The title of the present study refers to the fact that Apollinaire consistently worked at the cutting edge of modern aesthetics. The volume seeks to rehabilitate four experimental genres in ...particular that have received relatively little attention. The first chapter examines a charming artist's book entitled The Bestiary, which features illustrations by Raoul Dufy. The second is concerned with a group of poems that celebrate ordinary, everyday life. The next chapter considers Apollinaire's little-known debt to children's rhymes. The final chapter discusses an avant-garde drama that was destined to play a key role in the evolution of modern French theater. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in avant-garde aesthetics. It will appeal not only to scholars of twentieth-century poetry but also to devotees of modern art and modern theater.
In her article "Ginsberg's Translations of Apollinaire and Genet in the Development of his Poetics of 'Open Secrecy'" Véronique Lane analyzes the extent to which the journals, letters and poems of ...Allen Ginsberg are marked by constant reference to literary models that give just as much weight to French as to American writers. Focusing on his long involvement with Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Genet's works, Lane argues that Ginsberg meticulously constructed the genealogy of his poetry through a threefold strategy of literary quotation, translation and encryption. Uncovering this strategy through analysis of "Howl," "At Apollinaire's Grave," and "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" does more than simply nuance or deepen our understanding of Ginsberg's work in the 1950s; it reveals that it was largely through his engagement with French literature that he developed the very aesthetic and hermeneutic method of his poetry.
Apollinaire's thoughts concerning the aesthetics of visual arts appeared in a specific artistic milieu, which was established in Paris in the early years of the twentieth century. Numerous ...exhibitions, poetic soirees and concerts were organized by promissing young artists who would soon afterwards leave a considerable mark in the art history and become part of painters' and poets' elite. Among them were yet unknown, but rising artists like Picasso, Duchamp, Dalì, Cocteau and others, and also Apollinaire, who actively took part in introducing a "new spirit of the times" (in French "l'esprit nouveau"), as he prophetically called the new atmosphere in Parisian artistic circles. In this epoch artists turned to the idea that a piece of art is multi-faceted and has syncretic character. In other words, it allows that aesthetics of different arts is permeate each other. So, poets and novelists were showing great interest in plastic arts getting to the point that they endeavoured to adopt principles of those arts in their poems or other literary creations. The aesthetic of visual i.e. figurative arts in general has been considerably transformed. (the new art had tendency to be dissociated from the mimetic principle), which was ecnouraging for poets, musicians or dancers to leave rigid traditional forma of expression and/or replace them with new ones, much more innovative. In that period art was in a process of mutation, turning to a new direction, which implied increased freedom of artistic expression. The boundlessness of artistic expression, as a basis for the aesthetic of the "new art" ("l'art nouveau"), has been taken from the aesthetic of black African plastic. The artists in Paris enthousiastically accepted artefacts originated in Oceania, discovering their perfect clarity of expression. Apollinaire as one of supporters of the "new art", considered that a way toward pure artistic expression and artistic truth has to go through a serious analysis of complex internal relations existing in a piece of art itself. That process requires a mental effort (such as decomposition of artistic elements before approaching to a piece of art as a whole unit) in order to comprehend the idea of the artistic truth. That is to say that the "new art" was on the way to abstraction. Among many of Apollinaire's admirers who were more or less influenced by his ideas about the aesthetic of visual arts, was the great Serbian novelist, lyric poet, literary and art critic and also diplomat Rastko Petrovic (1898-1949), whose aesthetic positions and artistic criteria, for his critical essays on art as well for his literary writing, were based on Apollinaire's reflections about the value of African art. He mostly varies and widens Apollinaire's standpoint and partially differs from it, such as when he considers the question of truth in the artistic work. When Apollinaire is talking about the truth in the work of art, he examines it within three virtues (purity, unity, truth) which he attributes also to the fire (taken as a symbol of painting and visual arts). He emphasizes that the artistic truth can multiply itself, and that is what gives to the art its special strength over common, quotidian reality. Petrovic agrees with this remark and underlines the fact that unlike reality an artefact is more meaningful - it is related to deeper content, in one word it is more real and represents a cosmos in itself. In comparison to Apollinaire's short definitions, Petrovic's reflections go further with explanations, but always following Apollinaire's main concept, even when he introduces the notion of falsehood (lie). He connects it with a process of the artistic creation (falsehood as generator of imagination) and he observes it as means for achieving the artistic truth (falsehood as distancing from the truth and from the reality).
