French Symbolism Research Articles

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BAUDLER'S POETRY

This paper explores the poetics of Charles Baudelaire, one of the key figures of French symbolism, through the analysis of his poetic actions, themes, and influences. Baudelaire, known for his vision of a modern world shrouded in dark melancholy and despair, creates a poetic universe that transcends traditional aesthetic norms and lays the foundations of symbolist aesthetics. Through the analysis of Baudelaire's verses, we discover the complex relationship between beauty and evil, as well as the deep melancholy that permeates his poetry. Baudelaire's relationship to man and his view of human nothingness and conflict with the world are also explored, and thus we mark the inseparable connection between poetry and philosophy. Through the use of symbolic language and metaphors, Baudelaire creates poetic images that express existential anxiety and the inner struggle of man with himself. In addition, we analyze the role of poets in the development of Marxist aesthetics and political thought. Through it all, his poetry is a complex, deeply introspective, and universally relevant body of art, as summarized in the book Flowers of Evil, which continues to inspire and provoke readers around the world.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0758/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Possessed by Poe: Hart Crane’s Tribute to il Miglior Fabbro in a Symbolist-Modernist Context

The article explores the ways in which Hart Crane, Stéphane Mallarmé and Mina Loy pay homage to Edgar Allan Poe in their respective poems. A comparative exegesis of the tributes in question reveals the connections as well as the differences between the ways the two American modernist poets and the French symbolist approach the legacy of their eminent American predecessor. A critical juxtaposition of Crane’s, Mallarmé’s and Loy’s poetic texts seems particularly worthwhile in view of the fact that Poe is regarded as one of the fathers of both French symbolism and American modernist poetry, which, in turn, are strongly interconnected. Consequently, the analysis undertaken in the present article results in broader conclusions concerning what, in the context of American and French literature, may be referred to as the symbolist-modernist continuum.

Close, but No Cigar

Close, but No Cigar

Bryusov-lyrics' Genre in a Translation Dialogue with French Symbolism

The subject of the study is an intertextual dialogue between V.Y. Bryusov and Paul Verlaine based on the poem "Croquis parisienne" ("Parizhskoe croquis"). The object of the research is the ways and means of forming intertextual and intercultural dialogue in poetic translations of the Silver Age. The authors consider in detail such aspects of the topic as the unique word usage of the word "croquis" in the use of V.Y. Bryusov, reinforcing the conclusions with quotations from the National Corpus of the Russian language. Special attention is paid to the exclusive use of the word "croquis" as a genre mark, which corresponds to the extensive tactics of mastering genres by V.Y. Bryusov both in translations and in original poetry. The main conclusions of the study are the means allocated by the authors to implement intertextual dialogue in translation: the changes made by the translator to the original text strengthen the dialogic component of the picture developed by the author and weaken the motive of existential loneliness presented in the original text. A special contribution of the authors to the study of the topic is the identification in the translation work of V.Y. Bryusov of the original genre of the ekphrasic type - "croquis"-a sketch associated with the visual and verbal representation of the image. The novelty of the research lies in a detailed description of this impressionistic poetic genre and tracing its semantic and aesthetic connections with the fundamental attitudes of Impressionism in painting.

“A [B]lack Baudelaire”: Linguistic Panic and Symbolism in Amiri Baraka’s 1960s Life and Work

In his infamous Dutchman (1964), Amiri Baraka evokes Baudelaire, the famed forefather of French Symbolism: building upon Véronique Lane’s 2017 monograph, Baraka, a member of the Beat Generation, has a French Genealogy, a practiced knowledge of French Symbolism which begs the application of a Symbolist paradigm to Baraka’s theory, works, and lived experience. In this essay, I justify this Baraka-Symbolist connection before undertaking a structuralist close-reading of both Dutchman and A Black Mass to suggest one understanding of Baraka’s mid-1960s transition from “[B]lack Baudelaire” to Black Muslim. This developmental narrative is founded within the contemporaneous scholarship of Franz Fanon and Baraka’s written take on the Civil Rights Movement. I unpack Baraka’s lived experience through a semiotic rereading of his autobiography alongside Pierre Quillard’s Symbolist play, The Girl With Cut-Off Hands (1891), applying James Harding’s notion of “linguistic panic” to these case studies to narrate Baraka’s development: like the Girl in Quillard’s play, Baraka’s self-genesis is a tale of cutting off (white) extremities, necessarily enacted in both the dramatic and the domestic. Lastly, I accept Baraka’s invitation to interrogate the racial politics of French Symbolism, informed by Mike Sell’s scholarship on the avant-garde, highlighting the Symbolists’ lack of racial sensitivity and the ways in which Baraka’s work draws our eyes to these shortcomings. I conclude that Baraka’s understanding of Symbolism offers us further insight into his radical artistic practices and personal transformation, while demonstrating how Baraka’s use and usurpation of French Symbolism lay bare the racial aporias of the historical avant-garde.

