Poetique De La Research Articles

In-Between: Children as Performers

In January 2020, I spoke with Lucy-Lou Marino, Gold Ray Martin, and Todd Roosevelt Martin about their experiences as performers in “As deep as I could remember, as far as I could see”, a performance by Swedish-Palestinian artist Tarik Kiswanson for Performa 19 Biennial (New York, November 2019).The interview was conducted through a card game to encourage them to think, talk about, and reenact their participation in the performance.From the recordings of this “performative interview,” this video-article creates a fictional dialogue between the children performers, the artist, and the Martiniquan writer, poet, and philosopher Édouard Glissant, whose “Poetique de la Relation” is a major influence on Kiswanson’s artistic work.Immigration, exile, relation, poetry, identity, and language emerge from the crossing of voices, images, and writings captured in New York City at different times and contexts.

Quatro coisas encontradas: análise espacial da casa no romance "Para Sempre" de Vergílio Ferreira

O artigo apresenta a análise espacial da casa no romance Para Sempre (1983) de Vergílio Ferreira, um dos maiores escritores existencialistas da literatura portuguesa. Paulo, o narrador autodiegético, está de regresso à casa amarela, à casa da sua infância. É o regresso definitivo que inicia a última fase da sua vida, o tempo que lhe falta até à morte. Deambulando pela casa, percorrendo corredores, subindo e descendo escadas, entrando em cada quarto, encontra um tempo imóvel que revela o seu passado, e o faz pensar sobre o futuro e os seus sonhos. Encontra também quatro coisas-símbolos (o violino, o chapéu de palha, o relógio e a estatueta de anjo) que funcionam como chaves. Com o apoio da obra filosófica A poética do espaço (La poétique de l’espace, 1957) de Gaston Bachelard constatamos que a casa amarela representa a vida de Paulo.

“Common Place: Common-Place” A Presentation of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of the Compounding of Places – Part 1

At the end of Poetique de la Relation, a list of “binarities” constitutes what Glissant’s philosophy of Relation sets out to reshuffle. Among them, the pair “Lieu commun: lieu-commun” is what will be analysed here. Beyond enabling us to survey a vast area of Glissant’s œuvre, it will also lead to the analysis of one of Glissant’s most operative metaphors: the “common-place,” advancing toward the configuration of an alternative, ever compounding reality.

LA POETICA DELLA RÊVERIE NEL «ROMANZO» DI FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT

Literature is a fundamental aspect of Francois Truffaut’s cinema. In his movies it is possible to find these two great passions – literature and cinema – which are always strictly connected together. The bibliography on the relationship between Truffaut and literature allows to study in depth what may be defined «Le roman de Francois Truffaut», to quote the title of a special issue of the French review «Cahiers du cinema», published in December 1984. Such «roman» is characterized by movies, as well as by letters and critical writings, which concern the work of the author. This paper is mainly concerned with Truffaut’s artistic project in terms of screen versions of a literary work that produced movies like «livres filmes» – as some film critics call them – through the use of that creative force which literary culture defines with the term of reverie; besides, in this essay the philosophical conception of reverie developed by Gaston Bachelard in his book La poetique de la reverie (1960) is applied to the “literary cinema” of Truffaut.

Essayism and the Multiplication of Possibility in Patrick Chamoiseau's Biblique des derniers gestes

This analysis shows the affinity between the concept of essayism and the project of creolisation undertaken by Patrick Chamoiseau and other Martinican writers. By translating the essayistic spirit—the will to assay, to try, to attempt, or to strive—to a non-European context, Chamoiseau and his fellow writers overhaul the form and stealthily undo assumptions about what the essay can or cannot accomplish. Through examples from Eloge de la creolite , by Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabe, and Raphael Confiant; Edouard Glissant’s Poetique de la Relation and Philosophie de la Relation ; and Chamoiseau’s epic novel Biblique des derniers gestes , this study demonstrates how Chamoiseau and his larger cultural project accord perfectly with the essayistic and how his translation of the genre reveals as-of-yet unexploited stylistic and modal alternatives to Montaigne’s original project. These examples all point toward vibrant prospects for essayistic fiction in the Caribbean and represent a productive appropriation and transformation of what is often considered a deeply rooted European form.

