Poetic Fiction Research Articles

L’Idée de fable. Théories de la fiction poétique à la Renaissance (review)

Reviewed by: L’Idée de fable. Théories de la fiction poétique à la Renaissance Elena Kazakova Teresa Chevrolet. L’Idée de fable. Théories de la fiction poétique à la Renaissance. Genève: Droz, “Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance” N° CDXXIII, 2007. 765 pages. In L’Idée de fable, Teresa Chevrolet focuses on the theoretical framework that surrounds literary production in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy and France. Such a study is not without its precedents: one could mention the History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance by Bernard Weinberg (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961) that Chevrolet heavily draws upon, as well as the more recent Poétiques de la Renaissance edited by Perrine Galand-Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn (Genève: Droz, 2001). These precursors notwithstanding, most of her book is based on her own patient readings of a large amount of treatises on poetic theory and commentaries of ancient authors of the time, the majority of Italian origin, which she quotes generously throughout the text. Such a bulk of primary sources makes possible Chevrolet’s attempt to catalogue all of the different currents and views that emerge, influence, and contradict each other over these two centuries. [End Page 1198] The book is divided into three main parts, following chronological development of the poetic theory. In the first part, Chevrolet develops the idea of the fable as allegory, presenting this as the dominant conception of fiction in the first half of the sixteenth century. Following the rediscovery of Plato’s Republic, Neo-Platonists found it necessary to defend poetic fiction against Plato’s merciless indictment of the poets. They attempted to answer Plato’s charges by linking the fable to the truth. Thinking fiction in terms of allegory provided the means to do so since such an approach makes it possible to suggest that a fable may contain a hidden meaning that is related to philosophical and religious truths. Chevrolet bases her presentation of the interpretative tendencies of the period on Paolo Rossi’s distinction between fable as a veil under which lie truths inaccessible to the mob and fable as a pedagogical instrument that exposes knowledge to everyone without distinction (Francesco Bacone, dalla magia alla scienza [Bari: Laterza, 1974]). Chevrolet’s discussion of the former model describes the extent of the fascination with mystery and hidden meaning in the first half of the sixteenth century, the theoretical explanation of which is found in the concept of prisca theologia, a theory that claimed that all cryptic messages of the past, such as the words of the first poets or Egyptian hieroglyphs, express the same eternal truths, with these ancient poets and sages being directly inspired by gods. However, the tendency to seek hidden meanings everywhere leads to a situation where allegorical reading is no longer possible due to the multiplication of interpretations gone out of control, making it impossible to find this hidden meaning as each interpretation may be considered as a symbol for something else. As for the pedagogical potential of fiction, that is, of allegory as a carrier of knowledge and morals, Chevrolet shows that this latter possibility is valued and exploited by theoreticians at the same time as they emphasize fiction’s capacity to conceal the truth. Thus, she insists on the dual nature of Neo-Platonic allegory, concluding that such a duality also marks the contemporary understanding of the nature of literature itself, which was seen both as the original sacred language and as a language constructed by men for men. The second part explores the acceptance and integration of Aristotelian ideas into Renaissance literary debates. Chevrolet opens with a presentation of the profound misunderstanding on the level of terminology that accompanies the entry of Poetics, rediscovered and translated into Latin and Italian in the early sixteenth century, into literary circles already versed in the language of Plato and classical authors. It is through people like Plato, Horace, and Cicero that such terms as mimesis and verisimilitude, crucial to Aristotle, were being read. Commentaries on the work manifest the general tendency to take these terms out of their context in an attempt to identify them with the familiar notions found...

Less Well-Wrought Urns: Henry Vaughan and the Decay of the Poetic Monument

"Less Well-Wrought Urns" focuses on the concern of seventeenth-century poets with the durability of literature. Donne, Waller, and Herrick each reconsider the classical tradition that the poet created a work "more enduring than bronze," hinting that such durability was a poetic fiction. But Vaughan suggests that his poems may last as mere matter devoid of form. Vaughan imagines his poem "The Book" as a thing that, even as it falls apart, continues to yield or offer meaning. Such a theory suggests one of the appeals of material studies-that, in the absence of shared assumptions, it may be possible to forge a community based on attention to matter itself.

