The article examines the phenomenon of lyric formalism--the view that poems wholly contain their meaning--from cultural and cross-cultural perspectives. It argues that the view presenting lyrics as pure self-contained expressions, not addressed to anyone, is part of a long cultural history that began in Romanticism and that led to the New Critics' formalism. It is culturally specific and must be studied as such. Through a reading of some key Romantic-era statements on the lyric by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hegel, this article shows the increasingly problematic status of the lyric addressee as a cultural notion. On one hand the addressee was important as the beneficiary of the poet's genius, but on the other hand s/he was neglected as non-essential to the truest form of self-expression. Ultimately the lyric addressee was repressed, though never entirely. Since poems were not regarded as addressing anyone, they were not meant to directly communicate meaning from speaker to listener; meaning was rather generated somehow within the listener. What the listener received, then, was only the form or music of the poem which triggered his own inward responses. Thus thought and music were split off from each other in a way that did not happen in other poetic traditions, like that of Arab poetics. In modern Western culture, poems were divorced from songs in both the popular mind and in high literary theory. Song became regarded as opposed to communication, and the poem as pure thought or text without a performative framework. This segregation of song from poem, music from text, must be acknowledged as culturally specific and belongs to a certain literary period. A glance at poetry within Arabic culture offers other alternatives, where the musical dimension is not contrasted to the textual, but is joined to it. ********** Lyrical formalism--the view that poems are complete aesthetic units that wholly contain their meaning, as a vase contains flowers--is sometimes viewed as if it was imposed on poetry by the Russian Formalists and the American New Critics. There is a common impression that critics like Cleanth Brooks ripped poetry arbitrarily out of its personal, cultural, and historical context and stuffed it into their "well-wrought urns," detached and self-complete. (1) But it may be that lyrical formalism in criticism came to reflect an already developing formalist tendency in literature generally, a tendency towards textual self-containment originating with the Romantics and pushed farther by the Modernists. (2) Reader-response theorist Jane P. Tompkins argues that the modern emphasis on the literary meaning of a text (its self-contained "message"), unlike the Classical or Renaissance emphasis on its social effects, implies that the inter-personal relations of author to audience became less important in the modern age. (3) Similarly, orality theorist Walter J. Ong sees the formalist tendency to regard texts as containing their meanings, rather than deliver
本文从文化和跨文化的角度考察了抒情形式主义现象，即诗歌完全包含其意义的观点。它认为，将歌词视为纯粹的独立表达，而不是针对任何人的观点，是浪漫主义开始并导致新批评派形式主义的漫长文化史的一部分。它具有文化特殊性，因此必须加以研究。本文通过阅读华兹华斯、雪莱和黑格尔在浪漫主义时期对抒情诗的一些重要论述，揭示了抒情诗作为一种文化观念所面临的日益严重的问题。一方面，收件人作为诗人天才的受益者是重要的，但另一方面，他/她被忽视了，因为对于最真实的自我表达形式来说，他/她是不必要的。最终，抒情的收件人被压抑了，尽管从未完全压抑。由于诗歌不被视为对任何人的称呼，它们并不意味着直接将意义从说话者传达给听者;意义是由听者自己产生的。因此，听者所收到的只是诗的形式或音乐，而这又触发了他自己内心的反应。因此，思想和音乐以一种在其他诗歌传统中没有发生过的方式彼此分离，比如阿拉伯诗学。在现代西方文化中，无论是在大众思想中还是在高级文论中，诗歌都与歌曲相分离。宋被认为是交流的对立面，诗是没有表演框架的纯思想或文本。这种歌与诗的分离，音乐与文本的分离，必须被认为是文化上的特殊性，属于一定的文学时期。阿拉伯文化中的诗歌提供了其他选择，其中音乐维度不是与文本相对立的，而是与文本结合在一起的。**********抒情形式主义——认为诗歌是完整的美学单位，完全包含了它们的意义，就像花瓶里装着鲜花一样——有时被认为是俄罗斯形式主义者和美国新批评主义者强加给诗歌的。有一种普遍的印象是，像克林斯·布鲁克斯这样的评论家武断地将诗歌从个人、文化和历史背景中剥离出来，塞进他们“精心制作的瓮中”，超然而自我完善。(1)但是，批评中的抒情形式主义可能反映了文学中普遍存在的一种形式主义倾向，这种倾向始于浪漫主义，并被现代主义进一步推动。(2)读者反应理论家简·p·汤普金斯(Jane P. Tompkins)认为，与古典或文艺复兴时期强调文本的社会影响不同，现代对文本的文学意义(其自成一体的“信息”)的强调意味着作者与读者之间的人际关系在现代变得不那么重要了。(3)同样，口语理论家Walter J. Ong认为，形式主义倾向于将文本视为包含其意义的文本，而不是将作者的意义传递给读者，这是转向大众读写从而转向私人阅读的结果。(4)王说，书面文本，无论是文学的还是非文学的，都越来越被视为他所说的独立的“封闭领域”，与作者、发行方式、表演方式和观众的直接意识隔绝。虽然诗歌是新批评主义最强调封闭领域的文学体裁(也许是因为它的短跨度可以更完全地孤立)，但根据翁的说法，封闭和去语境化的文本是所有体裁的标准，无论是文学还是非文学。因此，汤普金斯和翁都没有单独关注抒情类型。但是形式主义在批评和教学语境中都与抒情体裁紧密相连，因此我们必须超越王和汤普金斯的论点。文学教授更有可能让学生仔细阅读一首诗，而不是一段同样长度的小说节选。大多数现代西方读者——甚至是那些从未听说过形式主义批评的人——都觉得抒情诗与读者的距离更近。…
