Lyric Form Research Articles

Trumpets of Lepanto: Italian narrative poetry (1571–1650) on the war of Cyprus

This paper aims to shed light on the corpus of Italian heroic narrative poems, written during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (1571–1650), on the war of Cyprus and the battle of Lepanto. While arguing that the literary significance of the event in this corpus can only be caught through a diachronically, geographically, and textually broadened vision, the article extracts among the discursive characteristics of this corpus four major issues that can guide our interpretation. First, early Lepanto poems are inclined to adopt features (shortness, lyric forms) that blur their adherence to categories by which they are commonly described. Secondly, beyond prevalent and common themes concerning internal discord and demonization of the Ottomans, their content and (critical versus laudatory) rhetoric are strongly determined by the cultural and geographical community in which authors operated, which further contributes to the variety within the corpus. Thirdly, poems written in circles close to Torquato Tasso show a remarkable proximity to his Gerusalemme liberata. Fourthly, an extension of the analysis to later Lepanto poems, where the battle functions as a Mediterranean event in both romanticized and moralizing settings, shows the importance of Tasso’s authority and its interaction with other sources.

Reading Lyric's Form: The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals

Reading Lyric's Form:The Written Hand in Albums and Literary Annuals Lindsey Eckert In her introduction to the 1832 edition of Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-book, Letitia Elizabeth Landon laments, "The ideas that seemed at first so delightful, are grown common, by passing through the familiarizing process of writing, printing. and correcting."1 Landon's comments are directly informed by her extensive experience with writing, printing, and correcting, particularly as a prominent contributor to and editor of British literary annuals like Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-book, The Keepsake, and Heath's Book of Beauty.2 Landon's contemporaries also saw their work "grown common" in literary annuals; authors such as Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and William Makepeace Thackeray were frequent contributors.3 Such notable authors—along with the volumes' attractive bindings and elaborate illustrations—made the annual one of the most commercially successful genres in the period, "dominat[ing] the market for poetry from 1825 to 1835" at a time when it was shifting away from poetry to prose.4 In the context of the literary marketplace in which Landon and her annuals were a driving force, her introduction to Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-book points to the specific commercial and material conditions facing Romantic writers. Initially, her emphasis on the distance between "delightful" ideas and the "familiarizing process" of their composition seems to echo more well-known Romantic descriptions of inspiration and writing, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous metaphor in A Defence of Poetry that the mind is "a fading coal."5 Shelley's assertion that "when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline" is an abstract claim rather than an allusion to the physical process of composing lines of type to be printed on a press.6 Indeed, throughout A Defence of Poetry Shelley eschews the material conditions of handwritten composition as well as its tangible transmission to readers via print and the marketplace. By contrast, Landon points to the practical realities that mediate poetic ideas into commercial products. Her own writing, she claims, has become tiringly familiar to her, a feeling perhaps shared by many writers forced to [End Page 973] reread their work as it makes its way to publication. But beyond that, she suggests that through writing and, more importantly, printing, correcting page proofs, and ultimately selling her work, its literary content somehow seems familiar in more general and negative ways. For Landon, material form takes the sheen off of one's ideas, and the further removed that material form is from the author—say, a printed lyric as opposed to a handwritten poem—the more common, tired, and familiar a work becomes. Landon's preoccupation with the "familiarizing process" that transfers poetic ideas into common and even banal material forms was not unique. Others also worried that new technologies and industrial techniques such as steam and iron printing presses, stereotype printing, edition binding, and mechanized paper production injected a new type of uniformity into literature. Thomas Carlyle went so far as to decry "the Mechanical Age" in which he lived.7 "[B]ooks," he observed, "are not only printed, but in a great measure, written and sold, by machinery."8 The vast amount of printed texts that these technologies produced and the rapidly expanding reading public that consumed them caused nineteenth-century writers, especially poets, to rethink the relationship between literary forms—lyric, ode, sonnet, ballad—and material forms—manuscript, book, broadside, newspaper, musical score. As Celeste Langan and Maureen McLane have asserted, "[W]e find in this period a sustained effort to reimagine poetry not as a genre—a literary kind among kinds—but as a medium."9 Focusing on the mediums of Romantic poetry, particularly manuscript albums and printed literary annuals, this article explores connections between poetic form and the various material forms it takes. My approach takes its lead from the New Lyric Studies and its arguments for historical poetics.10 Scholars such as Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson have convincingly argued that transhistorical understandings of lyric mistakenly conflate different types of poems that would have been distinct for historical readers and that likely would have encouraged different methods of reading genre...

