Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10824212
Petra Aczél
Rhetoric is broadly referred to as the theory and practice of suasory communication enabling humans to participate actively in public. Although traditionally viewed as strongly tied with exclusively verbal persuasion, rhetoric has always extended beyond this limitation. Semiforgotten elements of the ancient faculty prove that rhetoric requires creative visual imagination from both parties (orator and audience) and that the practice emanates from and embeds in visuospatial, sensual experiences. These visual features are combined with the verbal in rhetorical practice resulting in a multidimensional—hybrid—discourse, the main function of which is persuasion. In this hybridity of codes and modes, the primary movement in the persuasive act is connection. This connection relates the person to the world, human imagination to articulation, thoughts to images, and words to pictures. By means of this connection persuasion becomes identification, a constitutive act enhancing the unity of different entities (either human or material). The present essay conceives of rhetoric, and especially visual rhetoric, as a suitable framework to interpret visual hybrids. Here, visual hybrids are understood to be entities that enact the internal rhetorical interplay between difference and unity represented by visual elements and motifs. The article first investigates the concept of ingenium and multimodality to introduce general rhetoric as a holistic framework of human experience and expression that is inherently visual and sensual. Then the paradigms of visual rhetoric are outlined to propose a possible classification of visual hybrids, illustrated by contemporary examples from art and advertising.
{"title":"Visual Hybrids as Constitutive Rhetorical Acts: Rhetorical Interplay between Unity and Difference","authors":"Petra Aczél","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824212","url":null,"abstract":"Rhetoric is broadly referred to as the theory and practice of suasory communication enabling humans to participate actively in public. Although traditionally viewed as strongly tied with exclusively verbal persuasion, rhetoric has always extended beyond this limitation. Semiforgotten elements of the ancient faculty prove that rhetoric requires creative visual imagination from both parties (orator and audience) and that the practice emanates from and embeds in visuospatial, sensual experiences. These visual features are combined with the verbal in rhetorical practice resulting in a multidimensional—hybrid—discourse, the main function of which is persuasion. In this hybridity of codes and modes, the primary movement in the persuasive act is connection. This connection relates the person to the world, human imagination to articulation, thoughts to images, and words to pictures. By means of this connection persuasion becomes identification, a constitutive act enhancing the unity of different entities (either human or material). The present essay conceives of rhetoric, and especially visual rhetoric, as a suitable framework to interpret visual hybrids. Here, visual hybrids are understood to be entities that enact the internal rhetorical interplay between difference and unity represented by visual elements and motifs. The article first investigates the concept of ingenium and multimodality to introduce general rhetoric as a holistic framework of human experience and expression that is inherently visual and sensual. Then the paradigms of visual rhetoric are outlined to propose a possible classification of visual hybrids, illustrated by contemporary examples from art and advertising.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"63 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139192957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10824240
Larry Abramson
While the drive toward homogeneous and pure visual languages was at the foundation of early twentieth-century utopian modernist art systems, the Dadaist and Surrealist reaction to this utopianism took the form of extreme and often violent hybridity. Marcel Duchamp's 1913 “readymade” of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool is a paradigmatic manifestation of the linguistic hybridity characteristic of post-utopian twentieth-century art. In the 1920s Francis Picabia made paintings constructed of separate and discrete layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual “monster.” Picabia's practice of superimposition was a significant forerunner of prevailing contemporary practices in postmodern painting. In his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” philosopher Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism. Pastiche is defined as a work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more sources, an incongruous hodgepodge of materials, forms, and images. In this age of pastiche, what are the options open to artists—to endlessly quote, imitate, or parody existing images and styles, or to construct a new and significant system of meaning? To discuss the centrality of the principle of hybridity in postmodern art—and in my own artistic practice of the past fifty years—I summoned Theolonius Marx, a fiction of my imagination who helped me handle the dilemmas of conceptual art in the 1970s. In this “conversation,” Theolonius and I ponder how hybridity has placed a challenge to utopian modernist concepts, and what the conditions are for it to thrive today as a relevant and sustainable medium.