Housing Complexes: Redesigning the house of psyche in light of a curious mistranslation of C. G. Jung appropriated by Gaston Bachelard

Jung's metaphor of house as psyche is often regarded as little more than an arbitrary and reductive ‘diagram’ that imposes structure onto his conception of psyche with its various parts and underpinning libidinal processes. And yet, as this paper argues, the impact and relevance of the architectural metaphor extends beyond a conceptual consideration of psyche into a lived experience of it. It is thus also Jung's phenomenological description of the way human beings dwell and experience their placement or non-placement within the world in which they find themselves. This paper elucidates these different interpretations. First, through Jung's accounts of his ‘dream-house’ in connection with the likely architectural influences of those houses in which he had lived or had designs to live; and second, through an examination of a curious mistranslation of one of Jung's overlooked descriptions of the architectural metaphor found in the celebrated work, La poetique de l'espace (1957)/The poetics of space (1958) by the renowned French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The metaphorical description under scrutiny is the relationship between cellar and attic rooms, which Jung uses in his essay ‘Allgemeines zur komplextheorie’ (1934)/‘A review of the complex theory’ (1948a) to expound his understanding of the effects of the complex on ego-consciousness. Bachelard's misreading inadvertently reverts the placement of the two rooms, thereby proffering something akin to a ‘topsy-turvy’ house of psyche. The implications of Bachelard's misreading for an understanding of Jungian complex theory is explored, and the wider conceptual and phenomenological implications for the possible redesign or renovation of Jung's metaphor of house as psyche are ascertained.

Translating Laurence Louppe

In the light of the increasing corporatisation of academic publishing in English, this paper draws on my experience of translating French critic Laurence Louppe's Poetique de la danse contemporaine (Brussels, 1997) into English (Dance Books, forthcoming 2010) to reflect cross-linguistically upon the need to maintain a diversity of linguistic perspectives and resources in dance commentary. Just as the dancer and the choreographer use each other to learn from the “translation” that their respective bodies and moves represent for each other, so the process of textual translation can provoke a more acute awareness of issues regarding the relationship between language and the complexities of dance experiences. Louppe emphasises that one of the insights of contemporary dance has been that “the body” is not simply a support for verbal language but can have its own, different, communicative modalities. In the light of this, Louppe's own literary poetics seeks in return to mine the etymological layers of her language – and to activate its anthropological roots in sensuous existence. My article discusses the conceptual resources upon which Louppe draws, including those drawn from the modern dance heritage, her own philosophical erudition and literary poetics, and the resources specific to the French language (as these emerge through my perspective from within English) in order to articulate issues of change, corporeality and mobility. This discussion is undertaken in relation to specific terminological and metaphorical examples and makes comparisons with the writings of Isadora Duncan.

The Decadent Writer as Collector and Flâneur: On Intertextual Networks and Literary Spaces in Huysmans

Etrange was the word most often used to describe J.-K. Huysmans' first published book, Le Drageoir aux epices (I873), and idiosyncratic group of short texts written at the borders of several genres, most notably the prose poem and the short story. Commentators most frequently call attention to the ways in which the Drageoir prefigures later aspects of Huysmans' style, first his naturalist and then his estheticist period. The editor of the recent critical edition repeats several times in his introduction that the Drageoir esquisse deja [les contours] d' oeuvre a venir and apparait comme un presage des engagements et demissions successifs envers les differentes esthetiques qu'il adoptera par la suite. (1) Such comments are, on one hand, a logical approach to an author's early work in which he is still experimenting with several styles and seeking his own literary voice. On the other hand, however, this approach to the Drageoir fails to address the text on its own terms. I argue here that Huysmans adapts and transforms the model of writer as flaneur in this early work while simultaneously figuring as a collector of various nineteenth-century textual traditions and conventions. A complex intertextuality below the surface of the Drageoir allows Huysmans to evoke, adopt, extend, parody, or reject a series of modes of writing in play during the I870's. Huysmans explores the literary territory of his period much as a flaneur might explore the city, moving with a purposeful aimlessness, receiving and reacting to various features of the landscape. It is worth pausing a moment over the concept of a collection and its relationship to the kind of literal and literary flanerie that Huysmans pursues. Naomi Schor notes the importance of both collecting and flanerie in Walter Benjamin's literary imagination, asserting that collecting, rather more than flanerie, is the activity that most closely approximates that of the author in that collecting and especially [...] book-collecting involves the retrieval and ordering of things past. (2) The texts comprising the work are heterogeneous in composition and arrangement, but the networks of images and approaches point toward an impulse to ordering, for a collection always implies a certain logic, or at least an invitation to seek similarities at or below the surface of the collected works. It is in this sense that Huysmans becomes a quasi-Benjaminian collector of texts. Benjamin asks of his own library: what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? (3) While Huysmans has assembled the collection, it becomes in turn the reader's task to impose a certain order upon it, by reading horizontally across its various texts and vertically between the Drageoir texts and literary works of the past which are evoked by the Drageoir. Huysmans' title prefigures some of the crossroads I shall explore. A drageoir is both a closed and an open space, a container that separates its content from its surroundings, without making that separation definitive, as a closed container would. Already in this image, Huysmans suggests a free-floating border between insides and outsides, a similar type of border, in fact, to that which exists between a descriptive text and the physical or mental landscape it traces. Such descriptive texts participate in the landscapes they describe, all the while remaining distinct from them. Gaston Bachelard hints at this relationship of texts to their objects in La Poetique de l'espace: L'espace saisi par ['imagination ne peut rester l'espace indifferent livre a la mesure et a la reflexion du geometre. [...] [I] l est vecu non pas dans sa positivite, mais avec toutes les partialites de 1' imagination. (4) For Louis Forestier, the interest of Huysmans' text lies in une rivalite entre les possibilites de l ecriture et un certain nombre de productions artistiques. (5) On this view, Huysmans uses the drageoir pour insister sur un desordre apparent du contenu ou, si 1'on veut, sur [. …