{"title":"Poem as Song: The Role of the Lyric Audience","authors":"J. Henriksen","doi":"10.2307/1350023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350023","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the phenomenon of lyric formalism--the view that poems wholly contain their meaning--from cultural and cross-cultural perspectives. It argues that the view presenting lyrics as pure self-contained expressions, not addressed to anyone, is part of a long cultural history that began in Romanticism and that led to the New Critics' formalism. It is culturally specific and must be studied as such. Through a reading of some key Romantic-era statements on the lyric by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hegel, this article shows the increasingly problematic status of the lyric addressee as a cultural notion. On one hand the addressee was important as the beneficiary of the poet's genius, but on the other hand s/he was neglected as non-essential to the truest form of self-expression. Ultimately the lyric addressee was repressed, though never entirely. Since poems were not regarded as addressing anyone, they were not meant to directly communicate meaning from speaker to listener; meaning was rather generated somehow within the listener. What the listener received, then, was only the form or music of the poem which triggered his own inward responses. Thus thought and music were split off from each other in a way that did not happen in other poetic traditions, like that of Arab poetics. In modern Western culture, poems were divorced from songs in both the popular mind and in high literary theory. Song became regarded as opposed to communication, and the poem as pure thought or text without a performative framework. This segregation of song from poem, music from text, must be acknowledged as culturally specific and belongs to a certain literary period. A glance at poetry within Arabic culture offers other alternatives, where the musical dimension is not contrasted to the textual, but is joined to it. ********** Lyrical formalism--the view that poems are complete aesthetic units that wholly contain their meaning, as a vase contains flowers--is sometimes viewed as if it was imposed on poetry by the Russian Formalists and the American New Critics. There is a common impression that critics like Cleanth Brooks ripped poetry arbitrarily out of its personal, cultural, and historical context and stuffed it into their \"well-wrought urns,\" detached and self-complete. (1) But it may be that lyrical formalism in criticism came to reflect an already developing formalist tendency in literature generally, a tendency towards textual self-containment originating with the Romantics and pushed farther by the Modernists. (2) Reader-response theorist Jane P. Tompkins argues that the modern emphasis on the literary meaning of a text (its self-contained \"message\"), unlike the Classical or Renaissance emphasis on its social effects, implies that the inter-personal relations of author to audience became less important in the modern age. (3) Similarly, orality theorist Walter J. Ong sees the formalist tendency to regard texts as containing their meanings, rather than deliver","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"89 1","pages":"77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80257449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The article concentrates on one of Virginia Woolf's profoundly lyrial novels, Mrs. Dallowav, to question the dominant acceptance of Woolf's British rootedness and lack of wanderlust. Through a close reading and analysis of pertinent passages, the article shows how Woolf was not simply experimenting with forms, but also pushing forward in her tropes movement across borders and travel. Every character in the novel is somehow related to a foreign place. The domestic dimension of this novel, stressed for so long, is problematized to give way to a fresh view of Woolf as more transnational than appears. The article calls on recent works in anthropological and feminist criticism related to boundary crossing to throw light on Woolf's text. The study draws parallels between movement of characters in London and the rhetoric of travel indicated or subsumed in the lyricism of the text. Even in shop windows gazed at