Historical Poetics Research Articles

W drodze do narratologii historycznej

The paper presents the concept of fundamentally new direction in the field of narratological studies – historical narratology. The author suggests turning to the research experience accumulated in Russian historical poetics by A. Veselovsky, P. Ricoeur’s and W. Schmid works. Narratology is seen as a theory of forming, storing and transmitting the event experience of the presence of the human self in the world. In particular, the work deals with diegetic picture of the world, with the historical dynamics of the most important types of narrative intrigue, and with the ethos of narrative. The most important characteristics of narrative are integrated into the concept of narrative strategy of a particular discourse. The emergence, spread and coexistence of narrative strategies in the diachronic dimension of the culture of storytelling as a form of human communication is at the core of research interest in historical narratology.

“MOVING MEASURE” IN THE CONCEPT OF HISTORICAL POETICS BY A. V. MIKHAILOV

The article aims to analyze one of the aspects of the historical poetics concept proposed by A. V. Mikhailov (“a step from the present”). Together with “a step from the past,” methodologically detailed by A. N. Veselovsky, it allows to approach a significant scientific category of the “moving measure” in literary works. The authors investigate the main aspects of this category. Firstly, the question is posed in regard to the need for research reflection aimed at carefully identifying the “back projection” in the interpretations of the classics, which is an “appropriation” of a classical text, its adaptation to the language of modern culture. “Back projection” interferes with the comprehension of the inherent meanings of a work of art. Secondly, it is the idea of the dynamics of the literary works’ meanings, determined by the constant process of “metamorphosis of the Word,” which requires decoding through the “reverse translation” of a work, its return to the cultural context that had formed the boundaries and vector of its meanings. Thirdly, the “moving measure” is understood as the prospect of analyzing the interpretations of the classics from different cultural epochs as “the voice of the work itself.” It opens up the possibility of including the facts of non-institutional literary criticism in the object of historical poetics, in addition to literary evaluations and opinions, and the subsequent development of analytical techniques for identifying “all interpretative halos” of a classical text.

張錯《連枝草》現代題畫詩對中國古典水墨畫的文本關涉

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.
 題畫詩是中國古典詩傳統之一，然則在現代詩的創作場域中卻尚待開展。現代詩人觀中國古典水墨畫而爲現代詩，本身即涉及詩和畫之間媒體形式的互文關係轉换，特别是中國古典水墨畫自成一再現體系，現代詩人如何出入圖像進行辯證，實爲重要課題。學者張錯既有《風格定器物》之論著，詩人張錯亦有《連枝草》之詩畫創作，兩者交相輻湊，實深化出“在現代情境中古典水墨畫之美與美感經驗如何發生？並且透過現代詩話語予以體現？”此一問題意識。本文即透過“觀中遊：動態觀視”“天工與畫工：生成意識”論述進程，研究張錯現代詩與中國古典水墨畫間的互文現象。從中可見張錯在題畫過程中，一方面爲畫作投置主體，透過畫中山水空間的層次組合，建構主體感官與山水自然的互動關係，突破繪畫本身形式上的静態限制，以詩話語釋放繪畫潛存之動能；另一方面則運用畫法入詩，整合中國古典水墨繪畫傳統進行繪畫山水與人物的再現，使文本産生藝術品評的功能，並揉入自身審美品味，進而使繪畫與詩美學得以共進。
 Inscribing poetry on paintings is a tradition in classical Chinese poetic history, but it has been under-developed in the field of modern poetry. Classical Chinese painting, which involves a process of translation of language into the symbolic system, is viewed by modern poets as modern poetry. Notably, Chinese painting itself is a representation system；this therefore has given rise to an important issue concerning how modern poets enter and exit the images as a dialectic discourse. As a scholar, Dominic Cheung authored a monograph, Authenticating Art by Styles; as a poet, he created the poems and the painting in Clovers-Selected Poems. These two works are deeply intertwined and arouse the awareness of two questions: 1) how does the “experience” of the beauty and aesthetics of classical landscape painting take place in modern contexts? 2) how can it be embodied through modern poetic language？
 Through the two discourses on “Viewing in Tours: Dynamic Viewing” and “Work of Nature and Work of Painting: Generating Consciousness,” this paper examines the phenomenon of the intertextuality between modern poetry and classical Chinese painting. It can be seen that in the process of inscribing a poem on the painting, the layout and the composition of the landscape in the painting establish an interaction between the subject and nature, which breaks the limits of the static state of painting itself and releases the potential agency within the painting through poetic language. On the other hand, the integration of traditional Chinese ink painting techniques in representing the landscape and character shall enable the text to feature a function of aesthetic valuation and to further enhance the aesthetic appeal of the painting and the poem.

