{"title":"Poem as Song: The Role of the Lyric Audience","authors":"J. Henriksen","doi":"10.2307/1350023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350023","url":null,"abstract":"The article examines the phenomenon of lyric formalism--the view that poems wholly contain their meaning--from cultural and cross-cultural perspectives. It argues that the view presenting lyrics as pure self-contained expressions, not addressed to anyone, is part of a long cultural history that began in Romanticism and that led to the New Critics' formalism. It is culturally specific and must be studied as such. Through a reading of some key Romantic-era statements on the lyric by Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hegel, this article shows the increasingly problematic status of the lyric addressee as a cultural notion. On one hand the addressee was important as the beneficiary of the poet's genius, but on the other hand s/he was neglected as non-essential to the truest form of self-expression. Ultimately the lyric addressee was repressed, though never entirely. Since poems were not regarded as addressing anyone, they were not meant to directly communicate meaning from speaker to listener; meaning was rather generated somehow within the listener. What the listener received, then, was only the form or music of the poem which triggered his own inward responses. Thus thought and music were split off from each other in a way that did not happen in other poetic traditions, like that of Arab poetics. In modern Western culture, poems were divorced from songs in both the popular mind and in high literary theory. Song became regarded as opposed to communication, and the poem as pure thought or text without a performative framework. This segregation of song from poem, music from text, must be acknowledged as culturally specific and belongs to a certain literary period. A glance at poetry within Arabic culture offers other alternatives, where the musical dimension is not contrasted to the textual, but is joined to it. ********** Lyrical formalism--the view that poems are complete aesthetic units that wholly contain their meaning, as a vase contains flowers--is sometimes viewed as if it was imposed on poetry by the Russian Formalists and the American New Critics. There is a common impression that critics like Cleanth Brooks ripped poetry arbitrarily out of its personal, cultural, and historical context and stuffed it into their \"well-wrought urns,\" detached and self-complete. (1) But it may be that lyrical formalism in criticism came to reflect an already developing formalist tendency in literature generally, a tendency towards textual self-containment originating with the Romantics and pushed farther by the Modernists. (2) Reader-response theorist Jane P. Tompkins argues that the modern emphasis on the literary meaning of a text (its self-contained \"message\"), unlike the Classical or Renaissance emphasis on its social effects, implies that the inter-personal relations of author to audience became less important in the modern age. (3) Similarly, orality theorist Walter J. Ong sees the formalist tendency to regard texts as containing their meanings, rather than deliver","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"89 1","pages":"77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80257449","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":"Moving Tropes: New Modernist Travels with Virginia Woolf","authors":"E. Lamont","doi":"10.2307/1350027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350027","url":null,"abstract":"The article concentrates on one of Virginia Woolf's profoundly lyrial novels, Mrs. Dallowav, to question the dominant acceptance of Woolf's British rootedness and lack of wanderlust. Through a close reading and analysis of pertinent passages, the article shows how Woolf was not simply experimenting with forms, but also pushing forward in her tropes movement across borders and travel. Every character in the novel is somehow related to a foreign place. The domestic dimension of this novel, stressed for so long, is problematized to give way to a fresh view of Woolf as more transnational than appears. The article calls on recent works in anthropological and feminist criticism related to boundary crossing to throw light on Woolf's text. The study draws parallels between movement of characters in London and the rhetoric of travel indicated or subsumed in the lyricism of the text. Even in shop windows gazed at by the protagonist in the novel, global relations of power are inscribed, destabilizing the stasis of home and creating metaphoric hybridity. ********** London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet ... Faces passing lift up my mind; prevent it from settling ... --Virginia Woolf All must end upon the Odyssey ... --Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf's profoundly lyrical fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, set in London and focused on a day in the life of one woman and her preparations for a society soiree, is most often interpreted as a thoroughly British, purely 'domestic,' novel. In fact, before feminist recuperations of her oeuvre made waves beginning in the early 1970s, Woolf's novels were valued by many scholars of the modernist period more for their aesthetic experimentation than the way in which they address important social and political issues. In the few sentences John Fletcher and Malcolm Bradbury devote to Woolf in their survey of canonical Modernism, her novels are described as \"exploration[s] both of the aesthetic of consciousness and the aesthetics of art\" characterized by \"a kind of