Poetic Tropes Research Articles

MOTHERS AND OTHERS IN FICTION BY SHARON DODUA OTOO AND OLIVIA WENZEL

ABSTRACTIn this article I argue that in recent novels by Sharon Dodua Otoo and Olivia Wenzel the trope of motherhood is engaged to evoke an emancipatory impulse that is paradoxically linked to acknowledging constraint or connectedness. Motherhood is an idea burdened by historical stereotypes, and I argue that Otoo and Wenzel use aesthetic means to subvert gendered and racialising mythologies and controlling assumptions about who can provide nurturing, reinscribing motherhood in ways that depart from Western expectations of an idealised one‐on‐one relation. Building on Michelle Wright's analysis of Black motherhood as a poetic trope of subversive agency, Theresa Washington's exploration of the West African concept of Ájè in African American women's writing, and Francine Wynn's conception of the chiastic mother‐infant relation, I suggest that Otoo and Wenzel show how the trope of motherhood can not only be subversive but (perhaps appropriately) epistemically generative. It can be read as a foundational image for a different epistemological discourse that does not depend on the mastery of difference.

Swerving with a tiger: architecture after the animal

Why is a tiger prowling through the passages of architectural discourse? Since its appearance in 1902, a tiger called Stripes continues to be associated with the Billiard Room of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. Coalescing other non-human and animistic worlds omnipresent in Southeast Asian folkloric beliefs, the tiger’s enduring persistence in the colonial monument demands scrutiny. This paper is constructed around the ongoing stickiness of Stripes and other tigers, and the presence of animals and their anecdotes in architectural discourse. Taking up Jennifer Bloomer’s provocation to go with the swerve of the unexpected, here I adopt the tiger as an alternative figure of thought — a theoretical and poetic trope of the tropical world — to decolonise architectural history. Besides making the animal central to a disciplinary discourse that remains largely anthropocentric, the tiger is also what Donna Haraway calls a ‘material-semiotic’ figure which reveals biases, assumptions, and perceptions about the environment and the collective in which it is found. The appearance of the tiger at the Billiard Room coincided with the gradual extinction of the species on the island, several decades after tigers were actively hunted for bounty in their depleted habitats. Thus, the tiger’s anecdotal form, when placed adjacent to the colonial architectural history of the Billiard Room, is ultimately disruptive. I trace the tiger’s influence in Southeast Asia’s intertwined natural, social, and cultural histories, and discuss how this Other animalistic world swerves the imagery and perception of a colonial space whose enduring reputation rests on its significant animal Other. Through Stripes, Bloomer, Haraway, and Bruno Latour, I argue why thinking-with the tiger matters for reconsidering what matters in architectural history today. And why the animal anecdote, precisely because of the slips and swerves of its storied forms, transforms architecture’s epistemological and ethical frontiers such that it can traverse otherwise unimaginable and unexpected modes of knowing-with.

Imaginative Capacity as Form-of-Life: Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens and the ‘Inoperative’ Potential of Poetry

This essay compares the poetic and political theories of contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben with the poetry of Wallace Stevens in order to outline a dynamic of ‘inoperativity’ that foregrounds the intimate relationship between language, form and an existential expression of possibility. Through a reading of Stevens’s prose essays and poetry, I demonstrate how Agamben’s reconceptualization of potentiality as a power kept in a non-relational relationship towards its formal realization can be mapped onto the self-conscious articulations of Stevens’s poetic speakers who employ poetic tropes and forms only to question and expose their claims to truth and foundationality. Rather than follow a tradition of poststructuralist readings of Stevens’s destabilizations, I argue for a framework of ‘inoperativity’ that preserves Stevens’s poetic attitude towards life, while showing how his emphasis on potentiality delineates an imaginative vigour that brings the poetic self into renewed attunement with his or her environment.

THE MAIN CONCEPTIONS FOR LANGUAGE 1 AND LANGUAGE 2 ACQUIRING

Socio-biology is the Darwinian framework of aimless natural selection for random changes in matter in motion derives an atheistic position from But from the first cosmic singularity to free will, explanatory gaps in the sociobiological account of religion invite God's foot at the door. Yoga about the anatomical connection between humans and God By interpreting the Taoist, Taoist, and Kabbalistic descriptions not as primitive, poetic tropes, but as internal receptions of little-known, enigmatic, epigenetically repressed structures, Leissner fibers and called the nervous system. I propose a new theistic sociobiological theory of religion. A valid belief in this theory could epigenetically awaken repressed Leissner fiber genes and initiate empirical testing of the theory.

