 are read thematically as dramas of successful or unsuccessful attempts at controlling the desires of the other. In all the poems the poet seeks to disclose in form and language something acting beyond the reach of the poet's knowledge and management. He formulates lyric poetry as ephemeral and performative, poetic language as independent of its maker's orchestration as “venturing syllables” and as “Chattertonian” (native English) and not “Miltonic” (“artful” and imposed), stanzas as occasions for expansive, that is, paratactic, syntax, and furthermore as deformances of the monumental sonnet form. This project, the article concludes, explains Keats's displeasure at his editors’ inclusion of Hyperion, a poem whose “march” is “undeviating” and written with a “god's” foreknowledge, in a book that experiments with the idea of a poet only as facilitator of an independent artistic life.

The Return of the Barbarians and the Colonial Order of the Archive

Cavafy's barbarians constitute a peculiar metaphor for the (self-)censoring process of revealing and hiding the voices of Others in the colonial order of the archive. The theme recurs in three of his works—an “unwritten” poem, a “hidden” poem, and a poem included in the canon—all of which reflect Cavafy's engagement with British colonialism in Egypt. The novelist and critic Stratis Tsirkas, also a Greek who grew up in Egypt, has argued that Cavafy's rising aversion to the British occupation regime developed alongside the shifting ideological lines of the Hellenic diaspora, as expressed by its dominant segment. Drawing upon Tsirkas's readings of the poems, we can revisit the poet's archive as a kind of “taxonomy in the making” where colonial reality is inscribed. In addition, Cavafy's “recording” of the hidden material allows us to reframe our readings of his canonical poems.

#Ledatoo: The morality of Leda and the Swan in teaching stylistics

The article discusses the morality of W. B. Yeats’ sonnet Leda and the Swan in the context of a widening gap between the sexual mores of earlier times and our own, and whether the poem remains a suitable choice for the teaching of stylistics. I begin by examining stylistics treatments of the poem, and its political, social and artistic context, then move on to consider charges of misogyny against the poem for eroticising and failing to condemn the rape it depicts. To assess these charges I examine other literary uses of the Leda myth both before and after Yeats, including earlier poems which romanticise the rape, and later ones which vilify it. I also consider the implications of my discussion for the teaching of other canonical poems on similar themes. The last part of the paper discusses more generally the place of morality in literature and literature teaching, including stylistics: whether teachers and analysts should promote a moral world view and moral behaviour through their choice of texts and comments on them, or whether there are other valid criteria for selecting and describing a text such as Leda and the Swan. To elucidate current views, I draw parallels with the moral didacticism of the highly influential literary critic F. R. Leavis in the mid twentieth century, and ask whether aspects of his patrician view have undergone a surreptitious revival in some contemporary pedagogy and criticism at the beginning of the twenty first.

Eulogizing a Generation in Elizabeth Alexander’s “When”

