Modern Poems Research Articles

Korean Literature and Performance?: Sijo!

Korean Literature and Performance?Sijo! David R. McCann (bio) The Korea Wave has brought sustained attention to Korean cultural productions of various kinds, ranging from the television drama series Winter Sonata and its descendents, through Korean musical and music groups starting with the 1990s hip-hop group Seo Tae Ji and Boys to the widely reported 2006 Madison Square Garden concert by the singer Rain. Among many features of the Wave, one less visible aspect has been its cultural transparency: in China and Japan, Korean cultural creations are perceptibly Korean, but in a somewhat abstract way. For Korean songs, Japanese- or Chinese-language lyrics may be substituted. For Korean television productions, the plots turn on what are viewed as traditional Confucian values, part of a shared Asian cultural heritage it seems, according to the audiences that have been studied. A slightly different way to put this point is that the performance, as much as the given particulars of its contents, seems to attract an international audience. If a performance dimension seems a relevant criterion by which to assess the globalizational adaptivity of Korean cultural productions, is there any comparable performance dimension to literature, and to poetry in particular? The question is not simply an academic one. Many Korean literary critics, as well as readers and authors, wonder why Korean literature has not found the same [End Page 359] broad and deep international acceptance as have the pop culture constituents of the Korea Wave. The literary reading tour provides one form of literary performance. Bruce Fulton, at the University of British Columbia, has for many years traveled every fall with Korean writers for a week or more, presenting readings in North American venues of contemporary literary works with English-language accompaniment. The poet Ko Un has traveled all over the world to read his work, and has built a strong and enthusiastic international following among readers and writers including Robert Hass, Gary Snyder, and other renowned poets. Ko Un is a remarkably charismatic artist; his reading of the poem "Arirang" elicited a powerful response from an audience at the Folger Shakespeare Library a few years ago. There are at least two other performance dimensions to Korean poetry that seem worthy of notice. The pop singer Maya's version of Kim Sowŏl's iconic "Azaleas," on her CD "Born to Do It," completely transfigures the poem, known since its publication in 1925 as a "folksong poem," or Minyoshi.1 One could imagine a concert in which Maya performed her version of the Sowŏl poem along with, perhaps, Yi Sang's famously Modernist poem "Crow's Eye Map," Ogamdo, or Manhae's "Ferry Boat and [End Page 360] Passenger," Narut'pae wa haeng'in, to list just two poems that, in a performance style such as hers, might seem quite different from their usual literary construals. There are, however, other performance dimensions to Korean poetry. "Azaleas" gives a series of directional instructions: "I" and "look at," in the Na pogiga that begins the poem, indicate a single point, the "I," and a straight line, "look at." The poem then bends the line away into a curve, with the word yŏkkyŏwŏ, a term that reverses the semantic field of what has preceded it, deflecting the happy anticipation of the opening phrase of the poem, "To look at me," into a diametrically contrary reaction: When, sick of looking at me, you. . . . That curved line then straightens into the going away, kasil ttae enŭn, and a sort of mental dance performance, from point to straight line, through the curve of "sick of" and into the straight line of movement away, has begun. The second stanza extends the movements and gestures into the grand invocation of the landscape and the flowers of Mount Yak, while the third brings the dance steps down to the feet, in the intimate treading gestures of the stanza. The final stanza, repeating the first two lines of the opening stanza, ends the poem with an ambiguous rhetorical gesture, perhaps accompanied in the reader's imagination by some hand gesture indicating closure, not weeping. There are a number of other poems which might suggest a performance-oriented, choreographic...

다차원 범주형 자료의 변환과 그의 응용

Ahn등 (2003)의 P-행렬을 사용한 두 <TEX>$c^d$</TEX>-분할표의 변환자료들의 유클리드 거리제곱은 두 분할표의 셀 (cell) 상대도수벡터들 사이의 유클리드 거리 제곱에 비례함을 보이고, PP-자료의 플롯을 현대시분석과 설문자료의 탐색에 사용하는 방법을 제안한다. The squared Euclid distance of the values which is transformed by P-matrix of Ahn et al. (2003) is in proportion to the squared Euclid distance of cell's relative frequencies in two Contingency Tables. We propose the method of using the PP-values for the analysis of modern poems and questionnaire data.