“El Libro de Alexandre: el clérigo al servicio del rey”

This article puts forward a number of examples that may perhaps contribute to confirm the idea that the Libro de Alexandre came from Castilian-Leonese palace circles in the first third of the thirteenth century. This study also suggests that it may have been one of the forms adopted by the monarch's moral and political education, functioning in a manner similar to the Chronica regum Castellae, the Chronicon mundi or even the Historia de rebus Hispaniae, for example. Whilst advancing the theory that historiographical fiction and poetic fiction had many features in common in the context of court reception, an attempt is thus made to demonstrate that the clerical men of letters put their art at their sovereign's disposal.

Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga (eds), Sign and Taboo: perspectives on the poetic fiction of Yvonne Vera. Harare and Oxford: Weaver Press and James Currey (pb £14.95 – 1 77922 004 9). 2002 and 2003, xvi + 236 pp.

Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga (eds), Sign and Taboo: perspectives on the poetic fiction of Yvonne Vera. Harare and Oxford: Weaver Press and James Currey (pb £14.95 – 1 77922 004 9). 2002 and 2003, xvi + 236 pp.

Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (review)

Robert Muponde and Mandi Taruvinga (eds), Sign and Taboo: perspectives on the poetic fiction of Yvonne Vera. Harare and Oxford: Weaver Press and James Currey (pb £14.95 – 1 77922 004 9). 2002 and 2003, xvi + 236 pp. - Volume 77 Issue 2

La diversion comme genre : L’écriture et ses labyrinthes à l’époque élisabéthaine

This paper focuses on the notion of “genre(s)” and tries to demonstrate that in the Renaissance England, artists often relied on a labyrinthine genre to improve the subtlety of the writings. The image of the labyrinth was chosen for a variety of reasons: derived from classical sources, sometimes representing chaos, sometimes standing for a complex harmony, this rich, ambivalent figure was at the same time attractive and repulsive. Gradually, the myth pervaded reality: under the Tudors, several kinds of mazes entertained Shakespeare’s compatriots. Indeed, knots and maze gardens proliferated, literally provoking the amazement of people contemplating their twists and turns. The old tradition which consisted in treading the path of a turf-maze still persisted, as Elizabethan literature shows, even though less and less young people wanted to take part in these pagan rituals. In the seventeenth century, poets started lamenting the gradual disappearance of these curves drawn on the grass. Still, the myth of the labyrinth was very pregnant in narrative, dramatic and poetic fictions. With its eccentricities and its extravagances, Renaissance literature gave the symbol a new life. Such translations as Edward Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bulloigne or the Recoverie of Jerusalem (1600) and Robert Dallington’s Hypnerotomachia (1592) allow us to enter a world full of “diversions” – in both senses of the word – and of intricate mazes. And more importantly, the image of the Cretan circumvolutions, when present in the texts, refashioned the style of Renaissance books: this is the reason why the labyrinth itself can be seen as a genre, fully operative during the Elizabethan period. Dramatists in particular used this peculiar genre to stage deviant trajectories and plots of “seduction”, in the etymological sense of the term. More generally, writers re-shaped labyrinthine discourses in order to respect the ideal of copia which had been defended by Erasmus. Finally, this essay explores the multiple meanings of “erring” for the Renaissance artists, given the fact that many of them played on its different facets (going astray or making a wrong choice), in order to produce “amazing”, and sometimes deceiving, literary works.

La poética de Petrarca y el Humanismo castellano del siglo XV

The Poetics of Petrarch and Castilian Pre-Humanism in the C.15. According to Petrarch, only the unlearned feel poetic fiction as a lie, since poetry holds within it a truth that, in order to be deciphered, demands education, culture and taste. Such a conception of the poet’s task had a markedly different reception amongst the intellectuals of the Castilian 15th Century. Some of these, such as Santillana or De la Torre, were fascinated by Petrarch’s words; others, such as the scholastic Fernández de Madrigal, utterly rejected equating the poet’s work with that of the intellectual (philosopher, theologian or historian). These two currents clearly mark the reception of incipient humanism and its consequent literary production.

Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (review)

Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (review)

Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (review)

Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera (review)

Gender, liberated signs, deepened history

Muponde, Robert and Mandi Taruvinga (eds). 2002. Sign and Taboo: Perspectives on the Poetic Fiction of Yvonne Vera. Harare: Weaver Press; (2003) Oxford: James Currey. 236pp. Newell, Stephanie. 2002. Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: “How to Play the Game of Life.” Manchester: Manchester University Press. 242pp. Woodward, Wendy, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley (eds). 2002. Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Cross / Cultures Series, 57. 356pp.

