Poetic Power Research Articles

The Poetics of Meráki: Dialogue and Speech Genre in Kalymnian Song

The dominant vehicle for oral poetry in the song culture of Kálymnos is the mantinádha, a rhyming couplet in iambic decapentameter. Though this poetic form has been studied extensively by philologists and anthropologists working in the Greek Aegean, a combined philological, ethnographic, and musicological approach is necessary to establish an expanded theoretical framework capable of exploring the interaction between poetry, music, and sociality. In performance, the texts of these poems are stretched, rearranged, interrupted, and delayed in order to conform to the contours of different melodies, each of which makes unique structural demands on the couplets that are sung to it. Close musical, metrical, and ethnographic analysis of several performances and attention to the interpretive choices of the expert performer or meraklís suggests an implicit theory, a model of the internal theory encoded in the music that governs the Kalymnian melody-poetry interface and reveals the ways in which the application of specific poetic and musical techniques both heightens the dialogic quality of these couplets and imbues them with socially poetic power.

“Hairs less in sight”: Meteors, Sneezes, and the Problem of Meaning in The Rape of the Lock

“Hairs less in sight”:Meteors, Sneezes, and the Problem of Meaning in The Rape of the Lock Dwight Codr (bio) No more my locks in ringlets curled diffuseThe costly sweetness of Arabian dews,Nor braids of gold the varied tresses bind,That fly disorder’d with the wanton wind. -Alexander Pope, Sappho to Phaon (83–6)1 This essay proffers a solution to one of the great mysteries of eighteenth-century British literature: what happens to Belinda’s lock of hair in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem, The Rape of the Lock? Or, rather, this essay considers why the loss of Belinda’s hair is not more of a mystery to modern readers. The simple answer is that because we tend to take Pope’s word that the lock, in the trivial world of Belinda and the Baron, is simply lost in the scuffle that occupies much of canto five, its later ascension to the heavens as a “sudden Star” provides us with all we need to know as far as its ultimate location is concerned. In other words, while the meaning or significance of the lock in this “stellified” condition has been the subject of much critical investigation, readers appear to have agreed that the location of the lock at the end of the poem is beyond dispute. In this essay, though, I would like to interrogate the givenness of the lock’s final location, beginning with the observation that the supernatural and epic finale to Pope’s poem, the lock’s transformation into meteor or star, does not fit with the meticulously contrapuntal balancing of high and low that otherwise governs the poem’s figures, spaces, actions, and characters. So instead of reading the lock’s transformation as the only answer to the question of location, I would like to suggest that the “sudden Star,” much like the battle that is also a game of cards or the Cave of Spleen that figures Belinda’s pique, is only one part of the total scenario that Pope wishes to render. [End Page 175] Accordingly, I will not be looking to the heavens to investigate what the stellified lock might mean or allegorize, but to the ground in an attempt to “find” the grossly material lock for which the stellified lock, I will argue, serves as epic figure. For if, as Cynthia Wall has put it, the “dominant tension[s] in the poem” are between the “visible and the hidden, the fragment and the whole, what is contained and what escapes,” then the hypervisible, fully integrated, and climactic astro-lock that terminates the poem in its high register of signification might have a hidden, fragmentary, elusive, and, in some senses, anti-climactic counter-figure residing in the poem’s low, realistic register.2 By recombining and rereading a variety of lines from the poem, I seek to show that in addition to offering his readers the ascendant lock, Pope cryptically sketches such a counter-figure. Specifically, when Belinda makes the offending Baron sneeze by thrusting a pinch of snuff at him, the lock, I argue, is to be understood as having been mistakenly substituted by the Baron himself for a handkerchief, causing it to disintegrate and disperse when he frantically and absentmindedly sneezes into it. This condition of dispersal thus renders the real lock’s discovery not simply difficult, but theoretically impossible (as “hairs” it no longer exists as a “lock,” or that which the party seeks to find). Scattering hints to this effect throughout the poem, Pope in fact seeks to recreate this very experience of searching and discovery for his reader. The stellified lock that dazzles readers’ eyes mimics at the level of the reading experience the attitude of the party within the poem, who, caught up in the dramatic intensity of the moment, forget that the lock is only a meaningful, legible modality for the less meaningful, elusive hairs that tentatively and only temporarily compose it. Pope’s subtlety in all of this suggests that he was less interested in asserting poetic power than in interacting with his readers. In providing them with an opportunity to put to use their own “quick Poetic Eyes”—eyes...