Parody, Byron, and Race: Being Derivative in the Nineteenth-Century United States

ABSTRACT This essay contributes to recent scholarly work on the afterlives of British poetry around the Anglophone world by focusing on how ordinary and anonymous writers in the United States reused the poetry of Lord Byron. It contends that imitations and parodies of Byron that proliferated in newspapers show his poetry to have been malleable, as useful to abolitionists as it was to defenders of white supremacy. Drawing on the methods of historical poetics, the essay examines parodies in the context of their social lives, investigating how people read, understood, and used widely circulating poetry. With this evidence, it contends that many writers used popular poems as metrical templates for their own thoughts and arguments, and uses this insight to analyze parodies of Byron’s The Bride of Abydos (1813) that took radically different stances toward the enfranchisement of Black Americans. It concludes that the original poem’s formal features—its meter, its rhyme, and especially its rhetorical structure—made it useful to writers who wanted to question the unity of the nation before and after the Civil War.

“Faustian Theme” in Slavic Literary Monuments: Problematics of Motives

The issue of conceptual correlation of Slavic stories about Savva Grudtsyn and Pan Tvardovsky with the concepts of “Faustian theme”, “Faustian legend” and “Faustian story” is considered. The question is raised about the legitimacy of referring the Slavic variants of the motive of the contract with the devil to the general group of similar motives by analogy with the “Faustian” one. A review of domestic and foreign scientific literature devoted to the difference and similarity of Slavic plots with the legend of Faust, as well as common sources and typological characteristics of the features of the “Faustian theme” is carried out. The results of a comparative analysis of texts about Faust, Savva Grudtsyn and Pan Tvardovsky are presented. Special attention is paid to the comparison of the anonymous work about Savva Grudtsyn with the novel by the Norwegian writer M. K. Hansen. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that for solve this problem a systematic literary methodology is proposed in the key of historical poetics, based on the differentiation of the analysis of plots, motives, the system of characters and semantic accents of works. The relevance of the study is due to the introduction into scientific circulation of previously poorly studied texts of literature and folklore, in which the plot of a contract with a demon is seen. The definitions of specific motives are given, which make it possible to differentiate literary monuments according to the principle of a plot model and a system of characters. The author's development in relation to the sources of the specified plot type is presented.

THE TITLE AS A PROBLEM OF HISTORICAL POETICS

An analysis of the works devoted to the poetics of the title demonstrates that although the majority of facts are presented correctly, the lack of a systematic approach and the required historical perspective makes the explanation of their origin completely unsatisfactory. It actualizes the need to review all the discovered facts in the history of the title as a form of the author’s reflection on the text framework in the context of historical poetics. Periodization of historical poetics in the terminology proposed by S. S. Averintsev demonstrates that the title is absent in the period of pre-reflexive traditionalism and appears only when moving to the next period, namely, reflexive traditionalism. The most archaic titles include the widely understood genre and theme of the text. Later, the title transforms into merely a name; common titles with predication occur sporadically. During the Renaissance, the title may have acquired a conditional character (numerical name), and the identification of the text was carried out through the development of the predicative part, which annotated the text and was sometimes of a promotional nature. The title in its modern form emerges during the transition from reflexive traditionalism to the anti-traditionalist tendencies of the bourgeois era. In the 19th century, the abstract becomes an independent genre and breaks away from the title, while the author, who was initially in the last position, subsequently moved to the first in the title complex (book name, genre, author).