Lyrical Television

Lyrical Television Scott MacDonald (bio) Lyric poetry has ancient roots. Aristotle distinguished the lyrical as one of the three broad categories of poetry (along with the dramatic and the epic). Over the centuries, many have attempted precise definitions of the lyric/lyrical, but most would agree with the classic understanding of the lyric as "a brief subjective poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, and creating for the reader a single, unified impression."1 Most definitions also specify that the lyric poem is an openly subjective expression of the poet. P. Adams Sitney was perhaps the first film scholar to understand that while the commercial motion picture is generally dramatic and/or epic, cinema has its own lyric tradition, epitomized by the films of Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie. Sitney's definition of the cinematic lyric: The lyrical film postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision. In the lyrical form there is no longer a hero; instead, the screen is filled with movement, and that movement, both of the camera and the editing, reverberates with the idea of a person looking. As viewers we see this mediator's intense experience of seeing.2 That independent cinema, particularly what has usually been called "avant-garde film," has often been understood as generally "poetic" and specifically lyrical by commentators is no surprise, since so many of those who shepherded cinema and [End Page 32] cinema studies into academe had received their academic training as students of literature and language. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that the lyrical film remains an academic idea: the audience for the kinds of lyrical cinema Sitney explored in Visionary Film remains largely confined to colleges and universities and to museums/archives—though this is by no means an insubstantial audience. After all, much the same might be said of lyrical poetry itself.3 Despite (or perhaps because of) the long literary history and the more recent cinematic history of the lyric, however, the idea of "lyrical television" can still seem strange—even to some of those for whom television is an object of serious study. And yet, the lyrical is very much alive within commercial television, in both obvious and subtle ways. 1. The Commercial Lyric For those committed to the idea that poetry must inevitably be non-commercial—if not in its distribution, at least in its initial motivation—my arguing that many television commercials are poetic lyrics might seem anathema. Indeed, one could argue that even the most lyrically poetic of advertisements is not a truly subjective expression in the traditional sense, since the manufacturers of the product advertised are making an institutional decision to hire an ad agency to produce the ad. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that certain advertisements are lyrical in their impact and that these ads do express the enthusiasm and commitment of the producers of the advertised product as well as the excitement on the part of those who create the ads, if not about the specific item advertised, at least about the wonders of new technologies and the opportunity to sing their praises. The 2014 ad for the Apple iPad Air can stand as a useful instance. The 90-second iPad commercial (by kinokid 77) is made up of 74 shots, accompanied by music and a voice-over by Robin Williams. The visuals offer both panoramic landscapes and intimate views of natural and architectural wonders, as well as scenes of adults and children interacting with others during artistic and sporting activities. The images are deftly edited and, to paraphrase Sitney's definition, fill the screen with movement, both of the camera and the editing, and reverberate with the idea of a person looking. The interplay between the montage of images and the voice-over and evocative music is complex and precise. The voice-over, recycled from Peter Weir's The Dead Poets Society (1989), is the now powerfully poignant encomium to poetry by the John Keating character, played by...