Pope and Rapture

The essay examines Pope's entire poetic career under the aspect of rapture, in all its many connotations and contexts. Though Pope's early amatory poems and his later satire are usually considered in isolation from each other, this essay explores their common preoccupation with the formal erotic, affective, and spiritual experience of rapture and thus demonstrates their dynamic interconnectedness. The result is a new account of Pope's poetic career, and a new assessment of the relationships between writing and life. Pope came to concentrate on writing satire in the last third of his life, but he was also a translator, a textual scholar, a prodigious letter writer, and in the first major phase of his career, a love poet depicting young women in love, such as Sapho, Eloise, the Unfortunate Lady, and Belinda, often focusing on erotic rapture and death. From about 1728 until his death in 1744, he no longer wrote this kind of poetry, but instead turned his creative energies toward passionate social and political satire, fashioning a poetic persona of the satirist as powerful, wide-ranging, virtually sacred raptor. Hence, Pope's poetic career moves in a direction from portraying passive subjects, usually young women under the influence of erotic rapture, to exercising his own poetic power of depicting the active force of rapture as satiric predation. The transition from poet of rapturous, death-haunted female love to poet of avenging satirical rapture coincided significantly with his involvement with, and rejection by, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu sometime in the 1720s. Though Pope is largely remembered for his satire, this essay takes a more holistic view of Pope's life and work, drawing attention to the ways that his translation, scholarship, and especially love poetry contributed directly to his satiric practice later in life. This essay not only brings Pope's biography to bear on his poetic artistry, but also unites what has often been seen as disparate parts of Pope's career by seeing him first and foremost as a poet of rapture.

Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry by Sarah Kay (review)

Reviewed by: Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry by Sarah Kay Rebecca Hill Sarah Kay, Parrots and Nightingales: Troubadour Quotations and the Development of European Poetry ( Philadelpha: University of Pennsylvania Press 2013) 400 pp. In her latest study, Sarah Kay weaves together a qualitative and quantitative analysis of citations in troubadour poetry from Occitan as it occurs in other vernacular poetry of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. She defines the titular theme, embodied by figures of the parrot and the nightingale, as the importance of quotation alongside mimicry in the development of poetry on the European continent. The parrot, parodized in Ovidian and Marcabruan literature, seems capable of little poetic efficacy, particularly where love is concerned. In contrast, nightingale’s prestige dominated the twelfth century’s bent toward imitatio. While the virtues of the nightingale have become emblematic of the vernacular lyric project, Kay hopes to “restore to visibility the phenomenon of troubadour quotation and to study it as a whole.” Pointing to research conducted regarding Romance (such as Boulton’s Song in the Story), Kay identifies a need to explore the implications of parroting rather than improvising, especially since she estimates that twenty-five percent of troubadour poetry is quoted within a few generations of composition. Although many specialists in medieval poetry will be familiar with Dante Alighieri’s insertions of Arnaut Daniel, Kay adds many more names to the trove of vernacular quotation source material circa and before the Divina commedia along the Mediterranean coast. As the first study of its kind and breadth, indeed, Kay’s work is comprehensive and latent with the possibility for much expansion. Kay asserts that the parrot has several less obvious merits and that it has been an enduring trope in literature since antiquity, particularly in the centro genre. Generated at the intersection of twelfth-century scholasticism and fin’ amour, troubadour [End Page 253] poetry, when cited, can serve as an “engine of change” as well as exhibit “desire for knowledge” (2), according to the author. Rather than emphasizing the violence or divorced origins of the method, as other scholars have, Kay chooses to focus on the fecundity of quotations, “like seeds from which a new, secular and lay poetry can grow” (11). Throughout her book, Kay impresses upon the reader that quotations served to elevate poetry—in particular, vernacular poetry—to the level of authority and incited the reading audience to conceptualize the corpus of troubadour poetry as an archive of coveted knowledge, which was worthy of study, internalization and reworking. Occasionally, Kay massages this thesis with insights from Derrida and Lacan to illustrate the ever-complicated difference between lyric, with its aspiration toward a “national culture,” and quotation, which is “exiled, diasporic, and cosmopolitan” (14), but even without a theoretical framework, her astute readings stand on their own. Kay defines her criteria for identifying citation with scientific specificity and simplicity: at least one full line—which is as much as one can hope for with respect to a genre that has been categorized and compartmentalized since Raimon Vidal de Besalu’s Razos de trobar, a late-twelfth-century treatise on poetics. In the first chapter of the book, “Rhyme and Reason: Quotation in Raimon Vidal de Besalu Razos de trobar and the Grammars of the Vidal Tradition,” which also opens the first of three sections entitled “Pioneering Troubadour Quotation,” Kay points out an important distinction between French and Occitan grammars: whereas the authors of French grammars had a more commercial aim in mind when writing about language usage, Occitan authors, such as Ramon Vidal (1196–1252), wished to enhance and disseminate the poetic power of language. Not at all shy in his endeavor, in preamble to his Razos, Raimon states “trobars et chantars son movemenz de totas galliardias” [translated by Kay as “compositions and song are what move all exception bravery”] (29). He goes on to explain that the alchemical union of adjective and substance in trobar poems are conducive to rational thought. Similarly, Jofre de Foixa (d. 1300) draws upon the grammatical breakdown found in Latin treatises; he separates all nominal forms into objects and accidents. However, it is Raimon who ushers in two...