Christian Images and Motifs in the Kizhi Plots of Russian Prose in 1960 — Early 1970-s

The article presents an analysis of Christian topics in prose works about the island of Kizhi. Methodologically, the study combines the approaches of studying the local text that have already become conventional, with the principles of historical poetics, bringing back the possibilities of diachronic analysis. This allows to take into account both the timeless semantic constants of the Kizhi Island image in literature, and the intellectual context of late Soviet literature, which is now attracting the attention of many researchers. 1960–70s are the period when the largest number of texts about the island appeared. The article offers a classification of the Christian topoi in the texts of that period. Three works by different authors are considered in more detail (Yu. Kazakov’ short story Adam and Eve, I. Mazuruk’s short story Kizhi, and V. Pul’kin’s book The Kizhi Tales), in which the Christian topic is represented both explicitly and implicitly — in the images of the church, icons, biblical story about Adam and Eve, gospel images of the apostles. In Soviet prose and poetry, the primordial religious meaning of Christian topoi is most often concealed in the subtext. The depiction of Christian symbols is ambivalent and requires legitimization: through folklore, through the theme of historical memory, dialogue of the past and present, etc. This kind of ambivalence clearly illustrates the complexity of the intellectual and spiritual atmosphere of the Thaw and the contradictory attitude of Russian literature towards the Christian traditions.

The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers

The Experience of Poetry: From Homer’s Listeners to Shakespeare’s Readers

“The Monarck of Loves Crowne:” Love and Law in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

This article examines the intricacies of legal imagination in Lady Mary Wroth’s Petrarchan sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621). It focuses on the bond between the speaker, Pamphilia, and her ruler, Cupid, which Wroth insistently conceptualizes in juridical terms, as a relationship between feudal lord and his vassal. Reading these figures of law at a junction of legal and poetic histories, the article argues that Wroth’s language of erotic feudalism simultaneously refracts the juridical realities of early Stuart England, resonating with the debates about the law of conquest and the limits of sovereign power under James I, and draws on the medieval poetic tradition of amorous jurisprudence, which articulates the idea of legal governance of love outside of the structures of positive law. This cultural, temporal, and juridical complexity of Wroth’s legal imagination tests the limits of historicist legal thinking, for the idea of erotic legality at once acknowledges the authority of positive law and, through alternative procedures, norms, and decisions, interrogates its principles.

Steamship to Argentina and Runaways: The principle of movement in the poetics of the new literary world

AbstractToday’s world is changing rapidly, and writers are sensitive to these dynamics in their work. This article examines the principle of movement in the poetics of two modern novels: Steamship to Argentina (2014) by the Russian‐German writer Alexei Makushinsky and Runaways (2007) by Polish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. As the literary analysis demonstrates, the principle of movement is a constitutive element of the artistic whole of these novels. It defines the image of the character, plot, spatial and temporal coordinates, and figurative dimension. The very titles—Steamship to Argentina and Runaways—are metaphorical and esthetically significant. To reflect this significance, the authors of this article offer an alternative translation of the title of Olga Tokarczuk's novel. When published in English, it was titled Flights. However, Runaways is semantically closer to the original Polish Bieguni and, as the article demonstrates, correlates more strongly with the semantic level of the text. Drawing on M. M. Bakhtin's ideas on the historical poetics of the novel, this study concludes that the poetics of Steamship to Argentina and Runaways is a form of representation of the new picture of the world, dynamic and transitional. This new literary world is recreated through the mobile chronotope and translingualism.

A Concise Review of Anglo-Saxon Poetry

This paper attempts to offer a concise review of the Anglos-Saxon poetry. English literary poetic history has a long span of time. It began enthusiastically with the Anglo-Saxon to affirm its unique identity among the Continent poetic literature. There have been a lot of serious attempts to achieve that identity since then. Consequently, English poetry enlarged its developments through many drastic poetic phases in order to participate in human’s artistic legacy. One of the English poetic endeavours is that of Romanticism. Before Romanticism, there have been many poetic trends that played a vital role and paved the way towards Romanticism. However, in this report, I would approach one of the Pre-Romantic trends, namely, the Anglo-Saxon poetic scene, depending at least on the historical development of the period and its literary bequests through its poetic schools, major poets, and some well-known poems. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present a consecutive overview of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Exit Pursued by Horace: Bears, Shakespeare, and the Classical Tradition

