The Visual, the Epic, and Pasternak’s ‘Devjat’son pjatyj god’

In this study I consider the role of poetic description in Pasternak’s ‘Deviat’sot piatyi god’ (‘1905’) in the context of the genre of the poema. Descriptive passages in poetic narratives, as a rule, provide a static setting for a protagonist’s actions. In the absence of any single hero in Pasternak’s poema, topography itself begins to move. I examine the categories of stasis and motion, central to ‘1905’, at the intersection of the visual and the verbal. The idea of reanimating the events of the first Russian revolution twenty years after the fact borders on the ekphrastic in places, where the poet transposes techniques and genres from the visual arts into a verse epic. Finally, I suggest that aesthetic perception itself is the dominant principle in the poema, as opposed to documentary faithfulness, which is traditionally emphasized in the scholarship on this work.

Mythologizing Greed and Betrayal in the Strait of Magellan in Juan de Miramontes' Armas Antarticas

Taking as a starting point Antonio Sanchez Jimenez's recent work on the myth of Jason in Lope de Vega's El Vellocino de Oro, this article examines the myths of Jason and Leander in Juan de Miramontes Zuazola's epic, Armas antarticas (1608-1609). After exploring the explicit allusions to the myths in the epic, I analyse an implicit reference to Leander in the portrayal of Tome Hernandez, the only survivor of the failed sixteenth-century Spanish settlements in the Strait of Magellan. As it turns out, Hernandez was rescued by the English pirate, Thomas Cavendish. In evoking the myth of Leander on the southern coast of Chile, Armas antarticas recalls Alonso de Ercilla's self-description in La Araucana (1569, 78, 89) as analysed by Ricardo Padron. However, I contend that the representation of Hernandez is best understood in comparison to Juan Boscan's Leandro (1543), the fullest and most widely disseminated Spanish version of the tale in the sixteenth century. Appealing to the Leander myth allows Armas antarticas to turn away from a focus on the role of greed in colonization. Yet shadows of Jason still lurk behind the portrayal of Hernandez, which raise other serious ethical questions for the Spanish Empire concerning piracy and loyalty as these play out in the Strait of Magellan. This essay shows that the poetic portrayal of Hernandez and Cavendish ends up exhibiting the same ambiguities associated with piracy as analysed by Daniel Heller-Roazen.

Wom(b)anism: Reading Relationships Between the Community and the Womb in Sankofa, The Women of Brewster Place, and Corregidora

This project attempts to contribute to the various discourses within the black womanist tradition. In 1983, Alice Walker published her landmark collection of essays entitled In Search of Our Mother Gardens: Womanist Prose. At the outset of the volume, Walker defines the core concept of womanism. After a poetic four-part definition of the term womanist, Walker concludes by stating, 'womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender' (Phillips 19). Although this analogy is critically engaged, the scholarly discourse that emerged in response to Walker's proposition shapes the intellectual inner workings of this project. Certain established concepts (such as ancestral mediation or the laying on of hands) work in conjunction with my own concepts of 'wom(b)anism' and 'the communal womb' to frame the interpretive discussions throughout these pages. Wom(b)anism and the communal womb both emerge from the black feminist and womanist traditions, especially via the role of ancestral mediation but also within the contested discourses on womanism itself. I apply the two concepts (wom(b)anism and the communal womb) to my readings of Haile Gerima's Sankofa, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, and Gayl Jones' Corregidora. The relationship between the community and women's wombs across each of these texts construct a narrative that features ancestral mediation (or intervention), various acts of violence committed against women's bodies, and the complicated circumstances through which women heal themselves andtheir communities.

Czech Syllabic-Accentual Metres (1795-1914)

This project was part of a major research project into Czech verse texts from the National Revival to the present and looked at two groups of topics from the theory and history of Czech verse. The first was the rhythm of iambic and trochaic trimeter and trochaic hexameters, with a typological distinction of variants due to individual and generational arising. The rhythmic contours of 63 sets of verses were described statistically and differences in the frequency of stresses on strong and weak positions of the metre were identified. The second part of the project concerned the Czech dactyl. The history of triple metres ranging from poets of the Enlightenment to the present day underground writer Krchovsky were traced in detail. Along with the rhythm and technique of verse, the group analysed the semantics of dactylic metres of different extents (dimeters, trimeters, etc.) and their relationships to literary genres and trends. Their findings differ totally from the assumptions of traditional metrics. A general metrical norm of dactylic verses was defined within the system of rules of correspondence by the method of generative metrics. They established a typology, specified the frequency of divergences from the norm in a range of texts and investigated their role in the style and rhythmic differentiation of poetic works.