The Everlasting flame: Zoroastrianism in history and imagination

With such ancient beginnings, Zoroastrianism is as remarkably enduring as it is venerable. The principle religion of Iran until the Advent of Islam, it has also been influential beyond its own followers, interacting with other, younger faiths and shaping their views on the nature of evil, the coming of a saviour and the last days. The resonant message of Zarathustra (or Zoroaster), the founder of the religion, is encapsulated in its most sacred scripture, the Gathas, whose poetic power can still be appreciated today. This richly illustrated book explores many important themes of Zoroastrianism: its rise during the second millennium BCE, its doctrines, rituals and teachings, its growth into the foremost faith of the Achaemenid and Parthian empires, its consolidation under the Sasanians, its expansion east to China, and its impact on Judaism, Christianity and Islam. From Iran to the west coast of India, the story continues with the maritime exodus of the Zoroastrians and their settlement as an immigrant community (now called ‘Parsis’) under British colonial rule. With chapters by world-leading authorities, this is a vital record of the art, literature and culture of one of the world's most fascinating religious traditions.

The Challenges of Retranslating The Great Gatsby into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

The Challenges of Retranslating <i>The Great Gatsby</i> into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

The Onset of the Image in Individual and Historical Consciousness: Visionary Moments in the Texts of Carlos Fuentes

Gaston Bachelard, justifying his phenomenological method, emphasizes “the onset of the image in an individual consciousness,” provocatively states that “the poetic act has no past,” and asserts that “the image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship” (xv, xi, xv). Bachelard hedges his bets, qualifying the statement about the poetic act's having “no past” with “at least no recent past” (xi). And soon, admitting that while for him the image's primary effect “involves bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in the soul of the reader, through the reverberations of a single poetic image,” a reverberation through which, “by going immediately beyond all psychology or psychoanalysis, we feel a poetic power rising naively within us,” nevertheless, “after the original reverberation, we are able to experience resonances, sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past.” But, he hastens to add, “the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface” (xix).

The Sudden Angel Affrighted Me

The Sudden Angel Affrighted Me

“Tightrope walking the twenty-first century”: Jeanette Winterson’s vital connections with Modernism

In Art Objects (1995), her aesthetic manifesto, Jeanette Winterson calls for a new literature for the new millennium, and new forms of writing that could “answer to twenty-first-century needs”. Far from repudiating the past, Winterson urges the twenty-first-century artist to turn to previous generations for inspiration, and to draw poetic power from the “lineage of art”. Since “every new beginning prompts a return”, before he/she can fully experiment with language, the true artist must first experience his/her vital connections with the past, not in the spirit of ancestor worship, but to reclaim past literature, “(re-state) and (re-instate) (it) in its original vigour”. Striking a delicate balance between continuity and emancipation, responsibility and freedom, the new millennium artist, vitally connected to the past, but in search of his/her own voice, must practice the difficult art of the tightrope walker, uniting two worlds on the “taut line” of language. Because they were able to master this difficult art – breaking new ground, but writing with “generations at (their) back(s)” – it is towards Modernist writers that the new generation must turn for inspiration, and more particularly towards the works of Virginia Woolf. In an attempt to highlight the fruitful tensions between early-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century literature, this paper looks at Winterson’s “cover versions” of key Woolfian subtexts, in her works published in the new millennium – The.Powerbook (2000), Lighthousekeeping (2004), The Stone Gods (2007), and her recently published memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011).

