Pub Date : 2022-03-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9471038
Ulla Savolainen
This article attends to literary testimonies of the Gulag and Soviet terror by an Ingrian Finnish man called Aatami Kuortti from the perspective of cultural memory. By analyzing two testimonies by Kuortti published in Finland in 1934 and 1964, the article focuses on “memory ideologies,” namely, the underlying conceptions concerning the nature, functions, and consequences of memory reflected in the testimonies. Contextualizing the works with respect to the times of their publication and analyzing differences between them, it will argue that Kuortti's testimonies represent two different types of memory ideologies: instrumental and reflexive. Moreover, the article suggests that the significance of the notion of memory ideology is that it affords systematic analysis of the ways in which memory is conceptualized on various levels of culture in general and mobilized in literary testimonies and memoirs in particular. It is a useful concept for analyzing beliefs, conceptions, and principles that people and societies reflexively associate with memory. The importance of understanding memory ideologies lies in the fact that they regiment the ways in which people and societies use and interpret memory, and in these processes make evaluations with social, political, and ethical ramifications.
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9356868
Juri Joensuu
This article looks into fictitious meals and the use of culinary recipe form in experimental and procedural literature, namely, works of constrained writing associated with OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). The recipe form is first scrutinized from the procedural, structural, and historical viewpoints, also concerning its lesser-known imaginative and esoteric genealogy. In addition, its connections to the notions of narrativity and fiction are discussed. The recipe's relationship to action is depicted by a simple procedural model. There is a metaphorical and conceptual, but also formal and operational, similarity between the coded procedures of cooking and writing. A recipe is a procedure, a script for an infinity of possible meals, and a literary procedure is a recipe for writing. It is not surprising, then, that Oulipian writers have utilized the recipe form in their food-related works. Four such literary recipes (by Georges Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Harry Mathews, and Alastair Brotchie) are closely examined, after discussion of key concepts of Oulipian poetics from the culinary viewpoint. The article's special point of reference is the parodic, satirical, absurd, and other humorous meanings that literary recipes often seem to produce, which is linked to the operational and structural dimensions of the recipe—its comically posited procedural form.
本文探讨了实验和程序文学中的虚构膳食和烹饪食谱形式的使用，即与OuLiPo（Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle）相关的受限写作作品。配方形式首先从程序、结构和历史的角度进行审查，也涉及其鲜为人知的想象力和深奥的谱系。此外，还讨论了它与叙事性和小说概念的联系。配方与行动的关系通过一个简单的程序模型来描述。烹饪和写作的编码程序之间有隐喻性和概念性的相似性，但也有形式性和操作性。食谱是一个程序，是一个无限可能的饭菜的脚本，而文学程序是一个写作的食谱。因此，欧李派作家在他们的食品相关作品中使用配方形式也就不足为奇了。在从烹饪的角度讨论了欧里派诗学的关键概念后，对四个这样的文学食谱（乔治·佩雷克、雅克·鲁波特、哈里·马修斯和阿拉斯泰尔·布罗奇）进行了仔细的研究。这篇文章的特别参考点是文学食谱似乎经常产生的戏仿、讽刺、荒谬和其他幽默含义，这与食谱的操作和结构维度有关——它滑稽地假设了程序形式。
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9356899
Haifeng Hui
Though particular texts have long held culturally foundational authority, debates over the idea of a canon and the texts that are to compose it are a much more recent phenomenon, one that originated in the United States and quickly spread to other countries. The present article situates China in the international trend of canon studies by tracing how the Chinese conceptualization of the canon was modernized in the 1990s by Western ideas when canon studies were introduced to China by Dutch scholar Douwe W. Fokkema. While embracing the Western notion of the canon as always in a dynamic process of change that involves aesthetic qualities as well as a power mechanism, Chinese scholars, under the influence of culturally specific practices of literary criticism, the Confucian principle of the golden mean, and the more recent Marxist teaching of dialectical thinking, refuse to replicate Western discourses, instead adhering to a more dialectical treatment of the mutually antagonistic positions. Moreover, China's rising international status and its pursuit of wider global influence have led Chinese scholars to approach literary (re)historiography as an opportunity to showcase Chinese scholarship and to enhance China's national image.