Joson Modern Poem and Love Poem which was pursued by Intellectuals from Joson studying abroad-About the case of Ji-yong

Joson Modern Poem and Love Poem which was pursued by Intellectuals from Joson studying abroad-About the case of Ji-yong

The Conflict between Foreign Traits and National Traits Shown in Korean Early Modern Poems - focused on a controversy over new-styled poems

The Conflict between Foreign Traits and National Traits Shown in Korean Early Modern Poems - focused on a controversy over new-styled poems

THE LONG GERMAN POEM IN THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY

ABSTRACTThe appearance in recent years of several book‐length German poems raises important questions. What accounts for this revival of interest in a form that seems an unlikely vehicle for contemporary writers? In what ways do these new long poems relate to the verse epic tradition from classical antiquity to the late nineteenth century? How do they situate themselves with respect to the long, modernist poems of the twentieth century, those of Eliot and Pound? To what extent are they part of a larger international renaissance of the long poem, represented by such works as Derek Walcott's Omeros? This essay approaches these questions by considering long poems from the early twentieth century to the present. Beginning with attempts by Rilke and Benn to respond to their predecessors and contemporaries, the article moves to the postwar revival of the long poem from 1970 to 2006. Poets discussed include Enzensberger, Sebald, Grünbein, Krechel, and Falkner. The essay argues that the long poem allows for a historically informed treatment of war, violence and destruction, themes common to these texts. The reflective modality of the long poem also permits a sophisticated and more critical approach to the ‘nostalgic turn’.

The Making of a Poem: Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Spender, and Yang Mu

One of formidable challenges for comparatists today is reconfiguration of Goethe's term Weltliteratur (1827) in age of globalization. In analyzing making of poetry, Stephen Owen raised point about negative effects of Western influence on modern Chinese poetry in his essay The of Global Influence: Is World Poetry? (1990). He suspected that Bei Dao had been selling the state's brutality and the suffering of oppression in China to West in highly translatable language (Owen, Anxiety 29). In so doing, poet sacrificed poetry to his own self-interest. Owen's views about loss of and decline in contemporary poetry from mainland China aroused heated debates and were harshly criticized, most notably by Michelle Yeh and Rey Chow, as symptomatic of Orientalist bias (Yeh, Chayi 94-96; Chow, Writing 1-26). Yeh found Owen's accusations self-contradictory, as result of his desire for difference. In insisting on cultural difference derived from his expertise in classical Chinese poetry, Owen in fact gave rise to suppression of internal differences within Chinese lyric tradition (Yeh 95). She saw in Owen's criticism his worries about disappearance of difference that clearly marks out contemporary poetry in China from that produced in rest of (Yeh 96). Rey Chow followed up on this point and argued that Owen actually suffers from anxiety over his own intellectual position as Sinologist (Chow, Writing 3). From these critics' points of view, Owen's essentialist notion of Chineseness in poetry is common in Westerners' Orientalist biases, which imprison the other in static past. In retrospect, although Owen's reading of high translatability of some modern poems as sign of deculturation is problematic, he did nonetheless remind readers of cultural hegemony of West. Instead of celebrating an innocent synthesis of all literatures in world, he warned them of pitfalls of taking for granted local (Anglo-European) tradition as universal literary model for developing poetry (Owen, Anxiety 28). Bearing in mind controversy caused by Owen's provocative question, David Damrosch put forward possible answer to question What is literature? based on study of circulation of literary texts via translation. According to Damrosch, all works begin in their original language, but a work only has an effective life as literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within literary system beyond that of its original culture (Damrosch 4). He indirectly endorses Susan Bassnett's suggestion that translation is a major shaping force for change in history of culture because it enhances mobility of text (Bassnett 10). To approach an understanding of world literature, questions contemporary discourse needs to address are not only about longevity of work, but also about its evolution across cultures. Doubtless, our rapidly globalizing of twenty-first century facilitates speedy travel of literary theory and practice. In Traveling (1982), Edward Said explicates ways theories are applied in any mature writing and iterates importance of critical recognition (Said, World 226-247). He sees this in Raymond Williams's way of using theory consciously to qualify, shape and refine his borrowings from Lukacs and (Said, World 241). In manner of influence studies, Said traces how Lukacs's Theory of Novel (1920) and History and Class Consciousness (1923) affected his European students and readers, more prominent among them Lucien Goldmann in Paris and Raymond Williams in Cambridge. Adopted in another place and at different time, theory appeared to Said to have lost its original revolutionary vigor and sedimented into kind of dogmatic orthodoxy. Years later, Said admitted bias in his early formulation and revised his arguments in his 1994 essay Traveling Theory Reconsidered (Said, Reflections 436-452). …