AbstractThis article puts the bear back in Horace, demonstrating the role bears have played from antiquity through the Renaissance as the great disruptor of the classical literary artefact, simplex et unum. The first section of the article treats bear’s place in ancient poetics. The second section exposes its role in Horace’s corpus, demonstrating how it instantiates both historical interpretive conflicts over one of Aristotle’s definition of the poet’s vocation and a wide range of Roman cultural and literary developments in the late first-century bce. The third and final section finds Horace’s bear stalking Renaissance artes poeticae and starring as the unstable genre-crossing centre of Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale’ (1611). This article shows that Shakespeare’s bear has as much to do with the history of poetics (and the War of the Poets) as with the material history of stagecraft, which has often been the intriguing focus of scholarship on the bear. In addition to heightening our sense of the monstrous qualities of Augustan literature, and to troubling our notions about the classicism of classical literature, this article clarifies how classical poetics could function, in its own time and thereafter, as both analytic field and a literary genre sui generis.

World Literature as a Speculative Literary Totality: Veselovsky, Auerbach, Said, and the Critical-Humanist Tradition

AbstractThis essay revisits critical-humanist approaches to literary totality that have largely been sidelined during the recent revival of world literature studies. While there has been no shortage of defenses of close reading in the face of distant reading and other positivist approaches, this essay argues that it is precisely the hermeneutic attention to particular works that has allowed critical humanists to think about literary practice within the most encompassing purview. For those in this tradition, “world literature” can never be a stable object but is a speculative totality. The essay discusses three exemplary critical concepts that assume a speculative epistemology of literary totality: Alexander Veselovsky’s “historical poetics,” Erich Auerbach’s “Ansatzpunkt,” and Edward Said’s “contrapuntal reading.” Each, it is argued, is grounded in the distinctive qualities of literary experience, a claim for which Theodor Adorno’s account of speculative thinking serves as a basis.

تصاویر من مخطوط الراجامالا بمدرسة التصویر المحلیة میوار بإقلیم راجستان فی شبه القارة الهندیة

يتناول البحث مخطوط الراجامالا من خلال مدرسة التصوير المحلية ميوار في إقليم راجستان، وتعد الراجامالا لوحات مستوحاة من الموسيقى والألحان الهندية الأصيلة، التي ازدهرت ما بين القرنين السابع عشر والتاسع عشر الميلاديين، ونفذت تلک اللوحات تحت الرعاية الملکية السامية لاکبر ملوک وشاهات ولايات الهند في تلک الفترة مثل منطقة الدکن في جنوب الهند وإقليم ماديا براديش في وسط الهند وولاية راجستان في شمال غرب الهند، وسهول البهاري وجامو في شمال الهند. ويهدف البحث إلي دراسة أهمية الراجامالا و تاريخها الأدبي والشعري وارتباطها بالموسيقى وذلک من خلال النظر في أنماط مدرسة ميوار من التصاوير التي تحتوي علي معاني وتفسيرات رمزية داخل الراجامالا، وذلک من خلال التصاوير المحفوظة في المتاحف سواء کانت داخل الهند أو خارجها. کذالک يعالج البحث نوع جديد من التصاوير الهندية التي ظهرت في فترة دراسة البحث وتحليلها من حيث الأنماط الموسيقية التي تتبع في شکلها أنظمة معينة، متبعا في ذلک المنهج الوصفي التحليلي ومراعيا لعنصر الزمان أي بالترتيب التاريخي من الأقدم إلي الأحدث. Paintings from the Ragamala manuscript at the local painting school, Mewar, Rajasthan, in the Indian Subcontinent Abstract: The research deals with the Rajamala manuscript through the local school of photography, Mewar in Rajasthan. Such as the Deccan region in southern India, the region of Madhya Pradesh in central India, the state of Rajasthan in northwestern India, and the plains of the Bahari and Jammu in northern India. The research aims to study the importance of Rajamala and its literary and poetic history and its connection, by using animation in Mewar from designs that contain meanings and symbolic interpretations within Rajamala, through depictions in existence inside or outside the existing. Likewise, the research deals with a new type of perceptions that emerged during the period of the study study, following in that descriptive analytical method and its location.