Blaise Cendrars 5: portraits de l'artiste by Claude Leroy (review)

222 Reviews this introductory study, helpful indicators to furtherreading abound. Reading crime fiction in terms of social history is an interpretative choice which inevitably sidelines narratological discussion of how suspense is created and maintained. Yet surely this, and not the sober social commentary which is generally foregrounded in critical stud? ies ofthe genre, remains forreaders its single greatest attraction. Aside from Tzvetan Todorov's indispensable 'Typologie du recit policier' (Paragone, 202 (1966), 1-14; repr. in Poetique de la prose (Paris: Seuil, i97i),pp. 55-65), discussed in the introduc? tion, Pierre Bayard's Qui a tue Roger Ackroyd? (Paris: Minuit, 1998) is a useful recent critical tool in this area. Overall, however, as a highly readable starting point forthose wishingto research aspects of French crime fiction,and as a student-friendly survey of themes and trends in post-war French culture, this study has much to recommend it. University College Dublin Emer O'Beirne Blaise Cendrars 5: portraits de I'artiste. Ed. by Claude Leroy. Paris and Caen: Lettres Modernes Minard. 2003. iv + 25opp. ?22. ISBN 2-256-91052-0. In his brief introduction, Claude Leroy states that the aim of this collection is to paint a picture of Cendrars that understands the idea of 'portraits de I'artiste [. . .] dans toute la gamme de ses emplois' (p. 5). In practice, this means dipping into the length and breadth of Cendrars's writing, travels, and relations with other artists? both within France and internationally?as part of an attempt to show how he saw (Cendrars 'as portrait painter') and was seen (Cendrars 'as subject'). In its scope and diversity, the resulting collection of thirteen essays undoubtedly represents a useful and substantial body of material for Cendrars scholars. In turn, although Surrealism and the interwar years understandably end up dominating to an extent, the fact that the book more or less pools material from across Cendrars's creative life allows for some very interesting tone and contrast to be picked out in his personality and reputa? tion. Good examples of this include Jay Bochner's engaging and thorough discussion of Cendrars's 'visage americain', and Myriam Boucharenc's piece on the reception of Cendrars's writing in Brazil. The book also presents newly discovered primary source material that does not figure in Cendrars's 9-volume (Euvres completes (Paris: Denoel, 1960-65). Although short in length, these three documents cohere with a number ofthe preceding essays and are potentially of general interest. Overall, how? ever, the collection is likely to be of limited value to readers with related specialisms, and it is a shame that the text does not frame Cendrars and his talents more explicitly. Firstly, in the absence of any formal biography or other contextualization, the reader is obliged to piece together the various phases of Cendrars's life by reading across the essays, which themselves oftenjump back and forthin period. More disappointingly, Cendrars's writing emerges from the book looking somewhat ordinary: there is little actual evidence here of why Cendrars's texts were lauded by fellow writers, or of his ability to write strange and sophisticated verse (as recently demonstrated by Clive Scott, whose work on Cendrars is not mentioned). Rather, the emphasis tends to be on exposition according to a particular theme, and there is no sustained attempt to engage either with textual analysis or with the many theoretical issues that inevitably arise in discussions of identity,author/text relations, and artistic communities. Neither is the text adequately situated within current scholarship, and it is unclear how the collec? tion relates to Minard's series of books on Cendrars (begun in 1986, and to which the current text represents the latest addition). Certainly, an image of Cendrars's persona does emerge here, and some contributions are very elegantly rendered?it is just that this diverse gallery is likely to be of interest to a rather particular kind of visitor. Keble College, Oxford Stephen Forcer ...

Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime, 1647-1785 (review)

Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785. By Downing A. Thomas. (Cambridge Studies in Opera.) Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [vii, 411 p. ISBN 0-521-80188-5. $70.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Of Dogs and Men: La Belle Créole and the Global Subject

Rien ne protege des morsures de cette enragee qu'est la chienne de vie (1) It has often been noted that much of Maryse novelistic energy is spent challenging, questioning, or even mocking essentializing models of Caribbean identity. (2) Indeed, one might argue that every one of her novels, including those ostensibly concerning places outside of the Caribbean, has targeted one of a series of fixed concepts of the Antillean subject. In many cases, these have been ontological possibilities posited by one or several members of the African Diaspora in the wake of the combined holocausts of the slave trade and the colonization of Africa. (3) Conde has systematically dismantled each of these possibilities in turn, refusing the comforting assumption of a constituted identity and inevitably substituting the necessarily endless process of the search itself. As Mireille Rosello notes, Conde's discourse shows that is keenly aware that the island is a discursive, symbolic, and evolving construction rather than a natural identity [...]. Rosello adds that she depicts a fragmented and diverse society, whose 'difference within' (as Barbara Johnson would put it) is neither erased nor naively celebrated as always already desirable. Neither the ethnically pure nor the celebration of the patchwork of hybridity is seen as a satisfactory end. As we will see in what follows, this deliberately inconclusive quest systematically refuses the mythical proportions of the epic quest for the self, recognizing instead the fundamentally and mundanely human scale of any pursuit, even of the absolute. (4) While this ideologically grounded refusal begins as a response to a series of specifically Caribbean discourses, it also, as I will show, allows Conde to reach beyond the local concerns of the Caribbean in to enter into dialogue with the human wor(l)d. One might say that much of the effectiveness of writing lies in its creative reconfiguration of seemingly disparate elements and themes, a literal and literary performance of the Glissantian poetique de la relation. This approach allows her to confront idees recues; to challenge the predictable order of things. She destabilizes her world so that it remains in constant and unsettling movement. These strategies perhaps produce the richest paradox of work: its refusal to limit itself to discussions of the Caribbean while insistently challenging the Caribbean's favorite tropes and myths. Conde inevitably returns (even if surreptitiously) to her birth-place in her novels in to leave it both literally and symbolically, just as also leaves it to return. We see this contradictory movement--towards and away from Guadeloupe--in Les Derniers Rois mages' myth of an African ancestry, La Colonie du nouveau monde's fantasies of a Garveyite return to the motherland, and in Traversee de la mangrove's elaborate play on the symbolism of departure and return itself. In all of work, stable Diasporic subjectivities are inevitably open to a lacerating critique. (5) For each myth Conde substitutes fluctuating signs that refuse even the hope of arriving at their destination. Such flux is once again the challenge that I will face in discussing her 2001 novel La Belle Creole. It is my contention that, in keeping with the writing strategies that I have alluded to earlier, this novel addresses another myth of the Antillean experience, the dramatic and historic relationship between the fugitive slave and the dog. The novel refutes the mythical potential of this relationship to again underscore the ultimately human scale of Caribbean history. In L'Esclave fugitif dans la litterature antillaise, Marie-Christine Rochman underscores the historical importance of what calls cynegetics in the Caribbean. She explains that [a]ucun des recits [historiques] les plus connus sur ces chasses [a l'esclave] ne mentionne l'utilisation de meutes de chiens and that seul le vocabulaire de la cynegetique regulierement utilise en distille la presence. …