Locus Amoenus and Locus Horridus in Ovid's Metamorphoses

This paper investigates several aspects of the sophisticated deployment of the literary tradition of the locus amoenus (”pleasant place”) and locus horridus (”fearful place”) in the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid. Ovid draws on a series of poetic conventions associated with such literary landscapes in the work of his Augustan predecessors. Elegiac poets such as Tibullus imagine dallying with their mistresses in peaceful landscapes far away from the strife of war, political competition, or urban disorder. In the Eclogues of Vergil, the locus amoenus may function as a site of poetic power, where the landscape itself both inspires and responds to the singer. In contrast to the pleasure and inspiration associated with these sites elsewhere in Augustan literature, the locus amoenus in Ovid's Metamorphoses often becomes the site of violent rapes and physical transformations. For example, Jupiter's rape of Callisto occurs in such a pleasant spot, as does Narcissus' fatal act of self-contemplation. The peace and beauty of these sites are set in deliberate contrast with the violence of the actions that occur within them. The locus horridus in the Metamorphoses is typically inhabited by personifications such as Somnus (Sleep) or Fames (Hunger). Somnus' sleep-inducing castle and the bare crag occupied by Fames show the inseparability of the personifications from their functions. They transform the landscape as well as their human victims into versions of themselves. Both types of Ovidian locus inspire the description of similar allegorical sites in later medieval and Renaissance poetry.This paper examines how the descriptions of such places in the Metamorphoses form part of the poem's construction of its physical, moral, and literary universe. The vision developed throughout the Metamorphoses of the relationship between human being and natural landscape contrasts sharply with earlier Latin poetry. The metamorphosis of characters into parts of the natural landscape (Daphne into a laurel tree; Cyane into a pool, and so forth) disturbs the stable boundaries that might otherwise be drawn between figure and background. Such descriptions also serve aetiological purposes: the poem points to the features of today's landscape as authority for the events narrated within it. Ovid's descriptions of landscape, finally, are always intertextual and metapoetic. By showing the operations of amor (passion), cupido (desire), furor (madness), and other passions on both character and landscape, they assist the poet in defining the character of a multigeneric work that combines aspects of both epic and elegiac literary tradition.

The Margins of the Dramatic Monologue: Teaching Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point"

Tricia Lootens has recently described difficult but rewarding experience f teaching at Pilgrim s Point. Her account was occasioned by its inclusion in Poems in Process section of eighth edition of Norton Anthology of English Literature. Lootens focuses on emotional difficulty of discussing infanticide stanzas in class, and what raw emotions and disagreements they provoke among students mean for relation between scholarly study of Victorian literature and teaching of it. (1) certainly agree that this poem can be difficult to teach, but in my experience students are unlikely to argue about whether infanticide is justified; they accept it relatively easily as terrible thing that should be blamed on condition of slavery rather than on phrase I couldn't judge her without being in her shoes recurs frequently in Women's Literature class in which usually teach this poem, and infanticide is just most extreme action my students refuse to judge. In fact, class discussion of this poem usually goes well. Only in papers do see problem that is, ironically, very source of poem's success: poetic power of speaker's language and intensity of emotion lead students to believe poem is autobiographical. There is always danger, of course, that students might believe that author is speaker of any first-person poem. We all know how often we repeat mantra the author is not speaker. Generally, students have more trouble keeping this in mind with lyrics than they do with narrative poems. Every semester that teach The at Pilgrim's Point, however, receive at least one paper (and sometimes more than one) that refers to speaker of poem as if she were poet, not merely in careless confusion of pronouns and referents that can happen with lyric poems, but in an explicit and biographical way. These students are convinced that Elizabeth Barrett Browning was gang-raped and killed her own baby, even after class discussion of historical context of poem and being give information that author was prominent white British author. Why do students make this error more frequently and persistently with this poem than with any other that teach? have come to conclusion that it is revelation of nature of dramatic itself: students are engaging in strong misreading. In this poem we see that formula for dramatic is not a supposed (to borrow Emily Dickinson's phrasing) (2) but rather, suppose were this person? All dramatic monologues require author and reader to imagine being person depicted, and doing so successfully leaves traces that cannot be erased by one's knowledge of rules of poetry. Because Runaway Slave is historically contemporaneous with author rather than set in dim past, cues of setting that prevent confusing author with speaker are not as apparent in this poem as in other dramatic monologues like My Last Duchess or Ulysses. An even more important factor, however, is way that Barrett Browning stretches conventions of form in this poem. Other dramatic monologues force reader into critical attitude toward speaker-as Robert Langbaum says, the genius of dramatic monologue is the effect created by tension between sympathy and moral judgment. (3) In Runaway Slave, however, judgment function is assigned to intradiegetic audience (first pilgrim-ghosts, then slave hunters), and speaker herself preemptively closes off possibility of judging her actions in her addresses to these audiences. Thus irony that is hallmark of dramatic is not present in poem. This is obviously consequence of Barrett Browning's abolitionist agenda; if we judge slave, we will not want as passionately to end slavery. …