Stylistics and Stylistic Analysis of a Modern Hindi Poem

Language is the medium through which all literature finds its manifestation. It is therefore necessary to have a language-based perspective for the study of literature. Since one finds in literature not only the referential but the creative and aesthetic aspects of language use, it is necessary to show that with a global perspective linguistics, through its sub discipline ‘stylistics’, can explicate literary texts as well. Hence, the paper consists of two parts: the first presenting a brief picture of linguistics as a discipline with a global orientation that is capable of studying not only the structures but also the functions and uses of language, and the second consisting of a stylistic analysis of S. H. V. Agyeya ‘s modern poem cup-caap nadii (The silent river). The first part briefly delineates the form of stylistics needed for explicating poetic texts. The paper emphasizes that stylistics must be semiotic in orientation, be sensitive to the context of situations and be rooted in ‘fictiveness’. Hence the approach has been called ‘semiolinguistics’ in order to distinguish it from other linguistic approaches. At the heart of stylistic meaning lies the multi-tiered stylization process which is attempted to be captured by positing three separate, though integrated, levels of the ‘sentence symbols’, ‘symbols in art’ and the ‘art symbol’. The paper focuses mainly on the level of the sentence symbol, since this is where stylization takes place, and the other two levels are implicated in the conclusions. This functional model is used for the analysis of the Hindi poem cup-caap nadi. The stylistic analysis of cup-caap nadi at the level of ‘sentence symbol’ views the poem as a linguistic construct in terms of its phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic/ pragmatic aspects. While the phonological level shows, through the irregularity of meter, a ‘prose rhythm’, the lexical level reveals the signification of continuous motion, and the contrasts in lexicon signify the poem’s focus on a mental ‘state’ rather than on any physical scene. At the syntactic level, the contrasting simple and complex structures of the poem signify respectively the steady and calm motion of external nature which by-passes or submerges all obstacles in verse paragraph A, and a continuous violent motion of an ‘internal’ river that cannot submerge or obliterate the ever standing obstacles of 'desires' and hence remains in a state of constant collision in verse paragraph B. The semantic/ pragmatic level reveals that the continuous motion and the memories and desires are a permanent feature of the poem 'I's personality along with his sense of helplessness.

Edvard Munch in Korean Modern Poems have accepted

Edvard Munch in Korean Modern Poems have accepted

Study on the new modern poem genre in the mobile age - focused on -

Study on the new modern poem genre in the mobile age - focused on -

Poetry Movements in Taiwan from the 1950s to the late 1970s: Breaks and Continuities

The period between 1950 and the late 1970s saw the birth of modern poetry in Taiwan and its emergence from a “rebellion” that took place both within and against the overarching influence of classical poetry, which it finally replaced. During this period it created its own language and cultural space, and finally found its rightful place among the general cultural activities of the time. At a time when poets could not avoid forming alliances, as Yu Kwang-chung (余光中) has observed, the journals and the movements for which they provided a voice and a rallying point, played an essential part in encouraging reflection on the nature and role of contemporary poetry, and in developing its language. In addition to the poems they published, the authors they introduced, and the translations of foreign works they made known, each of these journals expressed clearly defined theoretical choices, and made their own contribution to what came to be known in Taiwan as the modern poem (現代詩, xiandaishi).