Critical formation of Hong Kong noir: Historiographical and methodological reflections

The critical formation of Hong Kong noir has been a conspicuous and ever-growing thread running through the scholarship on Hong Kong cinema for some time. This essay charts the history of and methodological grounds for the critical formation of Hong Kong noir, while providing historiographical reflections more generally on the field of Hong Kong cinema studies and on the tantalizing idea of a global film history. Dividing the history of the critical formation of Hong Kong noir into two phases, this essay discusses the development of Hong Kong noir as a critical category from ‘Kowloon Noir’ and ‘Tsim Sha Tsui noir’ to ‘Hong Kong neo-noir’ and ‘Hong Kong noir’ in conceptual terms. It also reflects on the methodological shifts in the study of noir-esque Hong Kong films from synchronic to diachronic approaches, from the perspective of localism to that of world film history, and from auteurism and reflectionism to historical poetics. In particular, it suggests that a wider application of the problem/solution perspective, which emerged in the second phase of this history, is imperative to fill gaps and correct misunderstandings in narrations of Hong Kong noir.

ON SOME FEATURES OF POST-SOVIET POLEMICS (BASED ON A REVIEW IN THE “VOPROSY LITERATURY” JOURNAL)

The article critically examines some techniques used in post-Soviet polemics based on the material from E. Abdullayev's note “New Understanding and old myths” (book review of Esaulov I. A. Russian Classics: New Understanding. St. Petersburg, Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy Publ., 2017) and traces the dependence of the interpretation and evaluation of the literary scientific system on the axiological views of the author of the description. At the same time, it demonstrates the influence of axiology on evaluation of philological work. The negative ideologems of the Soviet philological science and their presence in the philological practice of our time are revealed. A reduced understanding of the task of historical poetics (and poetics in general), which is characteristic of both Soviet philology and influential post-Soviet publications, prevents the construction of a new history of Russian literature and the identification of the role and place of Christian tradition in the text and subtext of works of Russian classical literature.

Knight Moves: Russifying Quantitative Literary Studies

Computational approaches to literary studies have tended to fetishize Russian Formalism. The evolving canon of Digital Humanities scholarship shows persistent leanings on Formalism and the theoretical movements that emerged in its wake, including Prague School structuralism, discourse analysis, and semiotics. Twenty-first-century scholars relive the evolutions, embattled stances, and fraught histories of modern literary theory and its founding figures, whom they claim as their predecessors – from historical poetics to the social turn of discourse analysis. As scholars working in Digital Humanities and Russian literary studies, we attempt to examine the suggestive continuities between Russian literary theory and computational literary analysis. Focusing on the posited link between discourse analysis and topic modelling, we offer a case study of topic modeling using the full run of the academic journal Slavic Review. We briefly review the process of topic modeling for literary analysis, consider some insights from topic modeling Slavic Review and, for comparison, briefly consider two other prominent journals in the field – Slavic and East European Journal and Russian Review.

The idea of Literature in the “American lectures” of Italo Calvino

The course of the so-called “American lectures” prepared by Italo Calvino became the last literary work of the writer and is rightfully considered his testament. Calvino himself addresses the text to posterity, collecting in his lectures the valuable properties of literature to be preserved for the next millennium. In the era of continuous flow of information, often consisting of formulaic texts and images that have literally flooded the entire media space, Calvino warns readers about the danger looming over such a distinctive and original kind of human activity as literature. The writer seeks to talk about the special role of literature and to build its unique qualities into the perspective of the development of the rapidly changing world. The categories that gave names to the five lectures are far from generally accepted literary terminology. Moreover, the writer’s reflections go beyond both the history of literature and traditional poetics and aesthetics. Calvino's view of literature is devoid of dogmatism and is extremely original. Analysing different phenomena, the writer draws unexpected parallels between literary works of different countries and eras. Taking Calvino’s frame of reference as the starting point, the reader becomes a full participant in the process, unwittingly continuing to mentally string new names and works on the connecting thread discovered by the writer. The alternative theory and history of literature proposed by the writer has become an unquestionable bestseller not only among specialists, but also among the general public.

