Poema of Lieutenant Schmidt’s End: Pasternak’s Dialogue with Tsvetaeva through the Prism of Genre.

Boris Pasternak’s poemy are acutely self-conscious of their place in the epic tradition. Lieutenant Schmidt (LS) represents one attempt at exploring the parameters of the poema itself as the poet makes a “difficult” transition from “lyric thinking” to “the epic.” In this article I examine this transition against a contemporaneous example in the genre, Tsvetaeva’s Poema of the End (PE). In LS, structural elements of the poema are counterposed to those of PE. While PE amplifies the individual voice, LS muffles what is personal for the sake of the public voice. While PE is atemporal, LS is historical. While PE unfolds on symbolic planes, with elements of plot kept to a bare minimum (a single moment of separation), LS is a plot-driven account based on concrete, documentary material. Finally, while PE is an “overgrown lyric”—representing the “lyric thinking” that Pasternak hopes to transcend— LS is an exploration of the possibilities that a more traditional model of the poema can offer. Although in the present analysis I draw on several theories of poetic genres, this is by no means an exhaustive study of epic versus lyric forms of poetry. Instead, my analysis focuses on those structural and thematic features of the poema that the poets themselves perceived as central to their texts. Pasternak, for his part, develops the structure and thematics of his poema in ways that are inspired by PE, but also, as we will see, in more significant ways, contrast with it.

Genre Under Construction: The Diary on the Internet

The emergence of the diary as a digital form has generated the kinds of introduction and explanation that typically accumulate around emerging genres, even though online diarists in many ways strive to reproduce the stereotypical print diary. However, as diarists and readers explore the nature of blogs, both in diary entries and comments pages, a tension is apparent between users’ accounts or explanations of the genre and their actual practices, and this tension provides a rich site for studying the evolution of the diary genre. Readers’ and writers’ comments illustrate the blogging community’s ideas about genre as a concept and how these ideas transfer to the “new” world of online media. In this paper, I look at the diary’s transition from page to screen, and consider how readers and writers build on and diverge from print culture practices in establishing expectations and “rules” for Weblogs. Examining how diarists and their communities establish and police the digital diary, and how generic knowledge is circulated and codified, helps understand the particular social actions the diary can perform only on the Internet.

The website as a domain-specific genre

The paper takes an initial look at how the medial conditions of the screen and the Internet define new constraints for language and style of company websites. The paper first discusses how the impact of bad grammar is enhanced by the salience and universal visibility on the screen. The main part of the paper argues that the language of company websites often represents fossilized rhetorical structures as a paper text hangover from the medial conditions of reading written texts and views this residue as an evolutionary stage of the evolution towards a medially appropriate style.