Visual Discourse in Petrarch's Sestinas

Visual Discourse in Petrarch's Sestinas Francesco Marco Aresu Introduction MS Riccardiano 1088 is a paper codex of seventy folios, dated between the end of the fourteenth century and beginning of the fifteenth, and conserved in Florence in the Biblioteca Riccardiana.1 It is a miscellaneous manuscript that preserves a redaction of Francesco Petrarca's canzoniere (in the Malatesta form).2 The copyist starts transcribing Petrarch's poems in two columns, the odd lines on the left and the even lines on the right, with the significant exception of the sestinas, which are copied in a single column on folios 17r, 20r-v, and 25v. After folio 26v, a sudden change of pen, ink, and layout occurs. Halfway through his transcription of the canzoniere, the copyist leaves a dramatic testimony of his scribal resolutions. From now on, as he tells the readers on folio 27r, he will discontinue the practice of following different layouts for different metrical genres, distancing himself from Petrarch's conventions as we know them from his partially autograph manuscript of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (henceforth RVF): MS Vat. Lat. 3195.3 Instead, the copyist will uniformly transcribe poems of any type in the same format, one verse per line, proceeding vertically: "Non mi piace di piu seguire discriuere nel modo cheo tenuto da quinci adietro cioe di passare daluno colonello alaltro, ançi intendo di seguire giu p(er) lo cholonello tanto che si co(m)pia la chançone o sonetto chesia [I don't wish to continue writing the same way I have done so far, that is, switching from one column to the other. Instead, I plan on writing down one column until either the canzone or sonnet is complete]."4 An urge for standardization and simplicity here replaces a more philological approach to the mise-en-page of the exemplar and Petrarch's authorial (and authoritative) editorial decisions.5 In this essay, I explore Petrarch's material treatment of the poetic genre of the sestina (with the exclusion of the sestina doppia, RVF 332)6 in the autograph of the RVF: the aforementioned MS Vat. Lat. 3195.7 I outline how [End Page 185] Petrarch's material choices isolate the sestinas from both the poetic experiments of his precursors in developing the form (Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Arnaut Daniel, Dante Alighieri) and the other metrical genres in the autograph of the RVF (sonnets, canzoni, ballate, madrigali). Then, I study how the mise-en-page of the sestinas interacts with their metrical form and subject matter. Finally, I focus on this interaction and how it relates to the other lyrical forms and their layouts in the autograph in terms of their semantic contribution to the structure of the canzoniere as an organic book of poems. I intend to show how the sestinas work as material and poetic loci for the progressive synthesis and assessment of the narrative of the songbook, or as niches for metaliterary considerations. Toward a History of the Sestina Often referred to as the lyrical sestina (in order to distinguish it from the narrative sestina or sesta rima), the sestina is a form that, in Aurelio Roncaglia's words: consta di sei strofe esastiche, più una tornada di tre versi. Le parole che terminano i versi non soggiacciono, entro la singola strofa, a vincolo di rima, ma si ripetono identiche in ogni strofa, combinando all'insistenza lessicale il dispositivo dei rims dissolutz…. Da una strofa all'altra varia soltanto l'ordine di successione, che risulta a ciascuna ripresa diverso, governato però da una legge di permutazione rigorosa.8 [consists of six stanzas of six lines each and a tornada of three lines. Within each strophe, words at the end of the lines are not subject to any rhyme scheme, but are repeated identically in all strophes, combining lexical insistence with the device of rims dissolutz…. From strophe to strophe, only the order of presentation varies: it is different at every round, though it still complies with a rigorous law of permutation.] Roncaglia's succinct definition requires some expansion. The notion of rims dissolutz (or rimas dissolutas; also rims estramps or rimas estrampas, literally "rhymes with a limp") refers to a rhyme...

The Contemporary Hero in Sylvie Kandé’s Epic of Futurity, La Quête infinie de l’autre rive

