Pseudo-revolution in Poetic Language: Julia Kristeva and the Russian Avant-garde

Slavic Review ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clare Cavanagh
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Milan Kundera ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Unnatural Death ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The Relationship

It is important to stress that these peculiar pseudo-revolutions, imported from Russia and carried out under the protection of the army and the police, were full of authentic revolutionary psychology and their adherents experienced them with grand pathos, enthusiasm, and eschatological faith in an absolutely new world. Poets found themselves on the proscenium for the last time. They thought they were playing their customary part in the glorious European drama and had no inkling that the theatre manager had changed the program at the last minute and substituted a trivial farce.–Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere (1969)In the preface to her 1980 collection Desire in Language, Julia Kristeva acknowledged her ongoing debt to the pioneering linguistic theories of Roman Jakobson, a scholar who, in her phrase, "reached one of the high points of language learning in this century by never losing sight of Russian futurism's scorching odyssey through a revolution that ended up strangling it." Kristeva's statement takes us in two directions at once, both of which I will explore in this essay: it draws attention to Jakobson's sustaining roots in the avant-garde experimentation in poetic language that flourished in Russia in the early part of this century; and it tacitly underscores Kristeva's own ties to Russian avantgarde theory and practice. For Jakobson, Kristeva has suggested, the brief, febrile period of artistic experimentation that Marjorie Perloff has called "the futurist moment" continued to inform his writing in vital ways long after its unnatural death at the hands of the Soviet state. Certainly Jakobson, like Kristeva, is preoccupied throughout his work— from his exploration of Khlebnikov's "transsense" in "Recent Russian Poetry" to his 1980 study of Holderlin's schizophrenia—with the relationship between abnormal or "trans-normal" language and poetic language that lay at the heart of formalist theory and futurist practice in early twentieth century Russia.

Theory and Practice of the Indeterminate Theatre

1989 ◽  
Vol 5 (20) ◽  
pp. 348-360
Author(s):  
Richard Schechner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
New York University ◽  
Academic Journal ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Don Giovanni ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice

Richard Schechner has recently come full circle back to the editorship of The Drama Review, which he earlier transformed from a quietly respected academic journal into the voice of American avant-garde theatre between 1962 and 1969. By this time, he had also joined the Drama faculty of New York University, where he still teaches, and created the Performance Group, for whom his productions included Dionysus in '69, Makbeth. The Tooth of Crime. Oedipus, and The Balcony. His early advocacy of environmental theatre, celebrated in his book of that name in 1973, developed into his present concern with theatre anthropology, the focus of his recent study. Between Theatre and Anthropology, discussed by Eugenio Barba in NTQ10 (1987). In October 1988 Schechner contributed to the Leicester conference ‘Points of Contact: Theatre. Anthropology, and Theatre Anthropology’, and there Nick Kaye discussed with him the relationship between his practical and theoretical work, its evolution, and the influences upon it–also looking in more detail at his most recent production, a performance combining Don Juan and Don Giovanni.

scholarly journals "(In)distinct Languages": Revisiting the Dualism of Literal and Literary Meaning in Roman Jakobson and Donald Davidson

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Mijatović
Keyword(s):  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Multilayered Structure ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Cascade Model ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Literary Meaning ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
The Relationship