Malagasy ecopoetics

Malagasy literary production has long displayed a discourse with Madagascar’s unique environment, often linking this with an exploration of island identity. This article examines and compares poetic writing in Madagascar across 350 years. It studies the anti-colonial prose poems of eighteenth-century white creole poet Évariste Parny alongside early twentieth-century poems of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, who brings French Symbolism into contact with traditional Malagasy verse, and lyrical poetry by the musicians in the modern folk-pop band Mahaleo, who bring a mixture of traditions to a unique Malagasy style of music. Parny, Rabearivelo, and Mahaleo all build on and break with generic convention of poetic form, and all do so to draw attention to the island’s specific experience of ecological colonial violence and to their interpretation of eco-regional identity. Their writings help us make sense of the ecological changes in Madagascar during and after colonisation, and of the human response to these changes.

Stevens and the Necessity of Distance: International Influence and the Theater Auditorium

Stevens and the Necessity of Distance: International Influence and the Theater Auditorium Hannah Simpson J. HILLIS MILLER described seeing Wallace Stevens perform at a poetry reading at Harvard University around 1950: As the hour went on, Stevens got more and more carried away by his own poetry. His voice got softer and softer, more and more inward, until only those in the first two or three rows, where I happened to be, could hear him. People in the back started leaving, but he paid no attention. Nor did he pay any attention to the loud ambulances and fire engines going by on Mount Auburn Street behind him, bells clanging and sirens wailing. He went right on reading, more and more quietly, absorbed in the sound of his own words. (23) By most measures of what constitutes a “good” public performance, Stevens offered a very poor one, apparently seeking to please only the small world of his own self and a few favored intimates rather than to engage the larger world of the auditorium, or to acknowledge the still larger and encroaching outside world. Miller’s experience echoes Stevens’s own avowed resistance to publicly performing his work: this is, after all, the man who declared, “I am not a troubadour and I think the public reading of poetry is something particularly ghastly” (qtd. in Richardson 225).1 Yet prior to this late-career aversion, Stevens had engaged rather more enthusiastically with the public world of performance: he wrote three plays for the theatrical stage between 1916 and 1917, entitled Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, Carlos Among the Candles, and Bowl, Cat and Broomstick . None of these plays achieved any critical or commercial success in performance, and Stevens would quickly abandon his attempts to write for the stage. Nevertheless, examining Stevens’s early engagement with the theater medium throws new light not only on his later resistance to public performance, but also on Stevens’s careful distancing of larger international “worlds” from his work, and the question of the ideal relation between reality and the imagination that recurs across his subsequent writing. [End Page 82] Here, I trace first the vexed question of the lines of international influence that shaped Stevens’s plays—with particular attention to Japanese noh and French symbolist theater—and, second, how the crowded material world of the theater medium troubled Stevens’s vision of his work. In both instances, the concept of distance is a crucial defining element. As we will see, Stevens self-consciously distanced himself (geographically and otherwise) from the international theater movements and models that seemed to influence his own playscripts. In turn, Stevens’s unhappy experience of the theater medium—specifically, the inflexible material reality of the stage space itself, and the too-close presence of the audience in the auditorium—would reinforce his sense of the necessity of imaginative distance between the individual and material reality, and of a more literal distance between artist and public. This idea of a necessary distance would crucially inform his conception of the relationship between self and surrounding environment in his later poetry and prose. Stevens as Playwright: French Symbolism and Japanese noh Stevens showed early promise as a playwright. His first completed play-script, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, was awarded the $100 first prize for the best one-act verse play by Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine in May 1916. The panel of judges praised its “extraordinary poetic beauty,” but expressed concerns as to “its actability,” admitting that “most of the judges doubt if it would ‘get across’ to more than a fraction of the audience” (“Prize Announcement” 160)—prefiguring Miller’s later description of Stevens’s failure to more literally “get his reading across” to more than a fraction of his Harvard audience. The more pessimistic members of the Poetry panel were proved correct. Despite Stevens’s subsequent revisions attempting to make “the play a play and not merely a poem” (L 194), his playwriting career had already peaked. By the time the Provincetown Players eventually staged Three Travelers in 1920, Stevens was so disillusioned with the public response to his plays that he was not even...