The Contemporary Hero in Sylvie Kandé’s Epic of Futurity, La Quête infinie de l’autre rive Alexander Dickow (bio) While scholars like Lynn Keller and Evie Shockley have devoted significant work to women’s epics in English, no similar scholarship exists on Francophone women writers, for lack of a comparable corpus. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and H.D. provide the beginnings of an Anglophone lineage that culminates in contemporary works such as Alice Notley’s Descent of Alette. By contrast, Sylvie Kandé’s Neverending Quest for the Other Shore: Epic in Three Cantos (La Quête infinie de l’autre rive: épopée en trois chants), published by Gallimard in 2011, is practically alone as an epic in contemporary French and Francophone literature by both women and men. Kandé is a Franco-Senegalese scholar and poet who has lived in New York for more than twenty years. In the Neverending Quest, she recounts at least two stories: that of the early 14th-century Emperor of Mali, Bata Manden Bori, known as Abubakar II or Abu Bekri II, and that of the thousands of African migrants who attempt to reach Europe. According to Kandé’s foreword, Abubakar II launches a massive expedition to explore the ocean to the West of Africa, never to return (13–14).1 The first two cantos recount the misadventures of Abubakar’s expedition, which include an attempted mutiny. Kandé imagines several versions of their final fate, including arrival in the Americas. The migrants’ expedition to European shores occupies the third and final canto. The migrants travel on a dangerous boat referred to as a patera. Originally a kind of shallow, flat-bottomed [End Page 399] vessel, the term has come to designate any boat carrying clandestine immigrants. The fate of these migrants, after the many travails of the passage to Europe, remains uncertain at the end of the epic, when a coast-guard vessel overtakes the patera and leads away the migrants, perhaps to a detention camp to await deportation. What kind of epic is Kandé’s Neverending Quest? In his well-known discussion of the genre, David Quint proposes a model of two competing epic traditions, the epics of the winners and those of the losers. But Quint’s victor or vanquished, winner or loser dichotomy tends to suggest a too-rigid conceptual dualism. I propose instead that epics vary widely (and not dualistically), particularly with regard to their temporalities. In other words, epics display representations of present, past, and future specific to each epic (but partially determined by their larger traditions, whether Greek, French, African, etc.). Sylvie Kandé offers the example of an epic of futurity. Rather than dealing in foundations and commemoration as epics often do, Kandé’s deals in becomings and unfoldings, potentialities and possibilities. Kandé participates in what Rachel Blau DuPlessis has called, with reference to many long poems by women, revisionary mythopoiesis (105–122). Yet in the act of rewriting the histories of Mali and clandestine migrants, Kandé suggests that history in general is always in process, always being renegotiated, that history is itself part of the future as much as the past. Futurity is also evidenced in her heroes, who are always still in the making, a promise rather than a gift. Kandé orients her epic toward the future in order to launch a communal ethical project: she ultimately demands that her reader carry on the task of reimagining an authentic contemporary hero. The Neverending Quest in context: an epic among epics As a matter of course, theoretical treatments of epics and the epic tradition turn on issues of temporality, historical consciousness, and their relation to narrative or lyric form. More than any other genre, the epic’s literary form manifests as an allegorical projection of a conception of history. In this view, a cyclical narrative (for instance, Saint-Amant’s unusual Moïse sauvé [Moses Saved]2) reflects a cyclical vision of history as eternal return. A radically digressive shape (like Byron’s Don Juan) contests historical teleology to suggest that history leads nowhere in particular. Finally, [End Page 400] an empire-building, end-oriented tale of relative ideological coherence (the Aeneid) implies a similarly end-oriented...

Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse

Reviewed by: Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse David William Foster Shellhorse, Adam Joseph. Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina. U of Pittsburgh P, 2017. Pp. xiv + 258. ISBN 978-0-82296-447-3. Many years ago, I published Cultural Diversity in Latin America (U of New Mexico P, 1994), in which I analyzed a series of Latin American verbal texts that were scarcely considered literature at the time (Latin American sociopolitical commentary, the ghosted autobiography of Eva Perón, child-oriented musical lyrics). Some colleagues complained that I was wasting my time with texts one would certainly not be teaching in the Latin American literature classroom. In general, the book did not much influence the debate just beginning to jell on criticism of Latin American literature, although some have been cited in subsequent criticism on the texts involved. In 1993, John Beverley published Against Literature with Minnesota. Since he has been better situated than I to influence cultural debates, his work has been notably influential, as befits the voice of someone who has been central to ideological controversies over Latin American writing. The one major difference between these two books is that I included Brazil; Beverley has rarely made reference to Brazil in his writing. Shellhorse's interesting monograph, titled Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina, is immediately attractive, then, because it is firmly grounded in the postulates of Beverley and others, and it is additionally important because the author is, unlikely many of his mentors cited, well aware of the importance of including Brazil in any legitimate use of the adjective Latin American. And, by focusing on Argentina and Brazil (some will lament the absence of Mexico here), in highlighting texts from these two major centers of Latin American cultural production, Shellhorse is implying their viability for other continental cultural centers. Anti-Literature, I would venture to say, is now squarely within the mainstream of the teaching of Latin American literature, at least as evinced by leading programs and the principal literary journals. That is, no one would seem to earn much grief anymore for teaching the écriture feminine of Clarice Lispector or sociopolitical and historical novels of David Viñas—or even, for that matter, of teaching Brazilian literature as an integral part of a Latin American Studies program, which was not true a couple of decades ago (which is why scholars like Beverley never felt like they had to pay much attention to Brazil). Indeed, the turn away from literature as an aesthetic phenomenon, seen in the declining enrollments in traditional literature-based courses, has sent my colleagues who used to decry my teaching popular culture scrambling for innovating ways to teach poetry, for example, alternatives to traditional lyric forms examples of which are abundantly represented in Shellhorse's collection of essays. Shellhorse understandably thumps the so-called Boom for its proposed monumentalization of the grand narrative, only to finally get right the representation of Latin American origins, history, and identity in ways in which the Romantic or Realist novel failed to do. The quest for the "purely literary" is a dicey one in Latin America, and the boom texts seemed to make it more reasonable: finally, we had full-throated literary creations that overcame the problem of why Facundo (a sociological treatise) is more intrinsic to Argentine literary than a "key" novel like José Mármol's Amalia. Modernism in poetry and the book in prose narrative established unquestionably literary parameters and standards that barely existed before. It has only been a questioning (beginning with their intransigent masculinist character) of the institutionalization of the two that began several decades ago that allows us now to see that alleged anti-literature is really where the excitement in Latin American [End Page 465] writing really is. But, then, González Echeverría was saying that almost thirty years ago with the publication of Myth and Archive (Cambridge UP, 1990), where, precisely, he emphatically recommended teaching Facundo over any of the pale novels of the period (or Euclides da Cunha's journalistic report...