This book examines poetic adaptations of painterly techniques in works by writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, Andre Breton, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery--all chosen for the ...experimentalism of their poetry as well as for the quality of their critical writings on art. Close attention is paid to essays on painters identified with Cubism, Futurism, and Dada-Surrealism in France and with Abstract Expressionism and New Realism in the United States.Selected poems are examined in light of the critical essays and are taken either as illustrations of a new plastic poetic or as novel hybrids of plastic and literary strategies. Although the parallels between modern poetry and painting go beyond avant-garde techniques, this book emphasizes such innovations as collage, chance operations, and automatism to demonstrate the shift in aesthetic attention from finished products to creative processes.
Foix reflects on his works as he tries to answer why he writes poetry. For him, his literary production is a defeated protest, a phenomenon of spiritual dissociation similar to what men of science ...designate as the consequence of the death of an organism, with its bifurcation, total dispersion, and even destruction.
Literary history is no longer dominated by the model of the “tradition of innovation” and by the belief that literary changes can be explained with the help of the sole tension between old and new. ...The articles assembled here offer a detailed look at what happened during the Modernist period (the first half of the twentieth century), demonstrating that more complex mechanisms are at work, which in turns helps to make literary history understandable in more heterogeneous terms.
Language has the dual power of abstracted meaning and physical being. The duality that I advance here is based on the analysis of the theories of Maurice Blanchot, Stephane Mallarme, and Jacques ...Ranciere. These three authors provide a framework through which I argue that all writing has an equally important abstract dimension as it does physical dimension. By abstract dimension, I mean the lexical connotations that are abstracted away from the physical work. By physical dimension, I mean the purely tangible and material-without any lexical meaning. This duality is apparent in works such as concrete poetry, images (films), and manuscripts. I use the poetry of Stephane Mallarme and Guillaume Apollinaire and films of Jean-Luc Godard as a modern proof of this duality; I use several medieval manuscript works as a historical comparison. These works clearly show the importance of the physical materiality of a work. I argue that this material importance holds true for all writing and all literature, not only images and poetic objects.
Quand elle n’est pas pacifique, ce qui lui arrive rarement, la poésie française consacrée à la guerre entre 1914 et 1918 est patriotique, belliqueuse, germanophobe, mensongère, scolaire. C’est là ...tout ce qui a été retenu d’elle par l’histoire, cela peut se comprendre et, pour l’essentiel, cela n’est pas faux. Le présent essai revient sur ce corpus méconnu et désormais malaimé tant il est dévoré par la guerre. Il propose une vue synthétique des événements et une lecture serrée d’œuvres poétiques qui, pour être mobilisées et par conséquent « en guerre », n’en sont pas moins absolument modernes. Leurs auteurs ? Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Cocteau, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Paul Éluard, mais aussi André Breton, Blaise Cendrars et Philippe Soupault. Chacun aura cherché une forme capable de dire cette guerre inouïe, jamais vue, qui défie au propre comme au figuré cette bien nommée folle du logis, l’imagination, pour tenter de dire ce que deviennent, au cœur de l’horrible, le temps, l’amour, la pensée, l’espérance. Toute la lyre va au front et fait en sorte que les outrances de la Grande Guerre passent à la littérature avec audace et inventivité, mais aussi avec sensibilité et humanité.
Inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire's courtship of Annie Playden while she was a governess and he a French tutor in the Rhineland, ‘La Tzigane’ has engendered only two articles since it was first ...published in 1907. At first glance, the composition seems perfectly straightforward. Most critics would probably agree with Laurence Campa that it is a melancholy complaint 'sur l'amour maudit et le poids du souvenir’. If ‘La Tzigane’ were really that simple, it would still be a significant accomplishment. However, the poem is much more complex than appears at first glance. Nor, in point of fact, is it really a melancholy complaint.
This project focuses on the ways poetry can respond in counterpoint to discourses that articulate and justify various power structures—examining the possibilities and the limitations of those poetic, ...discursive interventions. The first chapter lays out a general, theoretical framework for conceptualizing this engagement. The second chapter explores several schemas through which the field of poetry has been conceptually organized, since the ways the field is framed play a part in delimiting those possibilities for political engagement. In the third chapter, I explore recent poems written through appropriative methods: poems which take a source-text and transpose it into a new context. I consider how the labor of poetic appropriation and the work of reading these poems can make visible, the structural conditions of precarity and marginalization while also drawing particular attention to the ways those inequities are effaced, justified, and/or rendered invisible.
PDF