Time and space in Sigbjørn Obstfelder’s prose poetry

The article dwells upon the time and space in Sigbjørn Obstfelder’s prose poetry. The genre of prose poetry came to Scandinavia at the end of the 19th century, on the peak of the French symbolism popularity. The strong influence of the French symbolist Charles Baudelaire is obvious in Obstfelder’s works. The most significant feature that defines the chronotope of Obstfelder’s poems is opposition between man and nature. By a person the author means not a lyrical hero but other people, the whole society, the essence of which can be described as “the abode of many people”. “Other people” are synonymous with the concept of “city”, and this chronotope is clearly seen in many of his poems. The poet describes both nature and city in details and the chaos of the city extremely contrasts with the rich and harmonious life of nature. The opposition of harmony and chaos, sincerity and alienation is emphasized by the contrast between the sounds of nature and the city: between weeping, sobbing, screaming, roaring and the sound of drops, the rustling of leaves and the singing of birds. Despite the beauty and harmony of nature the lyrical hero still cannot exist outside the city for a long time. Perhaps he can exist only in a borderline state — between people and nature, harmony and chaos, trying to combine, unite in the mind both worlds, but staying alone in both of them. The common feature of all his prose poems is transition and border crossing and it can explain the originality of Obstfelder’s prose poems.

Horror Art: A review of The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe

Horror ArtA review of The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe John A. Dern (bio) Magistrale, Tony, and Jessica Slayton. The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe. Anthem Press, 2021. 204 pp. $125.00. (hardcover) Early in their introduction to The Great Illustrators of Edgar Allan Poe, Tony Magistrale and Jessica Slayton observe how the tenor of Professor Magistrale's early American literature survey at the University of Vermont changes when the curriculum turns to the oftmorbid compositions of Edgar Allan Poe: "The level of enthusiasm among the students becomes charged…" (1). Poe tends to have this effect, not only on students, but also on those who illustrate his works, as The Great Illustrators makes clear. Magistrale and Slayton's text is an exploration of Poe-inspired illustrations from the nineteenth century into the postmodern era. As an exploration, the book is a work of depth, not breadth, which Magistrale and Slayton acknowledge (1). In this sense, it is unlike Burton Pollin's Images of Poe's Works: A Comprehensive Descriptive Catalogue of Illustrations (Greenwood Press, 1989). In a prefatory entry to the latter entitled "Using the Catalogue, Filmography, and Indexes," Pollin describes "The Catalogue" portion of his text as "an extensive descriptive bibliography of printed images and illustrations inspired by works of Poe" (xix). The Great Illustrators, on the other hand, tackles what the introduction calls "a paucity of interpretive scholarship that actually explores in any detail the historical sweep of Poe illustrations and their importance" (3). The introduction goes on to promise "close [End Page 99] analyses" of particular Poe illustrators and selections of their work in historical and intertextual contexts, and that is precisely what the book delivers (3). Pollin, in his own introduction, notes that an awareness of the "changing perspective on Poe's rather limited oeuvre" arises from the "broad survey of the illustrations" that he provides in that section of Images of Poe's Works (1). Though their own enquiry is more targeted, Magistrale and Slayton bring an abundance of interpretive depth to the "changing perspective" of Poe's works as they analyze select illustrators' renderings of Poe over the course of a century and a half, from the first chapter, "The French Poe," to the last, "Postmodern Poe." The work of Jacques Derrida provides the paradigm for The Great Illustrators. Approaching illustrations of Poe's works via ekphrasis, Magistrale and Slayton treat Poe's texts as ergons and illustrators' works as parergons: "Derrida states that—without fail and without intention—the ergon is inherently incomplete, thus creating space for the parergon to attach itself" (4). Throughout The Great Illustrators, Magistrale and Slayton reveal again and again how Poe's illustrators take full advantage of the interpretive latitude that Poe's works afford, their own creations attaching themselves to individual Poe poems and stories as complementary narratives. In "The French Poe," the first artist treated—and certainly one of the first to make one of Poe's works his own—is Édouard Manet, whose 1875 illustrations of Poe's "The Raven," as Magistrale and Slayton point out, depict a much more composed narrator than readers of that poem might expect (17). In fact, in contrast to more traditional Gothic approaches to "The Raven," Manet provides an urban setting for the poem, his narrator thus taking on the role of flâneur, à la Charles Baudelaire: "Manet's illustrations offer us a flâneur who subsists in a situation that is as bizarre as it is improbable" (21). In other words, Manet, who was introduced to Poe through the French translations of Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, makes Poe's "The Raven" his own, instilling "his own meaning and emphases onto Poe's poem with the imposition of his work as a framing force" (26).1 As Magistrale and Slayton explain, moreover, "The line from Poe, the quintessential Romantic, to Mallarmé, one of the central figures of French Symbolism, cannot be underestimated" (29). Indeed, Manet's [End Page 100] intriguing and final of his four illustrations for "The Raven"—which has to be seen to be appreciated—demonstrates the artist's "closest confluence" with Mallarmé's translation of "The Raven" (30). In short, in a...