W. C. Handy and the “Birth” of the Blues

This article reexamines the origins of blues music from a revisionist perspective, seeking to disarticulate mythic understandings—including the popular notion that the blues were “born” out of African American pain and hardship in the Mississippi Delta—from what the best recent scholarship actually tells us about the music's earliest days. The collective portrait evoked by Abbott and Seroff, Muir, Ottenheimer, and Wald is of a lyric form with a long and fragmentary prehistory in Tin Pan Alley sheet music, plausible musical origins in the Ohio River Valley rather than the Deep South, and a critical but unrecorded early flowering within the precincts of black vaudeville, exemplified by the career of Butler “String Beans” May. Songwriter and bandleader W. C. Handy, the celebrated “father of the blues,” is thoroughly implicated in this narrative of blues’ emergence; his roles as popular historian, mythographer, and author of “St. Louis Blues” are reassessed in a way that clarifies his legacy.

Советская поэзия в 1926 году в зеркале анкетирования писателей и читателей

В статье рассматривается проблема востребованности поэзии в СССР на примере всего одного – 1926 года, когда одновременно несколько литературных изданий решило исследовать отношение к ней читателей и самих поэтов. Анализ проведенных опросов читателей и библиотек показывает правоту Бориса Пастернака, который утверждал, что в настоящее время лирическая поэзия переживает кризис, связанный с утратой прежнего ее адресата и несформированности нового реципиента, который бы нуждался в лирических формах презентации субъектности ее автора.

Theocritus’ Idylls: On the Verge of Modern Lyric

Abstract:This study argues that Theocritus experiments not only with archaic lyric forms and models but primarily with concepts that have been associated with modern lyric poetry to conceptualize his lyric aesthetics. Although some of the

Callimachean ‘Lyric’

Abstract:The present paper considers how Callimachus incorporates archaic lyric forms in new articulations in his poems. Despite writing in stichic rather than strophic meters, Callimachus works the epinician, the threnos and the paean into elegiac and hexametric works. In some cases, such as the

Bestiaries of feeling: flies, snails, toads and spiders in Richard Lovelace’s Lucasta: Posthume Poems (1659)

ABSTRACTA number of poems in Lovelace’s Posthume Poems describe tiny creatures: snails, spiders, flies, ants and toads. These poetic subjects are bound up literally in their own or others’ substances – ingested or digested by spider’s webs, toad’s spume or magpies’ bellies. This essay reads these tiny bodies as metaphors for particular affective states closely connected to the intestine conflicts of civil war.Interpreting these feelings through a combination of contemporary affect theory, and the symbolic histories of these tiny creatures within the emblem book tradition, this essay argues these poems draw attention to how the material losses experienced by Royalists render the emotional demands of exemplary self-fashioning increasing difficult to sustain. Lyric poetry becomes an unexpectedly appropriate vehicle to articulate this ambivalence. Declared surplus to requirements (at least by Thomas Hobbes) in the new and heavily politicised aesthetic proposed by William Davenant and Hobbes in The Preface to Gondibert (1650), these “tiny creature” poems exploit the perceived inadequacies of the lyric form to diagnose the conditions of a non-monarchical world.

