{"title":"Poetry & Science: Intransitive Writing Of Denis Roche and John Ashbery","authors":"Ekaterina M. Belavina","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-143-157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-143-157","url":null,"abstract":"The poetry of the 20th century has become a real linguistic laboratory. The transition from traditional (national) systems of versification to free verse and, what is especially important, to international free verse, which can be translated faster and with less distortion, made it possible to reduce the time gap in the reception of American authors in France and French authors in the USA. John Ashbury, a prominent representative of the New York School, who lived in France for about 10 years, Denis Roche and Marcelin Pleine — members of the editorial board of the avant-garde magazine Tel Quel, the theorist of intransitive writing R. Barthes were active participants in the transatlantic dialogue of poets in the middle of the 20th century. The texts of John Ashbery and Denis Roche are an international vers libre created according to the principle of intransitive writing. R. Barth, also participating in the French-American dialogue, analyses the peculiarities of writing of the period in question in his paper “To write is an intransitive verb” (1966). A poem is understood as a rhythmic inoculation of lived experience, which has a transformative power for the writer and the reader.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68679148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Myth and Melos in Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot","authors":"Temur Kobakhidze","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-177-206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-177-206","url":null,"abstract":"The paper is dedicated to the poem by T.S. Eliot Four Quartets (1943), it examines its artistic specificity, its poetic and musical peculiarities with their complex symbolic subtext and a whole layer of meanings. The organizing principle of the Four Quartets is the synthesis of myth and melos. The poem contains features “borrowed” from music so that the “musical energy” (melos) that is not yet a melody finds a specific poetic embodiment. Built on the principles of musical poetics, Eliot's poem contains various artistic images that alternate and combine according to the principle of the development of musical themes (like Wagner's leitmotifs) and their meaning does not remain the same, but is changing. Another similarity between the poem and a musical work is its timeless character: a full perception of the musical integrity of Four Quartets is achieved after repeated reading of the text, simultaneous experience of what has already been read and what has yet to be read — and this is like listening to a symphony, the desire to perceive it in its entirety, beyond time. The myth, in contrast to the quite specific mythologems of The Waste Land, in Four Quartets and its melodiousness, does not have any subject or plot even in its infancy and is rather represented by abstract, general ideas and archetypes. The article analyzes the archetypes and elementary symbols of Four Quartets (circle, square, quaternity, intersecting lines, etc.) and reveals their significance. The paper demonstrates that the imagery of Four Quartets is also based on Eliot's personal impressions, which merge with many “intellectual” associations and, refracting in the mythopoetic structure of the poem, turn into general, universal symbols.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68679789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Assemblage Point: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the American Racial / Cultural Identity Model","authors":"O. Panova","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-315-366","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-315-366","url":null,"abstract":"Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852) being the most powerful statement on the racial issue in the 19th century American literature, succeeded to incorporate and rethink everything that the national tradition had in stock on the problem of slavery and race relations. The Black racial / cultural identity model that was taking shape in the 18th century Anglo-American literature, later was being enriched and transformed throughout American (and African-American) literary history. Uncle Tom's Cabin became another crucial text (the next one after Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia) that provided the emerging Black cultural / racial identity model with a new quality: it became universal, nationally recognized — and at the same time a point of controversy provoking endless debates and open for dynamic change and transformations, as was the case with anti-Tom literature and the ambivalent reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in African American literary tradition. The analysis of The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) by Caroline Lee Hentz, a typical example of anti-Tom novels, gives an idea of the pro-slavery response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The final part of the paper is a survey of the main stages in African American response since the 1853 argument between Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass that became a matrix for the further polemic, and up to Henry Louis Gates’s subversive “double-voiced” interpretation of the novel which is in full agreement with the tendency to revise the role of white Abolitionists in the antislavery movement and African American history, typical for African American studies in the 1990s–2000s.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68680193","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Context of the Text: Paratextuality of Joel Barlow’s Poems","authors":"Elena M. Apenko","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-175-197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-175-197","url":null,"abstract":"The paper presents the analysis of attendant texts in the poems of one of the authors of the American Enlightenment epoch Joel Barlow (1755 –1812) “The Vision of Columbus” (1787) and “The Columbiad” (1807). G. Genette pointed out that paratext as a system of secondary texts is the constituent part of the totality of literary work and produces its impact upon the reader. The examination of the titles, prefaces and commentaries undertaken in the paper helps to reveal means and mechanisms used by Barlow to originate the contact with the reader, and also reach the poems’ pragmatic potential. According to J. Barlow‘s intention the synergy of the text and all the paratext elements was to generate a coherent narrative of American history “from Columbus to Washington.” Comprehensive unity of the poems’ texts and their peritexts address the dual goal. First, they create a large-scale historic panorama, and on the other hand strive to implant onto readers’ minds some philosophic and political ideas having both crucial importance for the national identity formation in general, but also momentary relevance. But in “The Columbiad” paratext acquires an additional dimension of ideological and methodological guidance. The author reveals his narrative strategies defining the reading procedure. The poem’s paratext explicitly records author’s awareness of the crisis of the Enlightenment aesthetic conscience at the turn of the 18th –19th centuries. So, the comparison of paratextuality of the two poems created with an interval of 20 years at some point presents the logic of fate of the Enlightenment literature in the USA.