{"title":"Hybridity and the Unifying Space of Painting: Larry Abramson in Conversation with Theolonius Marx","authors":"Larry Abramson","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824240","url":null,"abstract":"While the drive toward homogeneous and pure visual languages was at the foundation of early twentieth-century utopian modernist art systems, the Dadaist and Surrealist reaction to this utopianism took the form of extreme and often violent hybridity. Marcel Duchamp's 1913 “readymade” of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool is a paradigmatic manifestation of the linguistic hybridity characteristic of post-utopian twentieth-century art. In the 1920s Francis Picabia made paintings constructed of separate and discrete layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual “monster.” Picabia's practice of superimposition was a significant forerunner of prevailing contemporary practices in postmodern painting. In his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” philosopher Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism. Pastiche is defined as a work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more sources, an incongruous hodgepodge of materials, forms, and images. In this age of pastiche, what are the options open to artists—to endlessly quote, imitate, or parody existing images and styles, or to construct a new and significant system of meaning? To discuss the centrality of the principle of hybridity in postmodern art—and in my own artistic practice of the past fifty years—I summoned Theolonius Marx, a fiction of my imagination who helped me handle the dilemmas of conceptual art in the 1970s. In this “conversation,” Theolonius and I ponder how hybridity has placed a challenge to utopian modernist concepts, and what the conditions are for it to thrive today as a relevant and sustainable medium.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"22 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139191478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10824184
G. Hagberg
Metaphors make possible creative and personally expressive ways of describing the world in a way that exceeds blunt literal description. In this article, the author considers (1) the ways metaphors function, (2) the ways that connotation, association, and implication can enrich and inflect the meanings of our words as we use them, and, finally, (3) the significance that these issues concerning verbal or linguistic meaning hold for our comprehension of parallel forms of meaning in the visual arts. The emphasis is on the artistic representation of hybrid creatures in painting, because where metaphors lead us to see one thing in the light of the other, so with hybrid creatures we can see either or any part of the hybrid in the light of the other part or parts. With some of the similarities between metaphorical speech and visual perception and interpretation identified, I turn to works by Caravaggio, Fuseli, the Parthenon sculptures, Botticelli, Picasso, William Blake, and Hieronymus Bosch.
{"title":"Visual Metaphors: On the Linguistic Structure of Hybrid Creatures in Art","authors":"G. Hagberg","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824184","url":null,"abstract":"Metaphors make possible creative and personally expressive ways of describing the world in a way that exceeds blunt literal description. In this article, the author considers (1) the ways metaphors function, (2) the ways that connotation, association, and implication can enrich and inflect the meanings of our words as we use them, and, finally, (3) the significance that these issues concerning verbal or linguistic meaning hold for our comprehension of parallel forms of meaning in the visual arts. The emphasis is on the artistic representation of hybrid creatures in painting, because where metaphors lead us to see one thing in the light of the other, so with hybrid creatures we can see either or any part of the hybrid in the light of the other part or parts. With some of the similarities between metaphorical speech and visual perception and interpretation identified, I turn to works by Caravaggio, Fuseli, the Parthenon sculptures, Botticelli, Picasso, William Blake, and Hieronymus Bosch.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"53 23","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139188783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10824198
Guy Tal
Studies of early modern images of witchcraft interpret the motif of hybrid creatures as representations of demonic incarnations intended in part to demonstrate the artists’ inventive prowess and capacity for phantasia. This article broadens the scope of analysis by arguing that the hybrid functions as a prolific site of reflection on the symbolic analogy between art and witchcraft, highlighting the common creativity attributed to the artist and the magician both. A comparative analysis of Italian, German, and Dutch images produced in the long sixteenth century identifies three distinctive aspects of the hybrid: as the offspring of Circe's magic of transformation in the works of Pellegrino Tibaldi and Annibale Carracci, as the figurative expression of witchcraft-associated features in Jacques de Gheyn II's engraving, and as an artistic invention in a theatrical design after Raffaello Gualterotti and an engraved grotesque ornament by Heinrich Aldegrever.