Addiction and Recovery in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son

Denis Johnson is the poet laureate of the pathology of addiction. His fictional landscape is peopled by lost souls—the sinners, the misfits, the desperate—waiting for a perpetually postponed salvation in a haze of alcohol and heroin.1 Johnson's distinctive vision finds its most spectacular expression in the short story collection Jesus' Son, eleven interlocked tales narrated by an addictive consciousness simultaneously clouded and yet rendered startlingly lucid by chemical dependency. This poetic fiction has inspired some readers to ecstatic hyperbole: “it seems sometimes as if Rimbaud returned from Abbysinia and spent a few years driving around America, hanging out with the riffraff who ended up in ‘Drugstore Cowboy’” (Crimson 3).

Reading Saint Flannery: Modernism, Sexuality, and the Culture of Psychoanalysis

Because flannery O'CONNOR was a Christian writer who suffered considerably from a painful and debilitating disease, died young, and left a legacy of remarkable stories and novels, critics of many persuasions have canonized her in ways few writers have been canonized. Since it is hard to argue with a saint, the vast majority of readers have capitulated to O'Connor's pronouncements on how to read those works. Several critics — myself among them — have reminded us how effectively O'Connor has set the terms of the discourse about her. Working in the modernist age, she thought herself not a modernist, but a throwback to an earlier age. Consequently, one of the more interesting, but generally ignored, questions about Flannery O'Connor is how to periodize her work. Whatever her claims, it is clear sheismodernist in important ways. We see that in her use of myth, for example, and in how she uses the devices of lyrical or poetic fiction such as powerful controlling metaphors and recurrent image-motifs to knit together a form in place of traditional emplotments. In her practice, moreover, she is a modernist easily allied with New Criticism. Of O'Connor's adherence to its tenets, Frederick Crews says, “As she freely admitted, she came into her own as an artist only after undergoing a full New Critical initiation at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop under the tutelage of Paul Engle and Andrew Lytle, with Brooks and Warren's then ubiquitousUnderstanding Fictionproviding the models” (144). Indeed, says Crews, “Even the most impressive and original of her stories adhere to the classroom formula of her day: show, don't tell; keep the narrative voice distinct from those of your characters; cultivate understatement; develop a central image or symbol to convey your theme ‘objectively’; and point everything toward one neatly sprung ironic reversal. No one ever put it all together with greater deftness” (144–45).

Jane Austen and the Aristotelian Ethic

Jane Austen and the Aristotelian Ethic David Gallop* Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. I don’t think it possible that anyone born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. S. T. Coleridge Coleridge’s often-quoted remark is recorded in his Table Talk for July 2, 1830, almost thirteen years after Jane Austen died. 1 He is reported to have admired her. 2 Yet as an artist, she could be said to have blown his dichotomy clean out of the water. For she had much in common with Plato and Aristotle. Like the former, she created a gallery of sharply individuated portraits with astounding dramatic realism. Her figures, like many of Plato’s, illustrate abstract concepts that are the prime focus of attention, as reflected in three of their titles. All her major novels display, like several of Plato’s dialogues, personal growth in their central figures. As in certain Platonic characters, a crucial part is played by self-knowledge or lack of it, and progress towards it inspires a benevolent, eventually mutual, love. 3 Also, like Plato the dramatist, Jane Austen is an ironist rather than a didactic writer. Her readers are less often told what to think than left to draw their own conclusions. And her irony, like Plato’s, can be merciless. On the other hand, her fiction embodies an Aristotelian, rather than a Platonic, aesthetic. For Aristotle, poetic fiction was not, as it had once [End Page 96] been for Plato, the archenemy of philosophy, but was to be seen, rather, as its ally. 4 So too Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey (pp. 37–38; 108–9) and elsewhere, 5 staunchly defends a fictional genre, the novel, while playfully satirizing certain kinds of historical writing. All six of her novels achieve, with incomparable beauty and subtlety, exactly the purpose that Aristotle assigned to fiction, when he too contrasted it with history (Poetics, chaps. 9, 23). Through the causally structured nexus of events that we call a plot, fiction illustrates generalizations about human character and conduct. “Fiction,” wrote Aristotle, “is more philosophical and more serious than history”: more philosophical because it points towards general truths of the sort pursued in philosophy and the sciences; and more serious, because—to speak vaguely for the moment—it appeals to our feelings as well as our intellects. It speaks to us not only as thinking beings, but as practical and moral agents. In that sense, a sparkling romantic comedy with a happy ending can be no less “serious” than the grimmest of classical tragedies. Nor does it matter if the former is written in prose, for Aristotle treats poetic meter and diction as merely cosmetic, peripheral to fiction’s central purpose (Poetics 1447b9–20; 1449b25,28; 1450b16; 1451a38–b4). It is true that novels generally mix narrative with direct speech. They may therefore seem to breach Aristotle’s precept that the composer of fiction, as a mimetic artist, “should say as little as possible in his own right” (1460a7–8). That puzzling text is often taken to suggest an unduly narrow view of mimesis, by restricting it to passages in oratio recta. 6 And although Jane Austen is unsurpassed as a creator of dialogue, her narrative voice admittedly tells us far more about her characters, and her attitudes to them, than their words alone would convey. She achieves some of her most delicious effects by placing words or thoughts in reported speech, thus filtering them through the narrator’s ironic perspective. But Aristotle’s dominant concept of mimesis is broad enough to cover novels, for it includes narrative as well as oratio recta (1448a20–21; 1449b9–12; 1459a17). Both drama and narrated epic give pleasure because we can draw inferences from them (1448b16–17; Rh.1371b9–10), and thereby recognize them as faithful to our experience of human life and conduct. As an early reviewer of Jane Austen justly observed, “We know not whether Miss Austen ever had access to the precepts of Aristotle, but there...