(In)distinct Languages: Revisiting the Dualism of Literal and Literary Meaning in Roman Jakobson and Donald Davidson The paper traces the relationship between the literal and literary language that is found in structuralism and analytic philosophy. The paper’s gist provides a comparative account of Roman Jakobson’s and Donald Davidson’s notions of poetic language and their relation to the general idea of language as it is given in their work. In reconsidering Jakobson’s and Davidson’s arguments, I propose abandoning the dualistic hypotheses of the oppositions between literal and non-literal language, and between literal and literary language. I contend that the notions of first and literal meanings are necessary for other types of interpretation. The dualistic hypothesis requires the cascade model, which displays a bottom-top transition across hierarchically arranged levels of meanings. Instead, I outline the multilayered structure of language with two thresholds: mimetic and semiotic. Therefore, the cascade model should be replaced with the palimpsest model of concurring, merging, and blending layers of meanings. Języki (nie)odrębne. Jeszcze raz o dualizmie znaczeń, dosłownego i literackiego, u Romana Jakobsona i Donalda DavidsonaW artykule poddano analizie relacje między językiem dosłownym a językiem literackim, występujące w strukturalizmie i filozofii analitycznej. W rozważaniach istotna była konfrontacja koncepcji języka poetyckiego Romana Jakobsona i Donalda Davidsona oraz ich związku z ogólną ideą języka, jaką można znaleźć w ich pracach. Rozważając ponownie argumenty Jakobsona i Davidsona, autor proponuje porzucić dualistyczne hipotezy, zasadzające się na opozycji między językiem dosłownym a językiem niedosłownym oraz między językiem dosłownym a językiem literackim. Twierdzi, że pojęcia znaczenia pierwszego i dosłownego są niezbędne w innych typach interpretacji. Hipoteza dualistyczna wymaga modelu kaskadowego, który ukazuje przejście od dołu do góry przez hierarchicznie ułożone poziomy znaczeń. Zamiast tego autor zarysowuje wielowarstwową strukturę języka z dwoma poziomami: mimetycznym i semiotycznym i wskazuje na konieczność zastąpienia modelu kaskadowego palimpsestowym modelem współbieżności, łączenia i mieszania warstw znaczeniowych.

The Newness of the ‘New Biography’: Biographical Theory and Practice in the Early Twentieth Century

Mapping Lives ◽  
2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Marcus
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Directed Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Subject ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Relationship

The dominance of modernist and avant-garde literature in the early decades of the twentieth century directed attention away from certain texts and genres. Biography was one of the genres that underwent transformation. In the 1920s and 1930s, it took new forms, which gave rise to an unprecedented popularity of life-writing. This rise in the popularity of biographies was linked to the perception that they had been reinvented, requiring a new level of critical self-awareness. This chapter discusses biographical theory and practice in the early twentieth century. This biographical dimension crossed national boundaries wherein common biographical tenets were developed. In this period, the concept of ‘new biography’ proliferated. This new concept of biographies was grounded on the relationship between the literary and the scientific, and the importance of the study of the character. In the chapter, the tenets and characteristics of the ‘new biography’ and the ‘new biographers’ are considered. It examines the new equality between the biographer and the subject; the brevity, selection, and attention to the form and unity associated with fiction; the development of central motifs in a life and of a key to personality; and the focus on the character rather than the events.

Misreading Egypt

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Tower Of Babel ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

Ważyk metafizyczny? / Ważyk – A Metaphysician?

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47
Author(s):  
Jerzy Święch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Late Phase ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Self Sufficiency

Summary Adam Ważyk’s last volume of poems Zdarzenia (Events) (1977) can be read as a resume of the an avant-garde artist’s life that culminated in the discovery of a new truth about the human condition. The poems reveal his longing for a belief that human life, the mystery of life and death, makes sense, ie. that one’s existence is subject to the rule of some overarching necessity, opened onto the last things, rather than a plaything of chance. That entails a rejection of the idea of man’s self-sufficiency as an illusion, even though that kind of individual sovereignty was the cornerstone of modernist art. The art of late modernity, it may be noted, was already increasingly aware of the dangers of putting man’s ‘ontological security’ at risk. Ważyk’s last volume exemplifies this tendency although its poems appear to remain within the confines of a Cubist poetics which he himself helped to establish. In fact, however, as our readings of the key poems from Events make clear, he employs his accustomed techniques for a new purpose. The shift of perspective can be described as ‘metaphysical’, not in any strict sense of the word, but rather as a shorthand indicator of the general mood of these poems, filled with events which seem to trap the characters into a supernatural order of things. The author sees that much, even though he does not look with the eye of a man of faith. It may be just a game - and Ważyk was always fond of playing games - but in this one the stakes are higher than ever. Ultimately, this game is about salvation. Ważyk is drawn into it by a longing for the wholeness of things and a dissatisfaction with all forms of mediation, including the Cubist games of deformation and fragmentation of the object. It seems that the key to Ważyk’s late phase is to be found in his disillusionment with the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Especially the poems of Events contain enough clues to suggest that the promise of Cubism and surrealism - which he sought to fuse in his poetic theory and practice - was short-lived and hollow.