Luminița Bușcaneanu: o viziune postmodernă asupra poeziei simboliste românești

The volume „Romanian Symbolist Poetry”, whose introductory study, selection of texts and bibliography were signed by Luminița Bușcaneanu, includes, in fact, 2 books: the monographic study on Romanian poetic symbolism and the anthology of poetic texts that subsumes a documented selection, performed competently and meant to demonstrate that the 40 authors „present a set of harmonious counterpoint ‚voices’ in general polyphony, which is the universal symbolism.”In the author’s opinion, the Romanian symbolism, in relation to the French one, is “in a different antithesis to the romanticism, arguing with the literary tradition of inspiration, in principle, folkloric – but, nevertheless, without ‚insurrections, without the publicity of the separation or the abuse of tradition’ – and trying to adapt the funds of French symbolism to the parameters of another type of artistic sensibility, the Romanian symbolism makes a brave leap to synchronize with the literatures of the world.”

The reception of French symbolism in Georgian Literature

The comparative study of Georgian modernist poetry in the context of French poetry reveals that Georgian poetry of the early XXth ventury is not an epigenetic appendage or periphery of European poetry. It creates its original invariant, which in a way expands and expands the mythohraphic discourse and mythological character of French poetry, chronotopes, cultural and landscape spaces.At the beginning of the XXth century the blueroks could not hide their amdiration for the work of French Symbolists, which they considered to be evidence that the path of Georgian literature was directed towards Europe. They had adored poets: Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire,Rimbaud, Verlaine… However, I think the announcement of the Blue roks as Georgian symbolists is very controversial… Therefore, I consider it important to establish the basic principles of French symbolism and, consequently, to connect it with the Georgian poets of the XX century, ib paerticular with the poetry of Galaktioni.

순수시(純粹詩) 시론을 넘어: 김춘수 시론에서의 폴 발레리 시론의 전유

Chun-su Kim understood the essence of French symbolism as Platonism. The concept of Platonism’s Idea is inherited by Baudelaire’s poetics of artificial paradise and Mallarmé and Valéry’s metaphysical exploration of the self. The concept of pure poetry as poetry that is composed of only musical elements excluding all elements other than poetry was artistically realized in Baudelaire’s poetry, starting with Poe. The first use of the phrase “la poésie pure” in Valéry’s poetics was found in “Avant-propos à la Connaissance de la Déesse”. Next, in Valéry’s prose “Situation de Baudelaire”, he thought that Mallarmé developed Baudelaire’s poetry with perfection and poetic purity. In Valéry’s prose “Propos sur la Poésie”, he pointed out that the expression of excitement was incidentally pure. In Valéry’s prose “Nécessité de la Poésie”, he emphasized the importance of intellect in poetizing and the importance of abstract thinking. Furthermore, he asserted that poetry should be inevitably narcissism. Finally, in Valéry’s prose “Poésie Pure”, it was emphasized that pure poetry should be an inaccessible ideal. Chun-su Kim described in detail the pure poetry that built up abstract thoughts into the poet’s inner world through the musical language in Poetics. Chun-su Kim analyzed Valéry’s poetry in Sense and Nonsense, and criticized Valéry’s poetry for failing to reach the ideal of pure poetry in that it was speculative. Valéry’s poetics of pure poetry was adopted in Chun-su Kim’s poetry. When Chun-su Kim created the works of the musical and philosophical pure poetry, it was same as Valéry’s. On the other hand, Valéry’s poetics of pure poetry was criticized in Chun-su Kim’s poetics, when Chun-su Kim wrote an autobiographical epic that embraced Korean tradition and history. In conclusion, Chun-su Kim created a new poetics beyond poetics of pure poetry by appropriating Valéry’s poetics.