'Life?': modernism and liminality in Douglas Livingstone’s &lt;i&gt;A littoral zone&lt;/i&gt;

In an attempt to find his place within nature in South Africa and in a global modern context, Douglas Livingstone returns strongly to modernist poetry in his 1991 volume A littoral zone. In contrast to his predecessors like Wallace Stevens in “The glass of water” and T.S. Eliot in The waste land, this volume at critical moments gets stuck in a liminal stage. Images and poems, and eventually the volume as a whole, despite the highlights they present, say that it no longer seems so possible to end up also within the postliminal stage, so as to complete a rite of passage. Yet modernist poems such as Stevens’s “The glass of water” have the ability to end up in postliminal affirmation through and beyond the liminal stage of the overall process. Here light becomes a thirsty lion that comes down to drink from the glass, with a resultant transcendence of the dualistic between-ness that characterises the liminal stage in the modernist poetic mode, while this further results in the incorporation of a deeper and refreshing, dynamic unity. Even more remarkable is that this poetic rite is not of a closing nature, but open, especially in the sense that it affirms all that is possible and greater than the individual ego or subject, this, while getting stuck within a liminal stage just short of the postliminal stage can be in the nature of closure, as Livingstone shows, for example, when he says in “Low tide at Station 20” that humanity is trapped in its inability to see the original power of unity with and within nature in order to live within it; and while humanity remains an ugly outgrowth on the gigantic spine of evolution. In provisional conclusion this article finds that it will be better to view Victor Turner’s 1979 celebration of what he terms the “liminoid” in the place of a “true liminality” critically. Although it is impossible to return to a collective catharsis in watching a play, one cannot feel too comfortable about getting rid of the cosmological, theological and concrete embeddedness of rites of passage (of which a liminal stage merely forms a part). Van Gennep links these matters, and modernist poets are still able to express these interlinked matters with a powerful, sensitive effect of dynamic unity. Livingstone also does this, but in considerably lesser measure, and from within a considerably more uncertain context. The article ultimately shows that for these reasons and more, Livingstone’s volume deserves far more critical reading than it has received to date, and that despite one or two weaknesses – of which the employment of The waste land in the rather flimsy “The waste land at Station 14” is the most serious – the volume continues to make a rich contribution to South African life, or within any country that views poetry as an important form of human communication.

The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Reda (review)

Reviewed by: The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Réda James Petterson Harrow, Susan. The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Réda. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp. 269. ISBN0802087221 Susan Harrow's The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self: Subjectivity and Representation from Rimbaud to Réda is an exacting, carefully researched and ultimately rewarding cross-century reading of the creative intersections of subjectivity and the dual materiality of language and the real in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge and Jacques Réda; a reading attentive to the disruptive ways in which, within poetry, "the language of materiality rolls into the materiality of language" (5; 13; 221). Harrow's keen eye for Rimbaud's visual detail along with her attention to the materiality of his language allows for refreshing perspectives on phrases worn nearly threadbare by decades of critical attention. Thus, rather than reading "JE est un autre" as yet again suggestive of "floating a-sociability" within configurations of "meaningless pieces [. . .] merely available for new relations" (Bersani, cited in Harrow 15; 51), Harrow notes that "the disjunctive syntax of the proposition calls urgent attention to the constitution of self in language" (10). Prolonged attention to material detail does occasionally obscure the rhetoric of materiality – for instance, "Oh! là! là!" in Rimbaud's "Ma Bohème" is read without irony as simply "exclamation and impassioned repetition" (17). Whereas Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer is read partly in terms of twentieth-century cubist fracturing of self and aesthetic subject, constituted in their very failure to "unify" (40) and where "the crisis of subjectivity is, at root, a crisis of language" (41), the Illuminations are presented alongside surrealist visual art to reveal the poet as 'self-ironizing anthropologist' (22). Throughout, Harrow aptly recognizes that the "readerly anxiety" triggered by Rimbaud's images and form points to the poet's social ability to "force the reader to engage in the making of meaning, rather than in the reception of pre-formed meaning" (54-55). Similarly, "even as the 'objective' brilliance" of Apollinaire's 1912-1914 modernist poems "work to obscure subjectivity" they remain redolent "with sparks of self-expressivity" (64). The modernist drive toward language's autonomous a-historical materiality thereby remains erotically charged with and positively distracted by personal and historical realities, not the least of which were the poet's lover, Lou, and the slaughter of World War I (79). Harrow thus demonstrates that the collision of historical circumstance and the imperative of modernist autonomy offers up a hybrid autobiographical self located "between the extratextual [End Page 152] writer and a writing-written self textually present in the specificity of a historically and materially located 'je'" (84). In passing, Harrow suggests that André Breton's reading of Apollinaire's war poetry "presupposes an ethically committed subject, hardwired to History and able to supply an authoritative, monological representation of the bitter reality of combative experience" (82). More thorough consideration of the materiality of surrealist subjectivity would have revealed it to be anything but monologically "hardwired to History." Through Ponge's Douze petits écrits – "twelve little textual incendiaries" (121) – Le Parti pris des choses and his art-critical writings, Harrow explores the relation between "self and world, self and word" (161), where the formal deflections and warping of this relation reveal "the visible traces of subjectivity in process" (115) and produce a "therapeutic shift" for the sake of "re-investing self" and "re-nurtur[ing] human subjectivity" (152-53). Harrow carefully situates Ponge's culture critique within "the stylistic and syntactic disturbances manifest in the text" (129) that leave their impression on both the material self and the linguistic-aesthetic subject. Just as closely examined is how Ponge's "desire to capture in language the rush of consciousness at the point of material contact with the world generates analogy and allegory" (9); though perhaps analogy and allegory also dazzlingly rush in to forcefully enroll the reader's belief in this point or "seam of contact between self and world" (9). Harrow's reading of Réda shifts decidedly toward...