La ‘Varietas’à la Renaissance : Actes de la journée d’étude organisée par l’École nationale des Chartes (Paris, 27 avril 2000) ed. by Dominique de Courcelles (review)

MLR, 97.4, 2002 959 La 'Varietas'd la Renaissance: Actes de lajournee d'etude organiseepar I'Ecole nationale des Chartes (Paris, 27 avril 2000). Ed. by Dominique de Courcelles. (Etudes et rencontres de I'Ecole des Chartes, 9) Paris: Ecole des Chartes. 2001. 267 pp. 124.50 F; ?19. Of the ten essays in this volume, four are specifically concerned with texts in Latin (Raphaele Mouren on 'La varietas des philologues au xvie siecle: Entre varia lecta et variae lectiones', Jean-Marc Mandosio on Poliziano, Isabelle Diu and Alexandre Vanautgaerden on Erasmus's Adagia, Marie-Dominique Couzinet on Cardano and Bodin), three with Italian and/or Spanish writings (Giuseppe Grilli on Poggio and the Lazarillo, Paola Vassali on Equicola and Villalon, Dominique de Courcelles on John ofthe Cross's Cdntico espiritual), just one with French literature (Ulrich Langer on the (Euvres morales of Jean des Caurres, 1575), the other two being devoted to matters architectural (Yves Pauwels on ' Varietas et ordo en architecture: Lecture de l'antique et rhetorique de la creation') or musical (Frank Dobbins on 'La variete dans la musique de la Renaissance'). Although the collection suffers from defects common in this type of volume (no bibliography and no index), it manifestly reflects, by its very disparate nature, the theme that it develops: 'la notion de varietas apparait comme un principe majeur des formes de pensee, d'ecriture et de vie qui prevaudront jusqu'a l'age classique, comme l'ordonnateur de toute la culture humaniste' (p. 3). The concept is especially familiar to us through its relationship with the notions oivariatio, imitatio, and copia and other forms of creative transformation (as recently described, forexample, by Michel Jeanneret in his Perpetuum mobile: Metamorphoses des corps et des oeuvresde Vinci a Montaigne (Paris: Macula, 1997; see MLR, 94 (1999), 529-30), and carries within itsimilar tensions. The pursuit of'variety' is certainly an attempt to imitate nature and successful imitation therefore reflectsan overarching (but hidden) order, but this is achieved through processes of disorder at work both in formal expression and in the individualpursuing it('et lejugeant et le juge sont en continuelle mutation et branle', as Montaigne tells us). One ofthe most stimulating and suggestive items is that of Mouren (pp. 5-31) on the philologists' varietas as variant reading and their collections of variae lectiones (called thus by Muret, for example, but also annotationes, miscellanea, and later adversaria) which in themselves lead nowhere, but can ultimately serve as repositories to be exploited by others. For his part, Langer signals the prevalence of the notion of variety in later sixteenth-century moral works (Horace's famous bee image crops up most appositely here) before discussing the 'banquet de savoir heterogene' (p. 129) to which we are invited by Des Caurres. Specialists in the differentdisciplines we associate with 'Renaissance studies', 'qui ca, qui la, voletans a leur aise', will all find something of interest in this volume. University of Wales, Lampeter T. Peach Poetique de la Renaissance: Le Modele italien, le monde franco-bourguignon et leur heritage enFrance au XVle siecle. Ed. by Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn. Preface by Terence Cave. (Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 348) Geneve: Droz. 2001. xvii +786 pp. 120 SwF. This is a work conceived on the grand scale, with the aim of throwing light on the evolution over two centuries of French Renaissance poetic theory from its classical, ltalian, and medieval French origins. It proceeds by studyingprimarily the successive formulations of theorists with differingperspectives, and secondarily ideas on poet? ics expressed in poetry itself. The editors have assembled an international team of fifteenscholars, from America as well as Europe, whose combined expertise enables ...