“I had grown wild”: A Critical Reading of Yeats’s Journey towards His ‘Final Mood’

W. B. Yeats had a long poetic career which is marked by three different moods expressed through his poetry. His journey towards the ‘final mood’ has passed through the early years of escapism, romanticism and a trace of pre-Raphaelite influence. Yeats began as a late romantic with his bent towards Irish tradition and folklore. But he soon moved from the dreamland of fairy tales and reached a world of life and reality. With the influence of French symbolism, his conception of beauty and poetry evolved further. The nostalgic yearning for the good, old days landed the poet in a mood of despondency and pensive thoughts. Yeats’s frustrating experience with Maud Gonne and his disillusionment with the prevailing Irish customs led him towards self-introspection. Naturally, his choice of themes became more realistic. The spectacle of war in both Ireland and Europe presented before Yeats a broad canvas of violence and destruction which reflected in his philosophical overtones and mastered imagery throughout his poems especially of the Middle Era. Like a true tragic hero, Yeats’s journey is from darkness to light and from suffering to the joy hidden in its bosom. The painting of gross destruction is left behind and the poetic theme became the gaiety of the sages. Yeats discovered significant meaning of life even through its trivial happenings. He unleashed the beautiful and lofty through individual experiences which are of real value. In his Last Poems the poet’s deeper understanding of human nature elevates him to a person with a rare kind of vision. The poetic joy of this visionary poet is more pronounced than then tone of despondency, desolation and loneliness expressed in his early poems.

SYMBOLISTS ANDREY BELY AND GEORGE BACOVIA: COMPARISON OF LOVE POEMS

The article discusses artistic features of the lyrical poems by A. Bely and G. Bacovia. The author also traces the features of symbolist poetics characteristic of both lyricists – the outstanding representatives of Russian and Romanian symbolism. The author compares the poems “The flying forest sings...” by A. Bely and “Pastel” by G. Bacovia, dedicated to the parting of lyrical characters, to love that is going away. These works reveal the main levels of artistic unity: image system, space-time continuum, lyrical situation, features of poetics and melody. An attempt has been made to translate the poem “Pastel” by G. Bacovia into the Russian language. The relevance of the research is determined by the lack of works devoted to the comparative analysis of Russian and Romanian symbolism, in particular, the lyrics of Andrei Bely and George Bacovia. The creativity of these poets finds its origins in French symbolism and at the same time has a bright individual character. The purpose of the article is to reveal the artistic originality of the worldview of two outstanding representatives of European symbolism, to trace the specific features of covering the theme of love in their works, taking the comparative analysis of A. Bely’s poem “The flying forest sings” and G. Bacovia’s poem “Pastel” as an example. The comparative analysis is the main method of research, it allowed to make a conclusion about the dramatic but bright nature of love in A. Bely’s poem and its pessimistic embodiment in G. Bacovia’s poem. Some conclusions are drawn about the similarities and differences in the image of the lyrical situation, the system of images, the space-time plan, colour values, composition, the ideological content, as well as the melody, rhythmic structure and meter.

‘Ireland is the True Subject for the Irish’: Yeats's Early Nationalist Overstatement