{"title":"Magical Monsters: Hybrids and Witchcraft in Early Modern Art","authors":"Guy Tal","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824198","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of early modern images of witchcraft interpret the motif of hybrid creatures as representations of demonic incarnations intended in part to demonstrate the artists’ inventive prowess and capacity for phantasia. This article broadens the scope of analysis by arguing that the hybrid functions as a prolific site of reflection on the symbolic analogy between art and witchcraft, highlighting the common creativity attributed to the artist and the magician both. A comparative analysis of Italian, German, and Dutch images produced in the long sixteenth century identifies three distinctive aspects of the hybrid: as the offspring of Circe's magic of transformation in the works of Pellegrino Tibaldi and Annibale Carracci, as the figurative expression of witchcraft-associated features in Jacques de Gheyn II's engraving, and as an artistic invention in a theatrical design after Raffaello Gualterotti and an engraved grotesque ornament by Heinrich Aldegrever.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"77 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139191591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10824254
David Gorman
{"title":"On the Theory of Prose","authors":"David Gorman","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824254","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"27 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139195762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10824226
Olivier Morin, Oleg Sobchuk
Monsters and other imaginary animals have been conjured up by a wide range of cultures. Can their popularity be explained, and can their properties be predicted? These were long-standing questions for structuralist or cognitive anthropology, as well as literary studies and cultural evolution. The task is to solve the puzzle raised by the popularity of extraordinary imaginary animals, and to explain some cross-cultural regularities that such animals present—traits like hybridity or dangerousness. The standard approach to this question was to first investigate how human imagination deals with actually existing animals. Structuralist theory held that some animals are particularly “good to think with.” According to Mary Douglas's influential hypothesis, this was chiefly true of animals that disrupt intuitive classifications of species—the “monsters-as-anomalies” account. But this hypothesis is problematic, as ethnobiology shows that folk classifications of biological species are so plastic that classificatory anomalies can be disregarded. This led cognitive anthropologists to propose alternative versions of the “monsters as anomalies” account. Parallel to this, a second account of monsters—“monsters-as-predators”—starts from the importance of predator detection to our past survival and reproduction, and argues that dangerous features make animals “good to think with,” and should be overrepresented in imaginary animals. This article argues that both accounts understand something about monsters that the other account cannot explain. We propose a synthesis of these two accounts that attempts to explain why the two most characteristic aspects of monsters, anomalousness and predatoriness, tend to go together.
{"title":"Why Monsters Are Dangerous","authors":"Olivier Morin, Oleg Sobchuk","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824226","url":null,"abstract":"Monsters and other imaginary animals have been conjured up by a wide range of cultures. Can their popularity be explained, and can their properties be predicted? These were long-standing questions for structuralist or cognitive anthropology, as well as literary studies and cultural evolution. The task is to solve the puzzle raised by the popularity of extraordinary imaginary animals, and to explain some cross-cultural regularities that such animals present—traits like hybridity or dangerousness. The standard approach to this question was to first investigate how human imagination deals with actually existing animals. Structuralist theory held that some animals are particularly “good to think with.” According to Mary Douglas's influential hypothesis, this was chiefly true of animals that disrupt intuitive classifications of species—the “monsters-as-anomalies” account. But this hypothesis is problematic, as ethnobiology shows that folk classifications of biological species are so plastic that classificatory anomalies can be disregarded. This led cognitive anthropologists to propose alternative versions of the “monsters as anomalies” account. Parallel to this, a second account of monsters—“monsters-as-predators”—starts from the importance of predator detection to our past survival and reproduction, and argues that dangerous features make animals “good to think with,” and should be overrepresented in imaginary animals. This article argues that both accounts understand something about monsters that the other account cannot explain. We propose a synthesis of these two accounts that attempts to explain why the two most characteristic aspects of monsters, anomalousness and predatoriness, tend to go together.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"31 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139192075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10824268
M. Kahan
{"title":"L'idée de la littérature. De l'art pour l'art aux écritures d'intervention","authors":"M. Kahan","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824268","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"1 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139189503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10824170
Michalle Gal
This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are presented with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category.Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality.Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context.Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception's relation to language.