Eating on the Insane Root: The Uncanny and the Sublime in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

At the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the entrance of Macduff, bearing Macbeth’s severed head on a pike, sets off mirthful celebration. Evil, it seems, has been mercilessly punished and all that had been foul in Scotland is now fair. There is, however, something excessive and incongruous about this gruesome thing, the sightless head that was Macbeth’s, juxtaposed against the optimism of the victors. For us, who have watched Macbeth’s precipitous rise and decline, we find scant comfort in the synecdotal assassination of a man who saw so deeply and intensely into an abyss of horrors. The profound ambivalence-a complex affect mingling revulsion, desire, terror, and regret-we experience in witnessing Macbeth’s precipitous rise and fall, I believe, can be accounted for by synthesizing Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny and theories of the sublime put forth by such figures as Immanuel Kant, and Edmund Burke. Macbeth’s persistent and strange power, then, emerges from its awareness of a compulsion to unearth the “old and long familiar” (what Freud would later deem “the uncanny”), as well as its poetic power to intimate the infinite, the unknowable, the unthinkable-that is, the sublime. In the end, we are left to ponder the greatness of Macbeth’s visionary capacity, the uncanniness that transforms “horrible imaginings” into all-too-real deeds, and the utterly compelling staging of evil that, through a man who dared to eat “on the insane root,” signals towards an infinite, untotalizable whole that overflows the mind’s capacity to grasp it.

The Poetics of Loss: Erotic Melancholia in Agamben and Dickinson

Remarking upon "Mourning and Melancholia," Giorgio Agamben notes that Freud writes with "a certain discomfort" of melancholia "'that a loss has indeed occurred, without it being known what has been lost.'" Agamben's elaboration of how a fictive introjection of absence allows melancholy to "open . . . a space for the existence of the unreal" leads to a psychodynamic picture that fuses the mortuary with the erotic. I argue that this psychodynamic observation offers a means for understanding Emily Dickinson's highly erotized, death-driven work. The Dickinsonian "I" gains poetic power to the extent that she simultaneously "buries" the absent other and claims amorous possession as he departs. Through close syntactic and rhetorical readings of canonical poems, I demonstrate that Agamben's psychosexual speculations on melancholia can provide a conceptual frame for a psychoanalytically informed interpretation of this enigmatic, impassioned poet's work.

