“Vasile Alecsandri” University

Faculty of Letters
Department of foreign languages and literatures

POETICS

Lect. univ. dr. ELENA CIOBANU

2011 - 2012
 I. INTRODUCTION TO POETICS. DEFINING CONCEPTS

Literature
c.1375, from L. lit(t)eratura "learning, writing, grammar," originally "writing formed
with letters," from lit(t)era "letter." Originally "book learning" (it replaced O.E.
boccræft), the meaning "literary production or work" is first attested 1779 in Johnson's
"Lives of the English Poets" (he didn't include this definition in his dictionary,
however); that of "body of writings from a period or people" is first recorded 1812.
(Online Etymology Dictionary)
The phenomenon of literature was brought to birth with Romanticism.
“The word ‘Literature’ had previously covered various forms of writing, both factual
and fictional; but now it was a signal that the virtues of all writing were epitomised in
one, peculiarly privileged species of it: poetry. Poetry was the condition to which all
the most authentic kinds of writing aspired. ‘Literature’ was a matter of feeling rather
than fact, of the transcendent rather than the mundane, of the unique and original
rather than the socially conventional.” (Eagleton, 12)
Roland Barthes, when discussing the concept of writing/écriture, connects the
birth of literature with the splitting of form and consciousness that happened
towards the end of the 19th century. In classical and romantic periods, consciousness
was not divided, but towards 1850 the writer ceased to be a witness of the universal
and became an unhappy consciousness that was forced to make a choice: either to
adopt or to refuse the traditional forms of his past. Classical literature thus exploded
and, since Flaubert to this day, literature became a language problem. The classical
transparency of language is no longer a characteristic of literature. Literary form is
burdened with itself, it is endowed with a second degree power. The writer must
confront it and assume it, because, if he destroys it, he destroys himself. (Barthes,
Gradul zero al scriiturii, 8)
Literary works are classified into three categories, called genres, each of which
refers to a sum of traits common to all the texts that are included in them: the epic, the
poetic and the dramatic genres.
 However, when students are asked to define literature, they define it mainly in
terms of its effects on them: relaxation, peace, pleasure, escape, dream, being in love,
maintaining hope, curing wounds, improving one’s self, developing creativity, a
sensation of openness, of freedom, a way of getting knowledge, a sort of puzzle to be
solved, recreation of life, interesting techniques, language for its own sake, something
beautiful, the book in our hand, vicarious experience. Some perceive it as art, others,
as an object. Others are more rational, and like the idea of solving problems, of finding
mysteries, of discovering hidden things, others are just fascinated by its aesthetic
quality and are thrilled by it to the point of being hypnotized and not able to explain it.
Some have thought about the experience lived through another, vicarious experience.
Functions of literature
- to imitate (Aristotle): things as they are, things as they were, and things as they
might be
- to divert, to entertain, to please
- to express emotions
- to instruct, to increase knowledge (of a second degree, an intuitive knowledge)
- to create alternative worlds, to offer means of escape from the present
- to create beautiful things
- to improve souls, society etc.: “Beauty will save the world” (Dostoyevsky, The
Idiot) – the idea that art can humanize, civilize, improve, change men and
things for the better; also, the idea that art is the best thing humanity has
created.
But Harold Bloom does not agree to the last point: literature won’t save
anybody and won’t improve any society, he says. Shakespeare will make us neither
better, nor worse, but he could teach us how to listen to our inner voice, how to talk to
ourselves (see Bloom, 57); what the great authors teach us is how to develop our own
self. The literary canon teaches us to use our solitude well, the solitude whose final
form is the individual’s confrontation with his own mortality. (Bloom, 56)
Literature is thus conceived as a way of facing death, which is the supreme
limit of human existence, a way of self-exploring. It is not just an aesthetic object, its
aesthetic nature is given by the sense it gives readers of something fundamental,
mysterious, difficult, which deeply corresponds to something inside themselves.
Oscar Wilde: “All art is quite useless.” (Preface to A Picture of Dorian Gray)
It is not something we possess materially, it is not something that has a
primarily social or economic value, but something spiritually significant. It is not in
keeping with fashion, tastes, temporary scales of judgment, it rather opposes them.
Experience is what we look for in a text, something to thrill us. This takes us as
far back as Aristotle and his theory of the catharsis (Gr. ‘purgation’): “Tragedy
through pity and fear effects a purgation of such emotions”. He may have referred to
the effects of the tragedy that aroused powerful feelings in the spectator especially
when it reached its climax, and then a sense of release from tension came, with the
denouement. (Cuddon, 115).
Terry Eagleton: “Astonishingly, what is in peril on our planet is not only the
environment, the victims of disease and political oppression, and those rash enough to
resist corporate power, but experience itself… modernity … has finally succeeded in
denuding us of ourselves… What we consume now is not objects or events, but our
experience of them (18-20). Modern poetry makes us regain our sense of experience,
through its “intolerable wrestle with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot). “The meaning
of its words is closely bound up with the experience of them.” (Eagleton, 21).
Do we buy experience when we read literature? Is it only a vicarious
experience?
It is experience that changes the reader, and the reader can change it, if he is a good
reader indeed. What is a good reader? A reader who is able to identify the messages
waiting to be deciphered in texts, to perceive their difficulty, ambiguity, multiplicity,
to understand how meanings are communicated. Sometimes, such good readers turn
into professional readers: literary critics, poeticians, theorists.
Prose
c.1330, from O.Fr. prose (13c.), from L. prosa oratio "straightforward or direct speech"
(without the ornaments of verse), from prosa, fem. of prosus, earlier prorsus
"straightforward, direct," from Old L. provorsus "(moving) straight ahead," from pro-
"forward" + vorsus "turned," pp. of vertere "to turn").
 Narrative
c.1450, from M.Fr. narratif, from L.L. narrativus "suited to narration," from L. narrare.
The noun meaning "a tale, story" is first recorded 1561, from the adjective. Narrator
first attested 1611; in sense of "a commentator in a radio program" it is from 1941.
Novel
"fictitious narrative," 1566, from It. novella "short story," originally "new story," from
L. novella "new things" (cf. M.Fr. novelle, Fr. nouvelle), neut. pl. or fem. of novellus
(adj.)). Originally "one of the tales or short stories in a collection" (esp. Boccaccio),
later (1643) "long work of fiction," works which had before that been called romances.
Novelist "writer of novels" is 1728, infl. by It. novellista.
Poetry
c.1384, from O.Fr. poetrie (13c.), from M.L. poetria (c.650), from L. poeta. In
classical L., poetria meant "poetess." Eng. lacks a true verb form in this group of
words, though poeticize (1804), poetize (1581, from Fr. poétiser), and poetrize (1602)
all have been tried.
Poetic
1530, from M.Fr. poetique, from L. poeticus, from Gk. poietikos "pertaining to
poetry," lit. "creative, productive," from poietos "made," verbal adj. of poiein "to
make". Poetic justice "ideal justice as portrayed in plays and stories" is from 1679.
Poet
c.1300, from O.Fr. poete (12c.), from L. poeta "poet, author," from Gk. poetes "maker,
author, poet," from poein "to make or compose," from PIE *kwoiwo- "making," from
base *qwei- "to make" (cf. Skt. cinoti "heaping up, piling up," O.C.S. cinu "act, deed,
order"). Replaced O.E. scop (which survives in scoff). Used in 14c., as in classical
langs.,
for all sorts of writers or composers of works of literature.
The logic of poetic language is different from that of prose; the laws according
to which they function are different. The logic of poetry is opposed to Aristotelian
abstract logic.
Poetics
(1) science about literature: implicit
 - Vinogradov: „the science of forms, aspects, means and devices of the linguistic
artistic creation of structural types and genres”
- poetics and literary criticism – langue (the system of literature) and parole
(particular modes of discourse)
- Valery: a sort of Mendeleev’s table-literature viewed as the table of
imaginative forms, as a pre-existing system waiting to be filled up: „Beautiful
works are the offsprings of their form that is born before them”
- Greimas: „a science of forms”, devices and patterns
- R. Barthes: „poetics is ... a science of the conditions of content, that is to say of
forms ...; its object will not be the full meaning fo the work, but on the contrary,
the empty meaning that supports them all” (Critique et verite)
- Northrop Frye: „there is a totally intelligible structure of knowledge attainable
about poetry, which is not poetry itself, or the experience of it, but poetics.”
(Anatomy ...)
- J. Culler: the purpose of poetics is to „make the implicit explicit” (poetics as a
theory of reading).
(2) Personal ars poetica: explicit

Main classical theories on poetry

1. Plato: Ion; the poet is like a sooth-sayer / magician, like a bee
“… the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain
of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as
well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired
and possessed. The lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing
their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are
inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the
rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their
right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for
they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the
gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower
to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and
there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the
mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is
unable to utter his oracles. Many are the noble words in which poets speak concerning
the actions of men; but like yourself when speaking about Homer, they do not speak of
them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to which the Muse
impels them, and that only; and when inspired, one of them will make dithyrambs,
another hymns of praise, another choral strains, another epic or iambic verses--and he
who is good at one is not good at any other kind of verse: for not by art does the
poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known
how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the
minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy
prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of
themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God
himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us.
… these beautiful poems are not human, or the work of man, but divine and the work
of God; and that the poets are only the interpreters of the Gods by whom they are
severally possessed.”

2. Aristotle: Poetics – the poet as an artisan, as an imitator; the rational view

The main preAristotelian ideas about poetry were formulated by Plato, in some
of his Dialogues (Republic, Phaidros, Ion, Socrates’ Defense, Theaitetos). He speaks
of poetry as divine inspiration, not as craftsmanship. Art is defined as imitation of
reality, the latter being itself a faded copy of the world of eternal ideas. This makes art
a third hand imitation and, therefore, an epitome of falseness, since it prevents man
from learning the truth towards which there is only one way, that of philosophy. In his
Republic, Plato formulates his famous condemnation of imitative art, based on three
ideas: 1. Poetry does not express the ideal world, that is accessible only to philosophy,
but only a faded copy of it; 2. Poetry is amoral and without piety, since it presents the
gods in an unfavourable light; 3. Poetry is rooted in the irrational part of the soul, thus
kindling low passions such as pleasure and pain. Plato considered that the emotions
brought about by the reading of poetry can cause serious mental problems:
 „Căci sunt puţini oameni în stare să-şi dea seama că, în chip necesar, ajungem să
împrumutăm simţămintele altora şi că cel ce-şi hrăneşte capacitatea de înduioşare în
împrejurările amintite greu şi-o mai poate controla cu prilejul propriilor încercări”
(Republica, X, 606 b – trad. Andrei Cornea).

Aristotle’s ideas about poetry and art came as a reply to his former mentor,
Plato. He rehabilitates all forms of art, considering that any form of art is a form of
imitation and that, instead of eluding the truth, they in fact make us come closer to it,
as they endeavour to render things „as they were or are, things as they are said or
thought to be, or things as they ought to be”.
Art must surpass its models, that is, the things it imitates, and the only criteria it
must obey are verisimilitude and necessity. The idea of the poet as imitator is
modified in the sense that the poet is no longer seen as divinely inspired, but a person
with an innate gift, whose writing is a rational activity based on his natural inclination,
according to which he chooses one genre or another.
”Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying
deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from
childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most
imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no
less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. … Next, there is the instinct for
‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore,
starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their
rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry.
The poet should speak as little as possible in his own person, for it is not this
that makes him an imitator. Other poets appear themselves upon the scene throughout,
and imitate but little and rarely.
The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity
imitate one of three objects—things as they were or are, things as they are said or
thought to be, or things as they ought to be.
Again, in examining whether what has been said or done by someone is
poetically right or not, we must not look merely to the particular act or saying, and ask
whether it is poetically good or bad. We must also consider by whom it is said or done,
to whom, when, by what means, or for what end; whether, for instance, it be to secure
a greater good, or avert a greater evil.” (Aristotle, Poetics)
Poetic truth is superior to historical truth; poetry is more scientific than
history, as poetry refers to the universal, while history to the particular; the laws of
necessity and of verisimilitude; poetry does not simply imitate things by copying
them, but it reveals their essence by representing their universal nature.
Romanticism adopts the Platonic view; Shelley in A Defence of Poetry mediates
between the two views; a poem is a succession of inspired moments and of
conventional passages that connect the more beautiful ones.
Edgar Allan Poe – definitive rejection of the Platonic view; denies the power of
inspiration; the necessity of the poem made according to the rules of poetic art: “I
select The Raven as most generally known. It is my design to render it manifest that no
one point in its composition is referrible either to accident or intuition--that the work
proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of
a mathematical problem.” (The Philosophy of Composition); adopts the Aristotelian
conception; followed by Valéry; Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry, Poe – two Aristotelian
intentions: to make the poem express only general, essential truths and to make the
poem the product of an attentive elaboration, achieved according to artistic principles
and rules.
On the other hand, Henri Brémond affirms the magic nature of poetry, its
aspiration to be one with prayer; the poetic nature of a poem is due to that mysterious
reality we call pure poetry; the aim of true poets is the poem-prayer, says Brémond.
The poet expresses the dynamic essence, the vital rhythm of all things that exist
in the world. He captures in words the dynamic heterogeneity of ever-changing
elements, their continual metamorphosis. (Jose Antonio Portuondo)
The category of the lyrical appears as such in the 18th century. Poetry comes to
illustrate a specific autonomous type of prelogical, imaginative, mythopoetic
knowledge, whose profound roots are to be found in man’s emotive life. Giambattista
Vico identifies it with the logic of humanity’s primitive stage; he fuses the mythical
with the poetic. The emotional origins of poetry are discussed in 18th century England;
sensitivity, spontaneous emotive language, passion, exaltation become the trademarks
of poetry in general.
The essence of all poetry is the lyrical perception of the world. The Romantic
fusion between poetry and music. J. S. Mill: poets by nature and poets by culture. The
true poet is the one in whose poems the succession of ideas is subordinated to the flow
of his emotions and is unpredictable.
- the psychologist perspective: the communication function; the poet’s feeling is
reproduced in the poem and transmitted thus to the reader, through emotive
contagion (Romantic England, to I. A. Richards)
- the metaphysical perspective: the revelatory function; poetry is irreducible to
the emotion that caused it, it is a means of intuitive knowledge which is
superior to rational knowledge; the philosopher listens to the poet (German
idealism)
Modernism sought to define poetry as an effect of language, of discourse.

• Plato’s dialogue: Eros as daemon, the one who loves, not the one who is loved;
ugly and poor; between the world of humans and that of the gods; love is the
desire to have beauty, to create beauty through beauty; Eros is the love for a
person at first (this person need not be beautiful at all physically), then of inner
beauty (through contemplation), then of ideal beauty; Eros can help man to
‘remember’ Beauty in its pure form, therefore, it can lead him to the Truth; Eros
is a longing for wholeness or completeness; man loves knowledge because it
leads him to the Good; men are in love with eternity, therefore they want to
create something that will make their name endure through time; most people
prefer to create children with their bodies; a few of them prefer to have a
different sort of children: spiritual achievements, art, philosophy
• Etymology, original meaning
• Harold Bloom and the canon, DWEM and the ‘Holy Trinity’ (class, gender,
race); approaches to literature; political correctness invading the realm of
literature; the canon cannot do social justice, it is only based on aesthetic value;
aesthetic value can be recognized and experienced, but it cannot be shared with
 those who are incapable of understanding its sensations and perceptions; the
individual self is the only method and standard by which one can understand
aesthetic value; to approach Freud through Shakespeare is to clarify and
enhance the text of the former, but to approach Shakespeare through Freud is to
diminish Shakespeare; aesthetic force is what ensures access to the canon, and
it is a blending of mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive
power, knowledge and stylistic exuberance; to surpass tradition – misprision,
anxiety; successful literary works generate anxiety, they are not an antidote for
anxiety; when we perceive aesthetic force we learn how to talk to our self, how
to use our solitude, confront our mortality, how to listen to our inner voice, to
develop the individual self; the canon is the art of memory
• The uncanny, what cannot be explained, but only felt as most profoundly true,
human: a sort of originality that cannot be assimilated, or else it assimilates us
to such an extent that it no longer appears uncanny to us. (31)
• Exploring otherness, trying to decipher the other who is by definition for ever
undecipherable
• Traditional and (post)modernist views
 II. POETICS: FORMALIST AND STRUCTURALIST PRINCIPLES.

