2 results
L
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- By Hélène Aji
- Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow, Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2018, pp 207-215
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
With the letters of the word spaced by equal signs, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is primarily the title of an American avantgarde poetry founded by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews and published between 1978 and 1981. The poems and essays appearing in the journal come from authors that started writing in the late 1960s, raising major questions about the conditions of writing and the emergence of master discourses. The equal signs underline the status of the letters and their combination into the formation of words. Formally, it breaks the integrity of the word and encourages the reader to become aware of the artificiality of the sign. In continuity with this questioning of the sign, and in keeping with the idea that there is an arbitrariness to the functioning of language, the texts also undermine the conventions of grammar and syntactic organisation, the composition of paragraphs and the delusions of transparent discourse. In the political context of FEMINISM and the rise of minorities, the Language poets debunk ideologies that become enforced in the very structures of language, and attempt to evidence their surreptitious domination over the discourses prevalent in the mainstream sociocultural sphere.
The poets refuse the notion of a school of Language Poetry, and function as a loose network of similarly preoccupied authors with differing poetic practices. The main poets associated with the term include Leslie Scalapino, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Nick Piombino and Tina Darragh, who produce texts based on disjunctive modes of writing and a focus on the materiality of the sign. Their poetics is, however, strongly linked to their modernist predecessors or nearcontemporaries, but with a preference for less central figures than Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot; the mentors of the Language poets are rather William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and the OBJECTIVISTS, as well as, among a younger generation, Jackson MacLow. The resulting poetry is deliberately challenging since it aims at emphasising the role of the reader in the very production of a text's meaning(s).
P
- Edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, University of Glasgow, Olga Taxidou, University of Edinburgh
-
- Book:
- The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 18 November 2022
- Print publication:
- 31 July 2018, pp 283-307
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
PAIDEUMA
A neologism derived from the Greek and borrowed by Ezra Pound from the work of German ANTHROPOLOGIST Leo Frobenius, ‘paideuma’ designates the deep-rooted ideas and moods specific of a historical moment. Characterised by its complexity and locality in time and space, it is akin to the Romantic zeitgeist, but Pound uses a different term to add a dynamic dimension to the notion: far from being passively absorbed, ‘paideuma’ is at the roots of ‘ideas that are in action’ (Pound 1952: 58). It is constantly being actualised into a combination of behaviours that could be deliberately changed. Thus ‘paideuma’ is closely tied to Pound's volitionist approach to culture in the 1938 Guide to KULCHUR. His interest in the concept also lies in its etymological relation to paideutics, the science or art of learning and education. For Pound, ‘paideuma’ is part of a general didactic project that is embodied in the variety of his writings, from the prose of the political and economic essays to the poetic arcanes of the Cantos. From Frobenius then, Pound derives a pedagogy based on a morphology of culture that he rewrites into his theory of the luminous detail. Paideuma is also the title of the journal devoted to Pound scholarship published by the National Poetry Foundation (University of Maine at Orono) since 1972.
READING
Pound, Ezra (1952) Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions.
Tryphonopoulos, Demetres P. (ed.) (2005) The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
PARATAXIS
Although the term itself is drawn from classical rhetoric, naming the grammatical arrangement of words, phrases or clauses in sequence but without the presence of connecting terms, parataxis has been seen by critics as a characteristic technique of modernist and EXPERIMENTAL literature. At the level of the sentence the effect of the lack of conjunctions is to leave unclear relations between phrases, where we might expect a text to indicate hierarchies of significance, cause and effect or even temporal sequence. Techniques such as COLLAGE, the juxtaposition of unexpected or unrelated images, and repetition might all be described as paratactic. In the critical writing of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, parataxis is attributed particular significance as a technique which suspends some traditional expectations of philosophical or discursive prose, in which the subject under discussion is subordinated to the logical and narrative unfolding of an argument.