‘Ireland is the True Subject for the Irish’: Yeats’s Early Nationalist Overstatement Dylan Thursfield Yeats’ declaration that ‘Ireland is the true subject for the Irish’ is extremely bold, limiting ‘Irish’ literature to an almost singular concern. But what does Yeats mean by this alarming statement? – and does it stand up to scrutiny? Firstly, we must establish a specifically early-Yeatsian definition of ‘Ireland’. To do this, I turn to his 1898 essay, ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, and his 1899 essay, ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’. These two works offer a manifesto-like outline of what he considered essential characteristics of ‘Irish’ literature during his early nationalist phase. After establishing this definition, I examine whether it holds throughout a cross-section of Yeats’s own poetic canon. I begin by studying two poems from The Rose: ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, and the 1892/5 variants of ‘The Sorrow of Love’. Following this, I investigate how his poetic treatment of ‘Ireland’, and its relation to mythology in his texts, evolved over time by analysing the 1925 version of ‘The Sorrow of Love’. Finally, I illustrate how Yeats had poetic concerns beyond the narrow constraints of ‘Ireland’ by probing the personal interests of ‘Politics’, and the occultist inflections in ‘The Second Coming’. ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ ponders restatement of Matthew Arnold’s belief that Celts have a ‘passion for nature, […] imaginativeness, [and] melancholy’, before claiming: ‘The Celtic passion for nature comes almost more from a sense of her “mystery” than of her “beauty”’ and it adds ‘charm and magic’ to nature, and the Celtic imaginativeness and melancholy are alike ‘a passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact’. The Celt is not melancholy as Faust or Werther are melancholy, from ‘a perfectly definitive motive’, but because of something about him ‘unaccountable, defiant, and titanic’.1 This subtly turns Arnold’s postDarwinian classification of Celtic peoples as a lesser race upon itself.2 They are presented as having the ability to defamiliarise readers’ experiences of ‘nature’ by endowing it with a ‘natural magic’ that is ‘the ancient religion of the world’3 – a ‘magic […] forgotten’by Keats, Shakespeare, and Virgil, who Dylan Thursfield Studies • volume 109 • number 436 414 ‘Look at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant’.4 By insisting there is a ‘forgotten’, ‘ancient’ alternative to the ‘Greek way’ of viewing the world,5 this text seeks to establish a potentially pre-Hellenic basis for ‘Ireland[’s]’ history and views: a different, yet equally ‘valid’, way of life to that favoured by the English and classical peoples. Early-Yeats’s ‘Ireland’ is concerned with nature, (pre-)Hellenic in its origins, and opposed to the dominant trains of thought in England’s literary culture. ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’ reiterates and deepens the above by stating that ‘a new kind of romance, a new element in thought’ is being ‘moulded out of Irish life and traditions’.6 Reading this statement in conjunction with Yeats’s interest in French Symbolism (arguably a precursor to literary modernism)7 underscores how this text locates Ireland at the forefront of literary development. These claims towards the avant-garde are married with the apparent ‘Romantic’ and ‘classical’ power of Ireland’s old poetry, which contains ‘the clouds of evening and dawn, that became in Homer’s mind the memory and prophecy of all the sorrows that have beset and shall beset the journey of beauty in the world […] [and] the spirit of Helen’.8 The image and metamorphoses of ‘the clouds of evening and dawn’ are drenched in (post-) Romantic notes evoking Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ and Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’. By asserting that these antique ‘clouds’ are present in Ireland’s ‘ancient’ poetry, the work suggests Ireland is innately classical and coloured by Romantic ‘beauty’; yet, perhaps puzzlingly, she also ‘has in her […] the forms in which the imagination of Europe uttered itself before Greece shaped the tumult of legend into her music’.9 Early-Yeats’s ‘Ireland’ is: concomitantly classical and pre...

Literary rhythm of the cycle by Isaac Babel “Red Cavalry”

This article examines the cycle by Isaac Babel “Red Cavalry in the context of literary trends of the 1920s. I. Babel avoided various literary organizations and loud manifestos; therefore, his role within the post-revolutionary literary system remains somewhat isolated: he had a reputation of a realist writer (although with some reservations) mostly due to specifically historical backstory of his military cycle. In this regard, his literary style is rarely viewed as a phenomenon of modernist literature – metareflective, intertextual, centered on the experiments with literary form. However, the works of I. Babel can be viewed as a characteristic to modernism phenomenon of “synthesis of arts” – not only painting and cinematography, but music as well. His musicality is traced both on the semantic level and particular recurring images, an on the level of rhythmic structure of the text. The article demonstrates “pretexts” (genre and stylistic models) that underlie the cycle “Red Cavalry”: folk songs, revolutionary marches, poetry of French symbolism (namely A. Rimbaud), which targeted to substitute versification with a rhythmic prose. Thus, some elements of I. Babel's prose are interpreted as variations of a free verse, which corresponds to the draft genre definitions given by the author to his stories, as well as to his writing style testified by some of his contemporaries.