Felipe Valencia. The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora

Felipe Valencia. <i>The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora</i>

THE TORN DIRECTION OF ASIAN LITERATURE

Socio-biology is the Darwinian framework of aimless natural selection for random changes in matter in motion derives an atheistic position from But from the first cosmic singularity to free will, explanatory gaps in the sociobiological account of religion invite God's foot at the door. Yoga about the anatomical connection between humans and God By interpreting the Taoist, Taoist, and Kabbalistic descriptions not as primitive, poetic tropes, but as internal receptions of little-known, enigmatic, epigenetically repressed structures, Leissner fibers and called the nervous system. I propose a new theistic sociobiological theory of religion. A valid belief in this theory could epigenetically awaken repressed Leissner fiber genes and initiate empirical testing of the theory.

Typological Comparisons of Folk Poetry of the Ukrainians and Southern Slavs at the Figurative-Lexical Level

The focus of the study proposed below is on important issues related to the identification of the common features of folk poetry of separate southern Slavs, in particular, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, and Ukrainian folk poetry, as well as individual works of art with a folklore component (for instance, Vila-Posestra by Lesya Ukrainka). It is, in particular, about the characteristic features of folk-poetic works at the level of imagery, poetics, and indicative lexical patterns. Common to folk poetry of the Southern Slavs and Ukrainians, especially when it comes to works of love or social nature, is the use of not only permanent epithets, but also indicative metaphors, comparisons and characteristic figurative expressions. In stages and separately considered are poetic tropes, separately their content and formal load, as well as functions when used in folk poetry of Ukrainians and South Slavs. Considerable attention is paid to lexical characteristics when creating the image of a beautiful girl in Ukrainian folk poetry and in folk-poetic South Slavonic samples, as well as to additional attributes of clothes and outfits of a young man and a girl in the folklore of the mentioned peoples. Figurative characteristics of animals, plants and natural phenomena (flowers, herbs, trees), as well as their functional purpose and place in the palette of folk-poetic works, characteristic lexical features of their reproduction in texts of epic and lyric songs, and folk ballads, do not remain without attention as well. The article compares dumas and songs and ballads about the escape from captivity, where there is also a distinct similarity in vocabulary when characterizing heroes and their actions. By collating folk poetry of Southern Slavs and Ukrainian folk songs, extraordinary factual material is revealed at the figurative-lexical level, eloquently testifying to the similarity of the texts. It is about certain clear general regularities of the overall plan, which can be traced both at the level of plot imagery in the thematic-genre dimension, and in the aspect of metaphors (constant epithets).

Queer for Art: Tennyson’s Poetic Autonomy as Female Same-Sex Desire

Abstract This article argues that in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and later, to lesser degree, in In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson expresses artistic autonomy by a Renaissance poetic trope of female same-sex desire. He does so to do away with the aesthetic closure and separation from the world implied by lesbianism in the Renaissance poetic imaginary. Via readings of these two poems, as well as historical and biographical examination of Tennyson’s writings and contemporaries’ writings about Tennyson – including later sexological writings – this article suggests that Tennyson’s choice of early modern aestheticized lesbianism as figure over the Hellenistic, intellectualized, male homoeroticism newly available in his Oxbridge milieu was personally as well as poetically motivated. Tennyson’s letters and biographies show that the poet was steeped in the tradition of erotic similitude. His poetry suggests that he anticipated the negative association between aestheticism and male homosexuality that would mark the end of his own century, so he portrayed solipsistic artistic production as linked to a female homoeroticism verging on autoeroticism. This article then offers a history of the strategic revival of a specific cultural-imaginary arrangement of female same-sex desire, and re-evaluates Tennyson’s place in the history of nineteenth-century homosexuality. Finally, in tracing erotic similitude’s relationship to autoeroticism, this article articulates the poetic and political stakes of historical morphologies of male homosexuality constructed as social, productive, and active, versus persistent constructions of female homosexuality as sterile, heretical, and anachronistic.

Review: Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil War, by Eliza Richards

Review: <i>Battle Lines: Poetry and Mass Media in the U.S. Civil War</i>, by Eliza Richards

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

Review: In the House of the Muses: Collection, Display, and Performance in the Veronese Palace of Mario Bevilacqua (1536–93)

Review: <i>In the House of the Muses: Collection, Display, and Performance in the Veronese Palace of Mario Bevilacqua (1536–93)</i>

The Early Icelandic Moral Economy According to the Major Poems of Egill Skallagrímsson

The Early Icelandic Moral Economy According to the Major Poems of Egill Skallagrímsson