Eulogizing a Generation in Elizabeth Alexander’s “When” Abdul Ali (bio) Black death has prompted a number of sonnets that have formed a literary record of how the poet reaffirms humanity in the face of racialized violence on the Black body. Whether we are discussing the latest protest—at this writing, it would be on behalf of Breonna Taylor, the African American woman who was murdered in her own home by agents of the state—or the untold number of Black people who were killed by mobs in 1919 and who inspired Claude McKay to write his canonical poem, “If We Must Die.” Taking McKay’s sonnet as exemplar, given its status in the canon of African American letters, we see Black death strictly through a masculine lens, calling for a lockstep militarized response to racialized violence that captures a measured scene of Black male rage, creating a template by which Black sonnets discussing Black death are judged. Nevertheless, our scholarly literature is finally catching up to the reality that Black women have been writing sonnets for a long time, dating back to Phillis Wheatley in the 18th century. Without the careful reading of Black women poets alongside Black men in our literary discourses on the sonnet, our record of Black life is incomplete, and so much of our humanity erased. There is much delight in reading the ways in which the poet Elizabeth Alexander, while responding to Black death, makes some radical revisions on what we call the “protest sonnet.” ________ Alexander’s and McKay’s poems offer a timely juxtaposition as they engage with the topic of Black death using the sonnet form and allow [End Page 179] us to measure attitudes about gender performance and respectability as it relates to living and dying. We can almost feel the heaviness of Black death from McKay’s “If We Must Die” as death is referenced six times. But as we read further, we understand that death is not the focal point of the sonnet. The question McKay raises is: “How” do we live? Death is a great possibility for Black people in the poem. Hence, the recurring line, “If We Must Die.” However, McKay does not treat death in absolute terms; he invokes the conjunction “if,” making it a conditional prospect. “If We Must Die / let it not be like hogs.” Again, McKay is concerned with how Black men live, if we die, extolling courage and honor as virtues to espouse. This poem is a call to arms. The speaker takes on the persona of a general preparing his troops for battle. In these 14 lines, we get a temperature for the year 1919—perhaps one of the bloodiest summers for Black Americans in history—but also of what the model of Black manhood should look like: fearless, ready for battle, a noble soldier. When we read McKay’s “If We Must Die,” there is little question as to whether it is a protest poem. The sonnet even ends with the words “fighting back.” However, Elizabeth Alexander illustrates Black men as the opposite of a soldier, and in so doing takes us off the battlefield. The Black men that inhabit this throwback to the 1980s are “divine,” “spea[k] French,” “ha[ve] read everything.” These are the Black men who likely attended Yale with the poet. These are post-Civil Rights Black men who can choose how and where they’d like to fight. It is only towards the poem’s final line that we see that the battle these Black men are fighting is an internal one. Alexander writes, “[they] photographed well, did not smoke, said ‘Ciao,’ // then all the men’s faces were spotted.” This final line describes lesions on the face that were consistent with those who were HIV+ during previous generations. The image is significant because it pivots the poem. We do not get any mention of death through the entire poem, and yet it waits ominously in the final [End Page 180] line. This choice speaks to Alexander’s dexterity as a poet: the poem becomes a double-enclosure; structurally it is silent about the AIDS epidemic within the poem, the way...

Permutations of Remembrance and (Counter-) Monumentalization: John Mccrae’sin Flanders Fields

AbstractThe article engages with the cultural impact of John McCrae’s canonical poem “In Flanders Fields” (1915), and more specifically the permutations of cultural memory and heritage discourse inIn Flanders Fields: 100 Years: Writing on War, Loss and Remembrance, edited by Amanda Betts and published in 2015. It shows how thirteen Canadians explore the revolutionary role of the poem in Canadian collective and individual memory, as well as its omissions and misrepresentations. The article juxtaposes the cultural history of the poem with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and its contemporary transformations, also showing how selected essays in the collection bridge the First World War with other armed conflicts. Applying Ann Rigney’s terminology, the article approaches the poem as a textual monument, demonstrating how “In Flanders Fields” has evolved from the role of astabilizerin Canadian cultural memory, providing a cultural frame for later recollections, to that of acalibrator, becoming a benchmark for critical reflection on dominant memorial practices.

Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry by Adriana X. Jacobs

Reviewed by: Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry by Adriana X. Jacobs Roni Henig Adriana X. Jacobs. Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. 344 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001065 In recent years, Hebrew literary scholarship has become increasingly engaged with the multilingual layers of Hebrew literature and the ways in which multilingualism, as a condition of modern Jewish life, played a constitutive role in its formation. The question of linguistic diversity and the growing awareness of the traces of a variety of languages in the fabric of Hebrew have sparked discussions that pertain to such pressing issues as the politics of language, the place of Hebrew within global and transnational networks, and its affinity to world literature. In Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry, Adriana X. Jacobs joins these scholarly efforts by positioning translation as a focal point for understanding Hebrew poetry and its essentially translational poetics. Strange Cocktail, which offers a series of "translation-centered" readings of Hebrew and Israeli poetry, argues that translation is enacted in Hebrew poetry as a creative mechanism repeatedly employed by poets in their own writing. The figure of the translator-poet is posited at the center of this inquiry, and Jacobs skillfully shows how in the work of several major Hebrew poets, translation functions as a generative practice that infuses their writing with new, often unexpected joints, thereby creating new legacies and traditions within a supposedly set and delineated cultural realm. "The poet-translator," Jacobs argues, "occupies the hinge (or hinges) where a narrative turns towards new possibilities, and also where it turns back in an act of revision" (22). It is this range of new possibilities and relations that the book seeks to unravel, through its dynamic readings of the works of four Hebrew poets: Esther Raab, Leah Goldberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Harold Schimmel. The book chapters, which are organized around each of these poets, are abundant with references to additional sources, including works of French, Italian, German, Russian, and American literature. Jacobs's reading weaves an incredibly rich net of associations, generating a fluid yet delicate movement between times, languages, and cultures, in a manner that carries the sensibilities of a poet-translator (indeed, performs a translational poetics) into her own prose. After providing a brief historical contextualization of the ways in which translation was perceived and practiced in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hebrew literature, Jacobs moves on to examining the work of poet Esther Raab and her unpublished translations of Charles Baudelaire. In this groundbreaking chapter, Jacobs confronts the traditional reception of Raab, who has often been seen as the first native Hebrew poet, with her multilingualism and the cosmopolitan affiliations that stir her writing. She compellingly shows how Raab's first poetry collection, Kimshonim, was shaped by her engagement with Baudelaire's text. That engagement, along with Raab's experiences of living in Cairo and frequently visiting Europe, Jacobs argues, allowed her to both break away from the poetic norms of her generation and assert the then-privileged status of an immigrant destined to resettle in the promised land. Jacobs's meticulous reading of Raab's poems in light of her emulation of the transformative immigrant position, reveals not only [End Page 212] the tensions that inhere in her assumed "nativeness," but also the centrality of translation to the construction of nativity in Hebrew literary imagination. The following chapter, which focuses on the work of Leah Goldberg, further explores how translation might blur the borders between "native" and "foreign." In her reading of one of Goldberg's most canonical poems, "'Oren," Jacobs shows that the poem's iconic pine tree is fundamentally a figure of translation, which travels and reappears in a variety of poems written across changing cultural contexts, from Heine to Lermontov. "The figure of the pine is transplanted—indeed, translated—over time, and ultimately read as a native element within the new linguistic and cultural contexts in which it is received" (113). Like the pine, a foreign remnant received as native, translation is reworked in Goldberg's poetry into a mode of writing, which she cultivates...

Adriana X. Jacobs. Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. 344 pp.

Reviewed by: Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry by Adriana X. Jacobs Roni Henig Adriana X. Jacobs. Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. 344 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001065 In recent years, Hebrew literary scholarship has become increasingly engaged with the multilingual layers of Hebrew literature and the ways in which multilingualism, as a condition of modern Jewish life, played a constitutive role in its formation. The question of linguistic diversity and the growing awareness of the traces of a variety of languages in the fabric of Hebrew have sparked discussions that pertain to such pressing issues as the politics of language, the place of Hebrew within global and transnational networks, and its affinity to world literature. In Strange Cocktail: Translation and the Making of Modern Hebrew Poetry, Adriana X. Jacobs joins these scholarly efforts by positioning translation as a focal point for understanding Hebrew poetry and its essentially translational poetics. Strange Cocktail, which offers a series of "translation-centered" readings of Hebrew and Israeli poetry, argues that translation is enacted in Hebrew poetry as a creative mechanism repeatedly employed by poets in their own writing. The figure of the translator-poet is posited at the center of this inquiry, and Jacobs skillfully shows how in the work of several major Hebrew poets, translation functions as a generative practice that infuses their writing with new, often unexpected joints, thereby creating new legacies and traditions within a supposedly set and delineated cultural realm. "The poet-translator," Jacobs argues, "occupies the hinge (or hinges) where a narrative turns towards new possibilities, and also where it turns back in an act of revision" (22). It is this range of new possibilities and relations that the book seeks to unravel, through its dynamic readings of the works of four Hebrew poets: Esther Raab, Leah Goldberg, Avot Yeshurun, and Harold Schimmel. The book chapters, which are organized around each of these poets, are abundant with references to additional sources, including works of French, Italian, German, Russian, and American literature. Jacobs's reading weaves an incredibly rich net of associations, generating a fluid yet delicate movement between times, languages, and cultures, in a manner that carries the sensibilities of a poet-translator (indeed, performs a translational poetics) into her own prose. After providing a brief historical contextualization of the ways in which translation was perceived and practiced in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hebrew literature, Jacobs moves on to examining the work of poet Esther Raab and her unpublished translations of Charles Baudelaire. In this groundbreaking chapter, Jacobs confronts the traditional reception of Raab, who has often been seen as the first native Hebrew poet, with her multilingualism and the cosmopolitan affiliations that stir her writing. She compellingly shows how Raab's first poetry collection, Kimshonim, was shaped by her engagement with Baudelaire's text. That engagement, along with Raab's experiences of living in Cairo and frequently visiting Europe, Jacobs argues, allowed her to both break away from the poetic norms of her generation and assert the then-privileged status of an immigrant destined to resettle in the promised land. Jacobs's meticulous reading of Raab's poems in light of her emulation of the transformative immigrant position, reveals not only [End Page 212] the tensions that inhere in her assumed "nativeness," but also the centrality of translation to the construction of nativity in Hebrew literary imagination. The following chapter, which focuses on the work of Leah Goldberg, further explores how translation might blur the borders between "native" and "foreign." In her reading of one of Goldberg's most canonical poems, "'Oren," Jacobs shows that the poem's iconic pine tree is fundamentally a figure of translation, which travels and reappears in a variety of poems written across changing cultural contexts, from Heine to Lermontov. "The figure of the pine is transplanted—indeed, translated—over time, and ultimately read as a native element within the new linguistic and cultural contexts in which it is received" (113). Like the pine, a foreign remnant received as native, translation is reworked in Goldberg's poetry into a mode of writing, which she cultivates...