Literariness
R. Jakobson (1921)
“The object of literary science is not literature, but literariness, that is, what
makes a given work a literary work.” Literariness was understood in terms of
defamiliarization, as a series of deviations from ‘ordinary’ language; the idea was that
one cannot study literature, but literariness/’literaturnost’: the totality of procedures
through which the material taken from life becomes a work of art; what makes a
text/material into a work of art

Criteria of literariness
• language used for purposes of imitation (making fictions)
• language used in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, that calls attention to itself
as medium (this theory has its roots in classical rhetoric and persists into
modern formalist criticism); literature as a mere abundance of tropes and
figures; the efforts to identify literariness with one particular rhetorical device
have not been convincing.
David Lodge argues neither of these definitions (the fictional and rhetorical)
can stand alone: there is literature which is not fiction (biography), and there is fiction
which is not literature (advertising)
• Foregrounding – the central concept of the Czech school of structuralism
(1930’s); any item in discourse that attracts attention to itself for what it is,
rather than acting as a mere vehicle for information, is foregrounded;
foregrounding depends upon a background of automatized components; the
background of literary discourse is constituted by ordinary language, the
relevant literary tradition, and the linguistic norms established by the work
itself.
• Theme: Hasan thinks that foregrounding needs a motivation, which is found in
the unity of literary texts, a unity of topic or theme that regulates the
development of the discourse without being literally present in it (the aboutness
 of the text); interpretation enhances and explains literary texts, while it destroys
the power of non-literary texts
• The poetic function
Roman Jakobson establishes that one of the six communication functions of a
discourse (referential, poetic, emotive – self expression, conative – imperative
addressing of receiver, phatic – checking channel working, metalingual – checking
code working) is the poetic function, and it is associated with one of the corresponding
six dimensions of the communication process – the message. In poetry the dominant
function is the poetic function, as the focus is on the message itself. In Jakobson’s
terms, poetry results from “the projection of the paradigmatic axis on the syntagmatic
axis.” (i. e. poetry successfully combines form and function) [I like Ike – political
slogan] (Jakobson's theory of communicative functions was first published in "Closing
Statements: Linguistics and Poetics", in: Thomas A. Sebeok, Style In Language,
Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1960, p. 350-377.

1.Context
2. Message
3. Sender ……………………………………….. 4. Receiver
5. Channel
6. Code

• The readers’ decision: Stanley Fish rejects Jakobson’s “message-minus”

definition of literature; he also rejects the ‘message-plus’ definitions that
present literature as a more effective medium of communication than
ordinary language is; for him, literature is “an open category, definable
simply by what we decide to put into it”. While he denies that there is
any difference between literary and non-literary language, Widdowson
distinguishes between ‘text’ and ‘discourse’: “although literature need
not be deviant as text, it must of its nature be deviant as discourse”
J. Culler: “to read a text as literature is to read it as fiction” (but that text
insists on being read as fiction, says Lodge)
 • Fictionality: the ‘deviance’ of literary texts. David Lodge: “literary
discourse is either self-evidently fictional or may be read as such, and
what compels or permits such reading is the structural organization of its
component parts, its systematic foregrounding

• Axiomatically literary texts: there is nothing else for them to be; any text
can be given a literary reading, but not all text will emerge with credit
from such a reading; this does not affect the status of texts that are
axiomatically literary

Harold Bloom: the literary canon: works whose most important characteristic is
aesthetic power, strangeness; Harold Bloom – strangeness as the trademark of
authentic literature: a sort of originality which either can be assimilated or it
assimilates us to the measure in which we don’t find it strange anymore. (31)
Strangeness is given by a sort of aesthetic force, resulting from a combination
of mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge and
stylistic exuberance. The perceiving of aesthetic force teaches us to talk to ourselves
and to get along with ourselves. The canon offers us a good way of using our own
solitude, that solitude whose final form is the confrontation of the individual with his
own mortality. (56) Aesthetic value is based on memory and on pain, the pain of
giving up easy pleasures for difficult ones. It is the outcome of the struggle of texts in
the reader, in language, in class and society. (64)
Poetics is the science whose object is constituted by literary language, and not
by the referent of literature. Until the 18th century the Aristotelian view of art as
mimesis dominated the field of literature. In the 19th century, pozitivism takes
over – the work of art becomes the expression of reality, there is a close connection
between literary works and referents; art must reflect reality – the signified/referent
determinism; interest in the typical. Romanticism had anti-pozitivist positions: art is
not dependent on anything, it is made for its own sake (see Oscar Wilde). In the 20th
century emphasis changes: relativism dominates: interest in the particular, rather than
in the general or the typical; in individual rather than historical existence; fragment,
rather than unity; internal relations rather than external ones; constituents rather than
the object. The humanism that lasted from the 17th century until the 19th gives in to
the anti-humanist view which denies the supremacy of man, of the self/subject.
Modern poetics has its roots in Russian Formalism, Czech Structuralism. The
other two most important critical literary trends were New Criticism and La Nouvelle
Critique.

1. Russian Formalism (1915-1920) which led to structuralism (1930’s)

2. New Criticism (between wars)
3. La Nouvelle critique (1950-60)

New Criticism developed in parallel to formalism and structuralism (I. A. Richards’

ideas)
Structuralism developed Saussure’s ideas and performed the ’phonological
revolution’ (Levi-Strauss) – language is not substance, but relation; meaning is
defined in a negative way, and not in a pozitive manner (meaning is not in the
words themselves, but in their relations to the other words)
La Nouvelle Critique was based on structuralism.

1. Russian Formalism (Tomashevsky, Jakobson, Mayakovsky, Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri

Tynianov, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson 1915) – Moscow Linguistics Circle;
The Formalist movement attempted to discriminate systematically between art and
non-art. Therefore its notions are organized in terms of polar oppositions. One of the
most famous dichotomies introduced by the mechanistic Formalists is a distinction
between story and plot, or fabula and "sjuzhet". Story/fabula is a chronological
sequence of events, whereas plot/ sjuzhet can unfold in non-chronological order. The
events can be artistically arranged by means of such devices as repetition, parallelism,
gradation, and retardation.

The mechanistic methodology reduced literature to a variation and combination of

techniques and devices devoid of a temporal, psychological, or philosophical element.
- poetic language refers to itself, not to an external referent; the signified/referent link
is shortcircuited, is lost
- basic concept: form; the device is an element of form; literature becomes a series of
devices/patterns/forms; the form / content division; the teleological principle of
artistic devices (form is an end in itself); forms: the motif, the plot and the fable, the
character as an epic function; invariables
- it studies literature as a sum of isolated devices, a mechanic conglomerate; that is
why it has been accused that it does not manage to explain the artistic nature of the
artistic work whom it takes out of its contexts and cuts into pieces / devices.

The analogy between biology and literary theory provided the frame of
reference for genre studies and genre criticism. "Just as each individual organism
shares certain features with other organisms of its type, and species that resemble each
other belong to the same genus, the individual work is similar to other works of its
form and homologous literary forms belong to the same genre" (Steiner, Russian
Formalism, 19). The most widely known work carried out in this tradition is Vladimir
Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928).
Roman Jakobson described literature as "organized violence committed on
ordinary speech." Literature constitutes a deviation from average speech that
intensifies, invigorates, and estranges the mundane speech patterns.
Two general principles underlie the Formalist study of literature: first, literature
itself, or rather, those of its features that distinguish it from other human activities,
must constitute the object of inquiry of literary theory; second, 'literary facts' have to
be prioritized over the metaphysical commitments of literary criticism (whether
philosophical, aesthetic or psychological) (Steiner, Russian Formalism 16). To achieve
these objectives several models were developed.
The formalists agreed on the autonomous nature of poetic language and its
specificity as an object of study for literary criticism. Their main endeavour consisted
in defining a set of properties specific to poetic language (be it poetry or prose)
recognisable by their "artfulness" and consequently analyzing them as such.
 Structuralism
Czech structuralism – Prague Linguistics Circle, 1926 (Mukarovsky, R.
Wellek, Jakobson) – founded modern poetics.
The main effort of structuralists has been toward the finding of patterns of basic
and universal laws. Robert Scholes: „it is typical of formal / structuralist thought that it
insists that truth is relative and that it is created rather than discovered... and what is
created is nothing other than the ’structure’...”, a notion „comprised of three key
ideas: the idea of wholeness, the idea of transformation, and the idea of self-
regulation” (Jean Piajet); structure is system, a self-regulating entity all elements of
which are interrelated and „therefore mutually inferable from any significant sample”
Benveniste: „By structure is meant the arrangement of a whole in parts and the
demonstrable coherence of these reciprocally conditioned parts in the whole”;
dialectical relationships among elements that are connected as confrontations of
energies. (e. g. Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story – the same structure)
Firstly, the structure is what determines the position of each element of a
whole. Secondly, structuralists believe that every system has a structure. Thirdly,
structuralists are interested in 'structural' laws that deal with coexistence rather than
changes. And finally structures are the 'real things' that lie beneath the surface or the
appearance of meaning.
Function, a concept employed in structuralist literary theory in two senses:
either as a kind of use to which language can be directed, or as an action contributing
towards the development of a narrative.

Ferdinand de Saussure
In general, the signifier and the signified are the components of the sign, itself
formed by the associative link between the signifier and signified. Even with these two
components, however, signs can exist only in opposition to other signs. That is, signs
are created by their value relationships with other signs. The contrasts that form
between signs of the same nature in a network of relationships is how signs derive
their meaning. As the translator of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, Roy
Harris, puts it:
"The essential feature of Saussure's linguistic sign is that, being intrinsically
arbitrary, it can be identified only by contrast with coexisting signs of the same
nature, which together constitute a structured system" (p. x).
In Saussure's theory of linguistics, the signifier is the sound and the signified is
the thought. The linguistic sign is neither conceptual nor phonic, neither thought nor
sound. Rather, it is the whole of the link that unites sound and idea, signifier and
signified. The properties of the sign are by nature abstract, not concrete. Saussure: "A
sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound
pattern" (Course in General Linguistics, p. 66).
Structuralist poetics may be described as a series of attempts to demistify
literature by showing that literary language, linguistic conventions, „textuality”,
„literariness”, not the imagination or consciousness of the writer, are the constitutive
agents of writing. Poetics seeks to establish the system of literature as the external
reference for the individual works, or to define principles of structuration that operate
not only through individual works but through the relationships among works over
the whole field of literature.
Lotman was the first to express coherently the main thesis operating behind
structuralist thought: the bigger an element of structure and the higher the level it
belongs to, the greater its relative independence within the framework of that structure.
This independence refers to the principle according to which the modification of any
one element entails the modification of all the others; a second important principle
is that the non-actualization of a structural element is equivalent to its negative
actualization. Structuralist poetics superposes many texts in order to eliminate the
specific features of each of them and to retain a number of „generic elements”, of
relations and functions. The elements that poetics operates with are words and
images. Language is not substance, but relation. As soon as a word becomes part of
a literary structure, that word loses its whole freedom, is reduced to a structural
element and is defined by its connections with the other elements of structure. These
relations can be distributional (among elements of the same level) and integrative
(among elements of different levels). The distributional relations are both syntagmatic
(bearing on the possibility of combination) and paradigmatic (bearing on the
possibility of substitution, based upon functional contrasts).
Lotman showed that structuralist investigation entails the identification of the
correlation among elements and their connections to structure as a whole rather
than the examination of various isolated elements. Such an investigation is meant to
view the functional character of the whole and of its constituent parts organized in
symbolic systems of levels and zones (phonetic, graphic, syntactic, semantic etc.).
Literary works are approached as living organisms, as functional structures;
expression and content are interdependent; idea and poetic representation of reality
have a similar structure that is to be studied; content cannot exist or be transmitted
outside the structure used to give it a form/body; the complexity of the structure is
directly proportional to the complexity of the information transmitted; summaries
destroy the structure and convey a different volume of information.
Poetry is meaning constructed in a complex way. Words and sentences acquire
a new semantic value, which is not possible outside that poem. The structural principle
of poetic works – the principle of recurrence, which makes confrontation possible.
Confrontation is realized as opposition (what differentiates elements that are similar)
and as identity (what unites elements that are apparently different).
The structuralist approach does not lead to the description of the
specificity of a given text, but to the identification of its structure, which is defined
as a particular organization of invariables belonging to a general code (of the genre, of
discourse, of the age etc.)
• Claude Levi-Strauss: applying structuralism to anthropology

Jonathan Culler: Structuralist Poetics

The type of literary study which structuralism helps one to envisage would not
be primarily interpretive; it would not offer a method which, when applied to literary
works, produced new and hitherto unexpected meanings. Rather than a criticism which
discovers or assigns meanings, it would be a poetics which strives to define the
conditions of meaning.
 The study of literature, as opposed to the perusal and discussion of individual
works, would become an attempt to understand the conventions that make
literature possible. (viii)
• the question of how linguistic models can reorganize literary criticism
and what their validity is.
Roland Barthes defines structuralism as ”a mode of analysis of cultural artefacts
which originates in the methods of contemporary linguistics” (Science versus
literature, 897, apud Culler, 3)
Linguistics is not simply a stimulus and source of inspiration but a
methodological model which unifies the otherwise diverse projects of structuralists.
(4)
Why should linguistics be useful in studying other cultural phenomena?
Because: 1. social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects and events,
but they are objects and events endowed with meaning, and, hence, signs; 2. they do
not have essences but are defined by a network of relations, both external and internal.
Structuralism and semiology are inseparable (4)
The ’phonological revolution’ (in Levi Strauss’s terms) was effected by the
Czech structuralism (Jakobson) and it provided structuralists with the clearest model
of analysis.
Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen school: ”A priori it would seem to be a
generally valid thesis that for every process there is a corresponding system, by which
the process can be analysed and described by means of a limited number of premises”
(Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, 9, apud Culler, 7) – one of the axioms of
structuralist method.
 III. LITERATURE AND REALISM. FROM REPRESENTATIONS OF
REALITY TO AUTONOMOUS ART

Formalism and structuralism form the basis of modern poetics and of many
cultural and artistic trends that developed during the 20th century. Their beginnings are
simultaneous to the radical transformation of arts that occurred during the last decade
of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century. Yet this development in
linguistic thought did not influence in any way the arts and the thought of that time. It
was only four or five decades later that structuralism really started to penetrate the
linguistic, philosophical, artistic circles in Europe.
However, the painters, writers, musicians manifested themselves at the turn of
the century in ways that deviated, sometimes quite dramatically, from the paths of
their predecessors. The Decadents, symbolists, impressionists of the late 19th century
were followed by the futurist, fauvist, dadaist, surrealist, cubist trends of the 20th
century, and they all tried to counteract the realist drive to depict reality in as exact a
manner as possible, to “keep the mirror up to nature”, which had so heavily dominated
the 19th century. These fundamental changes came about on the background of the
complete changes undergone by the social, political, economical environment of the
period (the two world wars, especially).
In America, the New Criticism “committed to formalist views of literature as an
art of language” (D. Lodge, 57) flourished in universities in the first decades of the
20th century, and, despite its successes in ‘close readings’ of texts, particularly poetic
ones, had a somewhat “improvised” theoretical basis: “I. A. Richards’ categories of
meaning, his distinction between emotive and referential language, a grammar
generally regarded as obsolete by contemporary linguists, and a little traditional
rhetoric.” (idem). The New Critics were greatly influenced by the literary avant-garde
of Western Europe and America, particularly the Pound-Eliot circles, but they did not
have any connection to the structuralists.
Therefore, the artistic revolution that took place in the first four or five decades
of the 20th century can be essentially understood not as a consequence of theories, but
as a natural result of the human effort to overcome the past, to find new forms of
expression, new spaces in which the now different energies should be poured. Before
analysing the modernist and postmodernist paradigms, we turn towards the past, for a
necessary inquiry into what was that the modernists felt the need to rebel against.
Realism
Realism, as dictionaries explain, is a shifty term with many meanings. It may be
better understood in connection with its opposites: the unreal, the unrealistic, the
fantastic, the improbable, the fanciful, the dream world.
We could define it, as far as literature and art is concerned, as the accurate
description of reality, being based on exact documentation, and being concerned with
the here and now, with the environment and movements of the time, and aiming to
achieve authenticity. For realists, meaning had a positive definition, as it derived from
the conviction that words and their referents entertained a type of relationship which
made them completely reflect one another. Language was just an instrument that had
to be used in order to transcribe life as transparently as possible. The claim of
authenticity derived from the conviction, in other words, that the word ‘tree’
transitively represented the real ‘tree’ in the world.
The mirroring of the world, or the creation of fictional worlds that pretended to
be variations of the real one, sends us to the concept of mimesis, or imitation. The
realist writers of the 19th century studied society, in all its dimensions, and man, as a
being whose identity is the result of his moving within a given temporal and spatial
milieu, and tried to give a historical account of reality. The minute depiction of time,
place, space, social relations, gestures, actions, movements, together with the
decisions, emotions, judgements, fears, failures and successes of their characters was
the recipe for the creation of authenticity in artistic texts. Yet this notion has to be
replaced by verisimilitude, as we must not forget that, as real as these literary
universes might feel, they remain products of imagination, and their so-called
‘authenticity’ is only ‘make-believe’, only a convention, an effect of linguistic and
discursive practices peculiar to the episteme of realism.
This may be better understood if we remember the Belgian painter Rene
Magritte who, in 1928-29, exhibited a painting, called La trahison des images (The
Treachery of Images) in which he realistically represented a pipe and bewilderingly
wrote under it: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (This sentence was later analysed by the
poststructuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, as an item indicating the paradox
created by Magritte.) By this, Magritte wanted to suggest that what seems to be real in
a work of art is in fact not so, that it only is a result of a certain mode of creation. If it
were real, the pipe could be used for smoking, but as it is in his picture, it is only an
image of a pipe. However, this happened at a time when realism had long ceased to
preoccupy artists and when it had been already repudiated as obsolete and superficial.
If we take two texts whose topic coincides, one that is literary, and one that is
scientific, we are tempted to recognize the latter as the more realistic, the more
credible one. A dictionary entry about a variety of birds (thrushes) seems more reliable
and more informative than a poem on thrushes, for example.
Turdus philomelos
A brown-backed bird, with a
spotted breast. Distinguished from
Mistle Thrush and Fieldfare by
much smaller size, uniform brown
upper-parts and yellowish-buff
breast and flanks with small
spots… Habitat: around human
habitations, parks, woods, hedges.
Nests in bushes, hedges, ivy,
occasionally in buildings.
(Collins’s Field Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe)

Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,

More coiled steel than living – a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense – with a start, a bounce, a stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
No indolent procrastinations and no yawning stares,
No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab
 And a ravening second.
(Ted Hughes, Thrushes)

When we ask ourselves why we consider the former to be the more true-to-life
of the two, we will have to admit that it is because of the way in which language is
used, according to certain principles and aims. Yet the verisimilitude of a text depends
largely on the abilities of its readers. Some readers may find the dictionary entry more
satisfactory in terms of the ‘truth’ it purports to transmit, some others may prefer the
‘truth’ of the poem as a superior one, as a better way of reaching the mysterious truths
of the world. These two attitudes correspond to two basic epistemological approaches:
one that states that the external world is knowable by scientific inquiry, by the
accumulation of data, by documentation, by definition; and another that suggests that
the world is knowable by intuitive perception, by insight. The former approach
requires referential language and is objective, while the latter uses emotive language
and is subjective. (see Cuddon, 728)

Art imitates life. Characteristics of the realist novel

As Erich Auerbach observes, the beginnings of modern realism are to be identified in
France, in the 1830’ – 1850’s. Realism derives from the works of such novelists as
Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and it was manifested in Europe and Russia through great
writers such as the English Victorians, and the Russian classics (Tolstoy, Gogol,
Dostoevsky). It had been prepared by the anti-Romantic movements in 19th century
Germany, and it was a result of the influence of philosophical ideas such as those
proposed by Auguste Comte (positivism, sociology), which were translated to the
literary field by Hyppolite Taine. Taine is best known now for his attempt at a
scientific account of literature, based on the categories of race, milieu, and moment.
Taine used these words in French (race, milieu et moment); the terms have become
widespread in literary criticism in English, but are used in this context in senses closer
to the French meanings of the words than the English meanings, which are, roughly,
nation, environment, and time. Taine argued that literature was largely the product of
the author's environment, and that an analysis of that environment could yield a perfect
understanding of the work of literature. In this sense he was a sociological positivist
(see Auguste Comte), though with important differences.
The invention of photography in 1839 played a tremendous role in the
moulding of public (and artistic) consciousness, as it convinced people that reality
could be perfectly reproduced, and then, obviously, completely apprehended. Painting
was the art most affected by this invention. The painters of the period tried to capture
reality as realistically as possible. One outstanding French representative of this mode
of pictorial approach is Gustave Courbet. His portraits, as well as his still-lifes or
landscapes exhibit an outstanding ‘vraisemblance’ or verisimilitude.
The characteristics of the realist novel could be summed up in the following:

“Inner and outer history conveyed through a third-person past-tense authorial

mode of narration or the autobiographical-confessional mode” (David Lodge)
"Whatever else it means, it always implies an attempt to use language to get
beyond language, to discover some nonverbal truth out there." (George Levine)
To render life as it is, in all its complexity, and not as it should be (exact
documentation)
Verisimilitude (credibility) – an effect, a convention
The average, the commonplace, the middle classes and their daily struggles
with the vicissitudes of existence
Man’s existence is conditioned by political, social and economical contexts that
are continually changing

The concept of mimesis

We have said that realism is based on the idea of imitation, of mimesis, being
“that willed tendency of art to approximate reality” (G. Levine). The idea of mimesis
originally belonged to Aristotle, but, as Erich Auerbach states, modern realism is
completely separated from the ancient classical notion of mimesis.
Aristotle thought that art should be an imitation of things, but the rules he
establishes for the creation of literature contradict the idea of realism as it was shaped
by 19th century novelists. His separation of styles, according to his classification of
matters and characters into higher/superior/sublime or lower/humble, makes him
consider tragedy a nobler species than comedy or satire, the latter being the space of
manifestation of ordinary beings, who were not deemed capable of serious actions.
Moreover, what is imitated in classical ancient literature, according to Aristotle, is not
the world as we see it, but an abstract thing: tragedy is “the imitation of an action”.
In his minute study of the idea of mimesis, Auerbach analyses its
metamorphosis through time, beginning with Homer and ending with modernist
writers. The introductory chapter, Odysseus’ Scar, is illustrative for the approach of
the whole book. Here, the German professor compares Homer’s Odyssey to the Old
Testament. After elaborate research into the linguistic, semantic, discursive features of
two excerpts, he comes to the conclusion that the Biblical discourse is far more
realistic than Homer’s despite the latter’s rich descriptions of characters, actions,
setting. The alternation of events, past and present, in Homer’s text is meant to please,
to entertain, while the verticality, the simultaneity of planes in Abraham’s story of
sacrifice creates both a foreground and a background, and the possibility of saying
more than it is actually said. The introspection of the Biblical figures gives them depth
and their mysterious relation with an imperceptible God allows them to become tragic,
even though they are all ordinary human beings. Auerbach considers that the Bible is
the first text where we can find the mixture of styles that basically defines the realist
approach to the world. He traces it further in medieval texts, in Renaissance texts, and
in 19th century texts. Classical antiquity, and the writings of the 17th and 18th centuries,
in as much as they conform to the rule of the separation of styles, cannot be considered
realistic. Aristotle himself manifested an intuition of this when he said that a tragic
poet should also be a good comic poet, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet poetically encodes
this blending of sublime and base things that is the human being:
What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in
faculty!... the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet, to
me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me…
 Modernism
Modernism was prepared by Romanticism and its theories of imagination.
Romantic writers believed in the power of the human mind to re-create reality and to
reproduce emotion. The ground-breaking symbolist movement brought about a new
aesthetics which was meant to discard the realist matter-of-fact descriptions and the
representation of things for their own sake. Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal constitutes the
origin of this literary trend, whose interest lay in the ideal, in imagination and dreams,
in spirituality. Thus, they shortcircuited the transitivity formerly linking sign and
referent, creating a much greater distance between them and anticipating Saussure’s
divisions. Their view on reality is similar to Woolf’s, when she writes, in Modern
Fiction, in 1919, after contesting the Georgian writers of the 1910’s in England, that

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a

luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the
beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to
convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever
aberration or complexity it may display…?

Her perspective resembles Henry James’s from his study, The Art of Fiction:

Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense

sensibility, a kind of huge spider web, of the finest silken threads,
suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne
particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the
mind is imaginative—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts
the very pulses of the air into revelations.

As these quotations indicate, one of the reasons why the modernists reacted
against realism was the latter’s artificial, simplistic, external view on life and
existence. The realistic determinism is replaced by the desire to explore the inside of
human existence. The stress falls differently now: the objectivity of the omniscient
narrator is denied in favour of the subjectivity of a self who is alone real through its
perceptions and experience. Writers use the ‘I’ “as an unqualified sign of authenticity”
or “bracket it within another ‘I’, and thus draw attention to the inherent ambiguity of
all human report, and by inference, to the ultimate impossibility of realism.” (D.
Lodge, 41)
Henry James and Virginia Woolf initiate a sort of realism of the mind which
came to be called psychological realism, and whose extreme manifestation took the
form of the stream of consciousness, technically achieved through interior monologue,
from Joyce’s novels. This kind of novels were interested in: the accurate
representation of the inner workings of the mind; the analysis of thought and feeling;
the digging further and further into conscious and subconscious territories.
David Lodge gives us “a kind of identity-kit portrait of the modernist novel”, by
enumerating some of its most common features:

Deviation from preexisting modes of discourse

Experimental or innovatory in form
Concerned with consciousness
Introspection, analysis, reflection, reverie
No real ‘beginning’ and ‘open’ or ambiguous ending
Allusion or imitation of literary models or myths/archetypes; repetition with
variation (rhythm)
Single, limited point of view or multiple points of view
Fluid and complex handling of time
No engagement with the public issues of their time
Elitist, failure to communicate to a wide audience

As Lodge argues, the two traditions, the realist and the modernist one,
continued to co-exist, during the entire 20th century.
 IV. AUTHOR, NARRATOR, CHARACTER, READER

The realist novel, as David Lodge observed, was based on the assumption that
“there is a common phenomenal world that may be reliably described by the methods
of empirical history” (47). An omniscient narrator strove to depict reality so as that
depiction resemble as much as possible what it purported to ‘imitate’. Objectivity was
thus one of the most important values for the poetics of realist fiction, and novelists
made use of all those techniques and strategies that would ensure the verisimilitude of
their texts. All their efforts were directed at giving the reader the impression that the
narrated world was as ‘alive’ as it could be, since it was based on the belief that the
fictional world and the real world were connected directly, and language was only an
instrument that had to be perfected in this respect.
However, with the advent of modernism, and the revolutionary changes in
thought that came with it, the metaphysics of fiction also changed profoundly. Not
only did writers change their view on reality, but they also concentrated on language
as not just a means effacing itself in the process of reflecting the world, but as a source
of literariness or poeticity in itself. The symbolist experiments, particularly
Mallarmé’s, affirmed the idea that it was now time for language to come before the
speaking subject, to perform tasks that were formerly assigned to a human
consciousness. The modernist and postmodernist change of paradigms was very close
to the “dehumanisation” of culture or the “antihumanism” initiated by the linguistic
revolution which reduced the human being to just another element in an abstract
scheme that functions at a higher level than that of any particular human mind. As
Lodge puts it, “structuralism is not a humanism, because it refuses to grant man any
special status in the world” (62). This corrosive disbelief in history and in realism
originates in the Saussurian distinction between signifiers and signifieds, in the
division operated between the world and language. The “I” becomes either “an
unqualified sign of authenticity”, or is “bracketed” within another “I”, and this “draws
attention to the inherent ambiguity of all human report, and by inference, to the
ultimate impossibility of ‘realism’” (Lodge, 41).
 The problem of how meaning is created in literary texts is intricately linked
with the problem of what generates and keeps literary texts together. The realist 19th
century idea of the author as producer, or controller, or manipulator of texts is
challenged to such an extent that the author is even declared dead by such a critic as
Roland Barthes. In his book, S/Z, the French critic distinguishes between what he calls
readerly (lisible) and writerly (scriptible) texts. The readerly text is the traditional
realist one, which is based on logical and temporal order, and is consumed in a passive
way by the readers who follow the continuous line established by the text. The writerly
text is the text which makes readers into producers of meanings, through its plurality
and multidimensionality. Much modern and postmodern fiction can be considered
writerly (Woolf, Joyce, Fowles etc.). The text seen as only a construction of layers
(codes), with “no kernel, no secret, no heart, no irreducible principle” (R. Barthes,
apud Lodge, 63) denies the idea of content and affirms the supremacy of form. Texts
become structures that are infinitely interpretable, that is, “transcribable” from one
code to another. The author’s authority is considerably weakened, as the text appears
as a complex construction at whose knots perspectives, prejudices, judgements, codes,
paradigms, beliefs play their role to various degrees. The author’s consciousness, as T.
S. Eliot also argued, is only a catalyst through which words are brought together.
Depersonalisation, impersonality and objectivity through infinite plurality are among
the supreme values of modernist and postmodernist writing.
The American critic Wayne Booth, in his 1961 book, The Rhetoric of Fiction,
analyses a distinction that has since become one of the most discussed issues of
literary studies: that between what is generally understood by the term of ‘author’ and
what he calls “implied author”. He argues that the real author creates in his text a sort
of “second self” (a term coined by Kathleen Tillotson), not simply an ideal, impersonal
‘man in general’, but an implied version of ‘himself’ that is different from the
implied authors we meet in other men’s works.” This implied author is not to be
equated with the narrator, which is only a creation of the implied author. In order to
explain what he means by this implied author, Booth refers to style, tone and
technique, but considers them too narrowly restricted to the verbal area to be
sufficient. What gives him the
 “sense of the implied author includes not only the extractable
meanings, but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of
action and suffering of all of the characters. It includes, in short, the
intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole; the chief value to
which this implied author is committed, regardless of what party his
creator belongs in real life, is that which is expressed by the total form.”
(569)
Also, the “implied author chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read;
we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he is the sum of his
choices” (570). The concept of the implied author is discussed in connection to the
idea of objectivity (neutrality, impartiality, detachment, impersonality,
disinterestedness, impassibilité), which Booth argues it is impossible to achieve, as
“there is always some deeper value in relation to which neutrality is taken to be good”
(566). Neutrality towards some values should not be mistaken as neutrality towards all,
he says. The problem of ‘sincerity’ or ‘seriousness’ is transferred to another level: “Is
the implied author in harmony with himself?”, that is, are his choices in harmony with
his explicit narrative character? However, these choices do not mean technical choices
for Booth, who thinks that objectivity has no connection to technique in fiction, they
are instead co-terminous with the metaphysics of the text written, with its
epistemes, its system of values and beliefs and stances.
Narrators, as distinct from Booth’s implied author, were much taken into
consideration by literary criticism, and various classifications were thus produced. We
mention the following:
G. Genette:
uninvolved narrator
uninvolved eyewitness
witness-participant
narrator as minor character
narrator as co-protagonist or as sole protagonist

Jonathan Culler:
 explicit or limited narrators
implicit narrators

Wayne Booth:

- self-conscious & naïfs

- undramatized & dramatized
- reliable & unreliable

Booth’s unreliable narrators are those whose values diverge strikingly from
those of the implied author’s (Benjy in Faulkner, all the picaros, the naifs). Frank
Kermode thinks that “all narrators are unreliable, but some are expressly so than
others… They break down the conventional relationship between sequential narrative
and history-likeness, with its arbitrary imposition of truth; they complicate the
message” (Kermode, apud Avadanei, 37).

Implied reader. Narratee

Although Wayne Booth dedicates the most part of his book to the implied
author, he admits the presence of the implied reader, too: “The narrator addresses a
real audience through an implied reader.” This implied reader is not the real reader, but
the reader projected or required by the text itself. It has been given various
qualifications, all of them sending to the reader-in-the-text which parallels the author-
in-the-text: implied or inscribed, encoded or ideal, model or fictionalized, super
reader or putative reader.
It was Gerald Prince who coined the term “narratee” in order to designate this
function that is implicit in the text, this element of the narrative situation. The growing
importance of the narratee for the process of the making of narrative discourse in
modern time derives from the fact that modern fiction has come to concentrate on its
own making: “when criticism gets to be too great a part of the fiction, fiction tends to
narrate its own reception” (Avadanei, 41). The antinovel is the result of the tensions
that arise between authors and readers, novelists and critics, writers and academics.
 The shift in focus in contemporary literary studies from author to reader makes
out of the latter one a re-creator of the novel. This reader is in fact the critic’s alter ego.
The technical changes that are necessary in postmodern writing require a full
collaboration from the reader who not only becomes an integral part of the process, but
is also fictionalized himself (parody – the author becomes the reader and re-creator
within a convention). The transformation of fiction into metafiction , into self-
interpreting texts imply “the amalgamation of the functions of reader, writer and critic
in the single and demanding experience of reading” (Hutcheon, apud Avadanei, 45).