Thérèse of Lisieux and Alphonse de Lamartine: The Spiritual Transformation of Romanticism

There has been some controversy since death of Therese of Lisieux (Therese Martin) regarding value of her poetry. Some critics have considered it to be somewhat charming but full of pious sentimental images typical of her day. Sackville-West, for example, declares that cannot be claimed for Therese's poems that they have much merit beyond their obvious sincerity (138). Kathryn Harrison, in more recent study of Therese, is somewhat less critical. She claims that most of saint's poems are unremarkable as art, but useful for what insight they provide into her spiritual (116). Her thoughts resemble Therese's own judgment of her poetry. In letter written in February 1897 to Maurice Belliere, Therese states: Ces pauvres poesies vous reveleront non pasce que je suis, mais ce que je voudrais et devrais etre En les composant j'ai regarde plus au fond qu'a la forme mon but etait de traduire mes sentiments ... (Une course de geant: Lettres 390-91; These poor poems will reveal to you not what I am but what I would like and should be When composing them, I have looked more at substance than at form my purpose was to translate my sentiments ... [General Correspondence 1059]). And so, how are we to judge Therese's poetical works? Are they as tasteless in content and style as some critics would have us believe or is there more to them? It would seem that only those able to unlock spiritual depths hidden in language and images of Romanticism still evident in late nineteenth-century French literature can uncover true value of Therese's poetry. Guy Gaucher remarks that if we disregard her poetry we run risk of missing some hidden spiritual treasures (141). James Wiseman considers her poems a privileged resource for our understanding of Theresian spirituality (540), while Hans Urs von Balthasar unhesitatingly states that her images render her equal of two great reformers of Carmel in poetic power (113). Though people from every continent and walk of life have discovered spiritual richness of Histoire d'une ame / Story of Soul, autobiography of this young Carmelite cloistered nun who died of tuberculosis in 1897 at age of twenty-four, few may be aware that Therese also wrote eight plays and at least sixty-two poems. Those who have ventured to read critical edition of her poetry might even have found it surprising to learn that five of her poems reflect tone and style of early nineteenth-century French romantic poet, Alphonse de Lamartine. (1) How is it possible that first and perhaps greatest French romantic poet had an influence on poetry of an unknown young woman whom Pope Pius X called the greatest saint of modern times? (2) Given her sheltered upbringing how would Therese have had access to Lamartine's writings? And, finally, how does Therese adopt in her poems traditional elements of romantic poetry of her day? Therese was born in Alencon in 1873 and died in Lisieux in 1897. Belonging to bourgeoisie, Therese's family was financially comfortable and supported monarchy and Catholic Church. With four older sisters and no living brothers, Therese was family pet. Her childhood was happy one until age of four when her mother died. From an outgoing, happy child Therese became extremely sensitive, relaxing only in surroundings of her extended family. Her parents devout Catholics who in their youth had given serious consideration to monastic life. Her spiritual development was strongly influenced by solid faith and piety of her father and her older sisters who served as mothers for her. Until age of eight, Therese was home schooled by two of her older sisters who had studied with Visitandines. She then spent next five years as day-boarder at Benedictine abbey in Lisieux where, according to standards of times, she had an excellent education for Benedictines were women of cultivated minds (Keyes 64). …

Byron's Manfred and the King's Head: Having Words with Bodies

Byron's Manfred was staged in a single performance of a 'rehearsed reading' at the King's Head Theatre, London in March 2007. Poised dynamically between theatrical production and closet reading, this rehearsed recitation played creatively into the critical debate about Byron's dramas as requiring one or the other mode of reproduction. This hybrid staging of Manfred also recast this theme of reproduction in the terms of incarnation and resurrection. These terms, charged here with an irony derived from Frankenstein, served to amplify within Byron's dramatic text the comic critique of the post-Waterloo resurrections of both Napoleon and the Bourbons. The thrust of this critique is that such resurrections do not derive from any intrinsic power incarnated in these political figures but rather from the rhetorical power accorded to them by an audience. Reception rather than inception is the prime mover here. The rehearsed reading went a stage further, by applying a similar critique to Manfred itself. Playing up the Orphic contours of Manfred resurrecting Astarte, the reading sought to shift the balance of poetic power from the text to the collectivity of the players and the audience. Collective, public reading contested the closet of Orphic poetry as much as it challenged the spectacle of political theatre.