Ethnolinguistic Nationalism and Other Political Contexts of Maironis

Widely acclaimed as the Lithuanian national poet, the Catholic clergyman Jonas Mačiulis-Maironis (1862–1932) in his canonical poems of the epoch of national revival expressed his romantic primordialist point of view that every nation has an inherent right to its independence that had been given by divine institution. Linguistic factors determined national identity in Eastern Europe of the late 19th century. Maironis as a follower of linguocentric nationalism modelled the conditions for the elite Lithuanian culture which would be significant at the European level. The longing for the so-called European virtues (universally based on Christian ethics) penetrated through all the poet’s world-view, therefore he was impressed by the diligence and activism of Western nations but did not support the ideas of social activism and individual liberties, opposed the ideas of secular philosophical trends, especially socialism and scientism. Eurocentrist motives in his rhetoric did not mean any challenge to the governing conservative Russian regime because they did not invoke opposition to the ideology of Pan-Slavism which was supported by the Tsarist ideologues. The poetical archetype of springtime awakening was related to the youthful activism of the “new” political nations of Eastern and Central Europe. Maironis was one of the first Lithuanian authors who openly criticized ideas of socialism and positivism; on the other hand, he provoked discussions of the enlightened group of the developing Lithuanian-speaking elite. He regarded the slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity as deceptive justification of populism and collective violence. Sceptically regarding parliamentary democracy, he emphasized the principles of Classical-Christian law and justice and the need for solidarity, consciousness and creativity. Maironis related the ideological dispute of conservative and radical trends to the decisive struggle of Christianity and atheism. He was a consistent and orthodox Catholic thinker, the opponent of any revolutionary upheavals; discussing social questions he emphasized that politicians should take into account doctrine of the Holy See on the obligations of Christians and principles of charity.

Filming a poem with a mobile phone and an intensive multiplicity: A creative pedagogy using stylistic analysis

A film poem is a cinematic work which uses a written, often canonical poem as its inspiration. Film poems frequently exceed the likely intentions of the poet, becoming something new; one creative work is used as a springboard for another. Typically, however, in film poems the poem’s stylistic detail is largely irrelevant to its cinematic execution. In a previous article, I spotlighted how this oversight/limitation can be addressed by bringing film poems into stylistics teaching and assessment. That article showed how stylistic analysis of a poem can be used to drive generation of a screenplay for a film of the poem. But, it did not show how the film could be produced on that basis. In contrast, this article does just that, modelling how a student could make a film from a poem, with their mobile device, where stylistic analysis has been used to stimulate the screenplay. Accompanying this article is a film that I made on a mobile phone. This is of Michael Donaghy’s poem, Machines. In developing this approach for producing film poems via stylistic analysis, I incorporate ideas from the philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, and from his collaboration with the psychoanalyst, Félix Guattari, in their book A Thousand Plateaus. In particular, I make use of their concept of ‘intensive multiplicity’. Generally, this article highlights how common ownership of mobile devices by university students, in many countries, can be used, in conjunction with stylistic analysis, to foster a different approach to interpreting poetry creatively which, in turn, can extend students’ natural capacity for creative thinking.