Introduction

Introduction Jean-Michel Rabaté On April 28, 2005, a group of writers and scholars left Philadelphia for Utica, New York. The goal of the trip was a conference jointly organized by Steve Yao of Hamilton College and Michael Coyle of Colgate University on the theme of "Ezra Pound and Education." In the car were Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Massimo Bacigalupo, Bob Perelman, and I. The five hours or so it took to drive North were occupied by animated discussions of literature, politics, feminism, modernism, and of course academic gossip. Given some potentially contentious topics and in spite of Pound's own agonistic views, nobody fought, a spirit of poetic camaraderie reigned until the end. I am mentioning this because one of the wonderfully positive outcomes of the trip and the conference was that Rachel agreed to become one of the jml editors, and I want to welcome her warmly here. It was a perfect coincidence that made us bridge the gap between creative writing and cutting edge scholarship, and that was also the focus of the conference. For at Hamilton and Colgate we did not only hear papers, most of which were brilliant and informative, on Pound's many-faceted activities, but poetry was also given pride of place. Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Romer, and Rachel all read their poems, Rachel quite dramatically in the Hamilton campus chapel late at night. The general theme of the Pound conference has some relevance to the contents of this issue that spans a whole modernist spectrum, from early modernism with Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to so-called "postmodern" novels like Kundera's recent books and Houellebecq's notorious Elementary Particles. While the ironical revisionist readings of these contemporaries tend to question the value of modernism as a whole, most modernist writers themselves insist on the pedagogical value of their writings. This has been demonstrated in a beautiful book written by one of the Pound conference participants, Gail McDonald, Learning to be Modern: Pound, Eliot and the American University [End Page iv] (Oxford University Press, 1993). The issue could be phrased first as: "What can one learn from modernism, has it still something to teach us today?" but also as: "How should we teach these canonical modernist texts, especially when they themselves insist on their pedagogical function?" Should this be done via a new literary history; American, British, or international politics; formalist close readings; or by choosing new philosophical, ideological, or theoretical handles? Finally, what does it mean to learn to be modern, if modernism can be seen as a literary struggle with a more radical modernity? These questions have all been treated in one way or another by the authors of the essays gathered in an issue that takes modernism as a point of departure. For most modernist writers, learning to be modern would begin with the elective discovery of strategic predecessors. One of them, put forward relentlessly by Mikhail Bakhtin in his groundbreaking theory of the modernist novel, was Dostoeysky. Here, Peter Lowe examines how Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment left a lasting impact on one of the best known modernist poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Eliot borrowed the crucial paradigm of the moral alienation followed by the liberating confession of a young man who feels he is the victim of his environment, a soulless metropolis. Of course, Prufrock never confesses, but his being a "non-Raskolnikov" adds crucial depth to his being a "non-Hamlet." Even if Eliot had read the novel earlier than was thought and in French translation, its influence accompanied him during the years when he was drafting his "Love Song." Its "insidious" streets owe as much to St. Petersburg as to Paris or Boston; the metaphysical theme embodied by Lazarus is deepened with the quest for salvation and rebirth stemming from a truly guilty conscience. Eve Sorum compares Eliot and Woolf and sees them united by a common masochist esthetic. From Eliot's notion of the "surrender of the self" to Woolf's embracing of pain as a key to literary creation, a hidden tradition of glorious passivity seems to provide a foundation for the esthetics of modernism. This...