Fiction poétique et vérité morale chez Mallarmé

Poetic Fiction and Moral Truth in Mallarmé Mallarmé's concept of fiction leads to the articulation of an ethics for the type of poetry he practiced ; furthermore, as with Kant, this ethics both originates in and is indissociable from a critique of the relation of man to the world, which understands freedom as a moral imperative — here to produce aesthetic Ideas — not as free play.

Theater, History, Ethics: An Interview with Hélène Cixous onThe Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies

Pioneer of the reflection on sexual difference, author of power ful critical essays, and prolific writer of poetic fiction, H?l?ne Cixous has also written a significant number of plays. In the last ten years, her theater has explored complex and painful moments of recent world history, focusing most particularly on the traumas of nations such as Cambodia and India as they struggle against imperialist control and internal disintegration in search of identity.1 Her latest work for the theater, La Ville parjure ou le r?veil des Erinyes [The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies] (1994), maintains the focus on contempo rary history. But it shifts the lens to Western society, more precisely, to France in the early 1990s, as it examines one of the most alarming examples of individual and collective failure to have occurred in our supposedly enlightened and humane democracies. In 1988 the families of French hemophiliacs, three hundred of whom had already died of AIDS, brought charges against the director of the National Center for Blood Transfusion, Dr. Michel Garretta, for continu ing knowingly to supply HIV-contaminated blood at a time (in 1985) when a heating procedure that inactivated the contaminating agent was available and already used in other countries. The trial that ensued uncovered the complex network of personal, financial, and political interests which forms the historical fabric of Cixous's play. The investiga tion revealed, for example, that, unchecked by the responsible govern ment agencies (the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Social Affairs), Garretta, more of a businessman than a doctor, responded to the lure of a lucrative market in blood products and to imperatives of economic national self-sufficiency, and chose to sell off his contami nated supply rather than buy heat-treated and safe, but more expensive (and foreign), blood plasma. After a highly publicized trial that deeply shook the confidence of the French in their prized health system, in the fairness of justice, and in the ethics of the Socialist government, the sentences handed down by the judge appeared, to many observers, trivial in relation to the offense: Garretta received a four-year prison

Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions

Imageless Truths: Shelley's Poetic Fictions

Manhattan Melodrama's “Art of the Weak”: Telling History from the Other Side in the 1930s Talking Gangster Film

Ever since gangsters first appeared on the American screen (officially with D. W. Griffith's Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) they have been involved in a prolonged battle with the forces of “legitimate” culture. Having fought their fights from the wrong side of the street gangsters have continually drawn attention to the line which separates legitimate from illegitimate Americans. This has raised problems in accounting for the gangster genre's significance. In stigmatizing the ethnic urban poor as criminal, the gangster genre betrays its origins in a nativist discourse which sought to cast “hyphenated” Americans as “un-American” and in need of “ Americanization. ” Yet, as perhaps the most powerful vehicle for the nationalization and popularization of ethnic urban American life, the gangster genre overturned many aspects of its iniquitous origin, playing an important part in the re-writing of American history from the perspective (and, as I shall demonstrate, quite literally in the voice) of the ethnic urban lower class.This contradiction is characteristic of the dynamic and changing role American popular culture artifacts play in the mediation of the nation's history. Regardless of the poetic and ideological licence gangster fictions take with the very real socio-historical problems of the ethnic urban poor, the central conflict which informs these narratives remains the question of social, economic, and cultural exclusion.

Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions by Karen A. Weisman

In short, Woodbridge is careful not to claim that magical thinking explains everything. But she demonstrates powerfully that we need to understand it if we are to understand the way Shakespeare’s imagination operates. She offers enough material on other writers— the closeness of Petrarchan lovepoetry conventions to evil-eye belief, the horror of the violation of categories in the monstrous body of Spenser’s Duessa— to show that the same applies to the whole culture in which Shakespeare wrote. In an age in which so much criticism is sceptical, politically determined, and material in the narrow sense, she invites an important re-adjustment in our thinking. Al e x a n d e r l e g g a t t / University of Toronto Karen A. Weisman, Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions (Philadel­ phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). xiv, 227. $34.95 US cloth. For the “more select classes of poetical readers” whom Percy Shelley defined as his audience, a new critical study of his work is a welcome event. That Karen A. Weisman’s Imageless Truths: Shelley’s Poetic Fictions presents an original and thought-provoking reading makes it all the more welcome. But this book also has much to offer less “select” readers. As Weisman states in her introduction, her reading is informed by a challenge to M.H. Abrams’s expressive theory of art, and is therefore of value to anyone interested in the Romantic period. Because a “climate of critical taste” is carefully estab­ lished, readers can consider the character of fiction-making in the work of other Romantic writers. Weisman notes her work’s kinship and differences with a deconstructionist perspective, which has been so influential in recent studies of Shelley and of Romanticism in general. Weisman’s specific task is to offer “a new reading of the Shelley canon in the context of the poet’s evolving constructions of— and self-consciousness with respect to — poetic fictions” (1). Poetic fictions is used in a broad sense “as a developing quest for a mode of fiction-making which is sensitive to the poet’s ill-defined belief in a metaphysical ultimate ... but also to his anxiety over the ominous implications of poetic fiction-making with respect to the quotidian world” (1-2). Weisman’s insistence that “the pressures of dailiness never eluded Shelley” (2) represents a valuable contribution to the recuperation of a poet whose critics still read him through the fiction of an unworldly “ineffectual angel,” rather than as someone whose writings are deeply grounded in the everyday. This work covers extensive territory in its 178 pages of text, offering readings of Queen Mab, Alastor, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Mont Blanc,” The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound, Epipsychidion, A Defence of Poetry, Adonais, the Jane poems 366 “The Invitation” and “The Recollection,” and “The Triumph of Life.” Along the way Weisman engages in an illuminating manner with biographical and intellectual contexts, as well as entering into a rich dialogue with critical commentary on Shelley. Weisman argues that Shelley’s poetic fiction-making is distinguished by a “persistent, double-edged anxiety over his own use of fictions, an anxi­ ety which impels every aspect of his intellectual development, and which finally leads to an obsessive self-consciousness over his comportment to the quotidian” (8-9). Above all, the study is focussed on language and rhetor­ ical tropes as aspects of his awareness of fiction-making: “Shelley through­ out his career will struggle to reconcile the contrary claims of imagination (and imagination’s manifestations in the necessary fictions of poetry) to the quotidian world from which poetry derives its metaphors and concrete im­ ages” (38). If in Queen Mab Shelley is not yet fully aware of the implications of fiction-making, Alastor initiates “Shelley’s life-long fear of solipsism” (21). Prometheus Unbound marks his “full understanding” that “the deep truth is imageless,” that “certain thoughts exist as thoughts at all only by virtue of their rendering in poetry” (81). In the unfinished “The Triumph of Life,” Shelley “to his horror, discovers that the concept of life, in the sense even of quotidian existence, is as amorphous an abstraction, as resistant to defi...

Poetic Fiction, Subversive Speech, and Proportional Analogy in the Parables

Poetic Fiction, Subversive Speech, and Proportional Analogy in the Parables

:Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon

1. The burdens of matrimony 2. The business of painting 3. The power of sight 4. Poetic fictions Epilogue: Founder's heritage.