"Erasing the Body: History and Memory in Medieval Siege Poetry" (original) (raw)
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Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, 2020
If poetics customarily deals with generalities, history seems to insist on particulars. In the 21st century, various literary critics have sought to manage these competing imperatives by developing an “historical poetics.” These critics pursue sometimes very different projects, working with diverse methodologies and theoretical frameworks, but they share a desire to think again about the relation between poetics and history. Some critics have pursued an historical poetics by conducting quantitative studies of changes in metrical form, while others have investigated the social uses to which poetry was put in the cultures of the past. Both approaches tend to reject received notions of the aesthetic or literary, with their emphasis on the individual poet and on the poem’s organic unity. Much work in historical poetics has focused instead on problems of genre and reception, seeking the historical significance of poetry in what is common and repeated. Sometimes this work has involved extensive archival research, examining memoirs, grammar books, philological tracts, and other materials in order to discover how poetry was conceived and interpreted at a particular time. These methods allow critics to tell histories of poetry and to reveal a history in poetry. The cultural history of poetic forms thus becomes a history of social thought and practice conducted through poetry. For other critics, however, the historical significance of a poem lies instead in the way it challenges the poetics of its time. This is to emphasize the singular over the common and repeated. In this mode, historical poetics aims both to restore poems to their proper historical moment and to show how poems work across history. The history to be valued in such cases is not a ground or world beyond the poem, but the event of the poem itself.
Poetry and fiction: a necessary, and historically verifiable, combination
In "Costellazioni", II, 5, 2018, pp. 105-122 This contribution explores some of the biological and cognitive aspects used in the texts that we now consider as literary, but which originally stood as magical and sacred. The existence of various types of rhythmic poetry and fiction is emphasized to examine which neurological and corporeal assumptions come into play: we need to identify the ‘sense nucleus’ conveyed which requires special attention and partaking. Finally, the focus shifts to issues relating to obscurity and eventfulness: stylization is regarded as an essential stage in the way the events are presented, before complex narratives can be attained Some specific analyses are based on the oldest epic text we know, the Gilgamesh, in which many rhetorical figures contribute to creating specific effects, finalizing biological and cognitive propensities through style.
Review: Narrative Poetics in the
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4. Bloody Poetics: Towards a Physiology of the Epic Poem
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2023
William Alexander, in his possibly unfinished essay on poetic criticism 'Anacrisis: or, A Censure of some Poets Ancient and Modern' (probably written in 1634 but not published until 1711), explains that his method to 'censure any Poet', that is, to assess poetry, is to 'dissolve the general Contexture of his Work in several Pieces, to see what Sinews it hath, and to mark what will remain behind, when that external Gorgeousness, consisting in the Choice or Placing of Words, as if it would bribe the Ear to corrupt the Judgment, is first removed'. 1 In a process that resembles an anatomical dissection of the poetic body by breaking it down into its 'several Pieces', Alexander thus disregards the 'gross Staff' that serves 'to uphold the general Frame', and concentrates instead on the 'sinews' of the poem, by which he means its invention, which lies hidden beneath the poem's skin, that is, its 'language'. Alexander praises in these terms John Barclay's heroic Latin novel Argenis (published posthumously in 1621, and translated into English in 1625), which, he affirms, 'whether judged of in the Whole, or parted in Pieces, will be found to be a Body strong in Substance, and full of Sinews in every Member'. 2 Alexander's observation on the strength of the poem residing in its sinewy invention recalls Ben Jonson being commended for his translation of Horace's Ars poetica (1640) on account of 'his Strenuous and Sinewy Labours', which explain the 'rare profundity' of his work. 3 Indeed, that the poem is envisioned as a body with bodily functions and processes that mirror those of humans and animals results in a parallelism that affects the understanding of poetics, the discipline whose object of study is the poem, its constitution and its parts, as analogous to anatomy, the science that dissects bodies and examines their inner workings and constituents. Barton Holiday, archdeacon of
Style in Literature: A Stylistics Study of a Poem
2017
This paper attempts a stylistic study of a poem. It targets to unveil the deeper underpinnings of semanticity in condensed literary pieces, particularly in poetry, as a consequence of the style employed by an author. Among other findings, the study uncovered the peculiar use of lexis and the features embedded in such peculiar use. It brings to the fore, the heavy use of deviation and parallelism in drumming home the theme of the poem. And finally, a fundamental literary feature used which is worthy of note and which the study has clearly drawn attention to in the analysis, is the foregrounding of the entire literary piece, which gives it a unique outlook. On the surface, one might not notice the effect of this literary technique but the study has meticulously pointed this out. Article visualizations:
Gregory of Tours' Poetics (in Comitatus: Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies)
This article uncovers some of the intricate story-telling patterns in the Histories of Gregory of Tours (ca. 538–594 CE). In The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, Meir Sternberg outlines a method of interpretation useful for approaching a literary artifact whose self-classification is history, identifying three principles operating interdependently within any narrative work: the ideological, the historiographical, and the aesthetic. These principles produce a complex network of linkages which make up the narrative as a mode of communication. Using Sternberg’s model as an instrument of interpretation, this analysis identifies narrative devices as functional structures for the Decem Libri Historiarum, such as intentional gaps, repetitions, and time manipulations. Gregory’s narrative demonstrates a flexible poetics, serving the purposes of history and ideology side-by-side. Narrative devices otherwise functionally at odds with one another (omission vs. repetition) are combined to produce a unitary artistic logic.
Literal and Literary Ekphrasis: A Medieval Poetics
Medievalia & Humanistica, 2019
This essay addresses images introduced into medieval romance via literal and literary modes of ekphrasis. Literal ekphrasis is most commonly used to describe the process of making an object, providing cues for visualizing the image and the action in the mind of the reader or listener, while the object itself is generally described using literary ekphrasis, a discursive description that does not adhere to the structures of visuality. Reading the images of Dido and Aeneas in Chaucer’s House of Fame and the Shield of Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as sustained practices of imitatio of Virgilian ekphraseis provides insight into a medieval understanding of a Greek poetic device. In rewriting Trojan history using two distinct modes of ekphrasis, the literal and the literary, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain-poet emulate Virgil and insert their work into a continuous poetic literary history. Medieval poetics of ekphrasis as literary practice reveals epistemological concerns that tell us as much about theorizations of visual language as about constructing poetic genealogies through emulation of classical models.