How All Occasions Do Inform: "Household Matters" and Domestic Vignettes in George Meredith's Modern Love

FOR ALMOST A CENTURY AND A HALF GEORGE MEREDITH'S MODERN LOVE HAS been recognized as a challengingly, troublingly modern poem. Successive generations found it contemporary and pertinent. In 1862 poem irked and even scandalized reviewers for its disturbing tastelessness and for what seemed its vulgar, amoral undressing of marital relations. young Swinburne, an avatar of new and shocking, was rare among poem's first reviewers for his admiring letter in Spectator of that year. (1) Apprehension about poem's indecency, however, quickly yielded to apprecitations of its art and then examinations of its richness in form, in style, in narration, and in imagery. Meredith mimes courtly sonnet tradition to reveal a tale of marital disarray. poem's images, which have been widely discussed, combine to depict domestic scenes from this marriage, scenes that are sharp, lucid, and forceful. emotions--essentially those of husband--highlight personal tensions and interpersonal games of couple (what might now be termed the family dynamics). Meredith's form, his images, and his attention to psychology 'all contribute to sense of modernity in Modern Love. Especially contemporary in their feel are often scathing domestic vignettes that alternate with lyric passages, that sustain narrative of poem, and that we are likely to find so vivid and striking. Much of power and effect of Modern Love derives from them, though they have drawn little critical attention. opening sonnet, which elegantly introduces, encapsulates, and anticipates rest of poem, begins--almost epic-style--in medias res: By this he knew she wept with waking eyes. (2) thrust of poem will be psychological. setting is couple's bedroom, focusing our attention on its centerpiece, their common bed. crisply delineated scene, like so many that follow, is wincingly familiar. husband is cognizant of his wife's misery, sensitive to her strange low sobs. Behind stone-stillness and silence of this dismal midnight, Each [is] wishing for sword that severs all. images of stone-tomb, serpents, venom, eyes, silence, and knives all appear in this stanza and are elaborated thereafter. Whatever ramifications each individual image will carry, it also contributes effectively to dramatic tableau Meredith constructs. sword may have chivalric and even biblical resonances, and it prefigures fatal of closing sonnet. But both sword and knife also convey psychological state of marriage: commonplace fantasy of wishing for blade (sword or ax) that would sever all and free one. It is a fantasy that is only incidentally homicidal or fatal; its primary impulse is to get out, to be cut clear. Part of Meredith's genius is to insinuate inexorable indirect consequences. dearth of love is fatal--in this case literally, always emotionally. As a story of a failed marriage, poem is appropriately focused on bed, and periodically returns to it. once-rapturous bed gone amok is a succinct metaphor for strain and disarray in husband and wife's relationship. Few furnishings more concisely record stresses and discordancies in a marriage. Orson Welles ingeniously exchanged bed for breakfast table that expands with every cut in infamous scene calibrating distance between Kane and Emily in Citizen Kane. Other artists have used opposing books, color schemes, rooms, and like to register disaffection. Meredith audaciously (for 1862) rejects any such indirection or euphemism, establishing primacy of this setting. In sonnet 15, husband watches Madam sleep--alternately reflecting on how image of Othello, The Poet's black stage-lion of wronged love, / Frights not our modern dames (an ironic simile considering Desdemona's innocence) and on how pure his wife's sleep seems. Rather than reinforcing happy, romantic memories, however, lyric concludes with his perusing her current love letter: The words are very like: name is new. …