ИДЕОЛОГИЯ СУФИЗМА И РЕЛИГИОЗНЫЕ МОТИВЫ В ТАТАРСКОМ РОМАНИЧЕСКОМ ЭПОСЕ

В процессе изучения духовного наследия любого народа появляется возможность представить его мировоззрение и верования. Основанные на любовных сюжетах татарские романические дастаны ценны, прежде всего, тем, что являются памятниками, отражающими историю, жизнь, духовные ценности нации. Что интересно: эти дастаны в народной памяти сохраняются как произведения, повествующие лишь об истории двух влюбленных. Но их значимость не ограничивается лишь рассказом об истории несчастной любви. Татарские романические дастаны привлекательны тем, что они тесно связаны с религиозной идеологией.Актуальность данного исследования обусловлена недостаточностью изучения взаимосвязи татарских романических дастанов с Исламской религией. Материал для исследования составляют тексты дастанов любовного характера, бытующие у татар, как «Тахир и Зухра», «Сказание о Йусуфе», «Сайфульмулюк», «Лейла и Меджнун», «Кузы-Курпяч и Баян-сылу».Цель статьи – определение влияния Ислама на татарские романические дастаны. Для достижения поставленной цели решены следующие задачи: пример . Также в статье автор дает определение татарским романическим дастанам, указывает на их отличительные черты от дастанов другого характера. Кроме того, в работе подробно разъясняется понятие суфизма, сыгравшего большую роль в формировании татарской поэзии, обосновывается частичное присутствие этой идеи и в татарских романических дастанах.В данной статье применяются сравнительно-сопоставительные и историко-типологические методы.Проведенное исследование позволяет сделать вывод о том, что религия Ислам оказала огромное влияние на татарские романические дастаны. В них от начала до конца повествуется глубокая вера главных героев к Всевышнему, часто используются религиозные термины, встречаются персонажи, которые имеют место в священных писаниях мусульман.

«Новые лирические исследования» XXI века: эстетическое и социальное в поэтической критике

The article considers the problem of correlation of aesthetic form and social content in contemporary poetry through the prism of contemporary poetry criticism, in particular, the New Lyric Studies of 2008 (M. Perloff, Y. Prins, R. Terada, V. Jackson, etc.). A representation of the lyrics as a genre of poetry, in which historically structured subjectivism and identity of author are interrelated with poetic writing, is at the center of the New Lyric Studies. In this context the lyrics is relative and volatile but also is the closest genre to the poetic nature, that allows to merge an autonomous entity of poetry with ‘agendas’ in the poem, which were difficult to connect in either too formal or too contextual critical approaches to the poetry in the 20th century. This became possible in the conditions of New Lyric critics speaking up against a substitution of poetry and literary criticism for historical, anthropological and cultural criticism because of the high popularity of cultural studies in the 1990s and the ensuing incorporation of interdisciplinarity in literary studies. Despite the objective of New Lyric critics to revitalize a theoretical study of poetry in the spirit of academic criticism of the New Criticism, the modifications in the methods for producing, existence and broadcasting of poetry and therefore in poetry of the last 50 years, poetry itself prevented the New Lyric from becoming the regressive movement. Some representatives of the New Lyric Studies subsequently expressed the need to study poetry in terms of new historical poetics and to create different methods capable to analyze the relations between culture and poetic form – between the social and the aesthetic. Having considered advantages and limitations of the New Lyric studies in the context of contemporary poetry discourse, reflecting not only the nature of contemporary criticism, but also perhaps the history of poetry criticism of 20-21th centuries, which is the dynamical coexistence and the mutual succession of different movements, the author draws a conclusion that this movement defines the right vector for the reconciliation of the long-standing struggle of formalism and contextualism in the poetry criticism as well as social and aesthetic components which poetic work includes.