R. Barthes: Writing Degree Zero (1953)

The concept of writing
Barthes begins his description of the concept of writing by establishing its
relations with language and style. Language, for an author, is a horizon, a limit and a
station, a social object by definition. It constitutes a sort of negative background, a sort
of familiarity within which the writer inserts his language. The language of the writer
is the geometrical place of everything an author could not say without losing the
essential signification of his work.
Style, on the other hand, is the decorative voice of an unknown and secret flesh,
it is situated at the border between flesh and the world, the transmutation of a humour.
Barthes underlines that it never is but a metaphor, an equation between the literary
intention and the carnal structure of the writer. What is maintained profoundly in style
are the fragments of a reality absolutely estranged from language. The freshness of the
writer that keeps him above History is given by the authority of his style, that is, the
absolutely free connection between language and its double of flesh. Style is both the
splendour and the prison of the writer, his solitude, his uniqueness.
If language is the initial limit of the possible, style is a necessity that links the
writer’s humour with his language. Yet, between language and style there is place for
another formal dimension yet: writing (écriture). Writing is a function: it is the ratio
between creation and society, literary language transformed through its social
destination, it is form considered in its human intentionality and thus linked to the
great crises of History. It is the choice of the social area within which the writer
chooses to situate the nature of his language.
The possible writings of a certain writer are established only under the pressure
of history and of tradition. The freedom of the writer is limited, because language is
never innocent: words have a secondary memory which is preserved in the new
significations. Writing is thus a compromise between freedom and memory: it is
freedom for one moment, through the gesture of choice, and it is a freedom that
remembers things.
Types of writing: classical (homogeneous), modern (plural), political,
philosophical, revolutionary, marxist, intellectual, classical, romantic, bourgeois,
modern, postmodern, epic, poetic, engaged, historical etc.
Writing degree zero
Can we conceive of a type of writing that be completely neutre? Roland Barthes
asks himself. And he answers by first defining it: such a writing would be a white
writing, a writing that be freed from any submission to any marked order of language.
The indicative is the zero term between the subjunctive and the imperative. Similarly,
zero degree writing is an indicative writing, a writing with no modalization at all. It
does not participate to any judgments and cries, it is made up of their absence. It is
total absence, impassible writing, innocent writing, a sort of primary language which is
equally distanced from living languages and from literary language. This transparent
speech achieves a style of absence which is almost an ideal absence of style (Camus’s
The Stranger). The social and mythical features of language are abolished in favour of
a neutre, inert state of form that is not engaged in history. Writing of this type is the
mode of the author’s new way of situating himself, the manner of existence of silence,
it regains the original condition of classical art: instrumentality. Elegance and
ornamentation are avoided, because they would reintegrate time in the writing.
Unfortunately, as Barthes eventually observes, nothing is more unreliable than
zero degree writing, as automatisms are formed in the very place where freedom could
be found formerly. Indefinite language is thus replaced by a certain type of writing.
The writer becomes the epigone of his primitive creation, society transforms his
writing into a mannerism, and makes him into the prisoner of his own formal myths.
 The death of the author (1968)
Roland Barthes redefines the idea of the author, stating, like Mallarmé, that “it
is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting
impersonality – never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist
novelist –, that point where language alone acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘oneself’”. He
advocates for the depersonalisation of the process of writing, arguing that within
language there can be no talk of persons, only of subjects, and that a subject which is
void outside of the very utterance which defines it, suffices to make language work.
As different from the previous literary analysts, he denies completely both the
writer as real person and the implied writer, as producer of the text. What interests him
is only the time of the utterance, the eternal here and now of the written text and its
refusal to arrest meaning. A text is only united as such when its multiple writings are
collected in the place of the reader: “the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its
destination; but this destination can no longer be personal.” The birth of the reader is
thus grounded on the death of the author.

The author-function: Michel Foucault (1969)

The problem of the author is debated by Foucault first of all by reference to the
relation that should be established between the proper name and its reference: the
relation between the proper name and the person is not isomorphic with that between
the proper name and what it designates. The name of an author has the role of
classification, as it allows the grouping of a certain number of texts, their delimitation,
their opposition to others, the exclusion of still other texts. The name of the author
circulates on the border of the texts, in the division that establishes a group of texts and
its peculiar way of existence.
There are discourses that are endowed with the author-function and there are
discourses that do not possess it. Private letters, contracts, commercials do not have
authors, but literary discourses do. The author-function is characteristic to the mode of
existence, circulation and functioning of certain discourses inside a given society. (43)
There are four basic characteristics of the author-function, as Foucault argues:
1. it is related to the judicial and institutional system that circumscribes,
determines and articulates the universe of the discourse (it is subsequent to the
penitentiary attribution of texts to someone; the possibility of transgression
belonging to the act of writing)
2. it is not uniformly and similarly manifested in all types of discourses, in all
forms of civilisation and at all times (legends, epics, poems enjoyed at first for
their own sake; the chiasmus in the 17th-18th centuries, when scientific texts
began to be accepted as such, and literary texts needed the names of their
authors)
3. it is not the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer, but the result
of complex, specific operations (the writer as the principle of structural unity;
an expressive nucleus; the element that allows the transgression of
contradictions)
4. it does not send to a certain real individual, but it can result in the simultaneous
appearance of several egos, or subject-positions, which can be performed by
different classes of individuals
Character
The beginning of the twentieth century brought with it a major disregard of
character, particularly in structuralist approaches. Their anti-humanist position made
them consider character as an ideological prejudice which had to be exposed as such,
while for the majority of critics before the twentieth century character appeared as the
major structuring force in fiction. The structuralists’ view was paralleled by the
creation of characters that were strikingly different from their 19th century
counterparts. Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Robbe-Grillet created
heroes who were relatively anonymous and refused to become full characters. The
dissolution of character was one important way in which the novel proposed to
undermine traditional expectations. However, it is these very traditional traits of
characters that often help describe the modernist ones. E. M. Forster’s definition of
characters as “word-masses” tries to subsume those realistic traits of characters to the
new paradigm of language serving as model of structuration at the beginning of the
20th century:
The novelist, unlike many of his colleagues, makes up a number of
word-masses roughly describing himself, gives them names and sex,
assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of
inverted commas, and perhaps to behave consistently. These word-
masses are his characters. (Forster, 55)
Hardison’s view is similar to Forster’s:
Hamlet and Macbeth exist only as words on a printed page. They have
no consciousness, and they do whatever the dramatist requires them to
do. The feeling that they are living people whose personalities determine
the actions they perform is an illusion. (Hardison, apud Avadanei, 83)
Character, in structuralist criticism, is defined, at best, as a participant, rather
than a being in its own right. The prominent place that is given to plot, time and space
makes it possible for the character to be understood as a sort of knot of relations,
directly dependent on plot. Vladimir Propp studied characters in the folktale, and his
most important principle is that which states that characters are variable, while their
functions are constant and limited. The quest of his heroes is made up of six main
stages (preparation, complication, transference, struggle, return, recognition) and thirty
one different functions (e. g. absence, complicity, mediation, reaction, movement,
guidance, violation, fight, victory, chase, salvation, exposure, transfiguration,
punishment, marriage) (see Avadanei, 88-89). He also isolated seven roles assumed by
characters in the folktale: the villain, the helper, the donor (who gives magical agents
to the hero), the sought-for-person and her father, the dispatcher (who send the hero
forth to his adventures), the hero and the false hero.
Even though Propp made no claim to universality for his set of seven roles,
Greimas uses it to develop his ‘actantial structure’. (Semantique structurale, 173-6).
His model consists of six categories set in syntactic and thematic relation to one
another:
 destinateur objet destinataire

adjuvant sujet opposant

When Propp’s roles are cast in this form, we have the following diagram:

dispatcher sought-for-person hero

donor and hero villain and

helper false hero
The basic relations between characters are desire (of the object),
communication and participation. Tsvetan Todorov uses Greimas’s model, while
rejecting his typology of actants, and taking (like Greimas) the sentence as his model
of explanation. His proposal is to treat characters “as proper names to which certain
qualities are attached during the course of the narrative. Characters are not heroes,
villains or helpers; they are simply subjects or a group of predicates which the reader
adds up as he goes along.” (Culler, 235).
Yet the process of constructing character, as proposed by Todorov, for
example, is challenged by Culler, who asks essential questions:
…do we, in reading, simply add together the actions and attributes of an
individual character, drawing from them a conception of personality and
role, or are we guided in this process by formal expectations about the
roles that need to be filled? Do we simply note what a character does or
do we try to fit him into one of a limited number of slots? (Culler, 235)
One possible reply to Culler’s questions comes from Northrop Frye, who
sustains that “the stock type which belongs to their [the characters’] dramatic
function… is not the character, but it is as necessary to the character as a skeleton is to
the actor who plays it.” (Frye, 172). Frye’s models (e. g. the impostor, the self-
deprecator, the heavy father, the churl, the braggart, the pedant), worked out according
to the four mythoi of spring, summer, autumn and winter, guide our perception and
construction of characters.
 Roland Barthes, in S/Z, somehow redeems the character from its subordination
to plot and denies that they are only functional elements of the plot or product of
combinations, instead arguing that they are central to narratives: “it may safely be
assumed that there is not a single narrative in the world without ‘characters’, or at least
without ‘agents’. Yet… these numerous ‘agents’ cannot be either described or
classified in terms of ‘persons’”. (S/Z, 256-7). Various definitions of characters as
‘assemblages’ of traits “intersecting the syntagmatic events that comprise the plot”
(Chatman, apud Avadanei, 86), or as composites of characteristics or motifs built
either directly (the presentation of their psychology, appearance, actions, behaviours,
choices, responses, incidents, masks, contexts) or indirectly (speech and dialogue), are
added a significant comment by Barthes, who argues that the name plays a tremendous
role in the making of the identity of a character:
Character is an adjective, an attribute, a predicate… The proper name
enables the person to exist outside the semes, whose sum nonetheless
constitutes it entirely. As soon as a Name exists (even a pronoun) to flow
toward and fasten onto, the semes become predicates, inductors of truth,
and the Name becomes a subject… the semic raw material… completes
what is proper to being, fills the name with adjectives. (S/Z, 190-1)
Among the better known categories of characters, we can mention the
following: fixed and mobile (Tomashevsky); flat and round; static and dynamic
(Forster); stereotypes; stock characters; allegorical and symbolic & full-dimensional,
universal; foils, protagonist/antagonist, collective; Henry James referred to centers
(observers, reflectors, reporters, witnesses, author’s deputies), ficelles (reader’s
friends), and fools; C. Bremond distinguished between agents and patients.
V. NARRATIVE DISCOURSE: THEME. STORY & PLOT

