Aesthetic Worlds: Rimbaud, Williams and Baroque Form

The sense of form that provides the modern poet with a unique experience of the literary object has been crucial to various attempts to compare poetry to other cultural activities. In maintaining similar conceptions of the relationship between poetry and painting, Arthur Rimbaud and W. C. Williams establish a common basis for interpreting their creative work. And yet their poetry is more crucially concerned with the sudden emergence of visible "worlds" containing verbal objects that integrate a new kind of literary text. This paper discusses the emergence of "aesthetic worlds" in the work of both poets and then examines how a common concern with Baroque form unites them in the phenomenological task of overcoming Cartesian dualism

The Cowl - v.23 - n. 9 - Jan 11, 1961

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 23, Number 9 - January 11, 1961. 8 pages

Subcultural and social innovations in the campaign for nuclear disarmament

In times of war and rumours of peace, when ‘terrorism’ and ‘torture’ are being revisited and redefined, one of the things some of us should be doing is talking and writing about cultures of peace. In what follows, I ask questions about the place of culture in protest by considering the cluster of issues around the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) from its founding in London in 1958. I look at instances of (sub)cultural innovation within the social and political spaces CND helped make available during its two high periods of activity and membership: the 1950s (campaigning against the hydrogen bomb) and the 1980s (campaigning against U.S.-controlled cruise missiles). What particularly interests me here is tracing the reticence and tensions within CND to the (sub)cultural practices with which it had varying degrees of involvement or complicity. It is not my wish to argue in any way that there was a kind of dead hand of CND stifling cultural innovation from within; rather I want to tease out ambivalences in some of its responses to the intriguing and energetic cultural practices it helped birth. CND was founded at a significant moment for emerging political cultures. Its energies and strategies contributed to the rise of the New Left, to new postcolonial identities and negotiations in Britain, and to the Anti-Apartheid Movement. In what ways did it attempt to police the ‘outlaw emotions’ it helped to release

Spartan Daily, January 13, 1961

Volume 48, Issue 61https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/4115/thumbnail.jp

Modalités contemporaines du récit biographique : Rimbaud le fils, de Pierre Michon

À travers l’essai biographique que Pierre Michon a consacré à Rimbaud, il s’agit ici de voir comment l’entreprise de raconter une vie d’écrivain se transforme à la fin du xxe et au début du xxie siècle. L’exemple de Rimbaud le fils nous paraît en effet symptomatique des recatégorisations que subit le récit biographique, après son entrée dans l’« ère du soupçon », sur le triple plan du style, de l’énonciation et de la narration. On verra que la biographie, chez Michon, dévie de sa trajectoire, et qu’il y est davantage question de l’impression – au sens propre comme au sens photographique – qu’a laissée Rimbaud sur des générations d’adulateurs et de lecteurs que des circonstances avérées de son existence. Cet ébranlement de l’événementiel, étonnant dans une biographie aussi brève (qui n’est, en ce sens, aucunement économique), fait le lit d’une fictionnalisation notable du propos biographique : des scènes imaginaires voisinent avec des conjectures étonnantes, et l’archive, pourtant rarissime – Michon se contente de répéter ce que tout le monde sait –, sert de fondement à l’invention, quand elle n’est pas elle-même inventée.Using Pierre Michon’s biographical essay on Rimbaud, this study seeks to examine how the enterprise of recounting a writer’s life story is transformed in the late 20th and early 21st century. Indeed, the example of Rimbaud le fils appears to be symptomatic of the re-categorizations of the biography in terms of style, statement and narration, after it entered the “age of suspicion”. The biography, as seen by Michon, is clearly more about the impression (in its literal and photographic sense) left by Rimbaud on generations of admirers and readers, rather than circumstances stemming from his own life. The shattering of the event-based narrative, rather unexpected from such a short biography (that is however not economical in any sense), paves the way for the fictionalisation of the biographical discourse : imaginary scenes are envisioned along with unexpected hypotheses, while archived material, although extremely rare – Michon merely reiterates what is common knowledge – serves as a founding basis for creation, in instances where the archive itself has not been created

Poetry's total scandal:Poets and postmen in Antonio Skármeta’s El cartero de Neruda