Poetics of Loss and Dislocation

Abstract This essay examines several recurring themes, references, and poetic tropes in Anna Frajlich's poetry, to establish how her personal experience of exile and dislocation shapes and enriches her poetic universe. It focuses on the poet's treatment of space, time, memory, human relations, and the nagging sense of incompleteness often expressed by her lyrical personae. The essay combines historical and structural analysis of the main features of Frajlich's poetry, paying special attention to the prosodic organization of her verse, types of poetic diction, the intermittent use of traditional and innovative poetic forms to show that the poet's work, though highly diverse in form and content, inclines toward the “classical” model of expression characterized by a sense of poise, emotional restraint, and search for order, while at the same time avoiding intellectual and moral aloofness, didacticism, abstractness usually associated with “classicist” literary style. Frajlich's poetry acknowledges life's confusion without yielding to it, resists chaos without denying its presence in our lives. Her personal experience presents itself primarily as a heightened sensitivity to all forms of discord and discontinuity in the lives of people, communities, and nations. Born of a “wound,” it surmounts a personal tale of anguish and alienation, and forges it into a universal tale of the modern human condition. An escape, an exile from home, a painful dislocation, self-doubt, and uncertainty, is transformed into what the poet calls a “perfect journey” of self-affirmation, self-renewal, and intellectual as well as emotional discovery.

Ekphrastic spaces: the tug, pull, collision and merging of the in-between

ABSTRACT Although James A.W. Heffernan influentially defines contemporary ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (1993, 3), we argue for a more dynamic and fluid understanding of ekphrasis. In particular, we focus on the multiple and indeterminate perspectives created by ekphrastic poetry, emphasising the way ekphrastic poetry develops complex and interart relationships that cause a fracturing and/or stretching in the perspectives of both the poem and the artwork(s) it invokes. A powerful in-between or liminal ekphrastic space is created in which meanings tug, pull, swirl and merge. As new meanings are created ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, Victor W. 1979. “Betwixt and between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, edited by W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, 234–243. New York: Harper and Row, 234), an ekphrastic point of view emerges, problematising and questioning both-artworks-at-once and highlighting the provisional as it probes what can possibly be said in language about modes of artistic representation in artworks. Additionally, because poetic ekphrasis cannot fully represent, and always reinterprets, another artwork, it is engaged in processes of substitution through which poetic tropes stand in for some of the content of the original artwork. In applying these ideas to the relationships of ekphrastic prose poems to works of visual art, we explicate works by David Grubbs and Lorette C. Luzajic, as well as our own ekphrastic prose poetry.

Nelson Mandela as poetic trope

Over the last fifty or sixty years, Nelson Mandela has almost certainly been the most frequently mentioned public figure in South African poetry. As with the “shape-shifting quality” (Barnard 5) of his political iconicity, so his representation in poetry has varied over time. More often than not, the meaning of “Mandela” in any given poem tells us as much about the poet’s attitudes as about Mandela the (once-)living man, but the sheer frequency of the references attests to his unique stature. This essay illustrates the range of meanings ascribed to Mandela by poets from the 1960s to the present day: the stoic embodiment of resistance during his imprisonment, the messianic figure leading his people to freedom in 1990, the potentially compromised/compromising politician following his release, and finally the revered elder trapped by his own iconicity and weighed down by the burden of public (over-)expectation. The essay concludes by suggesting that Mandela’s name will continue to be invoked in the future as a kind of touchstone of personal character, political probity, and national promise.

Сохранность и изменяемость поэтико-стилевых слагаемых в разновременных записях песни «Шара Гюргю» эпоса «Джангар»

Introduction. In the system of artistic and visual means, the epithet occupies one of the important places. To create a heroic image, the narrator uses epithets that characterize the status of the hero, age and heroic merits of the heroes. Goal and tasks. The purpose of the article is to study artistic-identifying combinations - epithets in the recordings of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” at different times, to identify their preservation and change over time. To achieve the goal, the following tasks were solved: epithets were identified in three different-temporal texts of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” (1862, 1970, 1971), a comparative analysis of artistic-identifying combinations in the texts of different dzhangarchi was carried out. Method. To study the poetical and stylistic texture, we applied the comparative method. The material of the research was records of different times: 1) “The Song about how the famous Ulan Shovshur of the mangas khan of the Ferocious Shara Gyurgyu reproached the Maloderbet cycle of 1862; 2) an audio recording of “Songs about the duel of a lion [-the hero] Ulan Khongor the Beautiful with the Ferocious Shara Gyurgyu” by Jangarchi Telty Lidzhiev 1970; 3) audio recording of “Song of Shara Gyurgyu” by jangarchi Mikhail Mandzhiev 1971. Results. The study of epithets in recordings of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” at different times showed that over more than a century that has passed since the first recording, the epic text in its artistic embodiment has undergone changes. The song “Shara Gyurgyu” of the Maloderbet cycle of 1862 is distinguished by an abundance of epithets, while in the recordings of the late tradition of the epic, there is a transformation of the artistic level of the text. Storytellers Teltya Lidzhiev and Mikhail Mandzhiev adhere to the main plot structure in the process of performance, without sharpening attention to poetic tropes. Observations of the texts of different storytellers at different times show that Dzhangarchi, having a wider epic knowledge, performs the song in accordance with the criteria of fidelity of reproduction, following the tradition of the epic school to which he belonged. A comparative analysis of recordings of the song “Shara Gyurgyu” at different times allowed us to identify constant units at the level of textual embodiment, which accumulate the poetical and stylistic basis of the epic narrative and mark the key links of the epic narration of the Kalmyk heroic epic “Dzhangar”.

