Reading Of Literary Works Research Articles

New Historicism: Text and Context

During most of the twentieth century history was seen as a phenomenon outside of literature that guaranteed the veracity of literary interpretation. History was unique and it functioned as a basis for reading literary works. During the seventies of the twentieth century there occurred a change of attitude towards history in American literary theory, and there appeared a new theoretical approach which soon became known as New Historicism. Since its inception, New Historicism has been identified with the study of Renaissance and Romanticism, but nowadays it has been increasingly involved in other literary trends. Although there are great differences in the arguments and practices at various representatives of this school, New Historicism has clearly recognizable features and many new historicists will agree with the statement of Walter Cohen that New Historicism, when it appeared in the eighties, represented something quite new in reference to the studies of theory, criticism and history (Cohen 1987, 33). Theoretical connection with Bakhtin, Foucault and Marx is clear, as well as a kind of uneasy tie with deconstruction and the work of Paul de Man. At the center of this approach is a renewed interest in the study of literary works in the light of historical and political circumstances in which they were created. Foucault encouraged readers to begin to move literary texts and to link them with discourses and representations that are not literary, as well as to examine the sociological aspects of the texts in order to take part in the social struggles of today.
 The study of literary works using New Historicism is the study of politics, history, culture and circumstances in which these works were created. With regard to one of the main fact which is located in the center of the criticism, that history cannot be viewed objectively and that reality can only be understood through a cultural context that reveals the work, re-reading and interpretation of literature is not just re-reading of texts that are already well known, but reading in a completely new way.

A Research on Reading Habits of University Students: (Sample of Ankara University and Erciyes University)

The activity of reading of an individual, which commences together with the beginning of school age and continues throughout their lifetime, is also the basic tool of learning. After acquiring basic skills pertaining to reading, ensuring that these skills are permanent, sustained throughout life, and transition to functional and critical literacy is closely related to the reading habit of the individual. In individualistic terms, the habit of reading is also one of the most important foundations of a robust and developed personality. In the world of today where knowledge is increasing rapidly and science and technology impose constant changes to human life, it is observed that humans constantly need to improve themselves in both their professional and social lives. In occupational and career development after formal education, especially for the purpose of being able to adapt to change, education and lifelong learning has become a necessity. University students are groups that are expected to have a high level of reading habit, which is among the individual and social development criteria. Thus, the determination of reading habits of university students is considered important in both areas they need and in their self developments throughout their lives.This study has the objective of determining the reading habits of students studying at the Ankara University Department of Primary Education and Erciyes University History Department. To that end, data of questionnaires applied to a total of 326 students consisting of 225 students from Ankara University and 101 students from Erciyes University have been analyzed and the results have been presented in the form of tables.According to the data obtained in the study, it has been determined that students at Ankara University and Erciyes University read novels, newspapers and magazines in their spare time, they enjoy reading literary works, historic, romantic, entertaining-humorous, and psychological genres the most, and they could not spare much time for reading books due to the intensity of lessons, busy social life, preparation for examinations and spending time on the computer/internet.

PENGGUNAAN FILM ADAPTASI SEBAGAI MEDIA PENGAJARAN SASTRA

It has become a trend in film industry, either in national scope or international scope, that literary works are adapted into movies. Some people think that it decreases people interest on reading literary works, which is already low, as most people tend to prefer watching the movies instead of reading the literary works. However, if we study this matter further, it is very possible that it happens the other way around. This article tries to highlight some important points of film adaptation from literary works, its possible roles in literary learning, and some practical applications of its utilization in literary learning in the classroom.

The Afterlives of the Author

Review Article| September 01 2014 The Afterlives of the Author Obscure Invitations: The Persistence of the Author in Twentieth-Century American Literature, by Widiss, Benjamin, Stanford University Press, 2011. 208 pages. Michael LeMahieu Michael LeMahieu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) 60 (3): 414–422. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-4006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael LeMahieu; The Afterlives of the Author. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2014; 60 (3): 414–422. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-4006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller

Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J. Hillis Miller

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Using Holland’s DEFT Model as a Reader Response Tool in the Language Classroom

Language students tend to struggle with literature because they find psychological and socio-cultural implications embedded in literary texts difficult to understand and discuss (Kramsch, 1996). This paper suggests that psychoanalytic literary criticism may offer a reading framework that could mitigate the struggle and allow for a deeper level of personal and social exploration of literary works. The DEFT model (Defense, Expectations, Fantasy and Transformation), as one type of reader-response approach to reading that draws on the psychoanalytic framework, might make the reading of literature easier because of its potential to offer to students strategies for finding a point of entry into the text. According to DEFT, the inability to find a point of entry into a new reading may be one of the reasons for finding a literary piece difficult, for ‘disliking’ or outright rejecting it. This qualitative study shows how the DEFT approach, originally created for native speakers but thus far little researched in relationship to non-native speakers, can be used to facilitate the reading of literary works in a language course.

Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: Using Holland’s DEFT Model as a Reader Response Tool in the Language Classroom

Language students tend to struggle with literature because they find psychological and socio-cultural implications embedded in literary texts difficult to understand and discuss (Kramsch, 1996). This paper suggests that psychoanalytic literary criticism may offer a reading framework that could mitigate the struggle and allow for a deeper level of personal and social exploration of literary works. The DEFT model (Defense, Expectations, Fantasy and Transformation), as one type of reader-response approach to reading that draws on the psychoanalytic framework, might make the reading of literature easier because of its potential to offer to students strategies for finding a point of entry into the text. According to DEFT, the inability to find a point of entry into a new reading may be one of the reasons for finding a literary piece difficult, for ‘disliking’ or outright rejecting it. This qualitative study shows how the DEFT approach, originally created for native speakers but thus far little researched in relationship to non-native speakers, can be used to facilitate the reading of literary works in a language course.

Dying for time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov

Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time--whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of being, or a transcendent afterlife. Martin Hagglund takes on these themes but gives them another reading entirely. The fear of time and death does not stem from a desire to transcend time, he argues. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in temporal life. From this vantage point, Hagglund offers in-depth analyses of Proust's Recherche, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Nabokov's Ada. Through his readings of literary works, Hagglund also sheds new light on topics of broad concern in the humanities, including time consciousness and memory, trauma and survival, the technology of writing and the aesthetic power of art. Finally, he develops an original theory of the relation between time and desire through an engagement with Freud and Lacan, addressing mourning and melancholia, pleasure and pain, attachment and loss. Dying for Time opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.

Atmosphere, mood, Stimmung: on a hidden potential of literature

What are the various atmospheres or moods that the reading of literary works can trigger? Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has long argued that the function of literature is not so much to describe, or to re-present, as to make present. Here, he goes one step further, exploring the substance and reality of language as a material component of the world-impalpable hints, tones, and airs that, as much as they may be elusive, are no less matters of actual fact. Reading, we discover, is an experiencing of specific moods and atmospheres, or Stimmung. These moods are on a continuum akin to a musical scale. They present themselves as nuances that challenge our powers of discernment and description, as well as language's potential to capture them. Perhaps the best we can do is to point in their direction. Conveying personal encounters with poetry, song, painting, and the novel, this book thus gestures toward the intangible and in the process, constitutes a bold defense of the subjective experience of the arts.

Architecture and Modern Literature by David Spurr (review)