joyous artistic freedom\" to focus on \"form\" (408-09). Beyond an interest in formalist issues, comparisons between Woolf and her Modernist contemporaries--T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ezra Pound and others--have never been extensively drawn. One significant reason for this oversight is the fact that Woolf, living and writing in Bloomsbury, never embraced the wandering, expatriate, \"starving artist\" existence that other Modernists did. Geographical wanderings, critics insist, produced an added dimension to the works of the High Modernist canon noticeably absent from Woolf's life and work. (1) And yet, Woolf's novel is teeming with hidden--or at least largely critically unrecognized--lyrical metaphors of movement and multiple tropes of travel at work within its English domestic setting that frustrate and problematize purely aesthetic readings of the novel. (2) Indeed, every character in the novel is implicitly or explicitly linke","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"4 1","pages":"161"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86834665","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":"Jawanib Mu'asirah fi Shi'r Abi Tammam","authors":"S. Salih, A. Tammam","doi":"10.2307/1350036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350036","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"60 1","pages":"52"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90472983","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":"Ghayn: Divagations on a Letter in Motion","authors":"M. Beard","doi":"10.2307/1350029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350029","url":null,"abstract":"Fascination with the alphabet as an aesthetic construct begins with children, but sometimes it expires with them too. If adult readers remember the hypnotic appeal which the letters once exerted, their sounds and their shapes, the alphabet can become a means to access the aesthetic traditions of a culture, a device to put the eyes close to the text, to trace the verbal texture of a poetic tradition. The letter ghayn, as an example, allows an entry into the specific aesthetic shapes of Arabic and Persian, Turkish and Urdu, through the key words which remain constant as poetic traditions pass through one language community after another. Words that begin with ghayn allow a contemplation of change--both terms for change and terms for the objects of change. Imagery of transformation and metamorphosis, always at the heart of poetic traditions, helps us sketch a phenomenology of poetry, which in many of the traditions using Arabic letters is synonymous with that ghayn-initiated word, ghazal (love poetry). ********** If the alphabet could talk, what would it say to us? It serves long stretches of its time mute, unobtrusive, passively attending to the meanings of the people who use it. We know it is there, but once we have mastered it we also learn to ignore it. It carries our messages for us and beyond that we take it for granted, but like unobtrusive servants noticed only by newcomers or by children, the letters are still there, and right in the foreground. Sometimes a calligrapher makes us notice them again. Perhaps all this time they are mumbling among themselves. (Ouch, that ragged-edged reed pen hurts. Oh great, there's that dull pencil again. Be careful where you put those dots.) And different alphabets might have different things to say. Here is a cunning shape--open to the right like a lower-case c in English, dotted. Drawn with a reed pen, it undergoes a subtle thickening as the arc descends past the midpoint. Inside a word the same letter pulls tight like a knot with two sharp shoulders, the dot still floating above unchanged. It shouldn't be hard for us to follow its tracks, shadow it like a photographer stalking a celebrity, or the narrator of a novel tracking a character as it goes about its work, listening to hear what it is saying. Perhaps it too will tell us stories. And stories lead us inevitably to the story of stories, The Arabian Nights. Ghazala For those of us who feel that the Thousand and One Nights is more than a collection of stories, indeed that it is the ultimate narrative template, the toaster text we can consult to find out what narrative really is, all we need to do to make our case is read the first story Shahrazad tells. This is the story about the merchant who angers an 'ifrit. It combines all the elements that will recur so charmingly in the later stories--the speed and sense of mystery which draw the reader in and the feeling of suspense, combined with unexpected transitions, that give it a surreal atmosphere. The merc","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"1 1","pages":"232"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89291402","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":"Arms Full of Things: Souq Al-Imam Al-Shafei at the Southern Cemetery","authors":"Nur Elmessiri, N. Ryan","doi":"10.2307/1350021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350021","url":null,"abstract":"The stock--padlocks without keys, limbs of broken plastic dolls, half a pair of earrings, used ketchup bottles, an anonymous photo album filled with family photos--of many of the stalls at Souq Al-Imam Al-Shafei, located in the City of the Dead, are not obviously saleable. Selling, one might therefore deduce, is only one function, and not necessarily the most important, of Souq Al-Imam. More gathering place than shopping mall, Souq Al-Imam provides an often needed pretext for passing time. If the passing of time is one defining characteristic of life, then a cemetery is as good a place as any for a