Historical Poetics (original) (raw)
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Understanding Poetry Otherwise: New Criticism and Historical Poetics
Literature Compass, 2020
This essay juxtaposes recent work in historical poetics with New Critical reading practices, particularly those theorized by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their influential textbook Understanding Poetry (1938). It focuses on the relationships among method, period, and aesthetic value: the ways that New Critical reading and its variety of critical judgment helped make 19th-century poetry minor. Examining Understanding Poetry's association of 19th-century poetry with aesthetic badness -- as well as the generic histories of the textbook's "bad" poems -- the essay demonstrates the importance of the problem of evaluation for historical poetics.
Modern Language Quarterly, 2016
In posing questions about what is "historical" and what counts as "poetics," historical poetics cannot separate the practice of reading a poem from the histories and theories of reading that mediate our ideas about poetry. While nineteenth-century verse cultures revolved around reading by generic recognition, a reading of poetry as a form of cognition emerges among later critics like I. A. Richards, who illustrates how a line from Robert Browning is read in the mind's eye, as if in the present tense. But Browning was already doing a version of historical poetics, in writing "Pan and Luna" as a poem about reading other poems about Pan, among them "A Musical Instrument," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the composition and reception of her poem, we see how Victorian poetry foregrounds its multiple mediations, including the mediation of voice by meter as a musical instrument. The recirculation of her popular poem through citation and recitation, illustration and anthologization, prosody and parody, demonstrates a varied history of thinking through-simultaneously "about" and "in"-verse.
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.
Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, 2024
Poetry does not have a history; it has many histories. By tracing the history of poetry in the West, in conjunction with genre studies and research on concept formation, it is evident that the genre "poetry" is contingent on the various rhetorical situations of its production. Such an approach reveals that the concept "poetry," like all concepts, is always in flux. Yet, despite the fact that "poetry" means different things to different people in different times and places, studies of oral poetry have yielded insights into traits that might be considered universal to poetry, such as its performativity and categorization as ritual language. Other common aspects include the use of parallelism, analogy and metaphor, musicality, and how poems function as metapragmatic symbols that reflect the values of their cultural production. This functionalist approach to poetry reveals that the evolution of poetry is at once historically contingent and culturally universal, and recognizes that poetry's multiplicity and continual becoming operate with the primary goals of generating and sharing culturally relative meaning.
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.
Comparative/Historical Poetics in an Age of Cultural Studies
Style
ABSTRACT“Comparative poetics” does not belong to the set of established terms. It was introduced by Earl Miner (1990) and might have heralded an ambitious project if not immediately undermined by the subtitle “An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature.” It did not take long to find that poetics did not easily agree with cultural studies as they were proposed. The word, reduced to a sign and viewed as a function, was cut off from its poetic significance. In search for a new poetics, a special interest has been recently demonstrated toward “historical poetics” only vaguely heard of before thanks to the eminent Russian scholars (the Formalists, Bakhtin, and Propp) but still less known in its original form worked out by Alexander Veselovsky. His magnum opus, unfinished by the author, may serve as a guide in our search for method to restore the study of verbal art as poetics of world literature.
Focusing on the way the configurations of language allow us to conceive reality and inhabit a world, including the experience of temporality, this seminar will address the forms of historical synthesis that characterize modernist poetics. Following an introduction to the relationship between the economy of poetic figures and the constitution of historical experience (which will draw on conceptions from P. Ricoeur, J. Rancière, A. Danto, H. White, and others), the seminar will center on readings of literary and critical works by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. Given these writers’ acute awareness of the relationship between their radical linguistic experimentation and new possibilities of knowledge and experience, particular attention will be paid to the modes of historical synthesis or apprehension of a number of poetic forms of meaning that can be grouped under three main headings: (1) “irony” (skepticism and enthusiasm – negation and critical sublation); (2) “translation” (insemination and afterlife – deployment of the past); and (3) “montage” (fragmentation and juxtaposition – synchronization of temporal dispersion). The aim is thereby to elucidate the specificity of a poetics which, confronted with the crisis of the historiographical discourse of Modernity (essentially, of the ideology of progress and historicism), and by contrast with other avant-garde movements contemporary to it, sought not a simplistic break with the past but rather its critical reabsorption through literary strategies of resistance and insemination, disjunction and superposition. Ultimately, the question remains as to the extent to which this “Poetics of History,” forged during the first quarter of the twentieth century, is one which is on its way to being superseded or, rather, one whose implications are still being worked out.
Lyric History: Temporality, Rhetoric, and the Ethics of Poetry
In this essay, I am less interested in the specifics of the on-going polemics around the “new lyricism,” than I am in the problematics of historical engagement and ethical implication that subtend them and open onto more general problematics of textuality, history, and interpretation that lyrics often foreground. These problematics do not obviate the importance of historical considerations in lyrical reading, nor do they undermine the crucial importance of history itself in our social and political lives. To refocus critical attention on poetry’s connection with its readers and the world, as in the new lyric studies, also reminds us that lyric has a rhetorical aspect and that the indeterminacies of lyric’s representation of a recollected moment of being or experience cannot be resolved by appeals to history as a ground for interpretation. The meaning of lyric and its engagement with the world exists in the futurity of its reader, the unpredictable phenomenology of its reception. Paradoxically, the historicization of lyric reminds us that history itself has a lyrical aspect. It combines recollection and projection, a statement of a past experience or state of being addressed to the subjectivity of a future reader or audience whose realms of experience and states of being remain indeterminate. Lyric poetry is one artistic form that makes this problematic involution of literature and history especially evident, though critics have traditionally assumed that no literary genre was more distant from its historical contexts.