Notion Of Poetry Research Articles

Debord et Jouffroy, alliés en instance de poésie

Alain Jouffroy and Guy Debord belong to the same generation, "attracted" by suicide and revolution, being in touch with surrealism and the Marxist movement(s) of May 68. Jouffroy never became a member of the Situationist group, but in the frame of "Poetry of real-life" he wrote the poems that the Situationists refused to produce. His poetry had a grasp of the everyday situations/meetings, by criticizing the capitalist society, and overcoming the very notion of poetry without abandoning the poetic means, proving, thus, that criticism of capitalism and criticism of poetry are both compatible with poetry itself. Jouffroy applies sabotage and guerilla war methods—as well as Situationist methods such as the textual-détournement—on his own texts to provoke a poetic-language revolution. Situationnists used to criticize Jouffroy's views. All the same, by publishing Revolutionary Individualism, Jouffroy enters into virtual dialogue with Debord, mainly, on The Society of the Spectacle. Jouffroy discusses Situationist topics including textual-détournement and the overcoming/abolition of art. In his Trans-paradis-express poetry collection, he stages his imaginary meeting with Debord and Ducasse. Finally, he inverts the course of history, officializes his alliance with Debord by establishing him as ``the poet of Paris'', an image that emerges from Debord's own films, life and autobiographical works. He inscribes Debord's project in his own poetical and revolutionary project: Revolutionary Individualism and the "Poetry of real-life". In this way, he justifies Debord's work as well as his own.

Poe in Cyberspace: The Pleasure Principle Revisited

Poe in Cyberspace: The Pleasure Principle Revisited

A pragmatic view of the poetic function of language

AbstractIn this paper, I try to expatiate on the poetic function of language on the basis of considerations by Jakobson and Waugh. I try to bring in the consideration that pragmatics plays an important role in elucidating the poetic function of language. Contextualism allows us to interpret a poem: referents must be fixed or need not be fixed due to the requirements of the discourse; citations are brought in through pragmatic ways; polyphony is achieved by taking into account the context of previous analyses of a poetic text; the vicinity of a certain word, or concept or line is likely to affect the interpretation of a certain expression; the poetic text can take different forms, from graffiti to discourse at the market place, to discourse between lovers. All these forms of poetic text would not exist if the notion of poetry did not include the idea of semantic/pragmatic compression which is matched, in interpretation, by expansions.

Ideas, language, action: The protest poetry of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter

The notion of poetry as protest is not new – Percy Bysshe Shelley famously advocated for radical social action in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (1819), for example, a response to the brutality of the Peterloo massacre. Far from making nothing happen, Audre Lorde notes that ‘poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought’; the form ‘is not a luxury’ but a ‘vital necessity’ from which ideas, language, and action might be wrought (1985). Certainly, in the context of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, poetry has occupied a central role in the expression of trauma and injustice, offering a critical means through which to speak truth to power, particularly from the margins, and via non-traditional publishing platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. This article argues that much of the protest poetry of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter activism operates in two key intersecting ways: as a transgressive variation of contemporary (anti-)elegy, and as a virtual performance drawing upon the network-building functions of social media. In both capacities, it is a form which resists the consolations of closure to demonstrate the ongoing social realities of systemic racism and sexism. Focussing on a range of poems which enact resistance, this article explores the ‘boundary-breaking potential’ of the elegiac performances of protest poetry, in which the ‘possibilities of a more equitable what could be take shape’ (Rutter et al., 2019, p. 24).

Evading Libitina

Abstract Under the sign of Libitina, the Roman goddess of burials and funerals invoked in Horace's Ode 3.30, this essay provides a celebratory introduction to the work of the Polish Jewish poet Zuzanna Ginczanka (1917–44), situating her within the cultural history of commemoration and consecration of the dead in Poland and the painful confrontation with the unburied dead of the Holocaust, of whom Ginczanka is one. Her best-known poem, a bitter parody of Juliusz Słowacki's “My Testament,” turns the Horatian notion of poetry as the most precious and enduring legacy on its head by construing the author's meager household possessions, looted after her denunciation to the Nazis in wartime, as the only offering her fellow citizens will cherish, while the text itself was actually brought as evidence in a postwar trial of the Polish woman she accuses in the poem and contributed to a conviction for collaboration. Using historian Thomas Laqueur's terms necro-sociability and necronominalism as competing impulses in a seemingly intractable struggle, this essay argues that it is possible to find in Ginczanka's joyful defiance of traditional accounts of body and spirit the point of departure for a poetics that claims a new freedom of imagination in the attempt to transcend the most stubborn of memory wars.

Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell

Reviewed by: Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell Frank Swannack Trudell, Scott A., Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 272; R.R.P. £63.00; ISBN 9780198834663. Recent scholarship has focused on the disparity between what early modern texts signified at the time of composition and postmodern critical assumptions. These studies counter theoretical thinking that considers a progressive literary history at the expense of early modern innovation. Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England discovers critical oversights through privileging 'a bibliographic fantasy' (p. 210). The book reveals how the modern notion of multimedia is already prevalent in early modern England, as poets and playwrights combine music, song, poetry, and theatrical bodies to startling, often puzzling, effect. Trudell challenges critical thinking that regards early modern texts as preserving a rigid historical literary imagination. His book examines how early modern poets and playwrights not only considered different forms of communication, but also the lingering emotional effects of their work on their audience. Thus Trudell finds fresh insights in Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy (1595). His argument highlights Sidney's practical approach to music. Trudell even speculates that Sidney may have been a musician himself, as Sidney conceived poetry by embracing all forms of musical composition and performance beyond a bibliographic circle. The appearance of songs in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Trudell asserts, indicates Sidney's notion of poetry that is not simply [End Page 265] to be read. With the emergence of printed songbooks, Trudell also entertains the intriguing notion of Sidney's poetry being experienced 'in domestic settings across England' (p. 29). He suggests the possibility of illiterate households enjoying Sidney's poetry through music and song. Another overlooked aspect of early modern life is the teaching of drama in English grammar schools. Trudell surmises that because Sidney was a student at Shrewsbury School, he would have been made aware of drama from a young age. The Elizabethan poet even performed in Accession Day tilts. The crux of Trudell's argument is how dramatic performance is ensconced in Sidney's poetic imagination to become fused with literary endeavours. Within the theatre, Trudell tackles pederasty surrounding boy actor-singers. His first important point is to differentiate early modern pederasty from the modern psychological disorder of pedophilia. Rather than being an aberration, pederasty refers to an established practice of eroticizing women, servants, and children. It is a practice, Trudell argues, the theatre uses to capture audiences in pederasty fantasies. The mediation of poetry through a boy's singing and sexualized body objectifies them, conversely, as monstrous receptacles encouraging abuse. Trudell also unearths a musical pederasty in Shakespeare's plays. With Twelfth Night, Trudell implies that the play's music functions like bawdy 'muzak'. Its miscellaneous frivolities create tension by often impinging on the play's action. Trudell's thesis finds a rich source in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The eroticized infantile musical fairies provide historical detail on how childhood could last into an actor's twenties. While contemporary media theory, particularly how information encodes messages deciphered by modern communication systems, is already present through how the disembodied changeling transmits sexual fantasies. A similar analysis of Hamlet's Ophelia leads Trudell to reconsider her mysterious feminized madness as an effervescing multimedia presence. In a fascinating discussion, Trudell asserts that her melancholic songs are derived from the popular anonymous ballad tradition. Her transformative singing and subsequent drowning combine the environment, the sexual violence of Ovid's Orpheus in the Metamorphoses, and music's lingering aftertaste to communicate emotive meaning. Finally, Trudell charts John Milton's love–hate relationship with song. Although present in Milton's work, singers haunt his texts as subdued voices. Ironically, Trudell also identifies Milton's removal from printed songbooks in the late seventeenth century. Milton's conspicuous absence from the period's musical community inspires Trudell's investigation of songbooks featuring the music of Milton's collaborator Henry Lawes. Trudell uncovers 'intriguing echoes' of Milton's A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637 and 1645) in Lawes's songbooks and in three editions...

Poetic Voice in the Research: A Social Sciences Exploration in Verse

This article doubles down on the notion of poetry as a vehicle for expression in qualitative research. Following from the work of Cahnmann (2003), Stenhouse (2014), and Lahman et al. (2010), and drawing from additional inspiration including Clandinin and Connelly (2000) and Kuhn (2012), the author constructs the argument for poetic voice in research in the form of a series of poetic interplay with research concepts. The article makes the case that rich sources of data may be found in alternative representations of findings, and research questions and the people who are invited to research projects should influence researchers' choices and data collection and presentation.