Les Jardins qui sentent le sauvage: Ronsard et la poétique du paysage by Dani�le Duport (review)

MLR, 96.4, 2001 I071 LesJardins quisententle sauvage:Ronsardet lapoetiquedupaysage. By DANIELEDUPORT. (Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 57) Geneve: Droz. 2000. I44 pp. 51.20 SwF. Daniele Duport investigates the representations of gardens and landscape in Ronsard's poetry, considering them as metaphors for, on the one hand, poetry whose techniques are manifest, and, on the other, poetry which gives the illusion of being artless, masking the fact that it employs similar devices. She has drawn the title from an aside unconnected with poetry, in Ronsard's 'Response aux injureset calomnies', but this statement of the poet's preference for gardenswhich resemble uncultivatedcountrysideprovidesthe basisandjustificationof her study,as she tells us (p. 92), in that it unites the two apparently opposed forms. Gardens are not, however, the startingpoint of the book. The firstpart deals with 'La poetique de l'abondance et de la vari6te', an aspect of Ronsard's poetry which has already received much attention (for example, from Terence Cave). Despite detailed and perceptive analyses of a number of poems (particularlyfruitfulin the case of the hymns of the seasons),the direction of the argumenthere is not alwaysclear, since, although the myths discussed relate the fertility of the natural world to poetic creativity, they do not have a direct bearing on the stated subject. Duport's explanation that 'ce qui parait deviation ramene a la natura naturans les mythes de l'ecriture' (p. 52) does not really resolve this problem. It is the second part, 'Du paysage au jardin', that carries the main weight of her argument and is the more illuminating. Invoking the classical theory which equates different landscapes (naturalgrandeur,pastoralcountrysideand cultivatedland)with the three levels of style, she concludes that Ronsard wishes to embrace all three, blurringthe stylistic distinctionsin his questboth to emulate his classicalpredecessorsand to imitate the luxuriant perfection of nature. Formal gardens do not interest him, because they lack the movement, variation and fluidity of form found in natural vegetation, qualitieshe seeksto incorporateinto his poetry. However, he praisesthe gardener's workfortransformingchaos into harmony. In the courseof analysingthe landscape features he favours, Duport examines Ronsard's use of the topos of the grotto as a sacred source of inspiration, and goes on to argue that his poetic ideal could be describedas 'l'antre,jardin sauvage',representinginspiredpoetry which infusesthe vigour of nature into an ordered aesthetic setting. This section makes her book a usefuladjunctto existingstudiesof Ronsard'spoetics. LANCASTERUNIVERSITY ELIZABETHVINESTOCK Jean-Antoinede Baif and the Valois Court. By YVONNEROBERTS. Bern, Berlin, and Oxford: Peter Lang. 2000. 231 pp. f24. This is a welcome and well-written study of Baif's relations with Catherine de Medicis, whom he served devotedly for thirtyyears, and with her sons Charles IX and Henri III. Focusingon hisreactionsto the eventsof the age asperceivedthrough his politicalverse,Yvonne Roberts tracesthe development of the poet's attitudes,as he moves froma firmlyCatholic and monarchiststanceto 'Politique'views. The book firstrecounts Baif's life, and his role as court poet and contributorto royal entertainments. A short section refers intriguingly to his 'long involvement with the Royal intelligence services'(p. 26), though the evidence for this appearsto be circumstantial.Roberts entersthe controversyover the dating of'L'Hymne de la Paix', which she ingeniously suggests was written in I570 as part of Catherine's campaign to secure Jeanne d'Albret's agreement to the marriage of Henri de MLR, 96.4, 2001 I071 LesJardins quisententle sauvage:Ronsardet lapoetiquedupaysage. By DANIELEDUPORT. (Cahiers d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 57) Geneve: Droz. 2000. I44 pp. 51.20 SwF. Daniele Duport investigates the representations of gardens and landscape in Ronsard's poetry, considering them as metaphors for, on the one hand, poetry whose techniques are manifest, and, on the other, poetry which gives the illusion of being artless, masking the fact that it employs similar devices. She has drawn the title from an aside unconnected with poetry, in Ronsard's 'Response aux injureset calomnies', but this statement of the poet's preference for gardenswhich resemble uncultivatedcountrysideprovidesthe basisandjustificationof her study,as she tells us (p. 92), in that it unites the two apparently opposed forms. Gardens are not, however, the startingpoint of the book. The firstpart deals with 'La poetique de l'abondance et de la vari6te', an aspect...

Morangos silvestres: sob a luz dos devaneios poéticos da Casa Onírica Bachelardiana

The goal of this article is a reading of the film Smultronstallet by Ingmar Bergman based on the concept of phenomenology discussed by Gaston Bachelard in his book La Poetique de I'Espace.