최남선의 창작 시조와 아포리즘철학적 오판

This research article explores the contextual background of Ch’oe Namsŏn who is well-known for his composition of sijo. Choe Nam－sŏn was drawn to the philosophical concept of aphorism and demonstrated its significance in his literary work, while the renaissance of sijo had arrived in early twentieth century Korea. The revival of sijo as a literary movement was not only Choe Nam-sŏn’s primary concern, but also a site in which we can understand the associations of aphorism with his national consciousness. The following characteristics are found in Ch’oe’s works and activities: First, his literary movement places emphasis on innovation rather than securing tradition. Secondly, his sijo poems show a shift from a lyrical form to the poetic form, by employing meter system into his poems. Thirdly, the transition fails to convey diverse emotion embedded in old sijo. Fourth, Ch’oe’s poems pursue the innovation, but the expressions and titles are somewhat banal and old, frequently employing Chinese characters. Fifth, the sijo poems are focused to represent the contemporaneous trendy thoughts and religious ideas rather than national concerns and ideas.

Individualism and memory: Robert Frost and Tanure Ojaide

This article examines individualism and memory in Robert Frost's A boy's will (1913) and Tanure Ojaide's The beauty I have seen (2010). The paper adopts existentialism as a critical approach. Previous studies on these poets, especially Ojaide, have neglected the individualistic nature of their poetry and stereotyped the poets. This article, thus, brings a new approach to the critical debates and scholarship on these poets. The aim of the article is to show the individualistic and existentialist nature of the poetry of Frost and Ojaide. In the analysis, individualism is examined at the level of form and content; starting with the use of the lyric form and poet-persona inclusion in the poems to the thematisation of gloom and the importance of memory, among others. The paper shows that, truly, these poets are largely individualistic in outlook, and they have expressed existentialist philosophy in their poetry.

Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankine'sCitizen

The longevity of the lyric belies persisting difficulties in terms of its definition and categorization, particularly given the form's evolution in the face of philosophical, sociopolitical and cultural transformations. In Claudia Rankine'sCitizen, the lyric is powerfully refashioned in response to the historical and contemporary tribulations of being a black citizen in America. Rankine's keen awareness of how linguistic injury caused by microaggressions registers in the body leads her to an adoption andadaptationof the lyric form, withCitizenaptly subtitled “An American Lyric.”Citizenis an urgent and timely book that sustains America's conversation on race and racial injustice on a level of national grief, even as Rankine brings it to the level of personal intimacy by asking, “How do you make a body accountable for its language, its positioning?” I contend thatCitizenis a work that extends the lyric's possibilities through creating a hybrid text containing lyric essays, photography, public art and video scripts, which are juxtaposed for intertextual and polyphonic effects. I argue that Rankine uses lyric hybridity to create a poetics of racial trauma that meditates on the effects of racial injustice as it manifests in the bodies of traumatized individuals. Lyric hybridity appears crucial to Rankine's project, since it allows for complex subjectivity and intimate address amidst a clarity of language that enables the reader to perceive how we easily we fail one another in our daily pursuit of relationality, community and citizenship.

A Strangeness in Common: Trespass, Drift, and Extravagance in Robert Frost

While recent work in lyric theory has put the generic category of the lyric into radical question, less attention has been paid to how lyric poets employ the instabilities of figuration and reference to critical, and ultimately social, ends. Taking as a test case the most popular poet of a regionally authentic American lyric, Robert Frost, I argue that Frost uses techniques of lyric voicing to critique the very means by which persons appear as familiar individuals, of a sociality or place, and therefore worthy of certain liberties and property claims. I draw upon Frost’s early New England poems, his relationship with Edward Thomas, as well as his final public lecture, “On Extravagance” to show how he links “drifts” in reference and cumulative “shifts” in sound or sense to the lived experience of transience, particularly within the context of rural economies. Frost allies the vocation of poetry and lyric form not with a rugged isolationism but a more conditional notion of freedom, one that forms across a variety of egoisms, boundaries, and moral or ethical values.