Chinese Poetic Modernisms ed. by Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Poetic Modernisms ed. by Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke C. T. Au Paul Manfredi and Christopher Lupke, editors. Chinese Poetic Modernisms. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 403 p. There is a saying that a good book has no ending, and Chinese Poetic Modernisms definitely falls under this category. This long-awaited ambitious project undertakes "the daunting task of examining Chinese poetic modernisms in different periods and locales" (7). Most of those ambitions are, in the end, fulfilled. The concept of Chinese modernisms has long been indistinctly present. In books focusing on modern Chinese literature, more often than not Taiwanese modernism, Hong Kong modernism, and Macanese modernism are treated separately from that of mainland China. The editors pledge to bring the concept to light through fourteen essays, divided into four sections that help delineate varied trajectories of modernist poetic trends. By following the book's logical structure, readers first become familiar with the major features of Chinese modernism that emerged mainly during the republican period. For example, Lan Dizhi's essay provides a comprehensive overview of the development of Chinese modernist poetry. The discussion revolves around the literary arts journal Xiandai, tracing its roots back to Li Jinfa and his contemporaries in the 1920s and tracking the trend's evolution through the 1940s (the Nine Leaves school, Jiuyepai) and identifying modernist characteristics such as "anti-lyricism," "anti-improvisation," and "anti-logical" (29). Modernist poets were eager to "advocate 'modern feeling' and 'pure poetry'" (32). Lan sheds light on two more characteristics embedded in Chinese modernisms from the outset. For one thing, modernist poets were under the influence of various Western sources, though in a complicated manner; for another, classical Chinese poetry played a significant role in their works. Contributors explore these intricate relationships. To name only a few Western influences: Li Jinfa was influenced by French Symbolism, Dai Wangshu by Spanish modernism (Lan 21-37), Feng Zhi by Rainer Maria Rilke (Geraldine Fiss 38-56), Yuan Kejia by T. S. Eliot (Yanhong Zhu 57-81), and Wen Yiduo's little poems by Shakespearean sonnets (Dian Li 82-106). Lan concludes that, as far as "acquisition of literary elements from both Chinese and [End Page 238] Western traditions" is concerned, these poets adopted a comparative literature approach which allowed them to absorb "the strengths and carefully eschewing the weaknesses of each tradition" (37). Lan's views, to various extents, are echoed by other contributors, not only in this section, but also elsewhere in the book. Expanding upon the apparent comprehensiveness of Lan's account of the first and third moments, the emergence of the Xiandai modernist group and the Nine Leaves school, Michelle Yeh's, Chen Fangming's (132-52), and Ruan Meihui's (153-80) discussions widen the geographic range and time frame, focusing on, but not limited to, postwar Taiwanese modernist poetry. Yeh identifies "six distinct moments when modernism is embraced as a literary paradigm" (108). While the formation of Le Moulin Poetry Society (Fengche Shishe) (1935-1936), which advocated Surrealism, is considered the second moment of modernism, the Modernist school (Xiandaipai) and the Epoch Poetry Society (Chuangshiji Shishe) arose in the 1950s as the fourth moment. Ruan's and Chen's essays, respectively, help elaborate these two moments. The fifth moment refers to the Modernist movement in Hong Kong in 1956, when Ma Lang published the journal Wenyi Xinchao (New Trends in Literature and Arts). Finally, the modernist poetry that emerged in post-Mao China is considered the sixth moment. Interestingly enough, Yeh's major concern does not lie in any one of these moments. By examining Xia Yu's poetry, Yeh seems to imply that there is one more moment–a seventh–in Chinese modernisms, which suggests that modernism is still an active force from the 1980s onward in Taiwan (111). At the outset, Chinese modernisms are an outgrowth of comparative studies. The fact that Dai Wangshu had translated Paul Van Tieghem's On Comparative Literature (1931) reminds us of the significance of the mutual relationships of different literatures. To varying degrees, most contributors in sections 1 and 2 have embraced the concept of "influence study." The emphasis in section 3, however, lies elsewhere; factual connection between...