by the protagonist in the novel, global relations of power are inscribed, destabilizing the stasis of home and creating metaphoric hybridity. ********** London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet ... Faces passing lift up my mind; prevent it from settling ... --Virginia Woolf All must end upon the Odyssey ... --Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf's profoundly lyrical fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, set in London and focused on a day in the life of one woman and her preparations for a society soiree, is most often interpreted as a thoroughly British, purely 'domestic,' novel. In fact, before feminist recuperations of her oeuvre made waves beginning in the early 1970s, Woolf's novels were valued by many scholars of the modernist period more for their aesthetic experimentation than the way in which they address important social and political issues. In the few sentences John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury devote to Woolf in their survey of canonical Modernism, her novels are described as "exploration[s] both of the aesthetic of consciousness and the aesthetics of art" characterized by "a kind of joyous artistic freedom" to focus on "form" (408-09). Beyond an interest in formalist issues, comparisons between Woolf and her Modernist contemporaries--T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ezra Pound and others--have never been extensively drawn. One significant reason for this oversight is the fact that Woolf, living and writing in Bloomsbury, never embraced the wandering, expatriate, "starving artist" existence that other Modernists did. Geographical wanderings, critics insist, produced an added dimension to the works of the High Modernist canon noticeably absent from Woolf's life and work. (1) And yet, Woolf's novel is teeming with hidden--or at least largely critically unrecognized--lyrical metaphors of movement and multiple tropes of travel at work within its English domestic setting that frustrate and problematize purely aesthetic readings of the novel. (2) Indeed, every character in the novel is implicitly or explicitly linke
{"title":"Moving Tropes: New Modernist Travels with Virginia Woolf","authors":"E. Lamont","doi":"10.2307/1350027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350027","url":null,"abstract":"The article concentrates on one of Virginia Woolf's profoundly lyrial novels, Mrs. Dallowav, to question the dominant acceptance of Woolf's British rootedness and lack of wanderlust. Through a close reading and analysis of pertinent passages, the article shows how Woolf was not simply experimenting with forms, but also pushing forward in her tropes movement across borders and travel. Every character in the novel is somehow related to a foreign place. The domestic dimension of this novel, stressed for so long, is problematized to give way to a fresh view of Woolf as more transnational than appears. The article calls on recent works in anthropological and feminist criticism related to boundary crossing to throw light on Woolf's text. The study draws parallels between movement of characters in London and the rhetoric of travel indicated or subsumed in the lyricism of the text. Even in shop windows gazed at by the protagonist in the novel, global relations of power are inscribed, destabilizing the stasis of home and creating metaphoric hybridity. ********** London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet ... Faces passing lift up my mind; prevent it from settling ... --Virginia Woolf All must end upon the Odyssey ... --Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf's profoundly lyrical fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, set in London and focused on a day in the life of one woman and her preparations for a society soiree, is most often interpreted as a thoroughly British, purely 'domestic,' novel. In fact, before feminist recuperations of her oeuvre made waves beginning in the early 1970s, Woolf's novels were valued by many scholars of the modernist period more for their aesthetic experimentation than the way in which they address important social and political issues. In the few sentences John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury devote to Woolf in their