Recommended Reading: Nelson Brooks, Language and Language Learning, Theory and Practice. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1960; French for Secondary Schools, Suggested Content and Organization for Four and Six Year Sequences. Pubi, by Bureau of Secondary Curriculum Development, New York State Education Department, Albany, N.Y., 1960; Source Materials for Secondary School Teachers of Foreign Languages, Prepared by M. J. Johnston and E. M. Eaton; J. S. Holton, P. E. King, G. Mathieu and K. S. Pond, Sound Language Teaching. University Publishers, N.Y., 1961; Robert L. Politzer, Teaching French – An Introduction to Applied Linguistics. Ginn & Co., N.Y.RECOMMENDED READING: Nelson Brooks, LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE LEARNING, THEORY AND PRACTICE. Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1960.FRENCH FOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS, SUGGESTED CONTENT AND ORGANIZATION FOR FOUR AND SIX YEAR SEQUENCES. Pubi, by Bureau of Secondary Curriculum Development, New York State Education Department, Albany, N.Y., 1960.SOURCE MATERIALS FOR SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES, prepared by M. J. Johnston and E. M. Eaton. Published by U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Office of Education, Washington 25, D.C. Circular No. 509, Revised, January 1960.J. S. Holton, P. E. King, G. Mathieu and K. S. Pond, SOUND LANGUAGE TEACHING. University Publishers, N.Y., 1961. $5.00.Robert L. Politzer, TEACHING FRENCH - AN INTRODUCTION TO APPLIED LINGUISTICS. Ginn & Co., N.Y., 1960.

1962 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 87a-88
Author(s):  
P. R. Ducretet
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Secondary School Teachers ◽  
New York State ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Education Department ◽  
State Education ◽  
State Education Department ◽  
Source Materials

Critical self-reflection: A performative act 批判的自己内省 ―パフォーマティヴな実践―

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Misako Tajima
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Secondary School ◽  
School Teacher ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
English Learner ◽  
Academic Journal ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
Global Spread ◽  
The Relationship

Autobiographic and narrative research has recently grown in stature in the field of social sciences. Inspired by Asian TESOL researchers’ critical analyses of self-stories, this paper attempts to reflect upon the author’s personal history in relation to English and discuss ways in which she can position herself as both an English learner and a non-native English speaker (NNES) teacher. The self-reflection and discussion is followed by an argument for performativity, a notion drawing on poststructuralism to understand language itself and the global spread of English. This paper, itself a performative act conducted by a secondary school teacher, exemplifies the concept. The non-academic schoolteacher’s very act of writing in an academic journal aims to contribute to questioning assumptions underlying the relationship between theory and practice and to reconstituting the academic fields of applied linguistics and TESOL. 近年、自伝的かつ語りを含む研究が社会科学の分野で活発になってきている。本稿では、TESOLを専門とする、あるアジア人研究者が彼女たち自身の物語を素材として実施した批判的分析に着想を得て、英語にまつわる自己の歴史を振り返り、英語学習者としての、またNNESの英語教師としてのポジショナリティをどこに位置づけるのかという問題について議論する。さらに、この批判的自己内省を経て、言語そのもの、あるいは英語という言語の地球規模的広がりを理解するために、ポスト構造主義の概念であるパフォーマティヴィティについて検証する。なお、本稿これ自体がある高校教師によるパフォーマティヴな実践であることに言及しておきたい。研究者ではなく、一高校教師が学術雑誌に投稿することを通じ、理論と実践の関係性の背後にある前提に疑問を投げかけ、その結果、応用言語学やTESOLという学問分野の再構築に貢献できることを希望している。

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