The passacaille in Lully's Armide: phrase structure in the choreography and the music

THE assumption that phrase symmetry in music of the classic style derives from symmetry in the dance may be traced back at least to de Lacepede's La poetique de la musique (1785).' Yet 18th-century choreographic sources show such variety in dance phrasing as to suggest that ballet masters-like composers writing for connoisseurs-toyed with conventions of symmetry. Using the rhetoric of dance movement and shape, they deftly played against expectations of symmetry by creating spatial or temporal asymmetry at odds with the symmetrical impulses of the accompanying music, even by asserting symmetry not implied by the music, or in unexpected rhythmic dimensions. That music and dance were frequently at variance with one another in this respect means, at the very least, that the perception of symmetry in phrasing at a dance performance was a many-layered experience, with the counterpoint of movement and sound creating its own special effect upon perceived phrase symmetry. For several reasons, the passacaille in Act 5 scene 2 of Jean-Baptiste Lully's tragedie lyrique Armide provides a fascinating study in phrase structure. (1) The ostinato element in the musical form, which imposes a certain degree of repetition upon the musical phrase structure, challenges both composer and choreographer not only to create variety, but to superimpose broad structural coherence and rhetorical shape upon what otherwise could be an additive form motivated primarily by virtuoso display. (2) The music exists not only in the full score of Armide published in 1686, but also in a short score arrangement published in 1713, as well as in an embellished keyboard arrangement by D'Anglebert. (3) Three notated choreographies are associated with Lully's melody, their publication dates ranging from 1711 to c.1725-an elaborate female solo dance by Louis P&cour, a female duo by Anthony L'Abb6, and a solo arranged by L'Abb6 from the duo setting.3 This article concentrates upon one of the choreographies-the remarkable solo by Pecour-and its relation to Lully's music, but also includes a general comparison with the duo by L'Abb6. By emphasizing matters of rhythm, metre and accent, rather than the use of space, this choreographic analysis highlights musical qualities in the dancing, describing its rhetoric and expression in terms associated with musical continuity and form. It envisions the dancer as part of the musical ensemble, using the human body as a musical instrument. Like the harpsichordist in a Rameau chamber work, the dancer becomes a captivating, at times dominating personality, sometimes leading, sometimes following, but always remaining an integral part of the ensemble.

Essais de Semiotique Poetique: Poetic Systems/Critical Systems

Long after the break-down of traditional forms and genres in French literature there persists the nagging problem of knowing what the word means and how poetry can be distinguished from For some the best solution has been to deny that the word has meaning and that a problem exists. Others, such as Jean Cohen, in Structure du langage have defined poetry as anti-prose and thus reaffirmed the traditional distinction of poetry vs. prose. In reply to Cohen, Gerard Genette denied such a clear-cut distinction and chose to speak of a po6tique du langage, thus positing language as a distinct langage within the langue. In a similar manner, Tzvetan Todorov has discussed the poetique de la prose.1 Without openly continuing the debate on the definition of Essais de s~miotique sides with Cohen's view that poetry is somehow distinct from prose and that a poetic can be defined.2 A collection of eleven essays by various critics under the direction of structural semanticist A. J. Greimas, Essais de simiotique pogtique tries to define discourse with the help of methods developed in semiotics. The book is organized around Hjelmslev's distinction between expression and (modifications of Saussure's signifiant/signifi%)3. In his prefatory remarks, Greimas provides an initial definition of semiotics as the correlation du plan de l'expression et du plan du (p.7), a definition, unfortunately, so broad that it can comprise anything from Ronsard to Flaubert. The definition also recalls the now antiquated distinction between forme et fond4. A further definition of an ideal is more specific: tous les niveaux seraient corr6ls et toutes les unit6s structurales homologuees (p. 23). While faintly recalling Valery's notion of pure poetry, Greimas' definition suggests another approach to texts, whereby the text becomes a closed system containing elements and relationships that can all be accounted for and categorized by the critic. The trick is to know which system to adopt in order to describe the poetic system. For Greimas semiotics provides the method, particularly as modified to fit his work in semanticss. Despite a variety of approaches and terminology in the essays, the book bears the semanticist's mark by its emphasis on contenu and isotopies (iterated semantic groups), and with the exception of two or three essays, deals more with semiotics than poetics. At the core of the book two basic questions are asked: How can discourse be described in scientific terms? and To what extent can linguistics, in particular semantics, describe the object? The essays provide their own answer.