survey of canonical Modernism, her novels are described as \"exploration[s] both of the aesthetic of consciousness and the aesthetics of art\" characterized by \"a kind of joyous artistic freedom\" to focus on \"form\" (408-09). Beyond an interest in formalist issues, comparisons between Woolf and her Modernist contemporaries--T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ezra Pound and others--have never been extensively drawn. One significant reason for this oversight is the fact that Woolf, living and writing in Bloomsbury, never embraced the wandering, expatriate, \"starving artist\" existence that other Modernists did. Geographical wanderings, critics insist, produced an added dimension to the works of the High Modernist canon noticeably absent from Woolf's life and work. (1) And yet, Woolf's novel is teeming with hidden--or at least largely critically unrecognized--lyrical metaphors of movement and multiple tropes of travel at work within its English domestic setting that frustrate and problematize purely aesthetic readings of the novel. (2) Indeed, every character in the novel is implicitly or explicitly linke","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"4 1","pages":"161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86834665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jawanib Mu'asirah fi Shi'r Abi Tammam","authors":"S. Salih, A. Tammam","doi":"10.2307/1350036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350036","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"60 1","pages":"52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90472983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fascination with the alphabet as an aesthetic construct begins with children, but sometimes it expires with them too. If adult readers remember the hypnotic appeal which the letters once exerted, their sounds and their shapes, the alphabet can become a means to access the aesthetic traditions of a culture, a device to put the eyes close to the text, to trace the verbal texture of a poetic tradition. The letter ghayn, as an example, allows an entry into the specific aesthetic shapes of Arabic and Persian, Turkish and Urdu, through the key words which remain constant as poetic traditions pass through one language community after another. Words that begin with ghayn allow a contemplation of change--both terms for change and terms for the objects of change. Imagery of transformation and metamorphosis, always at the heart of poetic traditions, helps us sketch a phenomenology of poetry, which in many of the traditions using Arabic letters is synonymous with that ghayn-initiated word, ghazal (love poetry). ********** If the alphabet could talk, what would it say to us? It serves long stretches of its time mute, unobtrusive, passively attending to the meanings of the people who use it. We know it is there, but once we have mastered it we also learn to ignore it. It carries our messages for us and beyond that we take it for granted, but like unobtrusive servants noticed only by newcomers or by children, the letters are still there, and right in the foreground. Sometimes a calligrapher makes us notice them again. Perhaps all this time they are mumbling among themselves. (Ouch, that ragged-edged reed pen hurts. Oh great, there's that dull pencil again. Be careful where you put those dots.) And different alphabets might have different things to say. Here is a cunning shape--open to the right like a lower-case c in English, dotted. Drawn with a reed pen, it undergoes a subtle thickening as the arc descends past the midpoint. Inside a word the same letter pulls tight like a knot with two sharp shoulders, the dot still floating above unchanged. It shouldn't be hard for us to follow its tracks, shadow it like a photographer stalking a celebrity, or the narrator of a novel tracking a character as it goes about its work, listening to hear what it is saying. Perhaps it too will tell us stories. And stories lead us inevitably to the story of stories, The Arabian Nights. Ghazala For those of us who feel that the Thousand and One Nights is more than a collection of stories, indeed that it is the ultimate narrative template, the toaster text we can consult to find out what narrative really is, all we need to do to make our case is read the first story Shahrazad tells. This is the story about the merchant who angers an 'ifrit. It combines all the elements that will recur so charmingly in the later stories--the speed and sense of mystery which draw the reader in and the feeling of suspense, combined with unexpected transitions, that give it a surreal atmosphere. The merc