Maria Magdalena – bohaterka jezuickiej epigramatyki. Przegląd źródeł

The body of epigrams authored by Jesuit poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comprise many texts with Mary Magdalene as a character. They were written by representatives of a few generations of authors, regardless of their origins. Such texts can also be found in the work of the most remarkable authors, including – to mention only a few – Bernardus Bauhusius, Franciscus Remondus, Matthias Casimirus Sarbiewski, Petrus Alois, Petrus Iustus Sautel and many others. A revival of interest in supernatural mediators came after the Council of Trent, particularly following the publication of On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images ( De invocatione, veneratione et reliquis sanctorum et sacris imaginibus ) and the Roman Martyrology ( Martyrologium Romanum ). The saints glorified in poetry are mainly representatives of modern times, including the Society of Jesus ( Societas Iesu ) itself. The biblical character of Mary Magdalene has a special place among these “modern” characters. An analysis of Latin collections of epigrams published in print indicates a tendency to produce poetic cycles or to arrange poems according to a particular central rule, especially the chronology of the events in biographical entries on the saint. Such epigrams were written predominantly in the late Renaissance and early baroque, with not so many in the second half of the 17th century. It seems that reading tastes and habits changed considerably during that period. Short texts with blunt conclusions became popular. The themes from previous texts dedicated to Mary Magdalene, such as earthly love versus supernatural love, crying and the fire of love, found their way into other literary genres. However, this ‘migration’ phenomenon has not been explained to this day. As a matter of conjecture, the transition of artistically sublime motifs into lyrical forms may have been strongly influenced by the theory of concepts. After all, it must be admitted that epigrams honouring Mary Magdalene paint a clear picture of the predominant cultural trends in the Renaissance and baroque times and testify to the literary preferences and literary theory of those days.

The Search for a Good Cause in George Meredith’s Modern Love

The Search for a Good Cause in George Meredith’s Modern Love Alicia Williams (bio) George Meredith’s unorthodox poetic project Modern Love (1862) is one of the bleakest depictions of love and marriage in nineteenth-century literature. The poem opens onto a disintegrating union between an anonymous husband and wife. The wife, we find out, has a lover, and the husband, on the advice of his doctor, responds by taking his own. Shortly after an overture for a return to monogamy on the wife’s part, her suicide dissolves the relationship. Filling in the space between these sparse plot points are tableau-like episodes and passages of intense lyric density, which often recount the husband’s psychological and emotional processing of small events in more detail than the events themselves. As a poet and a novelist, Meredith had particular reason to think about the differences between extended narrative and lyric forms and the effect of running those modes together in Modern Love. Formally, Modern Love sits uneasily in the gray area between a thematic collection of fifty sixteen-line sonnets and a variation on novelistic marriage and adultery plots. With this structural ambivalence, Meredith unfolds the answer to the poem’s already grim animating question—how might we crawl out of this tragedy?—at a painfully halting pace. At the very center of the poem, for example, Meredith stalls the already stalling narrative to offer a metacommentary on the adultery plot, taken from a French novel. This sonnet condenses into sixteen lines what I argue is Modern Love’s generic argument for the limitations of the novel in representing marriage. Though the husband avows appreciation for the naturalness of the French novel’s subject, the sonnet also parodies its narrative logic, which depends on a sequence of cause and effect: You like not that French novel? Tell me why. You think it most unnatural. Let us see. The actors are, it seems, the usual three: Husband, and wife, and lover. She—but fie! In England we’ll not hear of it. Edmond, The lover, her devout chagrin doth share; Blanc-mange and absinthe are his penitent fare, [End Page 211] Till his pale aspect makes her overfond: So, to preclude fresh sin, he tries rosbif. Meantime the husband is no more abused: Auguste forgives her ere the tear is used. Then hangeth all on one tremendous If:— If she will choose between them! She does choose; And takes her husband like a proper wife. Unnatural? My dear, these things are life: And life, they say, is worthy of the Muse. (Sonnet XXV, ll. 1–16)1 If the husband wants to praise the naturalness of the adultery plot over the implied unnaturalness of English propriety or romanticized ideals, then why does Meredith comment on that form in the very middle of his narrative poem— instead of writing an adultery novel, for example? Meredith had in fact written a novel about adultery: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, published in 1859, a few years before Modern Love and a few years after one such “French novel,” Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856). Meredith’s experience writing a novel about adultery sharpens Sonnet XXV’s specific critique of novelistic narrative, a critique that applies to both French and English novels, marriage and adultery plots: its causal logic. That is, he requires not an adultery novel but a uniquely narrativized sonnet collection to make his case against the novel’s forward-looking narrative logic. In the first three quatrains of Sonnet XXV, Meredith laughs at cause and effect: Edmond’s diet of blanc-mange and absinthe, an emphatically minute detail that parodies the naturalistic mode, leads to his pale aspect, which leads to the wife’s admiration, which leads to his change in diet to rosbif, which leads to the termination of the affair. For a moment, of course, this conclusion is unclear, and that lack of clarity tellingly reflects Modern Love more closely: “Then hangeth all on one tremendous If:—/If she will choose between them.” A marriage whose future appears to be contingent on the wife’s decision: the similarity of this situation to the husband’s sobers the otherwise...