Brother Journalist: Tom Wolfe and the Serapions

Abstract The purpose of this article is to analyze a peculiar case of a creative appropriation, made possible by a combination of coincidences, readings, and misconceptions during the time Tom Wolfe (1930–2018), future bestselling author, reformer of American journalism, and controversial public intellectual spent at Yale as a graduate student in the 1950s. This appropriation appears to have been generated by a confluence of factors that impressed itself on Wolfe’s mind. He referred to this confluence as “the Serapion Brothers” and repeatedly confessed to having been influenced by this group. The Serapions, according to him, were experimental, avant-garde Soviet writers, heirs to French Symbolism, who wrote about the Russian Revolution in a highly unconventional manner. Critics took Wolfe’s incorrect statements at face value; the far-reaching influence was noted but never looked into. In fact, this influence seems to have stemmed from a source misunderstood by Wolfe himself, making his authoritative work resonate with a different element of Russian modernist tradition and informing his theory of the New Journalism. Wolfe’s professed realism was dominated by aesthetic and differed in the way of engaging the reader’s subjectivity from the European tradition that he claimed to have followed.

Poetic Life Picture of French Symbolism Aesthetics

Poetic Life Picture of French Symbolism Aesthetics

Reading Colour: George, Rilke, Kandinsky, Lasker-Schüler by Rey Conquer

Reviewed by: Reading Colour: George, Rilke, Kandinsky, Lasker-Schüler by Rey Conquer Neil H. Donahue Reading Colour: George, Rilke, Kandinsky, Lasker-Schüler. By Rey Conquer. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019. Pp. x + 272. Cloth £55.00. ISBN 978-1788746755. As the title suggests, Reading Colour addresses an activity, a relationship of engagement, between a reader and a poetic text, that produces a meaning, however differently. As an ongoing activity, the reading of color provides an exemplary exploration of the production of literary meaning and limits of verbal representation in the period of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century German literary modernism. For Rey Conquer, the language of color, whether in literature or in practical use in the world, has “a certain elusiveness with respect to meaning,” which can only be ascertained through careful parsing, attentive close reading, as it “oscillate[s] between semantic richness and emptiness or indifference” (3). The question of how color functions— how it signifies—condenses broader questions of literary signification, and what better place to study such condensation of signifying practices than in Dichtung? The poets of the subtitle make particularly florid (if not also floral) use of color, which, in turn, makes the question of color a good point of entry to understanding the individual poet, the period, and the problem with verbal color. In order to establish the theoretical contours of the discussion, Conquer’s very well-researched study draws upon a broad range of sources from related studies of other literatures (American, French, English, etc.) to studies of cognitive science and perception, natural science (plants, birds, etc.), linguistics, film, philosophy, and especially art history, while keeping the focus on the literary question about color and how it works, framing the problem between the “brute reality of colour” (20) and its “semantic unresolvedness” (20). The cornerstone of the argument for this period is, necessarily, Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles” (Vowels, 1871), which teases with its suggestions of referential correspondences between language and color— “A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, voyelles” (A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue, vowels)—while highlighting the arbitrariness of such equations. If it were only so easy! Rimbaud channels Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences” from Flowers of [End Page 619] Evil (1857; not cited by Conquer), in which he imagines a “forest of symbols” where “Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent / Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, / Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, / Les parfums, les couleurs et les son se répondent” (Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance / In a deep and tenebrous unity, / Vast as the dark of night and as the light of the day, / Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond, trans. William Aggeler, 1954). Here, scent, sound, and color intermingle into a unified, synaesthetic, and self-contained symbolic realm. Both poems amounted to manifestos for French symbolism with its hermetic aestheticism, which leads Conquer directly to Stefan George, but not before establishing in the German context points of instructional contrast with illuminating readings of poems by Arno Holz (excerpt from Phantasus, 1898–1899/1916–1929) and Kurt Schwitters Merzgedicht (“An Anna Blume,” 1919). This lineage and these readings demonstrate the new materiality of poetic language as it separates itself from any easily referential or transparent realism in favor of its own textured textuality as object and artifice, paralleling the trend toward abstraction in the visual arts as a manipulation of line and color on/in its own two-dimensional surfaces. The first two of four main chapters examine in prismatic detail George’s brilliant aestheticism and mosaic surfaces of rhymed language (“Gerformt aus feuerrotem golde / Und reichem blitzendem Gestein,” Die Spange); and then Rilke’s exquisite formalism that balances in equipoise the visual and the verbal, surface and depth, image and word, with painterly color as the visual mediation, like his use of grammatical subjunctive on the conceptual level. Whereas these chapters place emphasis on the construction, the fabrication, of the poems, the next two probe the interactive process of reading poems, where color has cut the cord of referentiality altogether in order to forge possibilities of meaning in relation to other words and usages...