Reviewed by: Architecture and Modern Literature by David Spurr Rita Sakr (bio) Architecture and Modern Literature, by David Spurr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. xi + 285 pp. $85.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. David Spurr’s Architecture and Modern Literature is in many ways monumental. It opens with a statement of its aims and parameters as an exploration of “a series of instances in which architecture and modern literature come together in ways that appear to break down the barriers between the two art forms, or at least to construct bridges between them,” while investigating “the manner in which the relations between architecture and literature are symptomatic of modernity as a crisis of meaning” (3, 6). The project thus appears both conceptually broad and well defined while it achieves two specific intellectual feats. On the one hand, the study constructs bridges not merely between architecture and literature but rather more widely, if largely implicitly, across literature, architecture, urban studies, cultural geography, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, and modernist studies. Perhaps the author could have further clarified the different directions of this complex interdisciplinarity and made it a more explicit component of his work. Nevertheless, it could be argued that formulating these disciplinary intersections more elaborately would have made Spurr’s study too theoretically dense and less pleasurable to read than it is. Moreover, Architecture and Modern Literature displays not only a fascinating understanding of cultural forms and fields (ranging from Babel and The Odyssey to “junkspace” and “non-lieu” and passing through The Inferno and The Arcades Project1) but also an ability to weave together architectural theory, philosophical principles, psychoanalytical insights, seminal spatial/geographical thought, and close readings of literary works (novels, poetry, and some drama). On the other hand, this study ambitiously traces the vast cultural time-space of modernity and modern literature across two centuries, while projecting its own view of modern literature and architecture’s particular horizons and transformations. Seeking to explore an originary moment for modernity, Spurr argues that [a]mong the effects of an emerging modernity in this period [late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries] are a variety of manifestations that call both literary and architectural meanings into question. These include the aesthetic of the fragment, the value placed on subjective interiority, the significance given to the human body, the development of new materials and techniques, and a conception of the past in terms of stock or reserve. (28) It is hard to agree or disagree with the specific periodization of the [End Page 701] modern in literature and architecture proposed here because of the complex aesthetic and historical questions at stake. More interestingly, the parameters of intersecting transformations and concerns, as outlined in the “variety of manifestations” above, are very well substantiated in the book’s eight chapters. Referencing Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Le Corbusier among others, the first chapter shows that literature’s approaches to “dwelling” have gone through several stages: “nostalgia” in the nineteenth century gave way to a “narrative and rhetorical” release from that phase as “a new consciousness of urban space” emerges “finally to a renewed confrontation with the absence of dwelling, where modern writing strives to relieve the misery of homelessness by giving thought to it” (54, 54-55). This argument is developed through readings of Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. The comparisons among the modernists here are presented succinctly: “If architecture figures in Proust as a metaphor of inner desire, it figures in Joyce as the concrete embodiment of modernity itself. Ulysses is a work that gets its characters out of the house and into the street, where they are confronted not with dwelling in its domestic sense but with their existence in urban space, the very scene of modernity” (63). In this context, Spurr wisely advises us not to confuse literary modernism, by Joyce and Woolf especially, with the “utopian manifestos of modern architecture in particular” (66). These themes are linked in many ways to the seventh chapter in which Spurr presents a primarily Heideggerian reading of building, dwelling, ruins, and the void in Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens: prominent cultural-geographical topics that Spurr revisits with...

Toward integration of reading and service learning through an interdisciplinary program

This study examined the effect of an interdisciplinary program of reading and service learning on the cognitive and affective development of university students in Hong Kong. As Nussbaum (1997) stated, literature plays a vital role in educating citizens of the world through its narrative imagination and its power of promoting understanding and empathy toward the life of others. Halstead and Pike (2006) also emphasized that art can foster reflection upon action and bring about change in behavior as a result of perspective change. In this study, 24 freshmen read literary works under the theme of children’s welfare and explored issues related to the welfare of children worldwide. Their reflections on these materials were expressed in writing and in a presentation. In the following semester, the students participated in voluntary services within and outside Hong Kong. All students completed a questionnaire on their humanistic concerns and sense of global citizenship at the beginning and the end of the project. Results showed that students were conscious of their changes after joining the program and stated their growth in values and knowledge. The pre–post-t-test analysis suggested that students had made significant improvement in the following areas: (1) their attitude toward serving others, especially in their personal and social values; (2) their engagement in reading literary and nonfiction works which reflect social and moral issues of the world; (3) their attention to world affairs; (4) their concern for the underprivileged; and (5) awareness of their potential in helping the poor.

Humanism in the Digital Age

Welcome to Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, a new online open access journal devoted to the reformulation of received philological and philosophical ideas of writing and reading literary works, motivated by the advent of electronic texts. There has never been a time in which the human was not a work in progress (Sheehan). Humanism today must address not only the plurality of stages on the road towards the formation of ideas of humanity but also the unfinished nature of the human project. While this is not solely the result of a technological revolution, it has nonetheless become obvious that technology is playing a crucial role in the new perspectives opened to humanism. The process that has led to contemporary understanding of technology in relation to the question of humanity is very long and complex. Scholars suggest a division of the evolution of the support and transmission of knowledge into four main revolutionary changes: 1) from orality to writing; 2) from volumen to codex, including the beginning of the book form; 3) from early book form to printed books; 4) from late print forms to digital forms (Roncaglia x-xi). Writing, reading, and their different supports were and still are at the core of the human idea.

Fiction out of fact: Raising awareness about domestic violence in the literature classroom

Domestic violence is a reality that haunts many women and children. How does an educator bring awareness of this problem into the literature classroom? How does one combine the technique of teaching critical analysis with attentiveness to a problem which is real and persistent? In this paper, we discuss the ways in which we blend the training of critical reading of literary works simultaneously with attention to the issue of domestic violence. By connecting textual materials with the private and public domains, students explore how texts are negotiated, interpreted and given meaning.

