POETICS TODAY最新文献

{"title":"Visual Hybrids as Constitutive Rhetorical Acts: Rhetorical Interplay between Unity and Difference","authors":"Petra Aczél","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824212","url":null,"abstract":"Rhetoric is broadly referred to as the theory and practice of suasory communication enabling humans to participate actively in public. Although traditionally viewed as strongly tied with exclusively verbal persuasion, rhetoric has always extended beyond this limitation. Semiforgotten elements of the ancient faculty prove that rhetoric requires creative visual imagination from both parties (orator and audience) and that the practice emanates from and embeds in visuospatial, sensual experiences. These visual features are combined with the verbal in rhetorical practice resulting in a multidimensional—hybrid—discourse, the main function of which is persuasion. In this hybridity of codes and modes, the primary movement in the persuasive act is connection. This connection relates the person to the world, human imagination to articulation, thoughts to images, and words to pictures. By means of this connection persuasion becomes identification, a constitutive act enhancing the unity of different entities (either human or material). The present essay conceives of rhetoric, and especially visual rhetoric, as a suitable framework to interpret visual hybrids. Here, visual hybrids are understood to be entities that enact the internal rhetorical interplay between difference and unity represented by visual elements and motifs. The article first investigates the concept of ingenium and multimodality to introduce general rhetoric as a holistic framework of human experience and expression that is inherently visual and sensual. Then the paradigms of visual rhetoric are outlined to propose a possible classification of visual hybrids, illustrated by contemporary examples from art and advertising.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"63 10","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139192957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hybridity and the Unifying Space of Painting: Larry Abramson in Conversation with Theolonius Marx","authors":"Larry Abramson","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824240","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824240","url":null,"abstract":"While the drive toward homogeneous and pure visual languages was at the foundation of early twentieth-century utopian modernist art systems, the Dadaist and Surrealist reaction to this utopianism took the form of extreme and often violent hybridity. Marcel Duchamp's 1913 “readymade” of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool is a paradigmatic manifestation of the linguistic hybridity characteristic of post-utopian twentieth-century art. In the 1920s Francis Picabia made paintings constructed of separate and discrete layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual “monster.” Picabia's practice of superimposition was a significant forerunner of prevailing contemporary practices in postmodern painting. In his essay “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” philosopher Fredric Jameson (1991) identifies pastiche as one of the main characteristics of cultural production in the age of postmodernism. Pastiche is defined as a work of art consisting of motifs borrowed from one or more sources, an incongruous hodgepodge of materials, forms, and images. In this age of pastiche, what are the options open to artists—to endlessly quote, imitate, or parody existing images and styles, or to construct a new and significant system of meaning? To discuss the centrality of the principle of hybridity in postmodern art—and in my own artistic practice of the past fifty years—I summoned Theolonius Marx, a fiction of my imagination who helped me handle the dilemmas of conceptual art in the 1970s. In this “conversation,” Theolonius and I ponder how hybridity has placed a challenge to utopian modernist concepts, and what the conditions are for it to thrive today as a relevant and sustainable medium.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"22 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139191478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visual Metaphors: On the Linguistic Structure of Hybrid Creatures in Art","authors":"G. Hagberg","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824184","url":null,"abstract":"Metaphors make possible creative and personally expressive ways of describing the world in a way that exceeds blunt literal description. In this article, the author considers (1) the ways metaphors function, (2) the ways that connotation, association, and implication can enrich and inflect the meanings of our words as we use them, and, finally, (3) the significance that these issues concerning verbal or linguistic meaning hold for our comprehension of parallel forms of meaning in the visual arts. The emphasis is on the artistic representation of hybrid creatures in painting, because where metaphors lead us to see one thing in the light of the other, so with hybrid creatures we can see either or any part of the hybrid in the light of the other part or parts. With some of the similarities between metaphorical speech and visual perception and interpretation identified, I turn to works by Caravaggio, Fuseli, the Parthenon sculptures, Botticelli, Picasso, William Blake, and Hieronymus Bosch.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"53 23","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139188783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Magical Monsters: Hybrids and Witchcraft in Early Modern Art","authors":"Guy Tal","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824198","url":null,"abstract":"Studies of early modern images of witchcraft interpret the motif of hybrid creatures as representations of demonic incarnations intended in part to demonstrate the artists’ inventive prowess and capacity for phantasia. This article broadens the scope of analysis by arguing that the hybrid functions as a prolific site of reflection on the symbolic analogy between art and witchcraft, highlighting the common creativity attributed to the artist and the magician both. A comparative analysis of Italian, German, and Dutch images produced in the long sixteenth century identifies three distinctive aspects of the hybrid: as the offspring of Circe's magic of transformation in the works of Pellegrino Tibaldi and Annibale Carracci, as the figurative expression of witchcraft-associated features in Jacques de Gheyn II's engraving, and as an artistic invention in a theatrical design after Raffaello Gualterotti and an engraved grotesque ornament by Heinrich Aldegrever.