{"title":"Visual Hybrids and Nonconceptual Aesthetic Perception","authors":"Michalle Gal","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824170","url":null,"abstract":"This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are presented with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category.Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality.Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context.Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception's relation to language.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"127 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139187979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10824156
Yeshayahu Shen, David Gil
How do we conjure up novel and unfamiliar entities in our imagination? Thomas Ward and others have suggested that we do so by deriving such entities from ordinary familiar ones. Hybrids, however, pose a challenge to this view since they are not derived from any one single familiar entity. Nevertheless, we argue here that the construction of hybrid entities is indeed governed by principles forming part of our structured imagination. These principles refer to a set of five abstract schemas, defined in terms of properties such as parts, symmetry, and spatial orientation. These schemas, alongside the absence of a schema, together constitute a schematological hierarchy: humanoid (e.g., man) > canoid (e.g., dog) > carroid (e.g., car) > culteroid (e.g., knife) > arboid (e.g., tree) > other (e.g., sponge). When forming a hybrid out of two or more entities, or parents, the overall shape of the hybrid is selected in accordance with the following three principles: (1) coherence: presence of a schema is preferred to absence of a schema; (2) accessibility: a schema corresponding to that of one of the parents is preferred to some other schema; and (3) height: a schema higher on the schematological hierarchy is preferred to a schema lower on the schematological hierarchy. To test these principles empirically, we conducted a large-scale experiment, in which art and design students were given pairs of words denoting familiar objects and asked to draw images of hybrid entities formed from these word pairs. The resulting corpus of 356 hybrids was found to provide strong empirical support for the above three principles. In doing so, it showed how human creativity is not unbound, but rather subject to substantive cognitive constraints, constituting our structured imagination.
{"title":"How to Build a Hybrid: The Structure of Imagination","authors":"Yeshayahu Shen, David Gil","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824156","url":null,"abstract":"How do we conjure up novel and unfamiliar entities in our imagination? Thomas Ward and others have suggested that we do so by deriving such entities from ordinary familiar ones. Hybrids, however, pose a challenge to this view since they are not derived from any one single familiar entity. Nevertheless, we argue here that the construction of hybrid entities is indeed governed by principles forming part of our structured imagination. These principles refer to a set of five abstract schemas, defined in terms of properties such as parts, symmetry, and spatial orientation. These schemas, alongside the absence of a schema, together constitute a schematological hierarchy: humanoid (e.g., man) > canoid (e.g., dog) > carroid (e.g., car) > culteroid (e.g., knife) > arboid (e.g., tree) > other (e.g., sponge). When forming a hybrid out of two or more entities, or parents, the overall shape of the hybrid is selected in accordance with the following three principles: (1) coherence: presence of a schema is preferred to absence of a schema; (2) accessibility: a schema corresponding to that of one of the parents is preferred to some other schema; and (3) height: a schema higher on the schematological hierarchy is preferred to a schema lower on the schematological hierarchy. To test these principles empirically, we conducted a large-scale experiment, in which art and design students were given pairs of words denoting familiar objects and asked to draw images of hybrid entities formed from these word pairs. The resulting corpus of 356 hybrids was found to provide strong empirical support for the above three principles. In doing so, it showed how human creativity is not unbound, but rather subject to substantive cognitive constraints, constituting our structured imagination.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"52 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139193132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-10578541