On Seeing Otherwise: Johann Jakob Breitinger’s Poetics of Attention

This article contextualizes Johann Jakob Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst (1740) within a transdisciplinary discourse on Aufmerksamkeit (attention) in eighteenth-century epistemology and science. I argue that Breitinger’s adaptation of the epistemology of attention defines his most distinctive poetological concepts, including his notion of poetry as a type of painting (poetische Mahlerey), his elevation of the new (das Neue) and the marvelous (das Wunderbare) into central categories of poetics, and his subversion of the traditional principle of imitation of nature (Nachahmung der Natur). Excavating Breitinger’s revision of poetics on the basis of a representationalist concept of attention recovers the Critische Dichtkunst as an important forerunner of Alexander Baumgarten’s momentous conjunction of artistic production and sense perception in a single discipline of aesthetics. Finally, the article demonstrates the transdisciplinary potency of the concept of attention in the early eighteenth century, well before the late-nineteenth-century rise of empirical psychology highlighted by conventional accounts of the emergence of attention as a key concern of modern culture.

La lectura sartreana de Mallarmé: la poesía crítica como negación pura

El viraje en la concepción sartreana de la poesía, ya comenzado en su Saint Genet y Orphée noir, se radicaliza en la biografía existencial que hace de la obra y la persona de Stéphane Mallarmé. Sartre plantea la posibilidad de que la poesía efectivamente pueda comprometerse (algo que parecía negado en Situations II) debido a su altísima potencia negativa-destructiva, que conduce a una manifestación de la esencia negativa, conflictual y «fracasada» de la conciencia como ser-para-sí llamando a su libertad y dando lugar así a una poesía crítica, hermana de la «literatura total».

Myth, Primitive Sign, Poetry: From Cassirer to Heidegger

Abstract Cassirer is important in 20th Century philosophy for the attention he gives to the fundamental relationship between myth and language. For Cassirer, myth is a non-subjective form of discourse wherein the origin of language coincides with both the human-divine encounter and the event of being itself. In this article, I trace the disagreement between Cassirer and Heidegger on the nature of the magical (or “primitive”) sign, which is at the heart of mythical discourse. While Heidegger initially argues that this form of sign is structurally impossible on the basis of his accounts of signs and language in Being and Time, he later comes to recognize that he had not properly accounted for its possibility within his phenomenological deduction. I conclude by describing how Heidegger’s notion of poetry eventually comes into alignment with the way Cassirer describes the function of myth and the magical sign.

ПОЕТИЧНИЙ ТЕКСТ ЯК СПЕЦИФІЧНИЙ ЗАСІБ ВІДТВОРЕННЯ ДІЙСНОСТІ

The article is dedicated to the embodiment of reality in the poetic model of the world of the British poetry by means of the linguistic and poetic analysis of tropes as the way to actualize cognitive processes in the formation of the world model. By means of linguistic, poetic and cognitive analysis the cognitive aspect of the poetry of the British romantic, modern and post-modern periods is investigated. From the position of cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics poetry is analyzed as the embodiment in the poetical works the result of cognition of a poet and his interpretation of reality on the background of his physical, social and cultural experience. Reconstruction of the poetical model of the world on the base of British poetical texts is accentuated on the notion of poetry and poetic texts, on the reflection of reality in poetry, on esthetic aspect of poetry and on linguistic and communicative peculiarities of poetry. The article is actual as the generalization of linguistic, poetic and cognitive paradigms aimed to the construction of the model of the world of different cultural and historic periods. The aim and the results of investigation are determined by the specification of the poetical viewpoint embodied in the British poetry of romantic, modern and post-modern periods.

The modeling methodology of the world’s fractal poetical model in the British poetry of the XIX–XXI centuries (linguistic and cognitive aspects)