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68678739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The American Poet is Always a Seeker after God, but He does not Always Find God”: George Sylvester Viereck’s Lecture “America as a Land of Poets” (1911)","authors":"Vasilii E. Molodiakov","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-213-235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-213-235","url":null,"abstract":"The beginning of the American Poetic Renaissance is considered to be 1912: the Imagists, Poetry magazine, the new generation of poets — Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, etc. This phenomenon keeps attracting a lot of attention of literary critics, meanwhile the previous two decades of American poetry fell out of sight of both readers and scholars. However it would be wrong to assume that there were no noteworthy poets and poems in America after Whitman’s death and before the debuts of Pound and Eliot. How did the American poets themselves evaluate “the current moment”? George Viereck’s lecture “America as a Land of Poets” delivered in 1911 at the University of Berlin can give an idea. George Sylvester Viereck (1884–1962), an outstanding poet, critic and editor, speaking of the “undiscovered, esoteric America, where religion and poetry dwell,” divided American poets into four groups. In the first one there are Whitman's heirs, nativists and democrats, singers of labor and comradeship, like Horace Traubel and Edwin Markham. Next, there are heirs of Poe, aristocrats and esthetes, masters of style, like George Santayana and William Vaughn Moody. The third group unites heirs of Longfellow, traditional and conservative authors, like Henry Van Dyke and Richard Watson Gilder. Finally, there are “lyrical rebels,” combining the legacy of Poe and Whitman and that of Swinburne and Baudelaire. Vireck included himself and the majority of young poets from the anthology The Younger Choir (1910) to the fourth group. This paper includes the full Russian translation of the lecture in Viereck’s English presentation.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68678884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Language-Centered Poetry in the USA and in Russia: Trajectories of Interaction","authors":"V. Feshchenko","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-66-101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-66-101","url":null,"abstract":"To date, it becomes obvious that “language writing” is one of the largest trends in American literature and poetic thought of the last decades, and among the avant-garde trends, it is probably the most significant, extensive and innovative. American literature has spawned several significant schools and communities over the 20th century, from Imagists and beatniks to the San Francisco Renaissance and the New York school. Language poetry in this row, on the one hand, is an equally powerful literary movement (in the number of authors, published books, magazines, etc.), but on the other hand it is marked not so much by collectively shared aesthetic principles (as in the case of objectivists or Black Mountain poets), as by the general ideology of poetic work with language as a social institution and an aesthetic medium. The paper analyzes the points of divergencies and convergencies in American and Russian “language-centered writing.” The linguistic concepts of Russian Futurism (“the word as such,” “language breeding,” etc.) and Russian Symbolism (A. Bely’s “poetry of language”) have made their way — through the theory of Russian Formalism — to the theories of American language poets of the 1970s. The study looks more closely into how this cultural transfer exactly happened. Apart from that, this study juxtaposes the language-related concepts in the theory and practice of Russian Conceptualists and Metarealists, on the one hand, and the conceptual writing of American language poetry. These literary movements, as this paper claims, are part of the general linguistic turn which manifested itself in poetic theory and experiment in several phases over the 20th century.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68679311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Not a Single Epithet, Metaphor, or a Desire to Be Reflected In a Symbolic Mirror”: A Whitmanesque Echo in Igor’ Terent’yev’s Poetry","authors":"Anna V. Shvets","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-37-50","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-12-37-50","url":null,"abstract":"The paper explores a Whitmanesque influence on Igor Terentiev, a Tbilisi-based minor Futurist poet, Alexei Kruchenykh’s disciple. While residing in Georgia with Zdanevich and Kruchenykh (that’s from 1917 up until the 1920s), Terentiev would write books of poetry exhibiting an unusual typographic design as a means of enhancing the poetic effect. In one of these books (“17 Non-Sense Tools”), Whitman’s name is invoked, and the paper investigates the connection between the poets further. The paper focuses on Whitman’s and Terentiev’s approaches to the issue of poetic signification. Whitman not only works with the nature of the signifier modifying it but also tries to render it inseparable from its signified, equating names and objects with each other. Such a semiotic approach could be interpreted through the lens of the opposition “presence effects” / “meaning effects” coined by H.U. Gumbrecht. Presence effects are interpreted as “[m]aterialities of communication... are all those phenomena and conditions that contribute to the production of meaning, without being meaning themselves” (informational content. — A. Sh.) [Gumbrecht 2004: 8]. Whitman tries to integrate both “meaning effects” and “presence effects” into the body of a poetic sign. Terentiev identifies that poetic orientation of “objectifying” signifiers and tries to devise an original poetic program on its basis. Terentiev engages Whitman’s poetic semiotic so that it informs his poetics to the extent that he designs creative writing techniques aimed at a direct communication of meaning, without relying on semiotic substitutes.