{"title":"Ghayn: Divagations on a Letter in Motion","authors":"M. Beard","doi":"10.2307/1350029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350029","url":null,"abstract":"Fascination with the alphabet as an aesthetic construct begins with children, but sometimes it expires with them too. If adult readers remember the hypnotic appeal which the letters once exerted, their sounds and their shapes, the alphabet can become a means to access the aesthetic traditions of a culture, a device to put the eyes close to the text, to trace the verbal texture of a poetic tradition. The letter ghayn, as an example, allows an entry into the specific aesthetic shapes of Arabic and Persian, Turkish and Urdu, through the key words which remain constant as poetic traditions pass through one language community after another. Words that begin with ghayn allow a contemplation of change--both terms for change and terms for the objects of change. Imagery of transformation and metamorphosis, always at the heart of poetic traditions, helps us sketch a phenomenology of poetry, which in many of the traditions using Arabic letters is synonymous with that ghayn-initiated word, ghazal (love poetry). ********** If the alphabet could talk, what would it say to us? It serves long stretches of its time mute, unobtrusive, passively attending to the meanings of the people who use it. We know it is there, but once we have mastered it we also learn to ignore it. It carries our messages for us and beyond that we take it for granted, but like unobtrusive servants noticed only by newcomers or by children, the letters are still there, and right in the foreground. Sometimes a calligrapher makes us notice them again. Perhaps all this time they are mumbling among themselves. (Ouch, that ragged-edged reed pen hurts. Oh great, there's that dull pencil again. Be careful where you put those dots.) And different alphabets might have different things to say. Here is a cunning shape--open to the right like a lower-case c in English, dotted. Drawn with a reed pen, it undergoes a subtle thickening as the arc descends past the midpoint. Inside a word the same letter pulls tight like a knot with two sharp shoulders, the dot still floating above unchanged. It shouldn't be hard for us to follow its tracks, shadow it like a photographer stalking a celebrity, or the narrator of a novel tracking a character as it goes about its work, listening to hear what it is saying. Perhaps it too will tell us stories. And stories lead us inevitably to the story of stories, The Arabian Nights. Ghazala For those of us who feel that the Thousand and One Nights is more than a collection of stories, indeed that it is the ultimate narrative template, the toaster text we can consult to find out what narrative really is, all we need to do to make our case is read the first story Shahrazad tells. This is the story about the merchant who angers an 'ifrit. It combines all the elements that will recur so charmingly in the later stories--the speed and sense of mystery which draw the reader in and the feeling of suspense, combined with unexpected transitions, that give it a surreal atmosphere. The merc","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"1 1","pages":"232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89291402","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The stock--padlocks without keys, limbs of broken plastic dolls, half a pair of earrings, used ketchup bottles, an anonymous photo album filled with family photos--of many of the stalls at Souq Al-Imam Al-Shafei, located in the City of the Dead, are not obviously saleable. Selling, one might therefore deduce, is only one function, and not necessarily the most important, of Souq Al-Imam. More gathering place than shopping mall, Souq Al-Imam provides an often needed pretext for passing time. If the passing of time is one defining characteristic of life, then a