The aim of the article is to explore an embodiment of reality in the world’s fractal poetic picture in the British poetry of the XIX–XXI centuries by means of the linguistic and poetic analysis of tropes as the way to actualize cognitive processes of the world picture formation. The cognitive style of the British romantic, modern and post-modern poets is investigated by means of linguistic, poetic, cognitive, mathematic, political and synergy analysis. From the standpoint of cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics, poetic text is analysed as the result of the poet's cognition and his interpretation of reality through the prism of his physical, social and cultural experience. Cognitive poetics is focused on the metaphorical aspects of thinking, due to which the conceptualization of human reality, based on physical and sensory-motor experiences, is possible, The reconstruction of the world fractal poetical model accentuates on the notion of poetry and poetic texts, on the reflection of reality, on esthetic aspect of poetry and on linguistic and communicative peculiarities of it.The article is relevant in the aspect of modern polyparadigmatic research trends, because it is a synthesis and systematization of three linguistic paradigms (linguo-poetic, linguistic-cognitive and poetic-cognitive). These paradigms are focused on designing the fractal poetic model of the world as a construct. This construct embodies the deep meaning of poetic texts belonged to different cultural and historical periods. The mathematically-sociological and synergetic modeling are also have been taking into account. The aim and the results of investigation are determined by the specification of the poetical viewpoint embodied in the British poetry of romantic, modern and post-modern periods.

Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire by Tom Hawkins (review)

Reviewed by: Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire by Tom Hawkins Jennifer Ferriss-Hill Tom Hawkins. Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 334. $99.99. ISBN 978–1-107–01208–0. Although the broad title of Iambic Poetics (even with the coda in the Roman Empire) might well be expected to herald a volume devoted to well-rehearsed authors and their works, readers will be pleasantly surprised to find here careful and compelling studies of Ovid’s Ibis, Babrius’ Mythiambi, Gregory Nazianzen, Dio Chrysostom’s First Tarsian, Lucian’s Pseudologista, and Julian’s Misopogon. Hawkins begins by elucidating the nature of Ovid’s Ibis as a prelude to further attack, a stance appealingly termed “iambus delayed.” Although the discussion has speculative moments, it is by pursuing every philological and ornithological possibility afforded by the peculiar bird for which the poem is named that Hawkins is able to do justice to this multifaceted work. As he traces the “ibidic” tradition back through Horace and (especially) Callimachus to Aristophanes and Plato, Hawkins brings to light how this rich nexus of antecedents makes meanings for the exiled elegist. The role of empire as essential to iambus is naturally prominent in this dense and detailed opening chapter, for Hawkins’ focus is not merely iambic poetics in the empire but iambic poetics and empire. In his chapter on Babrius, Hawkins strives to resurrect the poetic integrity of the Mythiambi, which suffers from being quarried for individual fables. This “new Aesop” is shown engaging with Hesiod, Hipponax, Plato, and Callimachus; as for Babrius himself, these weighty models contribute depth and complexity to his work. Concluding the book’s first half is Gregory Nazianzen, responsible for synthesizing Hellenic and Christian: after being deposed from the See of Constantinople, far from withdrawing into a guileless “meditative retirement” (144), he reinvented for himself a persona of both ascetic saint and efficacious iambist. Making use of Callimachus’ Aetia preface and the notion of poetry as a pharmakon, Gregory crafted “new and hybrid forms” (143), such as verse epistles in Greek and lengthy poetic autobiographies, in order to counter his rivals and reassert his place as a Nicene spiritual leader. The second half of the book explores how, perhaps counterintuitively, three authors of Greek prose—Dio Chrysostom (in his First Tarsian), Lucian (in the Pseudologista), and Julian (in the Misopogon)—made use of iambic poetics. The argument that these figures activated the possibilities of the Archilochean poetic tradition in their oratory is convincing, though the role of empire recedes into the background. These five later chapters are, understandably, structurally rather different from the first, as the average reader requires a great deal more in the way of context and step-by-step explication in order to follow and evaluate the arguments. Hawkins is careful to explain in his introduction the feature that unites this eclectic selection of authors: “Their combination of an overt denial of any iambic agenda with a pronounced reliance on iambic poetics” (9–10). This seems clear enough, but at times it is hard not to feel that the project is somewhat artificially circumscribed, particularly when the first, meaty chapter on Ovid’s Ibis is followed by five more on authors who, as Hawkins admits of Babrius, have “trouble finding readers today” (87). Nevertheless, Hawkins has produced a book that is both wide-ranging and focused, and that accomplishes the enviable task of treading new ground. He displays an easy command of an admirably broad range of authors, both Latin and Greek, along with their at times substantial secondary literatures, and his prose is lively and engaging. While most readers are [End Page 270] unlikely to study the entire volume, each individual chapter will prove indispensable to scholars and students interested in the particular works treated therein. Jennifer Ferriss-Hill University of Miami Copyright © 2015 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc

Poetry as praxis: An exploration of poetry discourse as qualitative inquiry

To capture the essence of an experience, poetry as research may manifest itself in two ways: (i) creating a research poem from existing data, often transcripts, or (ii) using participants' poetry as a data-set for harvesting patterns and themes. This research focuses on the second form of poetic inquiry as a means of praxis by using the poetry of inservice teachers, preservice teachers, and elementary students to discover themes in regard to the teaching and learning process. As literacy teacher educators, creating praxis (moving from the theoretical to the practical) remains the ultimate goal of teaching and learning experiences. We gathered poems as data-sets in order to explore the possible benefits and limitations of poetic inquiry. As we approached the notion of poetry as a form of inquiry, we probed whether this art-based inquiry might also equate educational praxis. After considering several poetry data-sets, this research provides evidence of possible benefits related to the praxis that poetry as discourse and artistic inquiry affords, and presents the caveats of the research by identifying possible limitations.

Introduction:

Introduction:

John Clare's Attempt to Save Poetry in "Don Juan: A Poem"

This article argues that John Clare's "Don Juan: A Poem" is an apt imitation of Byron in its deceptive attempts to both signify and deny the very notion of poetry. Though the tenor of Clare's later works seemingly conflicts with that of his earlier landscape poetry, the paradoxical "Don Juan" instances motifs from both the early and late works. Yet, the idealism of the very notion of poetry that the early Clare tries to keep out of the public's eye still exists in the polemical asylum work, "Don Juan: A Poem." Utilizing Julia Kristeva's binary of the semiotic and symbolic, I argue that Clare wishes to keep the semiotic energy of poetry separate from the formulative linguistic power of the symbolic. Clare's late poetry takes on a contentious and bombastic tone that contradicts what Clare actually posits as the idealism of poetry. Hence, Clare may be taking the attention of his readers away from the "true poesy" he desires to keep safe from the negativity of the public eye.

«Rewording in melodious guile» W.B. Yeats’s The Song of the Happy Shepherd and its Evolution Towards a Musico-Literary Manifesto

This essay intends to explore how The Song of the Happy Shepherd elaborates on the notion of poetry as song, to contextualize it against the background of its (para)textual history and evolution, and emphasize its role as a musico-literary manifesto. Yeats’s Song is able to perform its variations on «the supreme theme of Art and Song» because its atavistically unifying ‘sooth’ is inborn to the very substance and features of its tropical mediation between poetry and song, thus making it neither classically «cracked» (l. 9) – i.e. burst asunder, fractured – like the merely «musical tune that Chronos sings» (l. 9), nor romantically ‘primeval and wild’ like The Song of the Shepherd in Thomas Moore’s To Joseph Atkinson, Esq. From Bermuda .

The matter of capital: poetry and crisis in the American century

In this highly original reexamination of North American poetry in English from Ezra Pound to the present day, Christopher Nealon demonstrates that the most vital writing of the period is deeply concerned with capitalism. This focus is not exclusive to the work of left-wing poets: the problem of capitalism's effect on individuals, communities, and cultures is central to a wide variety of poetry, across a range of political and aesthetic orientations. Indeed, Nealon asserts, capitalism is the material out of which poetry in English has been created over the last century. Much as poets of previous ages continually examined topics such as the deeds of King Arthur or the history of Troy, poets as diverse as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Claudia Rankine have taken as their the dynamics and impact of capitalism--not least its tendency to generate economic and political turmoil. Nealon argues persuasively that poets' attention to the matter of capital has created a corresponding notion of poetry as a kind of textual matter, capable of dispersal, retrieval, and disguise in times of crisis. Offering fresh readings of canonical poets from W. H. Auden to Adrienne Rich, as well as interpretations of younger writers like Kevin Davies, The Matter of Capital reorients our understanding of the central poetic project of the last century.

The ‘birth of truth’: Alain Badiou and Plato’s banishment of the poets

Plato famously banishes the poets from his ideal city in book X of his Republic. Yet in this banishment Plato establishes the boundaries of reason, art and poetry — boundaries that have haunted western thinkers since antiquity. In this article I will explore those Platonic boundaries, specifically the intellectual limits of poetic writing as reflected upon by self-identified Platonist Alain Badiou. That being said, I am not attempting, strictly speaking, to look at Badiou’s interpretation of Plato’s banishment of poetry. Instead, I am using the banishment as a springboard for discussion of Badiou’s notion of poetry as the ‘birth of truth’ in his Handbook of Inaesthetics. I will examine the way this text interacts with Plato’s conceptual banishment. I assert that this interaction should illuminate the status of writing — especially artistic writing — in the state.