Russian Opera as Cultural Text (The Golden Cockerel by N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov)

This project entailed a detailed study and analysis of the literary and musical text of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Golden Cockerel, involving source study, philological and musical-historical analysis, etc. Goryachikh studied the process of the creation of the opera, paying particular attention to its genre, that of a character fable, which was innovative for its time. He considered both the opera's folklore sources and the influences of the 'conditional theatre' aesthetics of the early 20th century. This culture-based approach made it possible to trace the numerous sources of the plot and its literary and musical text back to professional and folk cultures of Russia and other countries. A comparative study of the vocabulary, style and poetics of the libretto and the poetic system of Pushkin's Tale of the Golden Cockerel revealed much in common between the two. Goryachikh concluded that The Golden Cockerel was intended to be a specific form of 'dialogue' between the author, the preceding cultural tradition, and that of the time when the opera was written. He proposed a new definition of The Golden Cockerel as an 'inversed opera' and studied its structure and essence, its beginnings in the 'laughing culture' and the deflection of its forms and composition in a cultural language. He identified the constructive technique of Rimsky-Korsakov's writing at each level of musical unity and noted its influence on Stravinsky and Prokoviev, also finding anticipations of musical phenomena of the 20th century. He concluded by formulating a research model of Russian classical opera as cultural text and suggested further uses for it in musicology.

"Sounds Funny? – Humor Effects of Phonological and Prosodic Figures of Speech"

Whereas semantic, logical, and narrative features of verbal humor are well-researched, phonological and prosodic dimensions of verbal funniness are hardly explored. In a 2 × 2 design we varied rhyme and meter in humorous couplets. Rhyme and meter enhanced funniness ratings and supported faster processing. Rhyming couplets also elicited more intense and more positive affective responses, increased subjective comprehensibility and more accurate memory. The humor effect is attributed to special rhyme and meter features distinctive of humoristic poetry in several languages. Verses that employ these formal features make an artful use of typical poetic vices of amateurish poems written for birthday parties or other occasions. Their metrical patterning sounds “mechanical” rather than genuinely “poetic”; they also disregard rules for “good” rhymes. The processing of such verses is discussed in terms of a metacognitive integration of their poetically deviant features into an overall effect of processing ease. The study highlights the importance of nonsemantic rhetorical features in language processing.

Kollektive Erinnerung. Topographie und Topik in Walthers ›Palästinalied‹

The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) conceived re- membrance as a product of ›collective memory‹ and explained this idea in his book on ›La Topographie légendaire des Évangiles en Terre sainte‹ (1941) showing that the topography of the Holy Land was predominantly an imaginary landscape construed by Christian communities. Following this concept, this article studies the ›Palästinalied‹, a text describing the arrival of a pilgrim in the Holy Land in the time of the crusades, abundantly transmitted under the name of Walther von der Vogelweide. The high degree of textual variance in the diverse manuscripts testifies the acting of ›collective memory‹ in the medieval poetic tradition. Of special interest in this context are the strophic arrangements, the variation of deictic markers, the reworking of melodic models documented in the manuscript transmission and the diatopic opposition existing between the emphasis of ›distant love‹ expressed in Jaufré Rudel’s Occitan song ›Lanqand li jorn son lonc en mai‹ (one of the named models) and the attitude of proximity prevailing in the ›Palästinalied‹.

Prometheus on Mars: Nineteenth-Century Science Fiction and the Language of Romanticism

The development of astrophysics in the nineteenth century drew mankind closer to the planets. For the first time, it was possible to give serious scientific consideration to the possibilities for life on other planets. The greatest leap, however, was in recognizing what was not known, and acknowledging the limits of human intuition. ‘Ideas,’ wrote Agnes M. Clerke, ‘have all at once become plastic’. As the scientific community tested the limits of scientific understanding, it became the role of science-fiction writers to imagine the universe beyond these limits. This paper will examine the ways in which nineteenth-century science fiction used the inheritance of the poetic language of Romanticism to reinstate the centrality of human being in the universe. I will explore the ways in which writers such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton (The Coming Race, 1871) and W. S. Lach-Szyrma (Aleriel, 1883) extended the Byronic hero to envisage extra-terrestrial utopias. The Hegelian systematic mythology described by Byron and Shelley had reimagined paradise and redemption on earth. Through science fiction, this mythology extended out towards the stars. A discourse on the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life became a Romantic discourse on the possibilities of being. The Byronic hero could now find a home not by escaping the shackles of religion, but as an angelic citizen of Venus or Mars. In this way, the paper will explore how science-fiction writers appropriated the language of Romantic poetry to build a bridge between the framework of scientific knowledge and the extent of human imagination.

Yerma. Por qué poema trágico y no tragedia poética

Ante las frecuentes afirmaciones que, atendiendo a las características del discurso, presentan al teatro de García Lorca como "poético", considero oportuno destacar la preeminencia de lo lírico sobre lo escénico en Yerma, obra a la que el mismo autor subtitula como "poema trágico en tres actos y seis cuadros". Teniendo en cuenta la prolija subtitulación del autor me propongo reflexionar, a partir del análisis de la pieza y con ayuda de algunos conceptos teóricos tomados tanto de Aristóteles como de la Semiótica, la razón por la cual Yerma necesita una recepción que advierta su naturaleza lírica esencial antes de reparar en su funcionalidad escénica.