As E. M. Forster argues in his Aspects of the Novel, the most important thing
about a novel is that it tells a story: “we shall all agree that the fundamental aspect of
the novel is its story-telling aspect” (Forster, 40). The basic difference between story
and plot, according to Forster, is that the former feeds the reader’s hunger for what
happens next, while the latter makes him wonder why the actions in the story happen
the way they do. He defines the story as “a narrative of events arranged in their time-
sequence” (Forster, 87). “A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on
causality. ‘The king died, and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then
the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” (Forster, 87) The critic summarizes the difference
thus: “Consider the death of the queen. If it is in a story we say: ‘And then?’ If it is a
plot we ask: ‘Why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of
the novel.” (Forster, 87)
The separation of the two aspects is in fact as old as Aristotle, who defined
mythos as “the arrangement of incidents” (apud Avadanei, 47). The Russian
formalists, about a decade before Forster, and the structuralists who followed them,
pondered on the same story/plot (syuzhet/fabula) dichotomy, only in different terms.
This dichotomy was one of Shklovsky’s two remarkable contributions to the Formalist
model of analysis, the other one being the concept of defamiliarization (ostraneniye,
more literally, ‘estrangement’). The technique of defamiliarisation is one feature that
distinguishes literary language from ordinary common language and it aims at
presenting the world in new surprising ways that change the readers’ perception and
thought. The plot/story distinction separates out the sequence of events the work
relates (the story) from the sequence in which those events are presented in the work
(the plot). Both of these contributions were attempts to describe the significance of the
form of a literary work in order to define its “literariness”.
Tomashevsky, one of the fathers of structuralist approaches to fiction, used the
terms of fable for story, subject for plot and motifs (the smallest narrative units) for
events. In Todorov’s words, “The fable would seem to consist of a collection of
narrative motifs in their chronological sequence, moving on from individual cause to
effect, whereas the plot consists of the same collected motifs, but in the specific order
of occurrence which they are assigned to in the text.” (apud Avadanei, 47-48).
Roland Barthes thinks of plot as an inventory of “the different formal terms
through which an enigma is isolated, posed, delayed and finally resolved.” (S/Z, 26)
Gerard Genette (1983) introduces the triad histoire/récit/narration, diégèse, récit
minimal.
No matter how the elements under discussion here are named, the difficulties in
the study of plot structure, as Jonathan Culler argues, arise from the necessity for the
literary analyst to determine “what shall count as the elementary units of narrative
and investigate the ways in which they combine” (Culler, 205). Propp’s study of
Russian folktales provides some of the most important concepts for the study of plot,
as the Russian formalist develops the idea of function, which is defined as “an act of
dramatic personae, which is defined from the point of view of its significance for the
course of action of the tale as a whole.” (apud Culler, 208) As a result, one cannot
“isolate units of plot considering the functions they serve” (Culler, 210). The desire to
know what comes next which in Forster’s view prompts the reader to go forward and
discover a story is not as important a structuring force as the desire to see an enigma or
a problem solved and to organize sequences so as to make them satisfy the reader’s
curiosity.
What we need to know when trying to isolate a plot is that
For a sequence to count as a plot one must be able to isolate not just
actions, but actions which contribute to a thematic modification. Those
aspects of the movement from the initial situation to the final situation
which help to produce a contrast between a problem and its resolution
are the components of the plot. (Culler, 213)
What is important then in the reconstruction of plot is its subordination to
theme, as the reader organizes the plot “as a passage from one state to another and this
passage or movement must be such that it serves the representation of a theme.”
(Culler, 222).
Typologies of plot go as far back as Aristotle, whose taxonomy relied upon the
vicissitudes of the main character as the supreme criterion. Ronald S. Crane reduces
Aristotle’s categories to three: plots of action (change of situation), plots of character
(change of moral character) and plots of thought (change of thought and feeling).
Northrop Frye also has a character-centered approach to plot, depending on the
“mode” (mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, ironic) defining the power of
action of the hero. To these the four mythoi are added (comedy/spring,
romance/summer, tragedy/autumn, irony-satire/winter), each of them going through
six phases and thus 24 categories result in the end.
Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale marks a shift in focus: plot taxonomies
should be based on form, not on content. In this respect, Todorov analyses the
“grammar” of the Decameron and uses ‘narrative nouns’ (characters), ‘narrative
adjectives’ (traits, situations), and ‘narrative predicates’ (actions). Further on, Roland
Barthes coins such terms as ‘kernels’ (major events that advance the plot) and
‘catalysts’ or ‘satellites’ (minor plot events that could be deleted without disturbing the
logic of the plot). Lotman argues that there are only two primeval kinds of plot: mythic
(no excesses or anomalies, timeless, motionless) and the linear tale about incidents,
news, excesses. The two exist in dialectical interaction, and the result is a “fusion of
scandal and miracle” as “mythologism penetrates into the sphere of excess” (apud
Avadanei, 52).
Generally, plots are approached as variations of the centuries old fundamental
pattern (complication, peripeteia, denouement). Barthes speaks of such stages as
thematization (mentioning the object of the enigma), formulation, promise to answer,
lure, the equivoque, blockage, suspended answer, partial answer and unveiling.
Jonathan Culler speaks about plots made out of actions that destroy, seek to destroy,
seek to restore and restore an equilibrium. Other authors classify the stages of plot
into: exposition, complication/initiating action, rising action, climax, falling
action/anti-climax and conclusion/resolution/denouement.
Plot taxonomies are difficult and often questionable, and the analyst’s task
should not be to do this, since “there are an infinite number of such taxonomies and
metalanguages” (Culler, 224); what he must do instead is to “explicate ‘the language
of plot that is within us’”, “the metalanguage within the reader himself” (idem), taking
into account that making stories is in the nature of man, who has been telling stories in
order “to escape, to remake, to alter…his… past and his… future” (Linda Hutcheon,
apud Avadanei, 52).
Theme
We have seen how the construction of the plot or of the subject is subordinated
to the thematic reconstruction of a narrative. However, as Culler points out, theme
did not constitute a separate object of investigation for structuralists. Theme might be
“the name we give to the forms of unity which we can discern in the text or to the
ways we succeed in making various codes come together and cohere… we could say
that plot is but the temporal projection of thematic structures.” (Culler, 224).
The problem of theme is linked with the problem of how we go from an event
to another by means of generalization in order to make them signify. In Culler’s
opinion, there are two basic operations that could be considered when trying to
decipher the process of identifying theme: empirical and symbolical recuperation
(see Culler, 225). The former is based on causality (and, despite its apparent
conventionality, more difficult to study than the symbolic one), while the latter is
closely related to a rule-governed process whose limits are extremely difficult to
establish. The empirical recuperation gives the reader the possibility of associating a
person with a rich dress to aristocracy or to the wealthy class, for example. The
symbolic code is based on antithesis, which makes the reader correlate it with thematic
oppositions that it might manifest: evil/good, forbidden/permitted, active/passive,
Latin/Nordic, sexuality/purity. The interpretation of oppositions produces what
Greimas calls the elementary structure of meaning: a four-term homology. Yet the
process may go on and on, as “the second pair of terms can serve as the point of
departure for further extrapolation.” (Culler, 226) The symbolic recuperation should
lead the reader from weaker meanings to stronger ones, from more concrete to more
abstract meanings, as “the force of meaning depends on its degree of systematization”
(Barthes, apud Culler, 227). The source of this power towards which symbolic
interpretation moves is the human body, argues Barthes, although his analysis of the
Sarrasine short-story proves that he did not allow the body to dominate the thematic
structure: it is only made into one of the codes that govern the development of the text.
 Tsvetan Todorov, in his Introduction à la littérature fantastique, establishes a
most simple classification of themes that can be identified in literary texts (apud
Culler, 228):
- ‘themes of the I’
- ‘themes of the you’
The former category of themes are concerned with the relation between man
and the world, with perception and knowledge, while the latter connect man to his
desire, and consequently to his unconscious. The basic assumption that sustains this
typology is that literary themes can be conceived as notions of the individual’s relation
to the world and to himself and the adjacent assumption is that our knowledge of
structures and elements that fall within this general paradigm enables us to stop the
generalizing process that leads to the identification of symbols at certain points that
feel the right ones. Greimas speaks of two extremes of symbolic interpretation: the
‘euphoria of heights’ and the ‘dysphoria of depths’, themselves based on the idea that
attraction and rejection, or happiness and unhappiness act as primary evaluative
experiences. Barbara Smith underlines the fact that the poetic allusions to the natural
“stopping places of our lives and experiences – sleep, death, winter, and so forth – tend
to give closural force when they appear as terminal features in a poem” (apud Culler,
228).
Jonathan Culler argues that the extrapolation process that leads the reader to a
definitive statement which feels like the ultimate truth of a certain literary work is a
sort of naturalization that is in its turn challenged by the texts that are not symbolic,
but allegorical:
In the symbolic text the process of interpretation is made to seem natural… a
fusion of the concrete and the abstract, of the appearance and the reality, of
form and meaning. The symbol is supposed to contain in itself all the meaning
we produce in our semantic transformations. It is a natural sign in which
signifiant and signifié are indissolubly fused, not an arbitrary or conventional
sign in which they are linked by human authority or habit. Allegory, on the
other hand, stresses the difference between levels, flaunts the gap we must leap
 to produce meaning, and thus displays the activity of interpretation in all its
conventionality. (Culler, 229)
The interpretation activity, in the case of allegories, is in fact, Culler argues, a
sort of translation of the story into another mode, and understand it as a parable (in this
case what justifies the process is an external authority – The Bible, for example -), or
else it is itself seen as an allegory of the interpretive process itself (when external
authorities are weak or when we do not know which apply). Allegory thus subverts the
symbolic relation by stressing the separateness of the two levels and by making the
potential link between them arbitrary.
 VI. TIME AND SPACE IN NARRATIVE DISCOURSE
In one of his famous works, Roman Jakobson formulated one fundamental
question around which the efforts of poeticians have revolved continuously: what
makes a verbal message into a work of art? In the case of narrative discourse, time and
space figure among those narrative elements whose function is to enhance the
literariness of the discourse, through the particular relationships they are made to
establish with the other elements (theme, character, perspective, story, plot). In this
respect, time and space are given special functions: they offer the background for the
story to unfold, they give opportunities for characterization, they help developing
themes, indicating symbols, and obviously they indicate paths of interpretation,
making up, together with the other elements, an organic whole – the novel or the short-
story itself.
In William Faulkner’s short-story, A Rose for Emily, the reader encounters
significant difficulties in establishing themes, because something that is felt to be
essential seems to remain outside any conceptualizations of communicated messages.
The author develops all those themes, but, at the same time, he inserts, among the lines
of his story, a truth about Emily that is beyond words, a truth that gives us the chance
to get a glimpse of authentic life, with its undefinable mystery. Recreating life is in
fact recreating also those parts of life that necessarily remain undefinable, and this is
achieved, among others, through the invention of spatial and temporal dimensions
acting as clues in the activity of decoding.
The use of time and space is never innocent, they always mean something, and
the literary use of time and space depends on epistemological models that allow one to
think of space either as participant in man’s suffering or as indifferent to man’s
existence, for instance. The anthropomorphism that is involved in this process of
making space signify generates emotions and attitudes that range from sympathy to
hostility. Time and space, as they are constructed in narrative discourse, depend on the
way in which they are conceptualized at one moment or another in history. Time, for
example, has been perceived as either a linear development from a beginning to an
end, or as a cyclical repetition of events endowed or not with a certain semantic gain.
The two concepts are however intricately linked to one another, as phenomenology has
taught us, since time cannot be conceived without the category of space and this works
the other way round, too. The unfolding of time generates space, and this movement is
performed by a subject involved in an existential project. Time and space are thus
intimately connected to consciousness and perception.
Mikhail Bakhtin, when he studied time and space in the novel, took the
phenomenological thesis described above as the basis for his demonstration that time
and space form what he called chronotope:
We will give the name chronotope (literally, “time space”) to the
intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are
artistically expressed in literature… it expresses the inseparability of
space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). We understand
the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature. (The
Dialogic Imagination, pp. 84-100)
What Bakhtin wants to emphasize is that time and space, when they enter
literature, become motivated, acquiring values that indicate their participation to the
created artistic whole:
In the literary chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into
one carefully thought-out concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens,
takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes
charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history
(ibidem, p. 85)
The interconnectedness of time and space is not however indifferent to
hierarchy, in Bakhtin’s view, because he considers time as the more important of the
two categories: “in literature the primary category in the chronotope is time.” The
notion of chronotope is also involved in the construction of character: “The chronotope
as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man
in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic.” (ibidem)
Chronotope can be discussed at various levels: at the level of the plot as a
whole, at the level of the story, at the level of the act of narration, or of the act of
reading. Within the chronotope of a novel, one encounters elements that are
chronotopic and that are subordinated to the general chronotope of the work: motifs.
Some of the narrative motifs that are essentially chronotopic, in Bakhtin’s view, are:
meeting / parting (separation), loss / acquisition, search / discovery, recognition /
nonrecognition. Of these, he chooses to analyse the motif of meeting, as it appears to
him to be the most important in this category, since
in any meeting the temporal marker (‘at one and the same time’) is
inseparable from the spatial marker (‘in one and the same place’). In the
negative motif (‘they did not meet’, ‘they were parted’), the
chronotopicity is retained, but one or another member of the chronotope
bears a negative sign: they did not meet because they did not arrive at the
given place at the same time, or at the same time they were in different
places. (Bakhtin, p. 98)
The motif of meeting is closely linked to the chronotope of the road and of
various types of meetings on the road: “In the chronotope of the road, the unity of
space and time markers is exhibited with exceptional precision and clarity.” (ibidem,
p. 100) One can see the importance of the road for the development of the plot in Tess
of the d’Urbervilles, where, from the very beginning, it is a meeting that precipitates
the subsequent chain of events: that between John Durbeyfield, Tess’s father, and the
village parson who changes dramatically the former’s idea of his own position and
identity (he tells him that he is the descendant of a knightly family descending from
Sir Pagan d’Urberville, a famous knight who came from Normandy with William the
Conqueror).
Bakhtin argued, as we have mentioned before, that the most important category
in the chronotope is time. Other theorists have similar opinions (Paul Ricoeur,
Auerbach). The idea they share in this respect is that temporality is a structure of
existence that is rendered in language through narrativity and that narrativity is “the
language structure having temporality as its ultimate effect.” (Avadanei, 66) The two
notions of synchronicity and of diachronicity play an important role in this argument:
literary works, as similar to musical pieces, differ from paintings or sculptures in that
literary works have starting points and closures, and are perceived in time, while
paintings are perceived simultaneously and impose no beginning or ending. The
diachronic aspect of the unfolding of the plot teaches the reader to read time backward,
because s/he reads the end into the beginning and the beginning into the end. It is what
Ricoeur calls “narrative repetition”: the “recapitulation of the initial conditions of a
course of action in its terminal consequences” (Ricoeur, apud Avadanei, 66).
A lot of theories regarding time in literature have been produced by many
critics, among whom we might mention: Henry James, E. M. Forster, Edwin Muir,
Wayne Booth, Frank Kermode, Gaston Bachelard, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes,
Tzvetan Todorov, Michel Butor, Jean Ricardou. It is useful to mention one
classification of time that belongs to Meyerhoff (Time in Literature). He separates six
types of time that are illustrated in literature (apud Avadanei, 67):
1. time as chronological, objective dimension, as continuous flow;
2. time as subjective, psychological reality;
3. time as dynamic interpretation of the relation between external events and
the formation of the self;
4. time as duration and the temporal structure of memory in relation to self-
identity;
5. time as infinite, eternal (“timelessness”);
6. time as transitoriness, or the direction towards death.
In the analysis of time and space in literary narrative, time needs to be taken
into consideration in connection to tense, and there can be identified two major
narrative tenses: the narrative past and the narrative present. The distinction between
story and plot/discourse leads here to the distinction between the discourse-now (the
current point in time in discourse time – the narrator’s now) and the story-now (the
current point in time in the story time – characters’ now). The same story/discourse
opposition enables the French theorist Gérard Genette to comment on the relations
between discourse-now and story-now and to propose the following types of time:

anterior naration time (narration as prophesy; a future tense narrative

that is situated in the future and recounts events that have not yet
occurred)
 simultaneous narration time (present tense narration, dialogues,
scenes; a present tense narrative whose action takes place at the same
time as it is recounted )
interspersed narration time (journals, epistolary novels)
posterior narration time (the most common one; a past tense narrative
whose events and action units have all happened in the past)