{"title":"Canon Studies in China: Traditions, Modernization, and Revisions in the Global Context","authors":"Haifeng Hui","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9356899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9356899","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Though particular texts have long held culturally foundational authority, debates over the idea of a canon and the texts that are to compose it are a much more recent phenomenon, one that originated in the United States and quickly spread to other countries. The present article situates China in the international trend of canon studies by tracing how the Chinese conceptualization of the canon was modernized in the 1990s by Western ideas when canon studies were introduced to China by Dutch scholar Douwe W. Fokkema. While embracing the Western notion of the canon as always in a dynamic process of change that involves aesthetic qualities as well as a power mechanism, Chinese scholars, under the influence of culturally specific practices of literary criticism, the Confucian principle of the golden mean, and the more recent Marxist teaching of dialectical thinking, refuse to replicate Western discourses, instead adhering to a more dialectical treatment of the mutually antagonistic positions. Moreover, China's rising international status and its pursuit of wider global influence have led Chinese scholars to approach literary (re)historiography as an opportunity to showcase Chinese scholarship and to enhance China's national image.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47756119","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9356837
J. Bremer
This article argues that it is helpful to discuss the logico-philosophical contents of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in terms that confront the poetic and literary qualities of its form and style. To begin with, it analyzes Wittgenstein's short remarks about expression as manifested in the “tone” of Georg Trakl's poetry and the “ineffability” of Ludwig Uhland's poem “Count Eberhard's Hawthorn.” Then it proceeds to consider his exchange of letters with Gottlob Frege about the form and style of the Tractatus. The final part of the article considers such Tractarian metaphors as “showing and saying,” “logical space,” “reflecting the world as in a mirror,” “ineffability,” and “climbing and throwing away a ladder.” The proposed examination concentrates mainly on the distinction—but also the connection—between what, through language as used in both philosophy and poetry, can be said and what can be shown, this being one of the central themes of the Tractatus itself. It is then claimed that the roots of Wittgenstein's later understanding of both “ordinary language” and the connection between philosophy, poetry, and the ethical form of one's life are already present in his first period of creativity.
{"title":"Wittgenstein's Tractatus as Poetic Philosophy and Philosophical Poetics","authors":"J. Bremer","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9356837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9356837","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that it is helpful to discuss the logico-philosophical contents of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in terms that confront the poetic and literary qualities of its form and style. To begin with, it analyzes Wittgenstein's short remarks about expression as manifested in the “tone” of Georg Trakl's poetry and the “ineffability” of Ludwig Uhland's poem “Count Eberhard's Hawthorn.” Then it proceeds to consider his exchange of letters with Gottlob Frege about the form and style of the Tractatus. The final part of the article considers such Tractarian metaphors as “showing and saying,” “logical space,” “reflecting the world as in a mirror,” “ineffability,” and “climbing and throwing away a ladder.” The proposed examination concentrates mainly on the distinction—but also the connection—between what, through language as used in both philosophy and poetry, can be said and what can be shown, this being one of the central themes of the Tractatus itself. It is then claimed that the roots of Wittgenstein's later understanding of both “ordinary language” and the connection between philosophy, poetry, and the ethical form of one's life are already present in his first period of creativity.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49094580","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9356851
Hans Demeyer, Sven Vitse
Contemporary developments in fiction have so far primarily been interpreted as an attempt to move beyond postmodernism toward a renewed sense of realism and communication. This article suggests an alternative conceptualization and puts forward the hypothesis that contemporary fiction marks a shift toward an affective dominant. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale defines the dominant as a structure that brings order and hierarchy in a diversity of techniques and motifs in a literary text. Whereas in modernism the dominant is epistemological and in postmodernism it is ontological, in contemporary literature we contend this dominant is affective. The prevailing questions are “How can I feel reality (myself, the other, the past, the present, etc.)?”; “How can I feel to belong to reality?”; and “How can I feel reality to be real?” This affective dominant manifests itself in motifs such as desire, attachment, fantasy, and identification. Formal and narrative devices that in modernist or postmodernist fiction contributed to an epistemological or ontological dominant tend to foreground questions of affectivity in contemporary fiction. Through the analysis of novels by Ben Lerner, Alejandro Zambra, and Zadie Smith this article substantiates this hypothesis. This approach allows us to study contemporary fiction both diachronically, in relation to postmodernism, and synchronically, in relation to its social and ideological context.