cemetery is as good a place as any for a market. Items plucked from the rubbish bins of affluent neighborhoods are recycled, given a new life at the City of the Dead. When counted in piastres, money can be thrown away and, in being thrown away, it can prevent things from being discarded. Because it is cheap, the life of objects in this market can be prolonged. To be all but worthless brings salvation. In a cemetery life cannot be other than mutable; to be at home in the Southern Cemetery is to acknowledge this mutability. And to trade in this Cairo cemetery is less a reaching of the end of the line than an exploration of the innumerable sidings that constitute that supposed end. ********** Friday Market in the City of the Dead I am drawn to places offering what people have thrown out, discarded, left behind, or have simply forgotten to remember, objects which for some long outdistanced purposes: chipped sinks, lengths of pipe. hills of washers and fittings, levers, plungers, faucets unable to carry water to anyone, ironwork, spikes and nails, doors and window frames, old radios tuned to frequencies no longer able to be beard, cogs, axles, fly wheels, spindles, pulleys, halves of microscopes, cracked bottles, bent coins, and photographs whose faces now lie beyond names, whose eyes are not fixed on sights we have seen, mounds of old wire, twisted knives and forks, and angular bulks of crank-driven phones which have lost all connections, dismantled old beds and wedding cups, mirrors which when you peer in show only blurred patches of your face shifting in darkness behind peeling silver, clothes which no longer fit the way they once did or simply no longer fit; all lie there naive and artless on old blankets or worn stone, tended with casual indifference; where others may see lives beyond this welter of lost objects, I cannot believe that these are ghosts or that they measure any history's passage, this is merely the entrance to some forgotten temple, these the implements of its mystery and the path along which we are to be led is simply a path of shapes into which we must fit ourselves, or we ourselves are places where these shapes must be seen fit. Tom Lamont I On a piece of sacking no more than a metre square lie two empty Coca Cola bottles (glass), a broken teaspoon, a rusting chain and several pieces of scrap metal. They are neatly arranged and nominally for sale, though it would be difficul
{"title":"Arms Full of Things: Souq Al-Imam Al-Shafei at the Southern Cemetery","authors":"Nur Elmessiri, N. Ryan","doi":"10.2307/1350021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350021","url":null,"abstract":"The stock--padlocks without keys, limbs of broken plastic dolls, half a pair of earrings, used ketchup bottles, an anonymous photo album filled with family photos--of many of the stalls at Souq Al-Imam Al-Shafei, located in the City of the Dead, are not obviously saleable. Selling, one might therefore deduce, is only one function, and not necessarily the most important, of Souq Al-Imam. More gathering place than shopping mall, Souq Al-Imam provides an often needed pretext for passing time. If the passing of time is one defining characteristic of life, then a cemetery is as good a place as any for a market. Items plucked from the rubbish bins of affluent neighborhoods are recycled, given a new life at the City of the Dead. When counted in piastres, money can be thrown away and, in being thrown away, it can prevent things from being discarded. Because it is cheap, the life of objects in this market can be prolonged. To be all but worthless brings salvation. In a cemetery life cannot be other than mutable; to be at home in the Southern Cemetery is to acknowledge this mutability. And to trade in this Cairo cemetery is less a reaching of the end of the line than an exploration of the innumerable sidings that constitute that supposed end. ********** Friday Market in the City of the Dead I am drawn to places offering what people have thrown out, discarded, left behind, or have simply forgotten to remember, objects which for some long outdistanced purposes: chipped sinks, lengths of pipe. hills of washers and fittings, levers, plungers, faucets unable to carry water to anyone, ironwork, spikes and nails, doors and window frames, old