The time of the story or story-time or the time of the histoire (the counterpart
of empirical time in the natural and social human community), which is the sequence
of plot events, is thus opposed to the time of the telling/discours, or discourse-time. It
is this disruption occurring between these two types of time that is one of the means by
which literariness is created. Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily fully illustrates this idea, as
the story is narrated from the end towards the beginning, and the reader must
reconstruct the order of these events, which is a difficult task, given the temporal
disordered displacement of events – the placing of one event after another that in fact
preceded it, for example. This reconstruction must take into account the
clues/instructions hidden in the text and operating the necessary demarcations. The
plot is organized in such a way as it can be imagined to form a loop: its beginning and
ending are identical, as they are connected to the death and funeral of the main
character. The climax comes only after the loop has been completed: the finding of the
silver hair on the bed beside Homer’s decomposed corpse throws some significant
light on the mysterious corners of the story, although this climax does not solve all the
questions one faces when reading this story.
To the time of the story and that of the discourse two other times have been
added by critics: the time of writing and the time of reading. One can also identify a
character’s time. The time of reading appears as a tremendously important one,
considering that
The time of all literary works is not the definite writing time, but the
indefinite reading and memory time. The meanings of the books are
ahead and not behind them – it is in ourselves; a book is not one given
 meaning… but rather a deposit of forms waiting for their meaning.
(Greimas, apud Avadanei, 70)
The reader should become a sort of ‘accomplice’ of the writer, a co-sufferer of
the experiences narrated by the novelist, and his time should substitute the author’s
time. The experience of reading is both a synchronic and a diachronic process, in that
the reader needs to diachronically construct a synchronic text that he is reading
diachronically.
The three main categories which Genette uses to characterize the diverse types
of relations between story-time and discourse-time are ordre/order,
fréquence/frequence, and durée/duration. They correspond to three fundamental
questions regarding time: ‘when?’ (order); ‘How long?’ (duration); and ‘How often?’
(frequency).
Order concerns the fact that narrative time can never parallel narrated time.
The arrangements and rearrangements of the events of a story may occur as normal,
anachronous or achronous sequences. In normal sequences the story and the discourse
have the same order, as “narrative time tends towards the linear representation of
time… and the episodes follow one another in accordance with the irreversible order
of time common to human and physical events.” (Ricoeur, On Narrative, 175) Fiction
is always based on some aberration from linear temporality. One may encounter works
made up of a complex unity of narrative strata connected through thematic recurrence
(Lord Jim), works based on the connection between narrative and memory (Under the
Volcano), and works depending on the ways in which separate narrative threads are
collocated (Eyeless in Gaza).
Anachronies refer to the plunging backward (flashbacks) or forward
(flashforwards) in the time of the story, and are characterized by distance (the distance
between the two fictional moments) and amplitude (the duration of the story inserted
in the digression). They can be:
external (its beginning and end occur before ‘now’)
internal (begins after ‘now’ and crosses the main story)
mixed (begins before and ends after ‘now’).
repetitive (they recall already narrated events)
 completive (they introduce events that were omitted from the primary
story-line)
Internal anachronies can be heterodiegetic (do not interfere with the interrupted
story) or homodiegetic (they interfere).
Achronies allow no coherent relation between story and discourse. The
narrative threads are brought together by spatial proximity, discursive logic, themes
and motifs etc.
Frequency is connected in poetry with the recurrence of sounds and stresses,
but in prose it can also refer to the repetition of images, themes, and motifs. Genette
distinguished between:
o single or singulary story (one discourse of one story moment or event);
o multiple-singulary (several representations, each one of several story
moments)
o repetitive story (two or more discourses for the same event)
o iterative (one discourse evoking several events).
Duration concerns the relation between the time that is necessary to the
reading of the narrative and the time of the story itself. This ratio can be high if
narrated time (story time) is low (little happens) or if narrating time is high (what
happens is told in great detail). The modes of report illustrating the rhythms of
correspondence between reading time and actual time include: abstract and summary
or narration proper (discourse time is considerably shorter than story-time;
acceleration); scene (story time and discourse time are approximately equal or
rhythmically mapped; isochronous presentation); stretch (discourse time longer than
story time; slow-down); pause or break (descriptions, comments, while no action takes
place); ellipsis/omission (a stretch of story time which is not actually represented at
all; discourse halts, while time continues to pass in the story).
Space, just like time, can also be conceived as story space and discourse
space. The former is the space where characters exist and move, their physical
surroundings, the locations where they live their imaginary lives, while discourse
space is the narrator's current spatial environment; more globally, the whole range of
environments in which the narrative situation is located. For instance, hospitals and
psychiatric wards are popular modern discourse spaces (J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in
the Rye, Günter Grass's The Tin Drum). Discourse space is mostly implied and is
the focus of spatial attention. It is the framed area to which the implied
audience’s attention is directed by the discourse, that portion of the total
story-space that is ‘remarked’ or closed upon according to the
requirements of the medium, through a narrator or through the camera
eye – literally, as in film, or figuratively, as in verbal narrative.
(Chatman, 102)
More specifically still, the terms “story-HERE” and “discourse-HERE” can be
used to identify the current deictic point of origin in story space and discourse space,
respectively.
• story-HERE The current point in space in story space; functionally, the deictic
point of origin for deictic expressions such as here, there, left, right, etc., often
used in register with the physical position of an internal focalizer
• discourse-HERE The current point in space in discourse space, equivalent to
the physical position of the narrator.
Story-HERE and discourse-HERE in conjunction with story-NOW and
discourse-NOW identify the story's current deictic center, i.e. the origin or zero point
of the text's spatio-temporal co-ordinate system. As Ronen (1986; 1994) has pointed
out, any description of space invokes a perception of space: apart from the reader's
imaginative perception, this is either a narrator's perception, or a character's
perception; both can be either actual perception or imaginary perception. For this
reason, fictional space is evidently strongly correlated to focalization.
Most important among the linguistic clues to spatial perception are expressions
that signal the 'deictic orientation' of a speaking or perceiving subject (representing the
current 'deictic center') - on the most basic level, expressions like near and far, here
and there, left and right, up and down, come and go, etc. Significant oppositional
spaces are city vs. country, civilization vs. nature, house vs. garden, transitional space
vs. permanent space, and public space vs. private space. All these spaces are culturally
defined and therefore variable; often, they are also very clearly associated with
attitudinal stances and value judgments.
 Methodologically, the most promising approach towards the semantics of
fictional space is to gather the isotopies correlating deictic expressions, spatial
opposites, and value judgments, and to identify the propositions that link the common
semantic denominators involved. What makes an inquiry into the semantics of literary
space so promising is the fact that spatial features can significantly influence
characters and events. This is often referred to as the ‘semanticization’ or semantic
charging of space.
Robert Lidell identifies the following types of setting:
1. the simple, utilitarian, low-keyed setting, minimally necessary for the
action and generally with no emotions involved in it (Jane Austen’s
novels)
2. the symbolic setting, which entertains a tight relation with the action
and which in fact becomes the action itself (e .g. tempestuous
happenings in tempestuous places, like the marshes in Great
Expectations)
3. irrelevant setting (the landscape does not matter and the characters
ignore it altogether), with a subtype of ironic setting (in contradiction
to and even mocking at the character’s feelings)
4. the inner landscapes – “the countries of the mind” (James Joyce)
5. kaleidoscopic setting (rapid shiftings from the world of the mind to
the world outside, like in Woolf’s novels)
The crisis in the novel that happened at the beginning of the twentieth century
involved, among others, a particular attitude toward time and space which favoured
space over time. J. Hillis Miller speaks of the spatialization of time which he identifies
in Eliot’s poetry as a “perpetual present” in which “the simultaneity of parts is
guaranteed by the fact that past, present and future exist at once for the imprisoned
ego. The reader must hold all the images of a poem in his mind at once, and set against
the others in order to apprehend the full meaning” (apud Avadanei, 78).
The spatialization of time in fiction is achieved through a network of motifs
that are continuously reiterated, or through a pattern of movements back and forth in
time that shortcircuit the linear chronological order of events. This new conception of
time has come to be related to the idea that language itself seems to be rather
spatialized and vertical than horizontal and successive. The use of the very words
“structure” or “pattern” are a proof of this fact, as they are spatial terms applied to
something that used to be understood in terms of chronology. J. Hillis Miller explains
that
The change from an infatuated movement forward to a detached seeing
of the past is also a change from time to space. Detachment spatializes
time, freezes it into a fixed shape… the narrator sees all moments in time
as simultaneously present, juxtaposed side by side in a spatial design.
The movement in orientation from future to past is a transformation of
time as it is lived from moment to moment into the spatialized time of a
permanent destiny. (Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy… 197-198)
Famous representations of space are Hardy’s Wessex or Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha, and yet the contemporary tendency is to make space absolute by
annihilating it through intertextuality, mainly.
 VII. POINT OF VIEW, PERSPECTIVE, FOCALISATION IN
NARRATIVE DISCOURSE
The notion of point of view, approximately synonymous with such concepts as
‘perspective’, ‘angle of vision, ‘stance’, ‘focalisation’ always involves two dimensions
(see Genette):
A subject/focalizer – the subject whose perception orients the
presentation
An object/the focalized – what the focalizer perceives
Focalization is tightly interconnected with the narrative levels, defined by
Genette through their relations to what he calls diégèse (the spatio-temporal universe
designated by the récit/plot/discourse) ordered by Genette as follows:
The extradiegetic level (outside the story)
The diegetic level (the level of the story itself)
The hypodiegetic level (stories told by characters inside the story)
The concept of diegesis, combined with that of narrator and his viewpoint
results in this typology of focalization:
o Intra-diegetic (narration comes from inside the text)
o Extra-diegetic (narration comes from outside the text)
o Hetero-diegetic (the narrator is not a character in the story)
o Homo-diegetic (the narrator is a character in the story)
Auto-diegetic (the narrator is the protagonist)
The various terms by which theorists have referred to narrators are based on the
narrator’s position towards the narrated events and actions: involved/uninvolved;
eyewitness, witness-participant, narrator as minor character, as co-protagonist or as
sole protagonist; dramatized/undramatized (Wayne Booth); conscious/unconscious;
covert/overt, reliable/unreliable (W. Booth) and so on. The latter distinction has been
challenged by such a theorist as Frank Kermode, who argued that
All narrators are unreliable, but some are more expressly so than others;
the more unreliable they are, the more they can say what seems
irrelevant to, or destructive of, the proprieties. They break down the
conventional relationship between sequential narrative and history-
 likeness, with its arbitrary imposition of truth; they complicate the
message. (apud Avadanei, 37)
One also needs to make the distinction between narrative voice (always
outside the story), and vision, which combines the perceptual, the conceptual (world
view) and the interest points of view (the place or situation to which the narrative
stands in relation). Voice is related to narrative mood, which depends on ‘distance’
and ‘perspective’.
According to the degree of persistence, focalization may:
o remain fixed throughout the story (James’s What Maisie Knew)
o alternate between two predominant focalizers (Fowles’s The Collector)
o shift among several focalizers (Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury)
Point of view is closely linked with what Jonathan Culler calls “narrative
contract”, that is, the relation established in the act of reading between the narrator of a
text, the things narrated and the way in which they are narrated. In fact, the process of
making a text signify is also a process in which point of view becomes one essential
means of “naturalization” (the discovery of the message(s) of a text), since we should
always remember that “every sentence is both a statement and an enunciative act.
However much a text strives to be pure story in Benveniste’s terms, it will still contain
features that characterize a particular narrative stance.” (Culler, 198-9).
Point of view is a convention that helps the reader understand or “recuperate” a
text, not only when this text is the product of an omniscient narrator or of a subjective
one, but also when the narrator seems to be absent. Modern and postmodern novels
which are, in Barthes’s terms, “writerly”, are so inasmuch as they prevent the reader
from answering to the question of who is speaking. As Jonathan Culler puts it, “the
most incoherent text could be explained by assuming that it is the speech of a delirious
narrator.” (Culler, 200) That is why
in cases where we should find it difficult to postulate a single narrator
we can appeal to that modern literary convention, made explicit by
Henry James and the many critics who have followed his lead, of limited
point of view. If we cannot compose the text by attributing everything to
a single narrator we can break it down into scenes or episodes and give
 meaning to details by treating them as what was noticed by a character
who was present at the time (Culler, 200-1).
According to Susan Snaider Lanser, point of view operates on three different
levels:
1. as content, it communicates attitudes, responses to a represented world, and
certain ideological constructs;
2. as aesthetic method, it reflects the system of artistic and literary conventions
through which culture allows social reality to be transposed into artistic text;
3. as structuring device, it may express the evasion of the discourse from
censorship, or the obscuring of censorship, that is, “the response to the
conscious and unconscious effects of ideology on the production of
consciousness and on its aesthetic verbalization.” (apud Avadanei, 40)
John Austin’s (How to Do Things with Words) elaborations on illocutionary,
locutionary and perlocutionary speech acts enables one to consider three types of
relations in connection to the idea of point of view: status – linked with the
narrator/speaker/speech act relationship, and with authority, competence, credibility,
sincerity, skill etc.; contact – the narrator/audience relationship, the physical
(graphics, paper qualities) and psychological channels; stance or real perspective – the
speaker/message relationship which depends on the manipulative dimension of
language that makes a text appear as cold, distant, evasive, passionate, ironic,
depressing etc. (see Avadanei, 40)
Stance corresponds in fact to focalization, whose facets are explored by Genette
on three levels: the perceptual, the psychological and the ideological ones. The
perceptual dimension implies the difference between spatial conceptions of point of
view (from the bird’s eye view to the limited observer) and temporal ones (external
and internal). The psychological aspect refers to the distinction between cognitive
elements (restricted/unrestricted knowledge of the narrator) and emotive elements
(from objective, neutral, uninvolved narrators to subjective, involved, ‘coloured’
narrators). Here we should add that emotion can be rendered in the narrative text either
indirectly, through external manifestations, or directly, through interior monologue or
through an external focalizer who has access to the consciousness of the focalized, the
latter being indicated in texts by such markers as ‘he thought’, ‘he felt’, it seemed to
him’, ‘he knew’, ‘he recognized’, or by modal expressions: ‘apparently’, evidently’,
‘as if’ etc. The ideological aspect sends us to the norms of the text, manifested either
as the ideology of an authoritative focalizer, or as a plurality of ideologies represented
by several narrators who may or may not be opposed to one another. (Genette, see
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics, Taylor &
Francis, 2002, pp. 70-85)
The various degrees in the distance between narrators and their narratives, or
the degree of absence/presence of the narrator in the narrative are translated into two
main types of narration: third person narration (or authorial narration, corresponding to
heterodiegesis) and first-person narration (correspoding to homodiegesis).
Third-person narration is produced by an authorial narrator who possesses
God-like abilities: omniscience and omnipresence. Genette refers to it as
heterodiegetic narration plus zero focalization. Subgenres of this type of narration can
be: figural narration, in which the story’s events are seen through the eyes of a 3rd
person reflector/internal focalizer, a covert narrator, (heterodiegetic narration plus
dominant internal focalization); reflector mode narration, in which the story is seen
through the eyes of either a 3rd or a 1st person reflector character. A figural text
presents a restricted/distorted view of events, it begins in medias res, having no or little
exposition, and it offers a direct view into the psychology of a character. Four typical
elements that signal a figural story are these: incipits using pronouns with no reference
and articles expressing familiarization; the ‘slice of life’ story – a novel whose time is
restricted to a very brief episode in a character’s life; epiphany; mirror trick – a means
by which the physical characteristics of a reflector figure are revealed without using
overt narratorial description.
First person narration is subjective and limited, and often implies the
distinction between narrating “I” and experiencing “I” or that between “I” as
protagonist and “I” as witness. Homodiegetic narration generally aims at presenting an
experience that changed the narrator’s life. Its subgenres may include fictional
biographies and initiation stories/Buildungsromans.
 There can be identified other four categories of narrative situations which are
peripheral to the types we have mentioned above:
We-narrative – homodiegetic narrative with a group of collective
internal focalizers
You-narrative – a special form of both homodiegetic and heterodiegetic
narratives, in which the narrator is referred to in the 2nd person; this
narrator can be either the narrator’s experiencing self, or another
character from the homodiegetic world, or a character in a heterodiegetic
world
Simultaneous narration – it resembles journalistic writing and interior
monologue; the experiencing self and the narrating self overlap; the
narrator doesn’t know the end of the story; it is a homodiegetic narration
in which the narrator tells a story that unfolds as he/she tells it
Camera-eye narration – it includes texts that read like transcriptions of
recordings made by a camera; the purely behaviorist representation of
events; neutral types of heterodiegetic narration
Dorrit Cohn takes consciousness/subjectivity as one crucial element in the
classification of narratives and she comes to a typology of basic techniques of
rendering consciousness:
1. Psycho-narration (omniscient description, the most indirect one; a
character’s consciousness is only rendered by the narrator’s
discourse)
2. Quoted monologue (a character’s interior monologue revealing
his/her mental discourse)
3. Narrated monologue (a character’s mental discourse is presented in
the guise of the narrator’s discourse; free indirect speech or indirect
interior monologue)
All these classifications may not work as very effective critical tools in modern
and postmodern novels, since in many of them the distinction between subjectivity and
objectivity often collapses, and the transition between narrative levels is discreetly
transgressed, so that the reader no longer can rely on any certainty regarding distances
between outside and inside, container and contained, higher level and lower levels,
narrating subject and narrated object. One sentence from a postmodern novel by
Christine Brooke-Rose, Thru, reads disturbingly challenging: “Whoever you invented
invented you too.”
 VIII. THE CONCEPT OF THE LYRIC. IMITATION, EXPRESSION
AND CREATION

There may be two basic ways in which one can conceive some definition of
poetry: 1. one may approach it from the standpoint of literary criticism and come up
with a ‘scientific’ arid definition which may even discourage readers not very much
accustomed with the critical jargon; 2. one may view poetry from the perspective of a
reader who loves the experience of poetry itself and who feels alienated when one tries
to capture the mystery of poetry in the restrictive limits of a definition.
Literary critics and poeticians obviously prefer the former type of definition, as
they need to express their judgments in a very general, abstract manner that is
supposed to explain the mystery of poetry as a whole. Poets themselves, when they
define poetry, refer particularly to their own reading experiences, to their own interests
and idiosyncrasies. Here are examples of both these ‘classes’ of definitions:

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm
me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that it is poetry. Is there any other way?” (E. Dickinson)

“Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” (R. Frost)

Poetry is meant to “replace the facile beauty of death by another beauty.”

(V. Mayakovsky)

Poetry is “an irrational eruption”, the “paranoic interpretation of reality.”

(A. Breton)

Poetry is “an utterance which is not heard, but overheard” (J. Stuart Mill)

“The poetic activity is an adventure of the operating spirit that, by being its own
 spectator at the same time, balances its own high poetic tension by meditating
on
its own activity.” (Hugo Friederich)

“Poetry is a way of stretching the resources of language beyond their ordinary

power, in order to communicate what language seems unable to communicate.”
(J. Korg)

The diverse ways in which poetry is defined proves the difficulty of the task
and even if we feel that each of them is right in some way, that each of them expresses
a truth that can stand on its own in many cases, we also feel unable to choose any one
of them as the complete, definitive description of poetry. As Jorge Luis Borges argues,
the one who attempts at explaining poetry is just like Saint Augustine facing the
problem of time: “What is time? If nobody asks me, then I know. If they ask me, then I
don’t know.” Borges underlines here the intuitive nature of understanding that is
responsible for the encounter with poetry and without which all theoretical statements
become futile, because if one does not grasp poetry intimately, emotionally,
personally, if poetry does not move that reader in any way, no mathematical definition
will help him/her unlock the gates leading to poetry. That is why Walt Whitman
sounds most convincing when he says that “no definition that has ever been made
sufficiently encloses the name of Poetry; nor can any rule or convention ever so
absolutely obtain but some great exception may arise and disregard and overturn it.”
Having taken into account that there must be a degree of skepticism in every
attempt at understanding and defining poetry, the students of literature should
nevertheless become aware of at least a number of issues that have been under critical
debate and that have been of considerable help in the analysis of poetry.
One of the first things to be mentioned about poetry is linked to its beginnings
and its historical evolution as a literary genre in itself. Aristotle mentions poetry in his
Poetics, but he does not mean it in the sense that we do nowadays. He thinks of it as
epic poetry, as different from the higher literary form of tragedy and from the lower
forms of comedy or satire. When he discusses Homer, he praises him because he
knows his place in the economy of his work, that is, he knows how to become
invisible, how to disappear behind his text and be a true imitator, instead of always
affirming his individuality, the latter alternative being something condemned by the
philosopher in other writers. The Aristotelian doctrine of mimesis came to dominate
the field of literary criticism for almost 18 centuries.
Yet during the 18th century, the classical conception of poetry as an imitation of
a feeling or of human actions is challenged and finally rejected, as other new ideas
begin to govern human thought and enterprise. The advent of pre-Romanticism in
England and the Romantic movement constituted a cultural environment in which the
lyric genre could be born as a separate genre, and could now form a triad together with
the much older dramatic and epic genres.
Etymologically, ‘lyric’ comes from ‘lyra’, as in ancient times poetry was
accompanied by a song played on a lyre. The thinkers of the 18th century begin to
meditate on individuality and on a type of approach to reality that is opposite to the
former intellectual approach that took reason as its supreme basis. The philosophical
and artistic mutations throughout the 18th century lead to the consolidation of the
notion of the lyric, which is almost always equated with lyric motifs and with the idea
of a subject spontaneously and naturally expressing his most intimate feelings, fears,
emotional fluctuations. Previously, such literary productions had also existed, but they
had not been subsumed to any generic notion, as the category of the lyric had not yet
been invented. The names under which such poems had circulated varied from century
to century and from country to country: melikos, lyrikos (ancient Greece); carmina
(ancient Rome); canzoni (medieval Italy); carme (medieval France); ode, sonnet
(Renaissance).
G. B. Vico is one of the 18th century philosophers who, in his very influential
work, La Scienza nuova, argued that poetry has chronological priority over prose,
since humanity, at its primitive beginnings, could only think and express itself by
means of a mythopoetic imaginative activity. Even though he equates “logica poetica”
with the logic peculiar to the primitive stage of development of humanity, and
considers that “poetic” is synonymous with “mythical”, he is very important in that he
explicitly and implicitly contradicted the traditional doctrines about poetry (poetry as
ornament and transmission of intellectual truths, poetry as an object of pleasure, poetry
as artifice, as ingenious, but superfluous exercise). Poetic logic is given the primordial
place in the development of language, writing and thought: Vico considered that man,
before he can integrate the world in intellectual categories, he integrates it in emotional
categories. Metaphor comes before prose. Language and poetry are gradually seen to
have an emotional origin. The importance of individual perception considerably grows
and the lyric is gradually associated with sensitivity, emotive spontaneous language,
passion, pathos.
These ideas are strengthened by the works of English empiricists, of the
physiologists of the French Enlightenment and those of Jean Jacques Rousseau. The
great English and German Romantics discover interior individuality, and the
imaginative powers of the spirit. “Senzaţia de libertate pe care o aduce cu sine această
descoperire este atât de violentă, că toate avatarurile poeziei postromantice … îşi
găsesc de fiecare dată explicaţia în încercarea de a da individualităţii un nou chip, o
altă coerenţă, o motivaţie, un scop.”(Crăciun, 308) [This discovery brought about a
sensation of freedom that was so violent that all the avatars of postromantic poetry
always find their explanation in the attempt to give individuality a new face, a new
coherence, a motivation, a purpose.] However, individuality as a central notion in
poetry was to last only until the beginning of the 20th century, when the self as the
center of discourse was a notion that was questioned and even denied altogether.