Wordplay and the Contextual Circle in Queneau's Petite Cosmogonie Portative

Wordplay and the Contextual Circle in Queneau’s Petite Cosmogonie Portative Chris Andrews Published in 1950, Raymond Queneau's Petite Cosmogonie Portative was an ambitious attempt to revive the long-dormant genre of the verse cosmogony, incorporating the most recent scientific discoveries of the day and employing a ludic rhetoric indebted to the surrealists and to James Joyce. This article will propose a taxonomy to account for the bewildering variety of portmanteau words and puns in the Cosmogonie, then show how in many cases Queneau's wordplay confounds categorization by combining the proposed types. Moreover, instances of wordplay are linked in complex networks, so that the discovery of a new meaning in one instance enriches the context for the others, leading to a dizzying proliferation of meanings and making the distinction between over-reading and exhaustive reading particularly difficult to draw. Like Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the Petite Cosmogonie Portative is a text that illustrates this problem of the "contextual circle" with exemplary force. The article will conclude by relating the effects of wordplay at the lexical level to the broader reorganization of scientific knowledge effected by the Cosmogonie as a whole, and evaluating the metaphor of "transmutation" which Queneau used to describe this process. We can begin to measure the project of the Petite Cosmogonie Portative by considering its title. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a cosmogony is a "theory, system or account of the creation or generation of the universe." Diachronic cosmogony may be opposed to the synchronic systems constructed by cosmology. Queneau's poem recounts the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the invention [End Page 69] of digital computers. The title is oxymoronic: the adjectives point to the brevity of the text, making light of the totalizing intent implied by the noun. But they also indicate the work's affiliations: although the Cosmogonie is by no means short for a modern poem, with its total of 1,388 lines, it is only about as long as a single canto of its great precursor—the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius. Like De Rerum Natura, the Cosmogonie renders homage to Venus. Queneau even parodies the invocation of the goddess that opens Lucretius' poem: "Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas" (De Rerum Natura I,1); "Aimable banditrix des hommes volupté" (Petite Cosmogonie Portative IV, 110).1 However the Cosmogonie does not respond to Lucretius in isolation, but to a long, if intermittent, tradition of scientific poetry, which can be traced back to the pre-Socratic philosopher-poets Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles, and which is still showing signs of life, although for most literary historians, essays in the genre since the Renaissance have generally failed. Either they were not completed, like André Chénier's Hermès (begun in 1782) or they have fallen irrecuperably out of the canon, like Les Trois Règnes de la Nature by Jacques Delille (1806). In an article on "Science and Literature" written for the Times Literary Supplement in 1967, Queneau agrees with the literary historians, looking back to Du Bartas and Peletier du Mans for the last examples of a truly scientific poetry, which, he says, not only has scientific subject matter but also transmutes the language of science into poetry. "Il faut remonter jusqu'à Peletier du Mans et du Bartas pour trouver une poésie scientifique, c'est-à-dire, non seulement dont le sujet est tel, mais encore où le langage de la science est transmué en poésie. C'est ce que j'ai essayé moi-même de faire dans la Petite Cosmogonie Portative."2 Albert-Marie Schmidt, in his study of scientific poetry in sixteenth-century France, uses the term hexaméron to describe a form introduced by Maurice Scève's Microcosme: a long cosmogonic poem in alexandrines, divided into six cantos (Schmidt 167). Queneau adopted this form for his Cosmogonie, prefacing each canto with a prose argument in the manner of eighteenth-century poets such as Delille. But within this antique frame is set a text of evident, even aggressive, modernity, continually infringing rules of spelling, grammar and lexis, not to mention meter and poetic decorum. The text is modern also in its employment...

Artificial Hells. Inauguration of the “1921 Dada Season”

I do not know who had the idea of the first Dada “event.” This idea certainly did not spring forth spontaneously, and its beginning must be sought in the evenings of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Those performances were still wholly literary in character. To explain the turn toward its current formulation, one needs to keep in mind certain connections. It was 1917. Zurich gathered together all elements of resistance or indifference from the fighting nations, among whom were primarily a large number of artists. The state of tension caused by the various kinds of secret actions undertaken in the city helped not a little to cement several friendships. The “Dada movement,” properly speaking, dates from this time. A veritable pact started it off, with clauses that shall be divulged later. Let us note for now that the Dadaists, unafraid to pledge their future, agreed to convene in Madrid in March 1921. I believe that only material difficulties kept them from realizing that project. I am skipping the metamorphoses that Dada underwent prior to its arrival in France, as that history is destined to be well known. I will simply recall, briefly, the public standing of French poets in 1919: verses by Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and myself were recited daily in one hall or another to the same audience, who invariably applauded. The profound boredom that emanated from these recitals, the incomprehension that resulted from reading out loud (a kind of reading that does maximum disservice to most modern poems, banishing their