Form, exform, and information in public space

If the urban tissue can be compared to a verbal text, how appropriate, then, do the linguistic disciplines prove in urban studies? This article briefly shows how morphology (Oliveira, 2016) and semantics (Benveniste, 1971) help us understand the city’s physical structures as well as the meaning these structures embody. Then follows a more substantial discussion of poetics (Ricœur, 1991) and its relevance to research on art in public space. An artistic intervention in public space may in fact appear as a poetic trope within the prosaic context of the city (De Certeau, 1988). Interrupting the smooth run of the urban machinery, it may re-inform what has become redundant. Thus, Marianne Heske’s House of Commons not only questions our definitions of form and exform (Bourriaud, 2016); in-forming an ex-form, it also questions the power of definition and other power structures inherent in the cityscape.

Pagan Gods as Figures of Speech: Dante’s Use of Servius in the Vita Nova

ABSTRACT The article sets out to show the ideological significance of the quotations from Vergil, Lucan, Horace, Homer, and Ovid found in Vita Nova 16 [XXV], the celebrated passage where Dante cites these poets as examples of personification in classical literature. In the quotations from Vergil’s Aeneid, Aeolus and Juno speak to each other, and Apollo speaks to the Trojans. In his framing of the quotations, Dante appears implicitly to regard pagan deities like Aeolus, Juno, and Apollo as inanimate things, raising the question as to why the author of the Vita Nova understood pagan gods in terms of poetic tropes. Focusing on the Vergilian quotations, this essay argues that Servius’s commentary to the Aeneid represents one of the major sources that might have led Dante to construe pagan deities as rhetorical personifications.

Troping Time: Refrain Interpolation in Sacred Latin Song, ca. 1140–1853

Abstract This article explores a practice in evidence across Europe from the twelfth to the nineteenth century involving the singing of a brief refrain within sacred Latin songs and hymns. Tracing the circulation of the two-part refrain “Fulget dies … Fulget dies ista” across multiple centuries, in both song-form tropes of the office versicle Benedicamus Domino and as a trope interpolated into hymns, I chart its unique movement between genres and in and out of written record. Examining the unusual origins, transmission, and function of the refrain, I begin with its emergence in twelfth-century manuscripts and conclude with its unnotated appearance in nineteenth-century printed Catholic songbooks. I argue that the refrain’s long-standing appeal can be located in its function as a poetic and liturgical trope of time itself. While tropes often enhance the “hic et nunc” (here and now) of the liturgy, the “Fulget dies” refrain gained additional temporal significance through its intimate link to songs of the Christmas season. The “shining day” imagery introduced by the refrain offered a tangible way of marking seasonal time in devotional rites, poetically indexing the light-based symbolism of Christmas, the winter solstice, and the New Year. The inherently temporal meaning of the refrain lent it flexibility as a trope, enabling its movement across genres and liturgies. Integrated into sacred Latin songs, the “Fulget dies” refrain functioned as a pithy musical and poetic commentary on liturgical, calendrical, and seasonal temporalities—in other words, as a trope of time in sacred song.

The Literary and Legendary Lives of the Onoe Bell

AbstractDuring the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a large eleventh-century bronze bell made in Korea became a grand attraction on the grounds of Onoe Shrine in Kakogawa, Japan. Although such bells are made of expensive material that require significant financial investment and technical skill, most are overlooked as common fixtures inside bell towers at Buddhist temples across Asia. Yet the bell at Onoe Shrine has a particularly complex and fascinating story to tell. Using object biography as an approach to study this unusual monument enables us to see how this bell became the popular subject of legends, travel-diary accounts, gazetteer entries, popular woodblock prints, and souvenirs made in a variety of materials. The bell's legendary life story accorded it the ability to solve human problems and use its voice to demand where it should be located, which fueled people's desire to see it with their own eyes and to make physical contact with it. This examination of the bell's intertwining life tales reveals how, after initially serving as a ritual object at a Korean Buddhist temple, it experienced dramatic transformations into a high-value export (or trafficked) commodity, Japanese poetic trope, shrine treasure, and tourist draw.