The Ocular Turn, Misty Poetry, and a Postrevolutionary Imagination

Abstract “The Answer,” a poem by Bei Dao first published in 1978, marks the emergence of a defiant voice in contemporary Chinese poetry and asserts skepticism as the political stance of a young generation in post–Cultural Revolution China. It also heralds a historic transition from an era of sonic agitation to an aesthetics based on visual perception and contemplation. This rereading of Bei Dao's canonical poem and other related texts goes back to the late 1970s, when the political implications of the human senses were firmly grasped and heatedly debated. The author shows that an ocular turn occurs in “The Answer” and drives the aesthetic as well as political pursuits of a new generation of poets. He further argues that, in a moment still enthralled with a revolutionary sonic culture, Misty poetry disavowed aural excitement and was part of the reconditioning of the human senses in preparation for a postrevolutionary order and sensibility.

A morte de Heitor e a recepção da Ilíada em Andrômaca e Troianas de Eurípides

Embora Eurípides tenha feito uso de elementos da Odisseia para se afastar do modelo ‘clássico” desenvolvido por Sófocles, ele explorou diferentes estratégias para engajar os espectadores de suas tragédias por meio da utilização do outro texto canônico por excelência na Atenas do século V a.C., a Ilíada. Este artigo foca esse tópico por meio da maneira como Heitor e seu funeral são retrabalhados em Andrômaca e Troianas. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/cadletrasuff.2018n56a526

PRECARIOUS LIVES: CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND THE FORM OF LIKENESS

In its anonymous reviewof Christina Rossetti'sSpeaking Likenesses(1874), theAcademynotes rather hopelessly: “this will probably be one of the most popular children's books this winter. We wish we could understand it” (606). The reviewer – who later dwells on the “uncomfortable feeling” generated by this children's tale and its accompanying images – still counts as the most generous among the largely puzzled and horrified readership of Rossetti's story about three sets of girls experiencing violence and failure in their respective fantasy worlds (606). While clearly such dystopic plots are not out of place in Victorian literature about children, something about Rossetti's unusual narrative bothered her contemporaries. John Ruskin, for instance, bluntly wondered how Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, who illustrated the story, together could “sink so low” (qtd. in Auerbach and Knoepflmacher 318). In any case, the book still sold on the Christmas market, and a few months later, Rossetti would publishAnnus Domini, a benign pocketbook of daily prayers that stands in stark contrast to the grim prose ofSpeaking Likenesses.It is therefore tempting to cast this work of children's fiction as a strange anomaly in Rossetti's oeuvre, which from the 1870s, beginning withAnnus Domini, to her death in 1894, became almost exclusively dominated by devotional prose and poetry. In contrast, I argue in the following essay thatSpeaking Likenessespoints to a widespread interest throughout Rossetti's writing – but especially in her most well-known poems fromGoblin Market and Other Poems(1862) andA Prince's Progress(1866) – in alternative modes of sociality that refract a conceptual preoccupation with likeness, rather than difference. Following traditions of critical thought that have paid increasing attention to relations that resist oppositional logic – Stephanie Engelstein and Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick's late work comes to mind here – I establish the primacy of a horizontal axis of similarity in bothSpeaking Likenessesand Rossetti's most canonical poem, “Goblin Market.” For Rossetti, the lure of similarity, or minimal difference, manifests itself most often in siblinghood and more specifically, sisterhood, the dominant kinship relation throughout her lyrics fromGoblin Market and Other Poems. Sisterhood anchors the title poem I will examine in this essay, as well as shorter verses such as “Noble Sisters” and “Sister Maude.” At issue in such relations of likeness is the discreteness of a (typically) feminine self. For Rossetti, shunning oppositional structures of desire and difference that typically produce individuation (exemplified in the heterosexual couple form and the titles of her uneasy lyrics “He and She” and “Wife to Husband”) allows for a new (albeit perilous) space to carve out one's particularity as a gendered being.