market. Items plucked from the rubbish bins of affluent neighborhoods are recycled, given a new life at the City of the Dead. When counted in piastres, money can be thrown away and, in being thrown away, it can prevent things from being discarded. Because it is cheap, the life of objects in this market can be prolonged. To be all but worthless brings salvation. In a cemetery life cannot be other than mutable; to be at home in the Southern Cemetery is to acknowledge this mutability. And to trade in this Cairo cemetery is less a reaching of the end of the line than an exploration of the innumerable sidings that constitute that supposed end. ********** Friday Market in the City of the Dead I am drawn to places offering what people have thrown out, discarded, left behind, or have simply forgotten to remember, objects which for some long outdistanced purposes: chipped sinks, lengths of pipe. hills of washers and fittings, levers, plungers, faucets unable to carry water to anyone, ironwork, spikes and nails, doors and window frames, old radios tuned to frequencies no longer able to be beard, cogs, axles, fly wheels, spindles, pulleys, halves of microscopes, cracked bottles, bent coins, and photographs whose faces now lie beyond names, whose eyes are not fixed on sights we have seen, mounds of old wire, twisted knives and forks, and angular bulks of crank-driven phones which have lost all connections, dismantled old beds and wedding cups, mirrors which when you peer in show only blurred patches of your face shifting in darkness behind peeling silver, clothes which no longer fit the way they once did or simply no longer fit; all lie there naive and artless on old blankets or worn stone, tended with casual indifference; where others may see lives beyond this welter of lost objects, I cannot believe that these are ghosts or that they measure any history's passage, this is merely the entrance to some forgotten temple, these the implements of its mystery and the path along which we are to be led is simply a path of shapes into which we must fit ourselves, or we ourselves are places where these shapes must be seen fit. Tom Lamont I On a piece of sacking no more than a metre square lie two empty Coca Cola bottles (glass), a broken teaspoon, a rusting chain and several pieces of scrap metal. They are neatly arranged and nominally for sale, though it would be difficul","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"3 1","pages":"9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73249104","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":"Signifying the Blues","authors":"R. Switzer","doi":"10.2307/1350022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1350022","url":null,"abstract":"The essay offers a philosophical examination of the blues, a uniquely powerful and influential twentieth-century musical genre. The examination is undertaken chiefly with reference to the works of Theodor Adorno, Angela Davis and Martin Heidegger--and to the insightful writings on the blues by Tom Lamont. Overall, the article is an attempt to come to terms with the artistic significance of the blues--in part, as a challenge to traditional aesthetic positions and biases. The blues, the article argues, \"signify\" not only in having or bestowing meaning, but in the uniquely African-American sense of the term: in a move that \"undercuts,\" that is at once insinuating and subversive, mocking and transformative. The article endeavors to suggest that this transfigurative force--which it argues must be located more in the music than in the lyrics, and not in the music's \"form\" but in its \"matter,\" its elemental corporeity--can be politically, aesthetically, and even ontologically liberating. Born of suffering and oppression, the blues can offer a profound recasting of the lived world and new possibilities of meaning and expression. ********** Pain gives of its healing power Where we least expect it. Heidegger, \"The Thinker as Poet\" The blues is a feeling--something out there, that can come upon you, that can come \"falling down like rain.\" The blues is also music, striking for its simplicity, its power, and its pervasiveness. We have all known the blues: Many of us have also been drawn to reflect in wonder at the songs and music called the blues, at this elemental expression of what might be called the \"lyrical impulse.\" Heidegger's brief words above hint at redemption. Veteran bluesman John Lee Hooker sings it this way: \"The blues is healing.\" The blues somehow touches us at the core of our inner-most suffering and hurt--whether from betrayal or a sense of powerlessness, or at the loss of a friend who had become, in some measure, like the mirror of one's own soul. (l) But the healing power of the blues is not so much about feeling better, if by this one means that a weight is lifted, that one feels \"happy\" instead of \"blue.\" Doubtless it is part of the captivating mystery of the blues experience that it feels good to sing the blues, and to listen; that one is feeling bad, but somehow feeling good about it. As Ma Rainey sings in \"Ya Da Do,\" \"It's a no-name blues, but'll take away your pains.\" Taken away, but not gone; suffering is not forgotten. Ralph Ellison writes: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. (Shadow 78) And indeed, the blues is not an anaesthetic--but a drive towards renewal. In a word, it is about feeling better--in t","PeriodicalId":36717,"journal":{"name":"Alif","volume":"234 1","pages":"25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77472775","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}
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