Ewan James Jones
The entrenched divide between meter and rhythm persists despite its unsatisfactory nature—or more accurately, perhaps, because of its unsatisfactory nature. Vincent Barletta's Rhythm: Form and Dispossession and Ben Glaser's Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics demonstrate the enduring and novel uses to which a preference for either of the two terms may be put. They richly embody a more general trend within criticism, where treatments of rhythm have tended to be wide reaching and subjective, and considerations of meter rather more narrowly focused and historicizing. At the same time, they avoid some of the more reductive binaries into which these cognates have historically fallen: meter as skeleton, rhythm as body, meter as law, rhythm as variation, and so on. Both represent required reading to anyone interested in how such formal questions might relate to the most pressing questions of our contemporary situation: race, sociality, and the (generative) limits of individual agency.Barletta's monograph opts, as its title suggests, for rhythm. At its heart is a striking contention: generations of critics, emboldened by the disputed Greek derivation of the substantive ruthmós to the verb rheo (to flow), have conceptualized the notion as a temporal phenomenon. But what if we returned to the earlier scattered and fragmentary presocratic formulations of the term, according to which it seemed to mean something more akin to static or frozen or bound shape? When Democritus speaks of the rhythm of the atom, or Aeschylus informs us that Prometheus is enrhythmed to the rock, such usages jar on a modern ear. Yet Form and Dispossession contends that this superseded speculative Greek ruthmós holds significance both for objects in general (which are fixed at a moment of flux), and for subjects in particular (who find themselves bound to a dominating pattern).There is much appeal to such an approach. Barletta offers us an account of rhythm that is formative and primordial, yet which steers clear of the dangerous nativism that has characterized innatist approaches from Nietzsche's Gay Science all the way through to Aviram Attirai's Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (1994). Rhythm, on this more humble and privative account, is not the moment at which self, body, or Volk channels itself, but rather a periodic interruption or relinquishment of self—“dispossession,” as the book has it. In order to establish the theoretical basis for this orientation, Barletta depends on a multitudinous (if rather established) cast of European high theorists, who cumulatively grope toward an understanding of rhythmical surrender: Blanchot, Levinas, Merleau-Pointy, Heidegger, Serres. These in turn enable a remarkably broad treatment of poetry from across time and space: three compressed chapters range from ancient Greece to the early modern Iberian Peninsula to twentieth-century African verse. Enrhythment ties together the Aeschylean chorus's lamentation for
他准确无误的韵律耳朵促成了这一事业:贯穿始终，《现代主义节拍器》一丝不苟而不迂腐，不仅对一行诗的语调轮廓充满活力，而且对单个音素证明历史的传声板的方式也充满活力。格拉泽实用地利用了几种韵律方法(计算节拍、音节，或两者的结合)，而不需要在关于“正确”韵律的古老而最终无法解决的争议中引用他随后的阅读。(我特别欣赏他的技巧，他用微小的变化重新表述一条线，以显示伴随而来的压力分布的变化。)读一读斯特林·布朗的《当圣徒们回家的时候》(1988 - 201)，你就会发现它在抵制德里克·阿特里奇的“节拍”韵律方面堪称典范:五步诗、四步诗、十四步诗等既定的、显然已经过时的基于节拍的韵律语言，比四步诗更能体现体体学的历史力量，尽管从分析角度来看，后者更适合英语诗歌的表达轮廓。然而，现代主义的节拍器提供了更多的，而不是一个精湛的示范，为什么我们可能希望保留格律命名法和实践，在一个滔滔不绝地声称已经拒绝了这两者的时代。在北美历史诗学模式的最新研究之后，它还将这些持久的诗歌纳入了更广泛的性别和种族戏剧中。关于艾略特和庞德的形成性章节为第一个问题铺平了道路，把关于这两位诗人的两个公认的事实——他们的厌女症和他们对传统韵律的矛盾自我抑制——结合在一起，产生了惊人的、令人信服的效果。庞德从《荒原》的早期草稿中删去了几句令人沮丧的壁画对联诗(“狡猾的法国人调制的气味/掩盖了善良的老女人的臭气”)，这是一个明显的例子。庞德的《女性肖像》(Portrait d’une femme, 1912)在这方面读起来很有意思，尽管格拉泽在解析罗伯特·弗罗斯特(Robert Frost)的旁注“没什么!”这是对麦克白的隐晦引用，而不是对冗余的简单驳斥(95)。这里和其他地方一样，关于现代主义把节拍器当作节拍器的概念仅仅代表神话，还是一个真实的事实——不管庞德和艾略特怎么想——可以转化为积极的影响，有一些模糊的地方。