The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: The American Skyscraper and the Modernist Poem

In the early 1910s, a vastly divergent range of American poets suddenly embraced the milieu of the machine-age metropolis-a shift as crucial to poetry's modernist rejuvenation as the adoption of new formal techniques. The most potent and yet paradoxical icon of this decade's urban verse was the skyscraper, which both promised its "cliff-dwelling" inhabitants a rationalist modernity without boundaries, and created a body of hermetic knowledge beyond most people's comprehension. Some verses read skyscrapers as symbols of capitalist depersonalization, others as loci of utopian possibility. Many see them as liminal, offering access to new dimensions of experience or knowledge-yet still wonder whether their transformative power will carry humans places we would want to inhabit.

Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry

Bromwich, David. Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry. University of Chicago Press, 2001), xiv + 256 pp. $16.00 paper. Over the last twenty-five years David Bromwich has authored several important books, including Hazlitt: The Mind of the Critic, A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost, Politics By Other Means (about the culture wars) and Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s. He and I were briefly colleagues in the English Department at Princeton University in the 1970s and, since that time, I have followed his career with interest and, on the whole, admiration. It has seemed to me that his books have usually struck the right note in the developing history of the profession of literary studies in the United States. His work, elegantly written and measured even in its most pointed judgments, has been a tonic and sometimes an antidote to the prevailing fashion in elite critical circles. His new book is made up of occasional essays on modern poetry originally published during the last twenty years in major journals or reviews (Raritan, Grand Street, TLS, and so on). Although he has made no pretense of comprehensive revision to effect a unity of argument for the essays, the book as a whole does make a strong, unified impression with its general view of modern poetry. Modern poetry, as these fine essays on Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashberry, Geoffrey Hill, and others demonstrate, is best seen as a resistance to cliché, to the received idea of things, and to the habit and instant consensus so typical of modern society. This resistance to cliché is, of course, most evident in modern poetry's experiments with the received language of poetry. And the modern poet, most typically, resists all other conceptions of his or her office than that of a self defined by its attempts to speak, however uncertainly, about its uncertain feelings, without cliché or the empty formulas of received wisdom. "What a modern poem somehow says is always Watch! Listen! Suppose!—and this in response to a scene or situation that does not have a story to fit into, and that may never have one. Poetry, on this understanding of its [End Page 159] function, is always involved in a resistance to cliché. ... The words of a poem are not to be supposed less intricate than experience itself. And concerning our own experience, we know that it cannot be reduced to a final [prevailing] understanding, whether as evidence, message, behavior, or example" (4). The "skeptical music" of the book's title, a phrase from Wallace Stevens' "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz," refers to this imaginative poise of uncertainty resistant to the ready-made formulation of one sort of reduction or other. For critically informed, sensitive, and tastefully expressed readings of modern poetry and poets—Hemingway is an honorary poet in Bromwich's (I think rightful) view—a reader could do no better than this book.

Pour une redéfinition du collage : poétiques et lectures poétiques américaines

Toward a definition of coilaging : composition and reception in American poetry. In an attempt to define the modalities of collage in poetry, in relation to the visual arts and above all to the Modernist poem, this paper reconsiders Ezra Pound's Cantos under the sign of compacting, questions the reduction of collage to mere practices of decomposition and recomposition, and opens the debate to the part played by procedures in the composition and reception of poems : as centred on textual generation as well as on the products of creation, Gertrude Stein’s text emerges as seminal in the construction of language poetry and Jackson Mac Low’s procedural poetry allows for a redefinition of collage and more generally of the poetic in terms of architecture.

Marguerite Yourcenar et Bion de Smyrne : une étude intertextuelle

Marguerite Yourcenar and Bion of Smyrna: An Intertextual Study Genette's definitions of intertextuality, applied to "Achille ou le mensonge" in "Feux" and the fragment "Epithalame d'Achille et de Déidamie" attributed to the bucolic Greek poet Bion, are extremely efficient, while Yourcenar, in elaborating a modern poem from the episode where Achilles is hidden by his mother as a girl amongst girls in the island of Scyros, has offered a possible reading incipient in Bion's fragment.