<em>Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision 1960––2000</em>, by Elisabeth Bekers

Reviewed by: Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision 1960–2000 Charlotte Baker Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision 1960–2000 by Elisabeth Bekers Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2010. 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-299-23493 paper. Rising Anthills is an important intervention on the subject of the controversial cultural tradition of female genital excision. Elisabeth Bekers borrows the image of the anthill from a Dogon creation story and Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah “to draw attention to the power of the literary works dealing with female genital excision” (4). In Dogon myth, the male god of creation attempts to penetrate the female Earth he has just created. When her clitoris rises in the shape of a termite hill to prevent this, he excises it, ensuring the submission of the Earth and of all women after her. Achebe uses the same image figuratively to reveal that the power of the anthill lies not only in its rebellious force, but in its remarkable memory. For Achebe, the anthill symbolizes the storyteller, appealing to generation after generation, and Bekers borrows this image to map the development of the debate on the practice in literature over the last four decades of the twentieth century. [End Page 190] The scope of Rising Anthills is impressive, discussing as it does twenty-two texts published between 1963 and 1998, including sixteen novels, three short stories, two plays, and a poem. The analysis of both familiar texts and less well-known material results in a study that emphasizes the diversity of representations of female genital excision by authors of African descent writing in English, French, and Arabic, as Bekers highlights the multiple ways in which writers have explored changing understandings of this cultural tradition. Bekers combines close readings of literary works with a sophisticated theoretical framework, adopting an interdisciplinary approach that crosses linguistic, regional, and national divisions in African literatures. The study draws on insights from literary criticism and narratology, the study of discourse, postcolonial studies, feminist and gender criticism, as well as critical work on the body, to construct a theoretical framework within which to analyse representations of female genital excision. Three substantial chapters trace an evolution in the depiction of the practice through three “generations” of writers. Chapter one reveals that writers in the 1960s, including Rebeka Njau, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Flora Nwapa, Charity Waciuma, and Muthoni Likimani, recognize the practice as a sensitive issue in the context of decolonization and therefore approach it with circumspection. Bekers finds more candid discussion of female genital excision in the less homogeneous writings of Ahmadou Kourouma, Nurrudin Farah, Nawal El Saadawi, Aminata Maïga Ka, Calixthe Beyala, and Alifa Rifaat in the 1970s and ’80s. These authors do not hesitate to critique the gender structures of their postindependent and more urbanized societies, elaborating the physical and psychological consequences of female genital excision to denounce the practice. Chapter three examines the globalization of the literary debate on female genital excision at the close of the twentieth century in the much broader, international context of the fight for women’s rights. Bekers selects six exclusively female-authored texts as representatives of their generation, including works by Aminata Maïga Keïta, Alice Walker, Evelyne Accad, Gloria Naylor, Saida Hagi-Dirie Herzi, Breena Clarke, and Glenda Dickerson to illustrate the complementarity between African American and African writing, and a shared condemnation of female genital excision. Despite the grouping of writers together in this way, the quality of Bekers’s close readings preserves the richness and diversity of the chosen texts. The result is a volume that specialists in this field will find informative, but that interested general readers and undergraduates will also find accessible, since the prose is clearly expressed and free of extraneous detail. [End Page 191] Charlotte Baker Lancaster University, UK c.baker@lancaster.ac.uk Copyright © 2011 Indiana University Press

Hurled into the Heart of Darkness: Moral Luck and the Hebrew Literature of the Intifada

This paper proposes an ethical reading of literary works that describe the Israeli soldier in the Intifada. It examines the experiences of Israeli soldiers, the nature of the situation, and the protagonist's choices and identity, in the light of the philosophical concept of moral luck (following Nagel's categories), which is generally defined as a state where a moral agent is assigned moral blame or praise for an action even though a significant part of what he does depends on factors beyond his control. Reading representative works, I show that the Israeli soldiers in many literary works find themselves in a state of bad moral luck that is both circumstantial (stemming from the Occupation) and constitutive (stemming from the military socialization process). By covering moral and immoral protagonists, realistic and non-realistic prose, the paper examines the reflection of the complexity of the conflict and the place of the individual in a situation of national and political dispute.

