"Erasing the Body: History and Memory in Medieval Siege Poetry" (original) (raw)
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.
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.
Poetics as Composition of Events
Systasis Journal nr. 40, 2022
The paper argues that Aristotle's Poetics reveals a unique view of art or poetic creation as a realm closely intertwined with the rest of the domains of human cognitive and creative practices such as philosophy, science, technology all stemming from the centrality of the notion of technē. In order to access the notion of technē in a way that allows for the propositions made here, one has to endorse the trajectory of reading Aristotle's text through the prism of the concept of systasis (of elements) as the definition of tragedy, an argument put forward in a daring and illuminating way more almost 70 years ago by the Macedonian classical philologist, Mihail D. Petruševski.
Historical Figuration: Poetics, Historiography, and New Genre Studies
Literature Compass, 2006
This essay has four interconnected goals: 1) to reflect upon some of the major theoretical and methodological developments (since about 1950) in the fields of early modern literary studies and history vis-à-vis the question of historicism; 2) to address, within the context of seventeenth-century England, inter-relationships between poetics and historiography; 3) to examine that “interdisciplinarity” specifically in terms of the seventeenth-century English poetic elegy; and 4) to trace (from Plato to Puttenham) and to argue for a specific theoretical aspect of that inter-relationship, which I will call historical figuration. My argument will hinge upon these connecting points, especially the latter two. On the one hand, I will argue that an early modern paradigm shift from theocentric to increasingly secular narrative frameworks for personal and national histories contributes to a transformation in poetic genre. English poets began to formulate a new intra-textual crisis of linguistic signification within the elegy's construction of loss and spiritual consolation as the experience of death and mourning became less theocentric and communal and more secular and individualized during the seventeenth century. This new intra-textuality to elegiac resistance emerges gradually but consistently from approximately the 1620s onward, facilitating the genre's new articulations of consolation situated within and against historical contexts rather than projected toward a transcendental horizon. On the other hand, I will also argue that this distinctive inter-relationship between poetics and historiography may be theorized as historical figuration, which may be linked directly to key contributions to the history of poetic theory from Plato to Puttenham. My two-fold thesis thus attempts to engender and engage what some may see as a trans-discursive poetics of culture. However, I would hesitate to place my argument within the new-historicist camp, but would hope instead that this essay may contribute to the emerging, interdisciplinary sub-field of new genre studies, which seeks to examine literary genres as manifestations of aesthetic forms and social discourses.
This essay introduces the March 2016 special issue of Modern Language Quarterly, "Reading Historical Poetics," edited by V. Joshua Adams, Joel Calahan, and Michael Hansen. In the introduction, we situate the work of the six scholars who contributed essays on historical poetics to the volume by describing and evaluating the conflicting methodological approaches pursued by scholars of historical poetics in current Slavic and American comparative traditions.
Poetry—In the Kingdom Under Siege
An exploration of the state of the art—poetry—vis-à-vis the encroaching darkness of satanic power in these times. The value of witness to the Kingdom of Christ in the power of His Spirit through poetry.
Narrative Becoming: Semiotics, Poetics and Prosaics in Ancient Literature
Narrative Becoming: Semiotics, Poetics, and Proasaics in Ancient Litearture, 2023
These essays are a collection of previously published work on the semiotics of poetry and prose. I have reset the text in each instance, editing them only lightly in most cases. Because most of this material was scattered over many years and many different venues, I thought their juxtaposition here might produce a sum greater than the parts.
Poetry and picturing in deep historical time
Re-imagening periphery. Archaeology and Text in Northern Europe from Iron Ages to Viking and Early Medieval Periods, 2020
This chapter approaches Text and Transition through a comparative analysis of poetry and picturing in a deep historical setting. It draws on epic poetry, from the Rig Veda, the Edda and the Bible, in order to explore the grand iconographic styles of the Scandinavian past. The aim is to demonstrate how these imges embody a cognitive dimension of current society by exploring picture-making and poetry as integral - and mutually dependent - parts of human life and being.