Reflexiones sobre el proceso creador en Antonio Di Benedetto

Este trabajo se propone iluminar, a partir de los datos aportados en diversas entrevistas, algunos aspectos del proceso creador de Antonio Di Benedetto para contribuir a un mayor conocimiento de su poética, especialmente de las reflexiones sobre la creación. Se parte del núcleo autobiográfico para ahondar en los inicios de su actividad de escritor: los años de aprendizaje, la imitación de su madre, una innata narradora, y las influencias de las lecturas de los grandes maestros narradores. A continuación se profundiza en la importancia del silencio en la obra de Di Benedetto, tanto en su función temática como estilística, ya que éste es el núcleo de un decir riguroso, esencial, donde lo no dicho adquiere valor y peso en sí mismo. Finalmente se estudia la estrecha vinculación de sus obras con el particular momento vital, así como su insistente búsqueda de perfección, que lo llevan a explorar las posibilidades expresivas y comunicativas de las diversas modalidades de la ficción, como la narrativa experimental y la fantástica.

Elementos de la vanguardia surrealista en la obra de Antonio Di Benedetto

La complejidad de la literatura del escritor mendocino Antonio Di Benedetto, autor de novelas fundamentales en la literatura latinoamericana como Zama y El silenciero, es abordada, mediante el estudio comparativo, a través de los documentos producidos por el surrealismo. Del vínculo de los relatos del narrador cuyano con la vanguardia se desprende un análisis crítico de la realidad en la obra literaria, como así también de los límites de los postulados del movimiento de 1924 tomados como insumos en la obra de Di Benedetto. Por otro lado, se han estudiado las propuestas del poeta vinculado al surrealismo Antonin Artaud, para relacionarlas con los quiebres discursivos que se repiten a lo largo de la narrativa dibenedettiana.

La guerre au théâtre: stratégie et dramaturgie

El presente estudio se interroga sobre la paradoja que plantea la representación de la guerra en el espacio escénico. Espacio bélico y espacio escénico son difícilmente reconciliables dadas sus características intrínsecas (entre otras, la tendencia centrífuga del primero y la centrípeta del segundo). Para salvar esta paradoja, los dramaturgos han desarrollado estrategias poético -retóricas como el uso de la metáfora, la metonimia y el fuera de escena. Por otra parte, el escenario a la vez que se instituye como espacio de una representación, se comunica con un espacio exterior que está más allá, pero que no se manifiesta siempre necesariamente. En virtud de esta vinculación, la representación de la guerra es atravesada por una serie de mediaciones. En primer lugar, la circulación de aquello que "flota" entre el escenario y el afuera del escenario, que los tropos (metáfora, metonimia) permiten recuperar al menos virtualmente. En segundo, el vestigio del episodio guerrero, inscrito en la Historia, que, en tanto vestigio, oscila entre la presencia y la ausencia. Finalmente, las restricciones del teatro mismo y sus principios éticos y estéticos, que trasforman la guerra en sus modos de manifestación espontáneos. El presente trabajo analiza la articulación de estas instancias en obras de Esquilo, Shakespeare y Genêt.

Espacio modernista. Una mirada abarcadora

El presente trabajo se propone una nueva mirada sobre el extenso corpus modernista hispanoamericano, narrativo y lírico, para descubrir en él las modulaciones del espacio poético y describir, evitando una formulación dogmática, el trazo de un periplo que comienza en el espacio americano, se sumerge en espacios interiores y artificiales, se evade en lo exótico y lo antiguo para regresar nuevamente a América con una técnica transformada. Se subraya la semejanza de tal periplo con la traslación física y espiritual de los poetas modernistas más significativos.

Procedimientos de construcción del espacio en Fuego en Casabindo, de Héctor Tizón

En Fuego en Casabindo (1969), Héctor Tizón configura una imagen poética del espacio de la Puna porque pretende re-crear ese mundo afectivamente a través de su memoria. Este espacio escritural no está configurado desde una visión objetiva sino desde la afectividad del que lo vivió y amó, desde la experiencia íntima y personal. Los espacios en Fuego en Casabindo no son referenciales, sino que asumen valores afectivos, tienen gran importancia en el andamiaje constructivo del relato y determinan un tipo de lectura de la novela, la lectura poética.

Lirismo, autobiografía y autoficción en "Viaje Olvidado" de Silvina Ocampo

Viaje olvidado, primer libro de cuentos de Silvina Ocampo, se caracteriza por un marcado predominio de lo lírico sobre lo estrictamente anecdótico o argumental. Más que de cuentos, cabe hablar de una serie de cuadros o acuarelas en los que la historia es una mera excusa para el discurrir de lo poético. Esto implica un uso del lenguaje particular, cuyos rasgos fundamentales son la coloquialidad y el carácter pictórico de la prosa. Del singular lenguaje empleado y de la presencia de ciertos núcleos temáticos repetidos con persistencia en los relatos, surgen configuraciones textuales que pueden encuadrarse en el terreno de lo autobiográfico y autoficcional. Aunque no hay en Viaje olvidado una voluntad autobiográfica expresa, proponemos que el marcado lirismo de los cuentos es una puerta de acceso a la difusa biografía de la autora.