{"title":"The Affective Dominant: Affective Crisis and Contemporary Fiction","authors":"Hans Demeyer, Sven Vitse","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9356851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9356851","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Contemporary developments in fiction have so far primarily been interpreted as an attempt to move beyond postmodernism toward a renewed sense of realism and communication. This article suggests an alternative conceptualization and puts forward the hypothesis that contemporary fiction marks a shift toward an affective dominant. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale defines the dominant as a structure that brings order and hierarchy in a diversity of techniques and motifs in a literary text. Whereas in modernism the dominant is epistemological and in postmodernism it is ontological, in contemporary literature we contend this dominant is affective. The prevailing questions are “How can I feel reality (myself, the other, the past, the present, etc.)?”; “How can I feel to belong to reality?”; and “How can I feel reality to be real?” This affective dominant manifests itself in motifs such as desire, attachment, fantasy, and identification. Formal and narrative devices that in modernist or postmodernist fiction contributed to an epistemological or ontological dominant tend to foreground questions of affectivity in contemporary fiction. Through the analysis of novels by Ben Lerner, Alejandro Zambra, and Zadie Smith this article substantiates this hypothesis. This approach allows us to study contemporary fiction both diachronically, in relation to postmodernism, and synchronically, in relation to its social and ideological context.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43842538","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9356913
M. Del Mar
{"title":"The Poetics and Politics of Custom: Law, Literature, and Time","authors":"M. Del Mar","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9356913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9356913","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49309062","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 : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9356809
Ryan Devitt
The article argues for the renewed relevance of Foucault's early essays on literature, written throughout the 1960s, given a return to anthropological reflection in so much literary theory today (especially through affect theory and “new” phenomenologies—both of which rely on older categories supplied by psychoanalysis). On one hand, Foucault reminds us of all the “warped and twisted forms of reflection” that arise from anthropological thought, with its assumptions regarding the “unthought” and the hidden structures of sense and perception. This same Foucault, on the other hand, is deeply engaged with literature; his writings on a range of authors—from Homer and Cervantes, to Friedrich Hölderlin and the Marquis de Sade, to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot—constitute nothing less than an oeuvre. And yet, despite proposals to move beyond Foucauldian critique and its orthodoxy in literary studies today, hardly anything has been thought or said about this body of work in which Foucault, as David Carroll points out, “has the most to say about literature and language.” This lacuna is all the more surprising, since Foucault's early essays offer a rich and fruitful understanding of the being of literature as more than a limpid reflection of the body. In his reading of Bataille and Blanchot in particular, Foucault offers a unique vision of literature that is neither suspicious nor negative but that, in connection with his well-known critique of finitude, culminates in a hopeful call for openness.
{"title":"Toward a Foucauldian Literary Criticism","authors":"Ryan Devitt","doi":"10.1215/03335372-9356809","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-9356809","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The article argues for the renewed relevance of Foucault's early essays on literature, written throughout the 1960s, given a return to anthropological reflection in so much literary theory today (especially through affect theory and “new” phenomenologies—both of which rely on older categories supplied by psychoanalysis). On one hand, Foucault reminds us of all the “warped and twisted forms of reflection” that arise from anthropological thought, with its assumptions regarding the “unthought” and the hidden structures of sense and perception. This same Foucault, on the other hand, is deeply engaged with literature; his writings on a range of authors—from Homer and Cervantes, to Friedrich Hölderlin and the Marquis de Sade, to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot—constitute nothing less than an oeuvre. And yet, despite proposals to move beyond Foucauldian critique and its orthodoxy in literary studies today, hardly anything has been thought or said about this body of work in which Foucault, as David Carroll points out, “has the most to say about literature and language.” This lacuna is all the more surprising, since Foucault's early essays offer a rich and fruitful understanding of the being of literature as more than a limpid reflection of the body. In his reading of Bataille and Blanchot in particular, Foucault offers a unique vision of literature that is neither suspicious nor negative but that, in connection with his well-known critique of finitude, culminates in a hopeful call for openness.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47249013","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}
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