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68679695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mutual Adaptation as a Guarantee of the Future: Octavia Butler’s Works","authors":"Artem A. Zubov","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-295-313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-295-313","url":null,"abstract":"The article investigates works by Octavia E. Butler (1947 –2006), an African-American writer who had a significant impact on the development of science fiction in the USA and the world. The paper provides an overview of Butler’s works and reveals the relationship between the problems and language / style of her prose, the latter being determined by the former. The first part of the paper examines the main topics of Butler’s works and focuses on the problem of survival. Being a disappearing minority, Butler’s heroines are usually isolated from others and, consequently, in order to survive they have to adapt to the circumstances, since resistance is impossible. However, for Butler the survival of an individual is less important than the preservation of the humankind. For Butler’s heroines it is the reproduction of the genetic and/or cultural memory of mankind that make the future possible and guarantee the survival. In the second part of the paper Butler’s works are analyzed in the context of Afrofuturism and it is pointed out that although Butler has much in common with other representatives of this movement, she deals with the projects for building an ideal society in a different way: Butler is skeptical about utopia as a project of a conflict-free society. The final part of the paper examines Butler’s language and style, noting that for her language serves as an impersonal, objective tool of analysis of human behavior. A special attention is paid to Butler’s latest novel Fledgling (2005), in which language serves both as a tool for expression and a topical issue.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68680188","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"At the Origins of Russian Latin American Studies. Lev Samoilovich Ospovat — on the Centenary of His Birth. Lev Ospovat. As I Remember","authors":"A. Kofman","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-383-399","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-383-399","url":null,"abstract":"The article is a tribute to the famous scholar Lev Samoilovich Ospovat, who together with his wife Vera N. Kuteishchikova, paved the way for the Latin American literary studies in the USSR. Lev Samoilovich started with his studies of Pablo Neruda’s life and work; he was the first to write and publish a book in Russian on the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda: A Survey of His Work (1960). A year later on the basis of this book, he defended his PhD dissertation. Subsequently, its author, critically reflecting on his experience, admitted that he often followed some officially imposed stereotypes in the interpretation of Neruda’s work and evolution. At the same time, even in this book one clearly sees an attempt to overcome the stereotypes, especially with regard to the attribution of Neruda's poetry to the method of socialist realism, and to understand the poetic world of the Chilean poet not only in connection with his political activities. L.S. Ospovat became widely known as the author of two books from the series “Life of Outstanding People” — Federico Garcia Lorca and Diego Rivera and a number of brilliant articles and prefaces. The result of Lev Ospovat’s Latin American studies was the book New Latin American Novel he co-authored with his wife; the book retains its value up to nowadays. At the end of his life Ospovat became interested in Pushkin studies and published several articles containing interesting discoveries in this area. The article is accompanied by fragments from Lev Ospovat’s memoirs that of L.S. Ospovat, which allows the reader to get an idea of the kind, highly intelligent, honest and very attractive person.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68680208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Myth and European Poetic Thinking in 1920 –1940s (Considering the Methodological Aspect)","authors":"Temur Kobakhidze","doi":"10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-148-176","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2022-13-148-176","url":null,"abstract":"The paper attempts to build an integral system of myth and determine its poetic function in the literature of the first half of the 20th century. There are a huge number of approaches to the study of myth as an unconscious symbol, but a myth becomes a literary phenomenon only when it is purposefully used by the author as part of his creative vision. Remythologization or the conscious return of literature to the original sources and archetypes in the work of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, J. Joyce, and others are part of the poetic innovation of an entire literary era. The article briefly traces the history of remythologization, and the name of T.S. Eliot stands out as the first to state and fix a new attitude to myth (“‛Ulysses’, Order, and Myth”, 1923). Myth, according to Eliot, is not an unconscious “force” of the writer's creative imagination, but is conceived as a poetic category, as a means of recreating the aesthetic orderliness of a work from the chaotic reality. Conscious mythologization is also conditioned by the need to synthesize several heterogeneous creative structures in a single artistic whole. The reader conceives the presence of a myth in a literary work through the association of imagery with extra-textual plots, thereby fulfilling the author's intention. The paper, using the example of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot and “The Wheel” by W.B. Yeats, shows how the suggestive archetypes and the variety of reader associations contribute to the timeless perception of the text (reading does not last in time, it is extremely generalized, cyclical, integral). All poetic means of remythologization are aimed at such a synchronous perception of the artistic time and space of the work, which acquires a mythologically universal character, becomes an artistic model of the world.","PeriodicalId":34458,"journal":{"name":"Literatura dvukh Amerik","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68679718","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}