Communicative Reason and Intercultural Understanding

Although Habermas sees intercultural understanding as a political task, his model of communicative rationality cannot satisfactorily explain how this could happen. One reason is the definition of the aesthetic, form-giving, moment of imagination, which reflects deeper epistemological and linguistic assumptions of discourse ethics. Despite sporadic attempts to recognize the role of rhetoric and poetry as an indispensable part of the communicative praxis, at the end of the day, Habermas sees language as fundamentally geared toward transparency and clarity, and not as endowed with poetic power and polyphonic creativity. My article aims to further develop, with the help of Vico and Bakhtin, the incipient thread in Habermas's discourse ethics that recognizes the importance of linguistic creativity and of imagination in communicative practice. This would help one to argue that, even when rational consensus and agreement cannot be achieved, dialogue is still not abandoned. This is the case because, through a larger definition of the dialogical, which adds to the discursive aspect, an aesthetic, rhetorical, and metaphorical dimension, it is possible to say that, even when conflicting, different voices and languages are still creatively and imaginatively interilluminating and hybridizing each other. Thus, they still transform each other, creating, at the same time, a prediscursive commonality, that can function as a necessary prerequisite for intercultural understanding.

“Meadows of Majesty”: Baptism as Translation in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

This article discusses Dickinson’s baptismal imagery as a creative and religious topos. Translation is a way of understanding the Puritan sacrament of baptism from its roots in Gospel narrative and Calvinist theology. It becomes the hallmark of Dickinson’s baptism trope as she finds, in the theology of baptism, a metaphor for her own poetic identity, repeatedly translating itself and inhabiting new names. I discuss the importance of Dickinson’s “vail” as a Puritan image of sacramental mediation and a Romantic symbol for the reach of the imagination, and I argue that Dickinson uses the baptismal narratives of sacrificial dying and spiritual rebirth to express the compromise or “vail’ that allows her to harness her poetic power, translating and representing herself anew.

Death Star, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Globalization

Death Star, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Globalization Darren Jorgensen (bio) In the original Star Wars series (1977-1983), the destruction of the Death Star takes place twice.1 This battle station, made of metal and as big as a moon, is blown up by rebels in Star Wars (1977) only to be rebuilt in Return of the Jedi (1983), before being destroyed once again. It is built and built again so that a malevolent Empire might dominate the galaxy, but its recurrence only ever presages its end. Its reappearances suggest that the Death Star is stronger than the narratives that want to kill it, yet not strong enough to come to its proper place in the galaxy. Like a ghost haunting the scene of its own murder, it holds within itself something unresolved that returns it to being, without the materiality of a life that would allow it to do so. Its indeterminate status is a source of anxiety for its commanders, who in both films declare that it is near completion or has just been completed, only to witness its sudden demise. The persistent becoming of the Death Star testifies to the dynamism of its image, to the way in which it exceeds the narrative that wants to contain it. It is Vivian Sobchack's argument that the poetics of such images precede and constitute the narratives of science fiction films rather than the other way around (125). Sobchack derives her poetics of cinematic images from Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (1964), a book that argues for images of "pure sublimation; of a sublimation which sublimates nothing, which is relieved of the burden of passion, and freed from the pressure of desire" (xxix). For Bachelard, the signification of the image, the way its meanings are constituted by social and cultural life, turns away from the essential mystery that animates it. It is, however, to unravel the dynamism of the Death Star that I want to turn to its significations, for the operation of one is not predicated on the exclusion [End Page 206] of the other. The significations of an image echo, that is hear and respond, to its dynamism. The Death Star rotates not only through the Star Wars series but beyond it, into a popular American culture that refers to it as its own. When George W. Bush campaigned for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2000, his reformist opponent John McCain claimed that "I'm Luke Skywalker trying to get out of the Death Star" (qtd. in Cutler par. 1). He was referring to the need to change America from within its most coveted institution, the Death Star a metaphor for the country's conglomeration of political, economic, and military power. Films such as Clerks (1994), Slackers (2002), and Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) also refer to the Death Star, testifying to the transsubjectivity of the image amongst a generation of young white American males who speak its name. Their rearticulation of the Death Star is both metaphor and reverberation, as the planetoid stands in for America and transforms their world into its metal fantasy and back again. The demography of this transsubjectivity and its variations becomes a means of imagining one's place in this country's version of late capitalism, yet the image cannot be reduced to its sublimation of this place. Its significance is not its immanence; its variations do not explain its poetic power. A distinction between the significations of the Death Star and its reverberation can be drawn between the two orders of films here, those in the Star Wars series and those without. In the series, the planetoid's cycle of emergence and demise describes its dynamism, its movement more like the cadence of poetry than the unveilings of narrative significance. This dynamism also takes place in Clerks, Slackers, and Enron, as young white American men speak of the Death Star and, in doing so, occupy the space of its immanent power. This is what Bachelard means by the transsubjectivity of the poetic image, as the speaker calls forth its emergence from the void. Yet this shift out of the Star Wars series...

Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, présentation d'une œuvre

Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, born in 1924 in Czernowitz and who died in 1942 in a concentration camp in Transnistria, wrote between 1939 and 1941 a volume of poetry of great poetic power, which through a miracle managed to survive. A friend of her youth kept it and it was only published in 1978 in Tel Aviv and then again in 1980 in Hamburg, entitled Ich bin in Sehnsucht eingehuellt, followed by numberous editions by Fischer-Taschenbuch. Her work is presented here with special regard to its affinity with the poetry of Verlaine.

'A magic voice and verse': Byron's Approaches to the Ode, 1814–16

The Romantic ode steeps itself in the turbulent waters of the mind's and heart's debates with themselves. These debates can take many forms, as Paul H. Fry indicates when contrasting Keats's odes with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's: Keats's odes, writes Fry, are 'not secretly ambivalent but candidly two-faced, or even many-faced'.1 Byron, too, thrives on the 'candidly two-faced', or even the manipulatively dissembling, and some of his finest shorter poems deserve to be associated with Romantic odes more commonly than is usually allowed by critics: in part, perhaps, because of Byron's jeer in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers at Coleridge's fondness for 'turgid ode, and tumid stanza' (196). The poems by Byron discussed in the present essay often wish to give themselves freedom from, even as they draw on, conventions associated with the ode, and thus form intriguing examples of an individual talent's creative way with tradition. 1816 was an annus mirabilis in Byron's career, the year he met Shelley, and, as significantly, learned, via Shelley, to admire Wordsworth's poetic power. It is also a year when a blend of artistic control with difficult and goading feeling issues, for Byron, in poems that have something of the force of the ode. Wordsworth wrote in a note to 'Tintern Abbey' in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads: 'I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode; but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and in the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principal requisites of that species of composition'.2 The comment intrigues; it shows a leading Romantic poet framing a poem in loose but intense relationship with a traditional form. In a comparable way, Byron derives imaginative nourishment from the example of the ode. If odes invoke, summon, plead, exhort and put us under a spell, so too does the Incantation from the first act of Manfred. The Incantation, first published as a separate piece in Byron's 1816 collection, The Prisoner of Chillon and Other Poems, contains 'impassioned music' and 'transitions', transitions possessing the quality of 'defensive paradox' of which Byron speaks in '[Epistle to Augusta]' (3). 'Defensive paradox' implies a fightback, organised under the standard of deftly sinuous language, against the slings and arrows of misfortune, and it nerves the poems discussed in this essay. On the first publication of the Incantation, Byron claimed that it was 'a Chorus in an unfinished Witch drama, which was begun some years ago',3 a claim that suggests the Incantation's genesis in the genre of choral ode. In the context of Manfred, it is spoken to Manfred by an unknown voice, but it also can be read as a poem spoken by Byron to his wife. The Incantation, like the work as a whole, thrives on a sense that the fictive cloaks the real. A two-way discharge of emotional poison is appropriate for a poem that is full of doublings. So, in the fourth stanza, Byron writes: And a magic voice and verse Hath baptized thee with a curse; And a spirit of the air Hath begirt thee with a snare; In the wind there is a voice Shall forbid thee to rejoice; And to thee shall Night deny All the quiet of her sky; And the day shall have a sun Which shall make thee wish it done. (I, i, 222-31) Here, the words are joined asunder; associations are married and divorced in the same breath. The 'magic voice and verse' may belong to the past tense: they have 'baptized thee with a curse'. But they are also reawakened by or even summoned up during the Incantation until they materialise as the 'voice and verse' which we are now hearing and reading.4 The mesmeric rhythm ensures that the reader will concede the potency of Byron's art. Yet the 'verse' turns immediately into the 'curse' to which it cedes supremacy in the embrace of rhyme. Any sacrament of the word is interfused with the diabolic. Intimacy and loathing writhe round one another; love and hate fuse. …