radios tuned to frequencies no longer able to be beard, cogs, axles, fly wheels, spindles, pulleys, halves of microscopes, cracked bottles, bent coins, and photographs whose faces now lie beyond names, whose eyes are not fixed on sights we have seen, mounds of old wire, twisted knives and forks, and angular bulks of crank-driven phones which have lost all connections, dismantled old beds and wedding cups, mirrors which when you peer in show only blurred patches of your face shifting in darkness behind peeling silver, clothes which no longer fit the way they once did or simply no longer fit; all lie there naive and artless on old blankets or worn stone, tended with casual indifference; where others may see lives beyond this welter of lost objects, I cannot believe that these are ghosts or that they measure any history's passage, this is merely the entrance to some forgotten temple, these the implements of its mystery and the path along which we are to be led is simply a path of shapes into which we must fit ourselves, or we ourselves are places where these shapes must be seen fit. Tom Lamont I On a piece of sacking no more than a metre square lie two empty Coca Cola bottles (glass), a broken teaspoon, a rusting chain and several pieces of scrap metal. They are neatly arranged and nominally for sale, though it would be difficul","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"3 1","pages":"9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73249104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The essay offers a philosophical examination of the blues, a uniquely powerful and influential twentieth-century musical genre. The examination is undertaken chiefly with reference to the works of Theodor Adorno, Angela Davis and Martin Heidegger--and to the insightful writings on the blues by Tom Lamont. Overall, the article is an attempt to come to terms with the artistic significance of the blues--in part, as a challenge to traditional aesthetic positions and biases. The blues, the article argues, "signify" not only in having or bestowing meaning, but in the uniquely African-American sense of the term: in a move that "undercuts," that is at once insinuating and subversive, mocking and transformative. The article endeavors to suggest that this transfigurative force--which it argues must be located more in the music than in the lyrics, and not in the music's "form" but in its "matter," its elemental corporeity--can be politically, aesthetically, and even ontologically liberating. Born of suffering and oppression, the blues can offer a profound recasting of the lived world and new possibilities of meaning and expression. ********** Pain gives of its healing power Where we least expect it. Heidegger, "The Thinker as Poet" The blues is a feeling--something out there, that can come upon you, that can come "falling down like rain." The blues is also music, striking for its simplicity, its power, and its pervasiveness. We have all known the blues: Many of us have also been drawn to reflect in wonder at the songs and music called the blues, at this elemental expression of what might be called the "lyrical impulse." Heidegger's brief words above hint at redemption. Veteran bluesman John Lee Hooker sings it this way: "The blues is healing." The blues somehow touches us at the core of our inner-most suffering and hurt--whether from betrayal or a sense of powerlessness, or at the loss of a friend who had become, in some measure, like the mirror of one's own soul. (l) But the healing power of the blues is not so much about feeling better, if by this one means that a weight is lifted, that one feels "happy" instead of "blue." Doubtless it is part of the captivating mystery of the blues experience that it feels good to sing the blues, and to listen; that one is feeling bad, but somehow feeling good about it. As Ma Rainey sings in "Ya Da Do," "It's a no-name blues, but'll take away your pains." Taken away, but not gone; suffering is not forgotten. Ralph Ellison writes: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Shadow 78) And indeed, the blues is not an anaesthetic--but a drive towards renewal. In a word, it is about feeling better--in t