Playing with time: Prose poetry and the elastic moment
The prose poem typically presents itself in the guise of a paragraph, suggesting that readers treat it as such: a narrative fragment. As a narrative ‘unit’ it might be expected to focus on a relatively brief moment in time, a tightly framed episode. Its isolation (from any other fragments of the imaginary ‘whole’), however, would seem to drive its attentions according to principles different to most lengthier narrative prose. The passage of time that might, for a longer narrative, stretch across its entirety, becomes, in many cases, a feature of the prose poem’s concision – and particular power. The elastic treatment of the ‘moment’ – sometimes connecting with both distant past and future – can therefore be identified as one of the form’s defining, poetic characteristics; intriguingly, it is a characteristic owing its effect, in part at least, to the fluidity of prose. This paper surveys a particular body of prose poetry, produced under the auspices of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI), noting the prevalence of the elastic moment and considering the variety of techniques involved.
The project : Verse and narrative : narrative structures and techniques in lyric poetry
Narratology and the study of lyric poetry This article provides a brief discussion of the theoretical and historical underpinnings of the study of narrativity in lyric poetry. As part of the justification of studying narrative aspects of lyric poetry, reference is made to contemporary paradigms in postclassical narratology of which transgeneric narratology is one. The project titled, "Verse and narrative: narrative structures and techniques in lyric poetry", from which the articles in this issue emanated, is described briefly by presenting the objectives of the research and by discussing the theoretical and historical implications of such a project. The theoretical part of the article concludes with a list of the preliminary findings. The article also serves as an introduction to this issue of "Literator", which contains the contributions on English and Dutch texts to the project. Opsomming Narratologie en die studie van liriese poësie Hierdie artikel bevat 'n saaklike bespreking van die teoretiese en historiese aspekte van die bestudering van narratiwiteit in liriese poësie. In die motivering van die geldigheid van so 'n ondersoek, word verwys na die dominante paradigmas in postklassieke narratologie, waarvan transgeneriese narratologie een is. Die navorsingsprojek, "Vers en verhaal: narratiewe
Narrative (Studies in Iconography vol. 33. Medieval Art History Today: Critical Terms)
The historical trajectory of "narrative" in the Oxford English Dictionary reveals an allegiance to written text that this essay seeks to problematize. The OED's earliest recorded use of "narrative" is found in the mid-fifteenth-century Life of Saint Augustine by J. Capgrave: "this maner of writing that is cleped narratyf" (OED, s.v. "narrative," adj. 1.a). The word's next development within the legal discourse of the early sixteenth century (n. 1.a-b) belies the evidentiary and textual mode of narrative that, in turn, lays the foundation for the literary concern with narrative as, starting in the late sixteenth century, a "sequence of events" (n. 2.b) "given in order and with the establishing of connections between them" (n. 2.a). Literary criticism's use of the term starting in the late 1970s maintains the sequentiality of narrative but looks to it as a representation of bigger stories, "grand narrative[s]" (n. 2.c) that shape societal discourse. Art and literary historians' theorizations of narrative art have sought to understand both the spaces and the structures of narrative in relation to texts. 1 Medieval visual narrative resists the evidentiary (legal), sequential (literary), and representational (critical) models of written narrative. The complex visual structures trouble the linear logic of written text, and have often left modern interpreters frustrated in their lack of allegiance to those texts. 2 This discomfiture emerges, I argue, because of medieval visual narrative's performative relationship to spoken word literature. 3 Narrative is not only written, it can be spoken as well and the impact of this duality is keenly felt in medieval narrative imagery. It is only in the last definition of narrative in the OED that we are presented with its performative aspect: "As a mass noun: the practice or art of narration or story-telling" (n. 3). This practice and art of storytelling both by and around medieval images will inform my inquiry into medieval visual narrative. In examining images in performative spaces enlivened by the spoken word literatures of liturgical drama and fabliaux, I seek to reinsert considerations of physicality and space into the understanding of medieval visual narrative.