Watching Actors

Dramatic acting is often loosely associated with the freedom to be someone else. This essay presents a philosophical exploration of this idea. It suggests that dramatic acting is a form of what it calls “existential amplification,” a fictional actualization of usually unavailable possibilities that partly constitute the self (under one of the self’s renderings). Acting is able to fascinate its practitioners and its audiences because it involves such self-expansion. The essay then distinguishs the uniqueness of this kind of amplification from other forms of living more through art or literature. It presents an elaborate comparison between acting (or responding to acting) and reading literary works (or engaging with literary characters); it also defends a version of the distinction between acting and pretending. Finally, the essay asks whether some forms of acting are morally objectionable, given its analysis of acting’s metaphysical structure.

Introducing Literature to an EFL Classroom: Teacher’s Presentations and Students’ Perceptions

This study documents a teacher-researcher’s presentations of 24 literary works to a class of 28 Taiwanese EFL senior high school students during a fourteen-week experiment, and reports on those students’ perceptions of the texts introduced and their attitudes towards literature in general. In preparing literary texts, the teacher explored the notion of computer assisted literature teaching (CALT), capitalizing on the Internet resources to prepare plot summaries of novels and plays. Some supplementary media materials were also used in the literature presentations. Results of participants’ responses to a 50-item questionnaire showed that most of the students like the presented novels most, followed by plays, short stories, and then poems. Furthermore, about half of the students like to read literary works and also like to be introduced to literature. Specifically, students like to read contemporary literature rather than classic literature, and such works as movie novels, realistic fiction, fantasies, and mysteries are their favorites. In the end, the author argues that there is low literature threshold, if any, for teachers to cross before they can introduce literature to their EFL students.

CRITICISM OF LITERATURE AND CRITICISM OF CULTURE

AbstractThere is a class of critics who are dissatisfied with the academic status of literary criticism and who want to re‐establish for literary criticism the status it possessed in the early and mid nineteenth century as simultaneously cultural and social criticism. This is an impossible task. The ‘cultural critics’ of the nineteenth century possessed their authority because they were without competition and because they could command the attention and respect of the whole of the literate audience. However, at the end of the nineteenth century intellectual authority came to be based in specialised academic disciplines and individual authority was undermined and ultimately disappeared. At the same time, the arrival of universal literacy in Britain fragmented and ultimately destroyed the generally educated audience to which the cultural critics addressed themselves. Consequently there is today no role for the cultural critic. Literary critics cannot speak with authority about social, political, or cultural questions. They can, however, speak with authority about literature. Whether or not this criticism can be grounded in disciplinary knowledge, it serves a necessary function for an audience that no longer possesses the skill of reading literary works and lacks the background knowledge that is necessary to make sense of literature.

Traduire l’Europe

Evropa je večjezična, ne glede na način, kako jo definiramo (geografsko, kulturno, politično). Vprašanje »prevajanja Evrope« nas torej nujno vodi k različnosti jezikov, med katerimi ne sme noben veljati kot izhodiščni za druge. V prvem delu se Yves Chevrel sprašuje, ali prevajanje Evrope ne pomeni morda poskus prevajanja sebe kot Evropejca. Naslanjajoč na odlomek iz Kafkovega Dnevnika, opremljenega z opombami Milana Kundere, dokazuje, da književnosti »malih narodov«, šele s tem, ko se uvrstijo v širši evropski kontekst, najdejo najboljšo priložnost, da se jih spozna in da se uveljavijo. Želja po prepoznavanju, po prevajanju sebe kot Evropejca, nas vodi do tega, da bi radi videli, kako drugi Evropejci prevajajo sebe in sporočajo svojo vizijo Evrope. Yves Chevrel tu navaja primer zanimivega uredniškega projekta, učbenika Zgodovine Evrope in sveta po letu 1945, ki so ga skupaj pripravili nemški in francoski zgodovinarji in ga leta 2006 izdali v nemški in francoski različici z istimi dokumenti in razporeditvijo strani. Ali se lahko takšna izkušnja ponovi in razširi na druga obdobja? Doba, ki je v Sloveniji znana kot »preseljevanje narodov« in v Nemčiji kot »Völkerwanderung«, francosko zgodovinopisje imenuje »invasions barbares« – invazija barbarov. Za zgodovino Evrope ni evropskega modela. Zadnji del se dotika branja literarnih del v prevodu, ki jih skuša Yves Chevrel rehabilitirati. Izhajajoč iz misli Wilhelma von Humbolta, ki je razlikoval pojma »das Fremde« in »die Fremdheit«, primerja prevode v različnih jezikih, kar omogoča boljše razumevanje različnih pristopov k istemu delu. Naslov romana Na Drini ćuprija Iva Andrića, ki se v slovenščini glasi Most na Drini, je v francoščini Le Pont sur la Drina, pa tudi Il est un pont sur la Drina. Različno pojmovanje evangelijske parabole o izgubljenem sinu je razvidno v naslovu slovenskega prevoda Gidovega dela Vrnitev izgubljenega sina (Retour de l’enfant prodigue). Chevrel ta del zaključuje z dvema citatoma Alberta Camusa in Virginie Woolf, ki poudarjata bogastvo evropske literarne dediščine. Evropa razmišlja v več jezikih, Evropa je celina prevajanja. Prevajanje posreduje, daje na razpolago, kliče k izmenjavi. Prevod je eden izmed veziv Evrope.