Poetry as expression and communication

Towards the end of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century,
poetry comes to be synonymous with the category of the lyric. A doctrine of art as
expression now develops, on the basis of both previous theories and contemporary
ones. Longin, William Jones, Edmund Burke are some of those who played an
important part in the rejection of the ancient doctrine of art as imitation and in the
establishing of a new one: that of poetry as a ”powerful animated expression of human
passions, of joy an pain, of love and hate, of admiration and anger.” (William Jones,
apud Matei Calinescu, 24). The lyric becomes the new poetic norm and the entire scale
of values is reversed: what in antiquity was seen as a sign of superiority (imitation) is
now seen as a sign of inferiority. These new changes in thought also produced theories
that connected the three genres to the three stage of human life. In this respect, Victor
Hugo, in his Preface to Cromwell, writes that ”Poetry has three ages, each of them
corresponding to an age of society:... primitive times are lyrical, ancient times are epic,
and modern times are dramatic.” (Hugo, apud M. Calinescu, 29). Schopenhauer
considers that the lyrical attitude is a characteristic of youth, while the pleasure of
telling stories is peculiar to old age. Ernest Bovet, at the beginning of the 20th century,
associates the lyrical with youth, the epic with maturity and drama with old age. These
associations are always debatable and imply very subjective judgments on the part of
their authors.
The chronological priority of the lyric is essentially important in the sense that
it eventually turned into aesthetic priority. The lyric is not only the origin of poetry,
but also its essence and finality. The other genres begin to be described as exterior to
the sphere of the poetic (see Calinescu, 30). The supremacy of the lyrical is thus
established, despite the fact the German idealist philosophers (Schopenhauer, Hegel)
continued to place poetry on a position that was inferior to prose and drama, as it was
characterised by a greater degree of subjectivity which subverted the rational
trajectories of thought.
In England, at the beginning of the 19th century, the Romantic poets boldly
proclaimed that ”Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its
origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads,
Wordsworth) P. B. Shelley, in the same way, writes that ”Poetry is the record of the
best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds... Poetry redeems from
decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” (A Defence of Poetry). The latter part of
this quotation draws attention to another view that concerns the nature of a poet. He is
seen as an inspired being, who is able to ”participate in the eternal, the infinite and the
one”, to unveil the hidden beauty of the world and to make the others feel ”sweet
sounds” with which he ”cheers his own solitude.” The Romantic conception of poetry
and the poet reminds one of Plato’s dialogue, Ion, in which poets appear as inspired
beings speaking only when they are possessed by the divine power:
 For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by
art, but because they are inspired and possessed. …they, like the bees, winging
their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and
winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been
inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him… they do not
speak of them by any rules of art: they are simply inspired to utter that to
which the Muse impels them, and that only; … not by art does the poet sing, but
by power divine.
Yet it was also the Romantic poets who underlined the role of imagination in
the creation of poetry. Among them, Coleridge particularly developed, in his
Biographia Literaria, a theory of artistic imagination, or “second imagination” (it was
clearly differentiated from primary imagination, which had a largely metaphysical
meaning). He made the famous distinction between fancy and properly creative
imagination. The former is based on memory, volition, association and choice: it is
that “aggregative and associative power” that is distinct from imagination or “the
shaping or modifying power”. This distinction continues the previous one between
genius and talent: genius means creation, organicity, spontaneity, intuition, while
talent means ingenious reproduction, associative mechanics, submission to the rules of
reason. The concept of imagination is closely knit with that of organicity, as
Coleridge thinks that imagination ensures the unity of the poetic work in which the
parts and the whole are in a dialectical relation with one another. The organic logic
Coleridge inaugurates will be developed later by E. A. Poe. For Coleridge, the logic of
poetry is the logic of organic imagination which manages to unify contraries and to
harmonize indissolubly the parts and the whole.
The exaltation of imagination as a supreme human power will be followed,
towards the end of the 20th century, by such views as those belonging to Terry
Eagleton, who argues that imagination was a necessary advent in an age that was
“increasingly governed by an ethic of selfish individualism” and that “this quirky,
enigmatic, somewhat fragile power… was a form of compensation for our natural
insensibility to one another.” He goes on to argue that “acts of imagination are by no
means always benign” and that “there is nothing creative in itself about the
imagination which launches wars as well as volumes of poetry” (Eagleton, 23-24).
This is the postmodern relativization of concepts whose borders are no longer stable,
strong and dependable. Yet, the fact that imagination also produces weapons meant to
kill does not deny its quality of redeeming the human heart. Imagination, in both its
negative and positive aspects, is the only means we have to push us forward, which
does not mean that it is the only ingredient that turns a creative product into a
masterpiece.
If we go back now to the doctrine of poetry as expression, we can infer two
main functions of poetry, depending on what is expressed and communicated to the
reader. On the one hand, poetry had a communicative function, as it tended to
reproduce the poet’s emotion, by a sort of emotive contagion, into the reader’s soul
(this is the psychological view); on the other hand, poetry had a revelatory function,
as it made its readers perceive some superior inexpressible truth situated in the
unknown essential zones of the spirit. The latter function turns poetry into a means of
knowledge superior to rational means. German idealist philosophy adopted this latter
view (Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Herder); the philosopher can never discover what the
poet can, and, as Novalis said, poetry was considered “the truth that the intellect
cannot touch.”

Poetry as craftsmanship
We have said that the Romantic view on poetry can be, to some extent, linked
with the Platonic image of the poet as an inspired being. This view is violently
attacked and rejected by Edgar Allan Poe, in his Philosophy of Composition (1846):
Most writers – poets in especial – prefer having it understood that they
compose by a species of fine frenzy – an ecstatic intuition – and would
positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at
the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought.
He views the poet particularly as a maker completely aware of the creative
process that underlies the production of the poem. When he refers to his famous poem,
The Raven, he claims that
 No one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition
– that the work proceeded step by step, to its completion, with the
precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.
He describes the choices he makes in terms of length, tone (melancholy), theme
(“I designate Beauty as the province of the poem”; the combination of beauty and
sadness – the death of a young loved woman as the most melancholy themes of all),
refrain (“Nevermore”), sound, climax, locale and he also explains how the narrative of
the poem suddenly turns, towards the end, through metaphor, into a poetic rendering of
“mournful and never-ending remembrance”.
In his other essay, The Poetic Principle, he connects poetry to music and
defines it as “the rhythmical creation of beauty”. The logic of the creative process is
completely rational, but its finality is to provide a purely spiritual experience. If the
poet searches lucidly, pathetically to achieve poetic state, poetry does not express, but
creates Beauty. The function of poetry is no longer to communicate or establish an
emotional communion or even to transmit some knowledge, but to display its own
process of creation as tension, as an ascending movement towards the objective and
inaccessible absolute. The poet must work language so as it may be able to suggest this
absolute.
Poe initiates a trend in poetic thought according to which poetry is the effect of
linguistic transformations, or a spectacle of language, and which will later lead to
symbolism, to the avant-garde and futurist, surrealist movements, to the so difficult
postmodern poetry that sometimes almost cares nothing for the reader who wants to
see it as a transmission of a comprehensible message. Perhaps the message of
postmodern poetry is that poetry exists for its own sake, as a game of language that
should be enjoyed as such and whose semantic effects depend on contextual,
subjective and changing perspectives.
 IX. POETIC “I” AND ITS MASKS. POETIC MEANING

The poetic I / voice

The poetic I should not be confounded with its poetic voices / masks/ veils/
avatars/ personae. It represents that textual entity which generates a certain poetic
discourse and whose identity is mainly of a linguistic nature. It is only a ”paper being”,
a being created in and through language, living in the text as a grammatical character.
Catherine Fromilhague stresses the fact that the ‘I’ of lyrical discourse is
une image poetisée, aussi distincte du moi de l’auteur que le ‘tu’ des
apostrophes en poésie l’est de n’importe quel allocutaire precisément
identifiable … une construction qui résulte d’une expérience personnelle
transformée en acte essentiel. Le caractère essentiel de cette instance est
particulièrement marqué dans la forme de l’adresse au lecteur.1
This transformation of personal experience into essential act, we think, entails
the circumscribing, the touching of that deep, pure self which is at the origin of a
particular poetical discourse.
This self which produces the discourse does not appear explicitly in the text, it
is manifested through the masks /avatars /veils /personas it chooses to ‘wear’, through
the way of structuring visions /images, through the voices it adopts in order to
communicate itself. As compared to its masks, the poetic ‘I’ is much more stable,
although we could not speak of an identity established once and for all. The poetic self
assumes its provisional identities according to the purposes it might have at one
moment or another. This ‘I’ also changes, evolves, and we might trace its evolution
and attempt to define it by studying its masks, their relationships with one another, the
types of relationships created, their recurrence or disappearance, their hierarchy. (e. g.
self/voice in Great Expectations; in Lady Lazarus; in The Raven; in The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock; Caesar and Cleopatra).

1
A poeticized image, as distinct from the I of the author as the ‘you’ of apostrophes in
poetry is from any precisely identifiable co-locutor… a construct which results from
the transformation of personal experiences into essential acts.
 I. A. Richards, the father of New Criticism in America distinguished in The
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), between two types of language: the ‘referential
language’ of science and the ‘emotive language’ of poetry. His main idea is that “we
may either use words for the sake of the references they promote, or we may use them
for the sake of attitudes and emotions which ensue.” Further, the scientific use of
language is concerned with correctness of reference and with logical connections and
relations of references to one another, while in poetry “logical arrangement is not
necessary” (Essays, 112)
This is linked with his semantic perspective on language, derived from the
behaviourist psychological theory of Pavlov and Watson. Together with Ogden, he
designed a “Triangle of Interpretation” (The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with C.
K. Ogden in 1923):
Idea (reference) [unicorn]
Image (significance)

direct, reciprocal, code

reversible rel.

Symbol (word) indirect, Referent (real object)

signified questionable, signified
unicorn arbitrary, often absent rel. ?

Poetry is very little concerned with the right part of the triangle, what interests
poets is the relationship established between the two extremes of the left part. The link
between idea (the signified) and the referent is shortcircuited in favour of the one
between the signifier (word, symbol) and the signified (idea, notion).
This happens because the priorities and functions of poetry are of a different
nature. Throughout time, the functions of poetry have varied greatly:

• To imitate nature in producing similar effects (classical Greece)

 • To express and communicate the emotions of the poet (Romanticism)
• To create beauty through the working out of a special rhythm meant to
reach the essence of humanity (Poe)
• To present things instead of describing them (Yeats, Imagism)
• To recuperate a lost mythic language
• To return to the origins of language in order to purify it and to resuscitate
it, to save it from its deadness
• To suggest things, to create allusions (Symbolism)
• To realize the secret true correspondences among the things of the world
(Baudelaire)
• To set imagination free from any constraints whatsoever
• To react against any sort of dogmas
• To revolt against language itself (avant-garde, anti-poetry)
• To scandalize, to oppose conventionality, common sense, to unsettle
order (Futurism, Dada, Surrealism)
The characteristic traits of the poetic self result from these views on poetry,
adopted by various poets or poetic schools: melancholy, wonder, anger,
despair, revolt, destructiveness are but a few of the psychological states
expressed or created in poetic texts.

Poetic syntax
Syntax (syn + taxis = putting together) is not simple juxtaposition. There is not
only a horizontal syntax, but also one on the vertical (rhyme syntax included here).
The poetical use of syntax is translated in fact into a fight against syntax, especially
against the inflexibility of English syntax. Syntax should be linked with Mukarovsky’s
notion of dynamic semantics (the meanings given by the various possibilities of
combination among words), which is different from that of static semantics (the
meanings words have when taken in isolation). The meanings of words are coloured
by the meanings of the words with which they are related in a poetic text, either
horizontally or (especially) vertically. (Shakespeare: Dawn in russet mantle clad;
Sylvia Plath: “a walking miracle”; “worms like sticky pearls”).
“The possible effects of using syntax for poetic purposes are already obvious: to
slow down our movement from one word to the next and thus to intensify our
perception of the individual words, to create ambiguities, to reorganize meanings.”
(Avadanei, 70).
John Cage: endless combinations of the same number of words.
e. e. cummings: destroying correlations altogether:

Anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.
(Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town)
Edwin Morgan: paratextual elements have to be associated with breaking
syntax: Message Clear.
 X. POETIC LANGUAGE & POETIC DISCOURSE

The relationship between language and discourse corresponds to the linguistic

distinction between langue and parole, that is, between the abstract system of rules
governing the construction of sentences/texts and the concrete realization of this
system in a given text, either oral or written, produced by a speaker/writer. Language
is the means by which we produce texts. Texts become spaces of discourse
manifestation. In a given text one or more discourses can become manifest. The
elements which transform a text into a discourse are:
1. The presence of a subject and of an object/addressee whose identities are
signaled by deictic elements (deixis – pronouns, verb tenses, modalisation);
2. The intention to persuade the listener/audience/public/other to do something;
social finality;
3. Different types of argumentative strategies meant to manipulate the other;
3. The attitude of the subject towards the facts he uses and towards the
audience;
4. A certain cultural episteme/model on which the attitude and the strategies of
the speaker are based.
Poetic discourse is that discourse which is produced by a poetic I (who is
different from the biographical, real self of the writer/speaker) whose main objective is
to create a text organized according to certain artistic rules, through which to
communicate complex messages of an aesthetic nature to a reader/receiver, by means
of poetic language. The criteria by which we identify a language as poetic have varied
along centuries, according to the cultural paradigms which have dominated societies at
one time or another.
According to Jan Mukarovsky, poetic language interferes with the other strata
of language, while it opposes them through its intrinsic aesthetic finality. He speaks of
the aesthetic function, which means that attention is concentrated on the linguistic
sign.
In the same way, Roman Jakobson establishes that one of the six
communication functions of a discourse (referential, poetic, emotive – self expression,
conative – imperative addressing of receiver, phatic – checking channel working,
metalingual – checking code working) is the poetic function, and it is associated with
one of the corresponding six dimensions of the communication process – the message.
In poetry the dominant function is the poetic function, as the focus is on the message
itself. In Jakobson’s terms, poetry results from “the projection of the paradigmatic axis
on the syntagmatic axis.” (i. e. poetry successfully combines form and function) [I like
Ike – political slogan] (Jakobson's theory of communicative functions was first
published in "Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics", in: Thomas A. Sebeok,
Style In Language, Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1960, p. 350-377)
Poetic language has been mostly defined by opposition to the language of
prose. The two have one element in common: their fictional character, but they differ
from two other points of view:
1. The lyrical dimension (subjective enunciation, problematic identity of the
subject, no external referent, no representational function);
2. The formal dimension (versification) (R. Zafiu)
I. A. Richards, the father of New Criticism in America distinguished in The
Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), between two types of language: the ‘referential
language’ of science and the ‘emotive language’ of poetry. His main idea is that “we
may either use words for the sake of the references they promote, or we may use them
for the sake of attitudes and emotions which ensue.” Further, the scientific use of
language is concerned with correctness of reference and with logical connections and
relations of references to one another, while in poetry “logical arrangement is not
necessary” (Essays, 112)
What makes a text poetic?
1. The way in which it uses language: stylistics
2. The literary conventions it is based on: prosody, intertextuality, imaginary
content, expression.
Language is the material of poetry, but linguistic analysis is not enough for us
to define the specificity of poetry. Poetry uses the linguistic microstructures in order to
build its own macrostructure. There is no definitive criterion which could be used to
separate poetic texts from non-poetic or “poetic” texts. Jakobson argues that the
frontier between the poetic and the non-poetic is extremely unstable. There is nothing
in poetry which did not exist before in language, and, on the other hand, there is
nothing in language which could automatically create poetry (Manolescu, 17).
Jakobson’s analogy: poeticity is a textual component which transforms the text in the
same way in which oil transforms the entire taste of a dish. Yet poeticity is not
something anterior to the poem, it is intrinsic to it. We must follow the other way:
from the poem to the language, from the poetic macrostructure to the linguistic
microstructures. It is poetry that makes the poeticity, and not language. Although it
uses linguistic structures, poetry cannot be reduced to them.
Poetry is a different type of communication which is based on two stages:
1. The poet works on the language, transforming it, emphasizing certain traits
and destroying others, according to his/her intention/view/taste (the deconstructive
stage).
2. The poet uses the elements obtained through the preliminary transformations
in the poem (the constructive stage).
The relation between language and poetry is a very complex one, because they
do not coincide with each other and poetry cannot exist outside language. On the other
hand, natural language has always been felt by poets, especially by the modern poets,
to be insufficient. Poets, profoundly dissatisfied with their maternal tongue, have tried
to invent their own language. As Mallarmé said, poets “repair the fault of languages”
(cf. Genette, Figuri, 232, M:19). This fault of language is the fact that the linguistic
sign is not motivated, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. In Roland Barthes’s
terms, the poet “wants language to imitate ideas” (idem).
There are several operations poets could perform in order to motivate linguistic
signs:
1. the use of mimetic properties of language (onomatopoeia and other imitative
strategies)
- Genette: mimologisms: words, groups of words, sentences, discourses that
imitate the objects they refer to, and not other idioms. (Palimpsestes, 87)
- the relation between the phonetic aspect of the word and its meaning is
reconstructed; attention is redirected: from the meaning to form; repetition of the same
word until its meaning is loosened or annihilated; treating a word as if it were an
object (“Acolo - / Fâlfâind în locul păsării / cuvântul pasăre se ouă în aer”, Doinaş);
creation of words that only suggest meaning, half-words:
2. Grammatical deviations
- changing morphological traits of the words (e. g. feminine forms used as
masculine or the other way round); conversion (he danced his didn’t); syntactical
deviations (ellipsis, tautology, parallelism);
3. Tropes
- all the figures of speech are intended to generate the metaphorical process
- tropes are situated on the semantic level: the poet manipulates language in
order to create new meanings; he changes language so that it should affect the word;
metaphor does not belong only to the word, but also to the sentence. Not only words
are metaphorical, but also entire sentences can be metaphorical.
- metaphor is not enough to create a poetic text; poetry and poetic language do
not coincide; there are needed literary codes and conventions which refer not only to
the semantic dimension, but also to how metaphorical meaning is used. (I am a miracle
/ “A walking miracle”)
The construction of metaphors is subordinated to the cultural codes of the age
to which the poet belongs. It is not the alteration of metaphor which modifies poetry,
but it is the alteration of poetry, as a sum of viewpoints and as literary practice, which
modifies the type of metaphor.
Traditional poetry and modern poetry display different types of metaphor:
1. The distance between the two terms of the metaphor (the tenor and the
vehicle) is greater in the modern poetry; in traditional poetry, it is closer to
simile/comparison. Yet, as Hugo Friedrich notes, modern poetry undergoes a profound
transformation: the elements supposedly comparable are in fact completely alien to
each other. The modern metaphor is no longer based on the ‘logical’ relation between
its elements, but on the ‘alogical’, even absurd, connection of terms that are
semantically unrelated. Analogy no longer defines metaphor, it is replaced by the
absurd. To understand modern metaphors has become a very difficult activity, since
they force words to acquire meanings that do not belong to them at all. Linguistic
criteria are never enough to check whether a metaphor is or is not successful.
2. Traditional poets prefer ‘topical’ metaphors, while modern poets favour
‘atopical’ metaphors. Atopical metaphors are in fact symbols or allegories that are
based on a mythology or, generally, on a collective tradition. Atopical metaphors are
metaphors that can only be understood contextually, they cannot be used irrespective
of their contexts. The former is relatively stable, it makes use of a previous analogy,
while the latter is not preceded by any other analogy or symbol, it belongs entirely to a
certain poet, it is original in the highest degree.
Nevertheless, metaphor and poetic language cannot be said to be one and the
same thing. Poetry is not an effect of the poeticizing of natural language. A poem is
not simply a language more expressive, more coloured, more picturesque than
ordinary language, it is language which has become a literary work.
Poetic language is not ordinary language to which there are added figures of
speech and stylistic devices, it is something more than this. Perhaps the poem itself can
be conceived of as a sui-generis figure: Călinescu has defined metaphor as a small
poem. M. C. Beardsley, like Călinescu, defined metaphor as a “poem in miniature”.
By reversing the equation, we could call the poem as an extended metaphor.
Michael Riffaterre, in Sémiotique de la poésie, describes the poem as a verbal
structure which generates its meaning in the same way in which a metaphor produces
its meaning. He considers that poetry expresses meanings in an oblique manner. “A
poem tells us one thing and signifies another thing.” This obliquity is created through
semantic deviations, syntactical distortions (ambiguity, contradiction, non-sense) and
prosody (creation of meaning – rhymes, symmetries etc.). Poetry is inseparable from
the concept of the text. It should be considered a finite, closed entity. Obliquity alters,
distorts or even annuls the representational function of poetic language, its mimesis.
Poetry does not send to a real referent, it creates its own referent. The poem does not
send to a reality outside it, nor can we say that it is non-referential: it is self-referential.
Its words, phrases, sentences can be representational, but poeticity is a function of the
poetic text.
 To decipher a poem we need a double reading: an euristic reading (the tracing
of meanings) and a hermeneutic reading (retroactive; it recuperates the already known
elements and establishes significances; literary competences are needed).
 XI. POETRY AND FORM. THE GRAPHICS OF POETRY