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"77 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139191591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Theory of Prose","authors":"David Gorman","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824254","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"27 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139195762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Why Monsters Are Dangerous","authors":"Olivier Morin, Oleg Sobchuk","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824226","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824226","url":null,"abstract":"Monsters and other imaginary animals have been conjured up by a wide range of cultures. Can their popularity be explained, and can their properties be predicted? These were long-standing questions for structuralist or cognitive anthropology, as well as literary studies and cultural evolution. The task is to solve the puzzle raised by the popularity of extraordinary imaginary animals, and to explain some cross-cultural regularities that such animals present—traits like hybridity or dangerousness. The standard approach to this question was to first investigate how human imagination deals with actually existing animals. Structuralist theory held that some animals are particularly “good to think with.” According to Mary Douglas's influential hypothesis, this was chiefly true of animals that disrupt intuitive classifications of species—the “monsters-as-anomalies” account. But this hypothesis is problematic, as ethnobiology shows that folk classifications of biological species are so plastic that classificatory anomalies can be disregarded. This led cognitive anthropologists to propose alternative versions of the “monsters as anomalies” account. Parallel to this, a second account of monsters—“monsters-as-predators”—starts from the importance of predator detection to our past survival and reproduction, and argues that dangerous features make animals “good to think with,” and should be overrepresented in imaginary animals. This article argues that both accounts understand something about monsters that the other account cannot explain. We propose a synthesis of these two accounts that attempts to explain why the two most characteristic aspects of monsters, anomalousness and predatoriness, tend to go together.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"31 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139192075","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"L'idée de la littérature. De l'art pour l'art aux écritures d'intervention","authors":"M. Kahan","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824268","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"1 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139189503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visual Hybrids and Nonconceptual Aesthetic Perception","authors":"Michalle Gal","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824170","url":null,"abstract":"This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are presented with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category.Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality.Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context.Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception's relation to language.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"127 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139187979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How to Build a Hybrid: The Structure of Imagination","authors":"Yeshayahu Shen, David Gil","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10824156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10824156","url":null,"abstract":"How do we conjure up novel and unfamiliar entities in our imagination? Thomas Ward and others have suggested that we do so by deriving such entities from ordinary familiar ones. Hybrids, however, pose a challenge to this view since they are not derived from any one single familiar entity. Nevertheless, we argue here that the construction of hybrid entities is indeed governed by principles forming part of our structured imagination. These principles refer to a set of five abstract schemas, defined in terms of properties such as parts, symmetry, and spatial orientation. These schemas, alongside the absence of a schema, together constitute a schematological hierarchy: humanoid (e.g., man) > canoid (e.g., dog) > carroid (e.g., car) > culteroid (e.g., knife) > arboid (e.g., tree) > other (e.g., sponge). When forming a hybrid out of two or more entities, or parents, the overall shape of the hybrid is selected in accordance with the following three principles: (1) coherence: presence of a schema is preferred to absence of a schema; (2) accessibility: a schema corresponding to that of one of the parents is preferred to some other schema; and (3) height: a schema higher on the schematological hierarchy is preferred to a schema lower on the schematological hierarchy. To test these principles empirically, we conducted a large-scale experiment, in which art and design students were given pairs of words denoting familiar objects and asked to draw images of hybrid entities formed from these word pairs. The resulting corpus of 356 hybrids was found to provide strong empirical support for the above three principles. In doing so, it showed how human creativity is not unbound, but rather subject to substantive cognitive constraints, constituting our structured imagination.","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"52 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139193132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rhythm: Form and DispossessionModernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics","authors":"Ewan James Jones","doi":"10.1215/03335372-10578541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-10578541","url":null,"abstract":"The entrenched divide between meter and rhythm persists despite its unsatisfactory nature—or more accurately, perhaps, because of its unsatisfactory nature. Vincent Barletta's Rhythm: Form and Dispossession and Ben Glaser's Modernism's Metronome: Meter and Twentieth-Century Poetics demonstrate the enduring and novel uses to which a preference for either of the two terms may be put. They richly embody a more general trend within criticism, where treatments of rhythm have tended to be wide reaching and subjective, and considerations of meter rather more narrowly focused and historicizing. At the same time, they avoid some of the more reductive binaries into which these cognates have historically fallen: meter as skeleton, rhythm as body, meter as law, rhythm as variation, and so on. Both represent required reading to anyone interested in how such formal questions might relate to the most pressing questions of our contemporary situation: race, sociality, and the (generative) limits of individual agency.Barletta's monograph opts, as its title suggests, for rhythm. At its heart is a striking contention: generations of critics, emboldened by the disputed Greek derivation of the substantive ruthmós to the verb rheo (to flow), have conceptualized the notion as a temporal phenomenon. But what if we returned to the earlier scattered and fragmentary presocratic formulations of the term, according to which it seemed to mean something more akin to static or frozen or bound shape? When Democritus speaks of the rhythm of the atom, or Aeschylus informs us that Prometheus is enrhythmed to the rock, such usages jar on a modern ear. Yet Form and Dispossession contends that this superseded speculative Greek ruthmós holds significance both for objects in general (which are fixed at a moment of flux), and for subjects in particular (who find themselves bound to a dominating pattern).There is much appeal to such an approach. Barletta offers us an account of rhythm that is formative and primordial, yet which steers clear of the dangerous nativism that has characterized innatist approaches from Nietzsche's Gay Science all the way through to Aviram Attirai's Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (1994). Rhythm, on this more humble and privative account, is not the moment at which self, body, or Volk channels itself, but rather a periodic interruption or relinquishment of self—“dispossession,” as the book has it. In order to establish the theoretical basis for this orientation, Barletta depends on a multitudinous (if rather established) cast of European high theorists, who cumulatively grope toward an understanding of rhythmical surrender: Blanchot, Levinas, Merleau-Pointy, Heidegger, Serres. These in turn enable a remarkably broad treatment of poetry from across time and space: three compressed chapters range from ancient Greece to the early modern Iberian Peninsula to twentieth-century African verse. Enrhythment ties together the Aeschylean chorus's lamentation for ","PeriodicalId":46669,"journal":{"name":"POETICS TODAY","volume":"2011 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}