The argument put forward here takes Antonio Skármeta's short novel El cartero de Neruda (Con ardiente paciencia) as a theorization of the relationship between poetry and politics, by way of the concept-metaphors (Mieke Bal) that are deployed in the novel. Skármeta stages the public role of poetry through the telling of a story about the poet Pablo Neruda and his postman Mario Jiménez. The relationship between poetry and politics is analysed with reference to Hazard Adams' concept of «the offense of poetry» and Roland Barthes' reflections on the total scandal of language in his essay «Écrivains et écrivants» (1964), here adapted as «the total scandal of poetry». In contradistinction to Barthes, who argues that the total scandal of language is impossible because of the absorption of scandalous language by the literary institution, Skármeta's short novel suggests that the total scandal of poetry is indeed possible when, as in the case of Pablo Neruda, Mario Jiménez and Salvador Allende, poetry becomes a constitutive part of a political project, within which it functions as a reminder of dignity and as the touchstone for political integrity

Tuwim’s Dialogues with Banality

The article examines the relation between Tuwim’s poetry and modern colloquial language. The avant-garde artists for whom in the beginning of the 20th-century art was an elite occupation, treated every-day speech as a mass form of communication. Tuwim’s poetry was frequently criticised for banality. Matywiecki presents the poet as a hero fighting with the demon of commonness. The crucial thesis of the article is that banality which is modified in a creative way says more about the epoch than elitist visions. In his poetry, satire and cabaret work Tuwim transformed triviality into dialog and a common human being into a creative person. Transition of the street talk into original speech is the defence against reducing individual being to cliché which means the fear of 20th-century killing ideologies.Zadanie „Stworzenie anglojęzycznych wersji wydawanych publikacji” finansowane w ramach umowy nr 948/P-DUN/2016 ze środków Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego przeznaczonych na działalność upowszechniającą naukę

Impact de l'incendie de forêt d'août 1990 sur le comportement hydrologique du bassin versant du Rimbaud (massif des Maures, Var, France)

6 tableaux ; 11 figuresDans le bassin versant du Rimbaud, après l'incendie de forêt d'août 1990, le comportement du ruisseau est devenu fortement impulsionnel. La destruction du couvert végétal a favorisé le déclenchement du ruissellement superficiel sur les versants et donc la multiplication de crues violentes. L'impact de l'incendie s'est manifesté pendant plus de deux ans. La revégétalisation du bassin versant a ensuite pondéré la réponse des écoulements aux précipitations. Le traitement à l'échelle annuelle des données du bassin versant du Rimbaud fait apparaître un accroissement des écoulements de l'ordre de 15 % après le feu. Toutefois la stationnarité de la chronique pluviométrique du poste du Rimbaud qui influence de façon déterminante le calcul des précipitations, est loin d'être démontrée. En définitive, il ressort que sur le bassin versant du Rimbaud, qui est constitué de roches très massives et dispose d'une capacité de stockage en eau extrêmement réduite, les conséquences de l'incendie sur les écoulements annuels sont modestes et se situent dans la marge d'incertitude des méthodes utilisées

Re/deconstructing the rimbaud myth: Kerouac and Mallarmé

In 1954, French critic René Étiemble controversially put forward a ground-breaking thesis that exposed a hitherto unrecognised threat to the integrity and rigour of Rimbaud scholarship: namely, that objective evaluation of his poetry was becoming increasingly impeded by the profusion of highly subjective powerful myths about his short, but eventful life. This article has three aims: first, to retrace the origins and lingering impact of the most dominant myths surrounding Arthur Rimbaud –specifically the contrasting myths of the ‘Catholic convert’ and the ‘rebel artist’; secondly, through a comparative analysis of the works on Rimbaud published by Jack Kerouac and Stéphane Mallarmé, to explore the extent to which the Beat author and the Symbolist poet respectively colluded with, or questioned these myths; thirdly, to conclude that Mallarmé’s text emerges as the more balanced and convincing of the two: first, because contrary to Kerouac’s excessive self-identification with Rimbaud, especially through the seductive myth of the rebel artist, it adopts a critical distance that amply fulfils Étiemble’s timely call for a ‘de-mythologised’ approach to this poet as the prerequisite for any accurate assessment of his poetry; secondly, and more broadly, because by portraying Rimbaud as a poet whose literary reputation owes as much to the preconceptions and agendas of outside influences beyond his control than to his intrinsic artistic merits, Mallarmé’s text is equally prescient in its identification of the pitfalls of our modern-day celebrity culture