A Transposing a Meadow's Silence (Ponge and Guillevic)

Et le silence, s'il est bien le dernier mot dont ait a nous faire part la realite, n'apparait jamais de maniere si eloquente que lorsque le reel est precisement en train de parler. Clement Rosset (1) When understood as the absence of signs, silence is all too often considered a verbal phenomenon. As such it occurs, for example, in the pauses between utterances, or in the blank spaces between groups of lines in modern poetry, with the result that particular instances of silence take on a meaning from the verbal units that frame them. There is, however, another type of silence that does not depend on words for its appearance or significance: namely, the state of being that is exemplified by a natural landscape. Such a calm is in fact often made up of sounds (those of the wind on leaves and branches, or of passing animals), but what makes it even more different from the first type of silence is that its modulated forms and effects exclude human speech. They are impervious to any translation into words that one might attempt, primarily because they convey no message whatsoever. Francis Ponge anchored most of his poems in such an experience of the world's self-sufficiency and of its silent indifference to whatever statements we make about it. Le monde muet est notre seule patrie, he proclaimed famously in an essay of this title published in his 1961 book Methodes. (2) According to Ponge, (or patrie) should be understood in the strong sense of the place to which each of us comes home: that is, the world of living matter to which we belong, whether we like it or not, over and above any political allegiance that we maintain to a nation or state. It is a homeland to which we return repeatedly at various moments of our life--occasionally while playing in childhood, or when traveling across unfamiliar terrain, or whenever we are made aware of our own fragile materiality, during moments of ill-health or when those people close to us die. Returning to the world of matter, and acknowledging our own place within it, can also occur voluntarily, however, as when we choose to walk in nature or read literary works that celebrate treks through the country. (3) Two such works are Ponge's 1967 poem Le Pre and a poem from Eugene Guillevic's 1979 collection Etier that is entitled De la Prairie. (4) In the pages that follow I shall examine the ways in which both poets recreate for their readers the natural silence of the meadows they chose to commemorate in writing. Of particular interest to me are the ways in which a natural, non-verbal, silence that characterizes the landscape addressed by each poem is transposed into the texts' verbal patterns, thus creating the impression that nature engages readers in a type of mute dialogue, or that its silence, to borrow Clement Rosset's remark cited earlier, speaks to us. In my discussion of these poetic effects Ponge's poem will be situated within the large dossier of variants and notes that the author published in 1971 as La Fabrique du Pre, whereas Guillevic's poem will be read alongside the three texts that accompany it in the penultimate section of Etier (E 147-89), and next to the long poem Herbier de Bretagne (E 191-210) which closes the book. Ponge's Le Pre begins by noting the two types of silence that a walk in the meadow precipitates. First there is the breathless wonder experienced by the walker upon discovery of the meadow. Words of praise well up in the walker's throat--Que parfois la Nature, a notre reveil, nous propose / Ce a quoi justement nous etions disposes, / La louange aussitot s'enfle dans notre gorge. / Nous croyons etre au paradis (FP 189)--only to be stopped by an inability to express such joy--Mais qu'est-ce qui obstrue ainsi notre chemin? [...] / Qui nous met les batons dans les roues? / Pourquoi, des notre issue en surplomb sur la page, / Dans ce seul paragraphe, tous ces scrupules? (FP 190). …