虽然前一种方法似乎更容易证明，但格拉泽经常声称节奏诗确实存在，无论是在《女性肖像》还是在其他地方。这种方法的惊人收获体现在他对路易丝·博根(Louise Bogan)的出色阅读上，在那里，韵律的规律性达到了一种与实验性男性现代主义者的幼稚模仿相距甚远的效果。正如格拉瑟非常出色地指出的那样，“(她的)格律形式延续了米莱、埃莉诺·威利或多萝西·帕克的战斗智慧和韵律发挥……为了精确的理想和倾向于僵直的雕像”(124)。随后对博根的一系列抒情诗、十四行诗和警句的阅读，感人地揭示了韵律的规律性既是自我的庇护所，也是自我的陵墓。在这里，个人以一种与《节奏与剥夺》类似但又截然不同的方式受到束缚:“节奏”与其说是一种普遍的存在状态，不如说是一种非常特殊的状态的标志:不自由的女性作家遭受着韵律传统这种可销售商品的折磨，并开始反抗自己。然而，在其他地方，节拍器的说法很难得到支持。上面我说过，艾略特和庞德不可否认的厌女症与“严格的”韵律的结合“经常”令人信服。然而，也有一些时候，相关的文本似乎是经过精心挑选的，或者被塞进了一种简化的韵律规律概念中，而直接或近似的文本语境却掩盖了这一点。例如，我们读到，在《阿尔弗雷德·j·普鲁弗洛克的情歌》的结尾，有两首美得惊人的三行诗，“不仅是一段抑扬格的五音步，而且是一首诗其余部分所没有的灵活格律的教训。”只有最后一行才能转动节拍器”(60)。但是节拍器是什么?抑扬格米?抑扬格五音步?格拉泽在这里的评论暗示了后者:结尾处的一句“直到人类的声音唤醒我们，我们淹死了”是一个完美的抑扬格五音步，给予或采取了“and”连词的重音降级。但是它所包含的三行诗是否真的“灵活”到目前为止这首诗还没有做到呢?格拉泽想这么说，部分原因是副歌“房间里的女人来来往往/谈论米开朗基罗”将韵律僵化与愚蠢或歇斯底里的女性气质联系在一起。但《普鲁弗洛克》从来没有在任何节奏中停留太久。
{"title":"Rhythm: Form and DispossessionModernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics","authors":"Ewan James Jones","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10578541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10578541","url":null,"abstract":"The entrenched divide between meter and rhythm persists despite its unsatisfactory nature—or more accurately, perhaps, because of its unsatisfactory nature. Vincent Barletta's Rhythm: Form and Dispossession and Ben Glaser's Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics demonstrate the enduring and novel uses to which a preference for either of the two terms may be put. They richly embody a more general trend within criticism, where treatments of rhythm have tended to be wide reaching and subjective, and considerations of meter rather more narrowly focused and historicizing. At the same time, they avoid some of the more reductive binaries into which these cognates have historically fallen: meter as skeleton, rhythm as body, meter as law, rhythm as variation, and so on. Both represent required reading to anyone interested in how such formal questions might relate to the most pressing questions of our contemporary situation: race, sociality, and the (generative) limits of individual agency.Barletta's monograph opts, as its title suggests, for rhythm. At its heart is a striking contention: generations of critics, emboldened by the disputed Greek derivation of the substantive ruthmós to the verb rheo (to flow), have conceptualized the notion as a temporal phenomenon. But what if we returned to the earlier scattered and fragmentary presocratic formulations of the term, according to which it seemed to mean something more akin to static or frozen or bound shape? When Democritus speaks of the rhythm of the atom, or Aeschylus informs us that Prometheus is enrhythmed to the rock, such usages jar on a modern ear. Yet Form and Dispossession contends that this superseded speculative Greek ruthmós holds significance both for objects in general (which are fixed at a moment of flux), and for subjects in particular (who find themselves bound to a dominating pattern).There is much appeal to such an approach. Barletta offers us an account of rhythm that is formative and primordial, yet which steers clear of the dangerous nativism that has characterized innatist approaches from Nietzsche's Gay Science all the way through to Aviram Attirai's Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (1994). Rhythm, on this more humble and privative account, is not the moment at which self, body, or Volk channels itself, but rather a periodic interruption or relinquishment of self—“dispossession,” as the book has it. In order to establish the theoretical basis for this orientation, Barletta depends on a multitudinous (if rather established) cast of European high theorists, who cumulatively grope toward an understanding of rhythmical surrender: Blanchot, Levinas, Merleau-Pointy, Heidegger, Serres. These in turn enable a remarkably broad treatment of poetry from across time and space: three compressed chapters range from ancient Greece to the early modern Iberian Peninsula to twentieth-century African verse. Enrhythment ties together the Aeschylean chorus's lamentation for ","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"2011 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：