원형신화를 모티브로 한 애니메이션 스토리텔링 기법 연구 -이성강 감독의 "오늘이"를 중심으로-

우리가 아는 옛 이야기, 옛날~옛적에로 시작되거나 아주 먼 옛날에 라는 서두로 시작하는 이야기는 어린 시절 부모님이나 할아버지 할머니로부터 들어온 익숙한 화법이다. 과거의 이야기는 인류와 함께 시작해서 설화, 전설, 신화라는 이름으로 끊임없이 재창조 되고 있기에 신화 속 원형에 대해 이해하고 무형의 이야기 속 이미지를 시각화하기 위한 애니메이션 스토리텔링 기법에 대한 연구로 재창조하는 과정을 통해 누구나 공감하고 즐길 수 있는 스토리의 재창조와 애니메이션 제작을 도모 할 수 있는 가능성을 살펴보았다. 이에 본 논문은 제주 서사무가 였던 원형신화가 애니메이션 '오늘이'로 만들어 지면서 본래의 이야기에서 작가의 의도와 주제의식에 맞게 원형에서 어떻게 가감되고 변형되어지는지를 애니메이션 스토리텔링 기법을 통해 비교 분석 하여 원형과 신화적 모티브의 활용이 애니메이션 창작에 도움이 되기를 기대하고, 더 나아가 국경과 나이를 초월하는 소재와 주제를 원형 속에서 찾아 관객과의 소통이 원할한 애니메이션이 계속 제작되어지길 바란다. Fairy tales starting with the phrase 'Once upon a time' have been told throughout generations to generations. These stories of the past started with the history of mankind, and are constantly recreated under the names of legends, fables and myths. Through understanding the archetypes frequently occurring in legends and story telling techniques used to visualize them, the possibility of better recreation of stories and animations are sought. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the original form of archetypical Jeju epic dance lyrics are adjusted accordingly to meet the author's intention as it transforms into the modern animation 'Oneuli' By this comparative analysis, the utilization of archetypes and mythic motifs in the creation of animation are expected to enhance the interactions with the audiences beyond the border and age.

Poetry's Circumstance and Racial Time: Aimé Césaire, 1935–1945

This essay starts from a consideration of the conditions of the emergence of Aimé Césaire's long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land in terms of the problem racial enunciation presents for lyric form. The essay proposes the working thesis that Césaire's Notebook is an occasional poem, or a poem of circumstance, but where the occasion in question is of a highly paradoxical sort, namely, decolonization. Taking the poem's long period of open composition and revision (1935–56) as the central problem, the essay goes on to sketch a mode of “circumstantial reading” that would circumvent a reductively historicist understanding of how the poem, its ideas, and its poetics move through time. Underlying the argument is a claim about a particular conjugation of race and time in which contingency converts to necessity and circumstance is not reliably ephemeral.

Archives Are Part of International Knowledge, Not Merely Happenstance

In Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions Siba Grovogui begins with a lyrical form of subversion as he speaks to those in International Relations whom he finds participating in moral justifications of a politics of death. Grovogui's assemblage of the colonial archive points to its operation at multiple registers. It is a site of contested possibility and regenerative change and it belongs to the whole world for a world otherwise. As a response to Grovogui's book, this essay argues that open-ended, multiple engagements can disrupt strategies of bifurcation problematizing asymmetrical zonings and scale making, thereby redefining the nature and terms of science (itself a naturalized modern knowledge formation) without fantasizing a greater sense of knowing or transcendence from ontological specificities and multiplicities.