The first and most obvious feature that distinguishes poetry from the narrative
discourse is its different layout on the page. This layout is more or less surprising,
depending on how much meaning the poet wants to connect with the graphic shape of
the poem. Sometimes, the graphic shape of the poem acquires special meanings and
the message of the poem could not be apprehended if this layout is not also taken into
account. e. e. cummings is one of the poets famous for the use of this special type of
relation between the words as they are arranged on the page and the message they are
meant to transmit:
In the world’s literature, Guillaume Apollinaire is acknowledged as the creator
of the so-called “calligrammes” (the volume was published in 1918). These were
poems with shapes that tried to express the message in a visual way. The poem Il
pleut, for example, was printed with letters trickling down the page like ‘tears’. Before
him, Rabelais had done something comparable with his epilenie: a song in honour of
Bacchus printed in the shape of a bottle (cf. Cuddon)
Altar poems (carmen figuratum – Lat. ‘shaped poem’): a poem in which the
verses or stanzas are so arranged that they form a design on the page and take the
shape of the subject of the poem. the device is believed to have been first used by
Persian poets and was revived during the Renaissance period.
Concrete poetry - a recent development of the altar poem. the object is to
present each poem as a different shape. It is thus a matter of pictorial typography
which produces ‘visual poetry’. Other further developments and refinements are
‘emergent poetry’ (which involves cryptographic tricks with letters), ‘semiotic poetry’
(use of symbols), ‘kinetic poetry’ (the movement of the poem depends on the careful
placement and programming of words or letters line by line or page by page in order to
achieve a visual pattern) and logograms. Also, pattern poetry; eye-poetry (it depends
totally on visual appeal); [ear-poetry] (Phil Roberts)
Dylan Thomas, Vision and Prayer:

Who
Are you
Who is born
In the next room
So loud to my own
That I can hear the womb
Opening and the dark run
Over the ghost and the dropped son
Behind the wall thin as a wren’s bone?
In the birth bloody room unknown
To the burn and turn of time
And the heart print of man
Bows no baptism
But dark alone
Blessing on
The wild
Child
e. e. cummings

l (a

le
af
fa

ll

s)

one

iness

Aural effects. Euphony

Euphony as such means “the pleasing effect of the sound of words, almost
necessarily involving reading aloud, recitation, oral interpretation.” (Avădanei). It is
that dimension which creates the musicality of the poem. (The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, La Belle Dame sans Merci, The Raven, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good
Night).
The acoustic components of the language are: sounds, intonation, breathing
force, timbre and rhythm. Sounds are the real foundations of euphony:
Repetitions of sounds: assonance, alliteration, consonance (harmony);
Rhyme schemes: the abstract pattern of end-rhymes in a stanza;
 o exact/full/perfect rhyme (identity of the last stressed vowel:
smiling/filing);
o slant (rhyme that is not true; also half/near rhyme; deliberate or
incompetent: other/powder);
o end rhyme (monorhyme, couplets, triplets);
o internal (within a line or other unit; between the word preceding the
caesura and the end-word: I met a man with a skin of tan);
o single-rhyme (cat/dog/bat/sheep);
o cross-rhyme (cat/dog/bat/frog);
o arch-rhyme (cat/dog/frog/bat);
o external (between successive lines);
o masculine (stressed: smile/file);
o feminine (unstressed: smiling/filing);
o eye rhyme (or printer’s rhyme; non-rhyming homographic endings:
cough/dough).
Rhyme is used, by the good poets to create powerful semantic relations.
Intonation – part of speech; punctuation marks the ‘musical scores’ of poetry;
it is influenced by the typographical patternings of modern poetry
Timbre – something peculiar to one poet or another only in so far a s we listen
to him reading his own poems; it may also be reproduced by an actor or te reader
himself, according to the various indications referring to the identity of the speaker and
the peculiarities of the voice
Rhythm (Greek, ‘flowing’) – closely connected to meter; it is given by the
recurrence of stresses and pauses; “the movement or sense of movement
communicated by the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables and by the
duration of the syllables”. In verse, rhythm depends on the metrical pattern and it is
regular. (Cuddon)
Ezra Pound said that the rhythm of a poem must have meaning. It is the first
sign that what we hear is poetry, and, furthermore, cultural conditioning makes us hear
“duplets [roses] as steady, triplets [violets] as fast-moving or light-hearted, rigid
adherence to a regular metre as monotonous, stretches of lines ending with end-stoped
singlets as heavy, and so forth” (Roberts, 34)
Meter (Greek, ‘measure’): the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables;
based on stress; a line may have a fixed number of syllables and yet have a varying
number of stresses; the most common meters in English: iambic; trochaic; anapestic;
dactylic; spondaic; the basic unit of meter is the foot; the metrical patterns are given by
line lengths or number of feet (mono-, di-, tri-, tetra-, penta-, hexa-, hepta-, octa
meter). English poetry is characterized by a specific type of meter, called accentual,
and it is given not by the number of feet, but by the number of accents/stresses. This is
the so-called ‘sprung rhythm’: the equivalence of two lines in a poem is ensured by the
same number of main stresses, irrespective of the difference in the number of
syllables.
Chaucer was the one who made the five-stress line his standard, in Troilus and
Criseyde, and in the verse parts of The Canterbury Tales. This became the basic line of
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats and many others. Yet this meter does not
belong to the majority of English speakers. In popular poetry the most common pattern
is the four-stress one.
Refrains create a more general rhythmic pattern; the similitude is not only
between lines, but between stanzas or sections. This device is most specific to ballads
(folk/literary ballads, protest songs).
Prosody is the study or science of versification and every aspect of it. it
includes meter, rhythm, rhyme, stanza forms.
Free verse: it has no regular meter or line length and depends on natural speech
rhythms and the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables. It was used by Walt
Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, William
Carlos Williams.
Blank verse: it consists of unrhymed five-stress lines; properly, iambic
pentameters. It is the most widely used of English verse forms and is the one closest to
the rhythms of everyday English speech; used by Shakespeare; particularly favoured
by dramatists; also used by the Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge).
 Modernity tried to destroy the rigours of prosody, but it turned out that the
rigours of free verse are no ‘freer’ that the ones before. If the poet has to adapt his
rhythm to his mood, this may become very restrictive in terms of prosody. W. C.
Williams meant, for instance, that his three line stanzas be read so that each line
occupy the same amount as the others, lineation marking thus the isochronous units.
Types of poems according to form
Meters and rhymes are the two things we have to take into account if we want
to identify types of stanzas: couplets (aa); quatrains (aabb, abab – interlaced rhyme,
abba – closed quatrain); tercets (axa, bxb, aaa-very difficult); terza rima (aba bcb
cdc…). The most natural to the English language are the couplets and the quatrains.
Couplets, quatrains and tercets are the basic form of all open-ended poetry in
English. Around Chaucer’s time, interest began to develop in larger and more complex
stanza forms, the so-called fixed forms, in which the smaller forms combine into larger
groups using a set rhyme-scheme. (Roberts, 90-1)
The oldest of these forms is the carol, a song mainly linked with Christmas, but
this is a recent sense. Originally, it came from the French term caroler, to dance in a
ring. It involves a leader singing and a chorus/participants. Typical rhyme scheme:
aaab (the leader) bb (the chorus/burden). It is similar to ottava rima, royal rhyme and
the Spenserian stanza, only the latter ones use the more sophisticated five-stress line.
The rondel is one of the forms favoured by Chaucer and other poets of his day.
Poetic forms beginning with ‘rond’ are linked to the rondo forms of classical music.
What these forms have in common is that they continually circle back to material first
presented in their opening lines. The rondel has 14 lines and 2 rhymes throughout,
repeating 2 of the opening lines halfway through, and closing with a repetition of the
poems first 3 lines. The rondeau is similar, but has 10 or 13 lines.
The ballade is another medieval form using patterns of line repetition: 8-line
stanzas, rhymed ababbcbc, with the same line appearing at the end of each stanza, as a
kind of chorus. The villanelle – 5 tercets and a concluding quatrain, returning to 1 or
more lines which function as a kind of burden/chorus. All these forms come from
medieval French song-and-dance forms. Use of these forms nowadays may have the
effect of turning the reader’s attention away from the other aspects of the poem. skilful
rhymes are no longer enough.
The sonnet is often referred to as the ‘king’ of English verse. The English
form: 3 quatrains and a couplet. It was different from the original Italian form. Modern
poets have used it, sometimes departing from traditional models to develop their own
unique forms: John Crowe Ransom (Two Gentlemen in Bonds), Edna St Vincent
Millay (Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree), Dylan Thomas (Altar-wise by Owl-light),
W. H. Auden (Sonnets from China), John Berryman (Berryman’s Sonnets) and Robert
Lowell (Notebooks).
The limerick – a particularly English form, invented by Edward Lear, a
Victorian; a 5-line stanza, rhymed aabba.
“All I want is to speak simply, for this grace I pray” (George Seferis, a greek
poet of the 20th century)
 XII. UNDERSTANDING POETRY: MODELS OF INTERPRETATION

1. A formalist model: New Criticism

It was an exclusively English and American tradition; it established itself as a
critical orthodoxy in the English departments in the United States in the 1940’s – 50’s
Representatives: I. A. Richards (Practical Criticism – 1929; Coleridge on
Imagination – 1934); F. R. Leavis (New Bearings in English Poetry – 1932;
Revaluation – 1936;); Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren (Understanding Poetry –
1938)
Principles according to which a poem should be both created and analyzed:
• The poem is not feeling, the ideal, truth, revelation, the sense of infinitude, or
some mysterious je ne sais quoi, but it is an organization of meanings and as
such can be rationally analyzed.
• “Reading” is the process of obtaining the “total meaning” of the poem;
“reading” is having a mental experience that approximately resembles the
relevant mental experience of the poet as he contemplates the finished poem.
(Perkins, 78).
• Knowledge about the age in which the author lived is not usually necessary.
What they were interested in was the particular text, which was to be analyzed
closely and objectively, not in an impressionist way.
• The greater the amount of diverse, relevant experience and feeling that is
present and organized, the greater the contact with reality; good poems embody
such states of mind, that is why their language must be polysemous through
metaphor, irony, paradox, ambiguity and their total form will combine the
multiple perspectives into a complex yet coherent pattern.
• A poem “should always be treated as an organic system of relationships”
(Brooks, Penn Warrren, apud Perkins, 78).
• Concentration on the language of the text, seeking to bring all its relevant
meanings and their interplay into consciousness (the so-called ‘explication’).
• Meaning should not be studied only lexically, but also the ranges of meaning
implicated in form and style, that is, in figures, syntax, rhythm, versification.
 • They adhered to Coleridge’s premise of organic form: the form is not external
and separable from the meaning, but further defines it.
• Their ultimate object of evaluation, on which the worth of the text finally
depended: the speaker’s state of mind, the extent to which he was in contact
with reality at all relevant points. Did the text embody a mature awareness, a
many-sided, complex, yet integrated attitude and vision?
• The presence of a persona (impersonality); the poem should have a “curve” or
“plot” enacted, it should be complex, organized in stanzas, rhymed, metrical,
tightly integrated in images and figures (formality, intellectuality, self-
conscious control); difficult, compressed, implied an elite audience.

2. A semantic model: Group µ – A Rhetoric of Poetry

According to Group µ, reading is a dynamic search for unity of meaning.
Reading is completed by the re-reading of the text. The first reading is linear, while the
second is rather spatial. The main concepts are those of isotopy and alotopy.
Isotopy is essentially manifested through recurrence (of semes, of syntactical
structures, of various types of relations, of sounds etc.). The reader has to identify the
main isotopy of a text by using his intuition and by studying the lexical webs of
relations organized around a basic concept.
Isotopy (izo + topos = the same topic); it ensures the unity of a text, its
coherence.
They establish a triadic model for the semantic analysis of poems:
 Logos (language)

Anthropos (man) Cosmos (universe)

Logos – all the manifestations of the function of communication (including

mythical beings, literary characters, works of art etc.)
Cosmos – everything that exists outside humanity and particularly outside
consciousness.
It is not possible to find objective criteria in order to define, in each case, that a
semantic series belong to one of the three fundamental categories. We have to take
into account the cultural aspects, models that are inculcated in our minds through
education.
The opposition anthropos / cosmos can be found at the basis of many cultural
codes and it generates the aesthetic ideology of poetry. It may be translated into such
oppositions as: micro / macrocosm; nature / culture; life / death; subject / object; space
/ time. Either man is integrated in the universe or the universe is transformed into a
subjective representation.
The poetic effect results from two main things:
1. The direct or indirect manifestation of an isotopy belonging to the idea of
Anthropos and of an isotopy belonging to that of Cosmos.
2. A rhetorical mediation, either explicit or implicit, between the two isotopies.
(referential mediation, discursive mediation, rhetorical mediation).
 The highest degree of poeticity is attained when isotopies are not present, but
completely superposed, when one isotopy can be read in another isotopy. The best
poems are those in which oppositions are strongest. The fundamental opposition in a
poem may be accompanied by other weaker oppositions.
When the isotopy of the Logos is introduced in the semantic scheme, mediation
is diminished, endangered. An effect of isolation and rupture is brought about when
the poem becomes a linguistic object, something fictitious, fabricated, when it no
longer sends to a story, no longer connects to a real referent. The modern poem is
separated from the world and becomes the model of a different harmonious one.
Stages of interpretation:
1. identifying isotopies
2. searching for recurrent items that have in common a number of semes
3. searching for alosemies
4. re-evaluating and mediation between isotopies / alotopies
5. rhetorical isotopies
6. syntactical structure
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