这篇文章提供了一个哲学的检查蓝调，一个独特的强大和有影响力的二十世纪音乐流派。考试主要参考西奥多·阿多诺、安吉拉·戴维斯和马丁·海德格尔的作品，以及汤姆·拉蒙特对蓝调的深刻见解。总的来说，这篇文章试图与蓝调的艺术意义达成协议——在某种程度上，作为对传统美学立场和偏见的挑战。这篇文章认为，蓝调“象征”的不仅是拥有或赋予意义，而且是独特的非裔美国人对这个词的理解:以一种“削弱”的方式，既含讽又颠覆，既嘲弄又变革。这篇文章试图表明，这种变形的力量——它认为这种力量必须更多地位于音乐中，而不是歌词中，而不是音乐的“形式”，而是它的“物质”，它的基本形体——可以在政治上，美学上，甚至在本体论上解放。诞生于苦难和压迫之中的蓝调能够深刻地重塑生活世界，为意义和表达提供新的可能性。**********在我们最意想不到的时候，痛苦会释放出它的治愈力量。海德格尔，《作为诗人的思考者》忧郁是一种感觉——一种外在的东西，它会降临在你身上，它会“像雨一样落下”。蓝调也是一种音乐，以其简单、有力和无处不在而引人注目。我们都知道蓝调，我们中的许多人也曾被蓝调的歌曲和音乐所吸引，被这种可以被称为“抒情冲动”的基本表达所吸引。海德格尔的简短话语暗示着救赎。资深蓝调歌手约翰·李·胡克这样唱:“蓝调是治愈的。”不知何故，蓝调触及了我们内心最痛苦和伤害的核心——无论是来自背叛，还是无力感，或者是失去了一个在某种程度上就像自己灵魂的镜子一样的朋友。(1)但忧郁的治愈力量并不在于感觉好起来，如果它指的是减轻了负担，那么一个人感到“快乐”而不是“忧郁”。毫无疑问，这是蓝调体验中迷人的神秘的一部分:唱蓝调，听蓝调，感觉很好;那种感觉很糟糕，但不知何故感觉很好。正如玛·雷尼在《Ya Da Do》中唱的那样，“这是一种无名的蓝调，但会带走你的痛苦。”被带走，却没有离去;苦难不会被遗忘。拉尔夫·埃里森写道:蓝调是一种冲动，它让残酷经历的痛苦细节和情节鲜活地存在于一个人痛苦的意识中，拨开它凹凸不平的纹理，并超越它，不是通过哲学的安慰，而是通过从中挤出一种近乎悲剧、近乎喜剧的抒情。作为一种形式，蓝调是抒情表达的个人灾难的自传式编年史。事实上，蓝调并不是一种麻醉剂，而是一种更新的动力。简而言之，它是关于感觉更好——更深刻、更充分、更专注的感觉。正如埃里森所说，蓝调可以被称为抒情冲动的感人实现，以一种原始而纯粹的形式。在将布鲁斯与“抒情冲动”等同起来的过程中，Hummer写道，这是一种努力表达“我将告诉你人类的真实故事:我将告诉你你自己的名字”的音乐(115)。查尔斯·西米奇写道:像所有真正的艺术一样，蓝调属于特定的时间、地点和人物，然后，矛盾的是，它超越了这些。它的超越性的秘密在于它的小调和孤独的诗意。抒情诗歌与任何地方的关系都不及蓝调。人们之所以写抒情诗和布鲁斯歌曲，是因为我们的生命短暂、甜蜜、转瞬即逝。蓝调见证了每个人命运的奇异。它以无声的呻吟、跺脚声、叹息声、嗡嗡声开始，然后为某种在任何语言中都没有名称的东西寻找词语，而所有的诗歌和音乐都在寻找与之相近的东西。．..
{"title":"Signifying the Blues","authors":"R. Switzer","doi":"10.2307/1350022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350022","url":null,"abstract":"The essay offers a philosophical examination of the blues, a uniquely powerful and influential twentieth-century musical genre. The examination is undertaken chiefly with reference to the works of Theodor Adorno, Angela Davis and Martin Heidegger--and to the insightful writings on the blues by Tom Lamont. Overall, the article is an attempt to come to terms with the artistic significance of the blues--in part, as a challenge to traditional aesthetic positions and biases. The blues, the article argues, \"signify\" not only in having or bestowing meaning, but in the uniquely African-American sense of the term: in a move that \"undercuts,\" that is at once insinuating and subversive, mocking and transformative. The article endeavors to suggest that this transfigurative force--which it argues must be located more in the music than in the lyrics, and not in the music's \"form\" but in its \"matter,\" its elemental corporeity--can be politically, aesthetically, and even ontologically liberating. Born of suffering and oppression, the blues can offer a profound recasting of the lived world and new possibilities of meaning and expression. ********** Pain gives of its healing power Where we least expect it. Heidegger, \"The Thinker as Poet\" The blues is a feeling--something out there, that can come upon you, that can come \"falling down like rain.\" The blues is also music, striking for its simplicity, its power, and its pervasiveness. We have all known the blues: Many of us have also been drawn to reflect in wonder at the songs and music called the blues, at this elemental expression of what might be called the \"lyrical impulse.\" Heidegger's brief words above hint at redemption. Veteran bluesman John Lee Hooker sings it this way: \"The blues is healing.\" The blues somehow touches us at the core of our inner-most suffering and hurt--whether from betrayal or a sense of powerlessness, or at the loss of a friend who had become, in some measure, like the mirror of one's own soul. (l) But the healing power of the blues is not so much about feeling better, if by this one means that a weight is lifted, that one feels \"happy\" instead of \"blue.\" Doubtless it is part of the captivating mystery of the blues experience that it feels good to sing the blues, and to listen; that one is feeling bad, but somehow feeling good about it. As Ma Rainey sings in \"Ya Da Do,\" \"It's a no-name blues, but'll take away your pains.\" Taken away, but not gone; suffering is not forgotten. Ralph Ellison writes: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Shadow 78) And indeed, the blues is not an anaesthetic--but a drive towards renewal. In a word, it is about feeling better--in t","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"234 1","pages":"25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77472775","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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