Collecting uncollectables: Joachim Du Bellay

Lists of wonders have circulated for millennia. Over and over, such inventories of spectacular man made constructions have been rewritten, re-edited and reimagi-ned. Both the wonders and the lists of wonders, preferably of the seven, have had a profound and long-lasting effect, and have been abundantly imitated, copied and reworked. Renaissance creative thinking was obsessed with the seven wonders of the ancient world, and early-modern Europe experienced a surge of visual and verbal depictions of wonders. This article is about a remarkable list of seven wonders, included in one of Joachim Du Bellay’s canonical poems on Roman antiquities (Antiquités de Rome), published in Paris in 1558. Du Bellay shapes his list of wonders by exploring pat-terns of both repetition and mutability. Almost imperceptibly, he starts suggesting connections between 16th-century Rome and distant civilizations. Through the eyes of a fictive traveller and collector, the poet venerates the greatness and la-ments the loss of ancient buildings, sites and works of art, slowly developing a ver-bal, visual and open-ended gallery, creating a collection of crumbling or vanished, mainly Roman, architecture. This poetic display of ruins and dust in the Eternal City is nourished by the attraction of the inevitable destruction of past splendour and beauty. In the sonnets, Du Bellay imitates classical models and patterns. Whi-le compiling powerful images and stories of destruction, he combines techniques associated with both a modern concept of copy and more ancient theories of co-pia. In this context, this article also explores whether Pliny’s Natural History might be a source for the imaginary collection of lost sites and wonders in Du Bellay’s Antiquités.

Un verso de Virgilio Piñera en la capacidad creadora de Reinaldo Arenas: de "La isla en peso" a <i>El color del verano</i>

Este trabajo pretende un acercamiento a El color del verano, de Reinaldo Arenas, a través de un posible desplazamiento poético. El escritor cubano comenta un detalle en su autobiografía que pudiera apuntar hacia un laberinto de permutaciones textuales donde se establecería una conexión, quizás inapelable, con un verso del imperecedero poema de Virgilio Piñera “La isla en peso”. El estudio se encamina hacia un retroceso creativo en el que se sugiera el origen de la idea; o sea, la fuente de donde brotara un fragmento fundamental de la trama de El color del verano. Por supuesto, habría que remontarse al canónico poema, publicado en 1943, con la isla y sus habitantes como protagonistas, para comprender la narrativa hiperbólica de Arenas. El paralelo comienza a delinearse entre ambos textos puesto que en uno se canta poéticamente a la isla en peso; en el otro, el peso de la isla hace que, sin plataforma, se hunda en el mar. La idea modificada toma forma y lo que fuera un verso en el poema de Piñera se convierte en el desenlace de la novela de Arenas.

Letitia Landon's “The Fairy of the Fountains” And Gothic Narrative

“The Fairy of the Fountains” is one of Letitia Landon's most enigmatic and disturbing poems. It makes for particularly difficult reading because Landon sought in this poem to translate the forms of ballad and medieval lay into her own nineteenth-century poetic idiom. Her replication of the ellipses and abrupt transitions common to folkloric forms renders the poem both demanding and powerfully suggestive. These significant challenges to a coherent reading of the poem are magnified by its length. Based on the author's experience of teaching “The Fairy of the Fountains” in an upper-division course on gothic and supernatural literature, this article elucidates how placing it in the context of other, better-known Gothic texts significantly enhances students' appreciation of this long poem by helping to illuminate the most puzzling aspects of Landon's narrative. This approach implicitly asserts that Landon's poem is worthy to be read alongside these equally enigmatic canonical poems and also offers students two much more accessible prose versions of the Melusine legend. Through this comparative, intertextual approach, students gain a rich sense of the variations possible on an ancient folkloric motif and develop an understanding of the place of these texts in nineteenth-century literary history.

The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists

ABSTRACTThis review of Simon Njami's seminal exhibition, The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists investigates the curator's effort to globalize contemporary art through cross-cultural interaction. It argues that the reinterpretation of Dante's canonical poem by contemporary African artists creates an exhibition that is less about art or Africa and more about meanings.