La Renaissance des mots: de Jean Lemaire de Belges à Agrippa d'Aubigné by Floyd Gray

MLR, 104.4, 2009 1141 gender in various ways. In the firstchapter Swift borrows theDerridean concept of 'spectropolitics' in order to coin the term 'spectropoetics': a text is 'haunted' by anterior texts and discourses that, paradoxically, must be foregrounded and kept alive for the very purpose of refuting them and laying them to rest. Swift's analysis of the Champion des dames, including illustrations and marginal annotations in both manuscripts and early printings, brings out this intertextual dynamics, while also shedding light on its shifting reception by fifteenth-and sixteenth-century readers. The second chapter, on debate poems, examines the textual mise en scene of rhetorical performance, aswell as tracing the literaryappropriation of often very technical aspects of legal terminology and procedures. The third and final chapter focuses on the representation ofwomen and the construction of gender in a series of querelle texts.Exemplary women might be portrayed as overcoming their feminine weakness and achieving amasculine ideal; or theymight be seen as surpassing the norms of either sex through a trulyexceptional greatness. Still others achieve great ness through traits, such as courage and chivalric prowess, thatmight normally be thought of as masculine, but without sacrificing their femininity?for example, in accepting as 'natural' the category of'female warrior'. And finally, women might be seen as attaining exemplary excellence through traits identified as 'essentially' femi nine, such as patience andmodesty. Swiftalso provides a very interesting discussion of'cross-gender ventriloquism', noting that if male authors often choose to adopt a female voice, Christine de Pizan herself sometimes wrote inamale voice. Inher con clusion, finally,Swiftdeploys the insights shehas generated throughout thebook ina reading of thevery peculiar Rousier des dames (c. 1510). This book isa verywelcome contribution to the study of fifteenth-centuryFrench literature,a field thathas bene fitedfromgreater attention in recent years but is stillneglected inboth teaching and scholarship, and remains largely unknown even among medievalists. Swift's study shows thevery real interest that thismaterial holds for twenty-first-centuryreaders. Pembroke College, Cambridge Sylvia Huot La Renaissance des mots: de Jean Lemaire de Beiges a Agrippa d'Aubigne. By Floyd Gray. Paris: Champion. 2008. 433 pp. 76. ISBN 978-2-7453-1539-7. Parts 11-v of La Renaissance des mots rework various articles?or, in the case of Rabelais, introductory sections to critical editions?published by Floyd Gray since 1976; they offer interpretations of Rabelais, Du Bellay, the commentaries on Ron sard'sAmours byMuret and Belleau, Montaigne, La Bruyere as reader ofMontaigne, Jean Lemaire de Beiges, Jeanne Flore, and d'Aubigne. These essays are preceded, in Part 1,by reflections on topics such as the effectsof printing; the instability of French and its adoption of new functions; concepts of imitation, invention, and translation; notions of poetry; creative and polysemic uses of prose; and textual additions in Montaigne and Rabelais. Gray intends these varied discussions to show how Te fait litteraire, au xvie siecle, commence a prendre conscience de lui-meme comme specificite, c'est-a-dire comme technique et comme art' (pp. 14-15). Itbecomes clear thatGray does not 1142 Reviews thereby intend to indicate a concern primarily with sixteenth-century conceptual izations of particular sorts ofwriting as privileged: while some studies interrogate what Renaissance readers and writers appear to have thought theywere doing, they do not focus exclusively on this. For example, Gray discusses the sense in which Muret and Belleau promoted Ronsard's poetry as a privileged discourse but thenmoves on to regretwhat Muret and Belleau?along with most modern critics, according toGray?do not do. The point towhich Gray repeatedly returns is that the texts studied use words in complex ways, and therefore correspond to the 'literary' as Gray defines it.The titleRenaissance des mots reflectsGrays assertion thatwords?or, rather, creative exploitations of them?were 'reborn' in the Renaissance (p. 142). The common thread in all of Gray's studies is the examination of themyriad different and rich ways inwhich Renaissance texts employed words; this is often accompanied by criticism of interpretative practices (mostly modern but also sixteenth-century) which do not focus upon the literary, that is,which interest themselves inwhat is said rather than in how it is said. As Gray puts it,his readings...