Adopting trans-historical and trans-national approaches to poetics is both a critical response to recent cross-disciplinary debates as well as a continuation of the work of scholars such as Pauline Yu, whose groundbreaking study of Sino-Francophone poetic exchange first appeared in PMLA in 2007 (“‘Your Alabaster in This Porcelain’: Judith Gautier's Le livre de jade”). Yu’s article marks a significant methodological shift, one that differs from the critical tradition developed in Sinology by James J. Y. Liu, Earl Miner, Steven Owen, and others, which draws relatively sharp cultural and generic lines of inquiry between Chinese and European literature. Instead, this renewed methodology focuses on modes of exchange, translation, influence, circulation, and textual history, rather than reifying an “essence” of literature, for which comparative method becomes a search for “common ground.”
Yet only in recent years has work of this nature revived. For example, Zong-Qi Cai has called upon East Asian Studies to reflect upon its own critical practices, in concert with Anglo-American debates around lyric (Cai, Configurations of Comparative Poetics; How to Read Chinese Poetry).
Nonetheless, the panelists in this session observe that the “globalization” of poetics entails expanding the geo-cultural range of, and terms of engagement with, poetic discourse beyond the Western lyric and Sinology. Re-establishing the continuity and diversity of comparative poetics is our panel’s commitment to making visible, in a significant and ethical way, the poetics of lesser known, under-studied cultures, both on their own terms and with regards to their influence on the Anglophone and/or Francophone poetics that have dominated the field.
Formative debates around the lyric that emerged in the last decade have challenged the longstanding reification of lyric poetry as a universalizing figure for poetry, most notably Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015). Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins have argued for “historical poetics,” a critical practice that situates poetry more fully in its context, when for so long lyric poetry has denied its own historicity, as described in their critical anthology The Lyric Theory Reader (2014) and Jackson’s Dickinson’s Misery (2005). Jackson, Prins, and others in the field (Meredith Martin, Meredith McGill, and Max Cavitch come to mind) argue that modern practices of reading that emerged during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the American academy, have become unspoken, if historically incongruous, assumptions of the study of poetry at large.
Using these debates as a useful guide, the papers in this panel address poetry as intelligible and intermediary, whether via translation, cross-cultural reading practices, or literary inheritance. This panel features scholars from different stages of their careers in order to foster creative dialogue between young and established scholars, often prevented by structural and institutional barriers.
The panel begins with Eric Touya’s account of transnational exchange in the work of poet, playwright, and literary critic Paul Claudel (1868-1955), “French-Chinese Poetics: Cross-Cultural and Symbolic Landscapes in Claudel’s Connaissance de l’Est.” While scholars often mark Rimbaud and Mallarmé as formative influences, Claudel’s years in China and his interest in Chinese art, nature, and landscape proved not only formative but, according to Touya, renewed Claudel’s poetry. Touya presents several poems from Knowing the East (Connaissance de l’Est), composed between 1895-1905, as paradigmatic of Claudel’s engagement with China.
Scholar and experimental poet Donato Mancini examines the little-known, Old French genre of fatras in “‘Li siecles parti parmi …’: The Contemporaneity of Benjamin Péret’s Le Grand Jeu (1928) and the Fatrasies d’Arras (1280).” Highly anomalous, long neglected, and not fully understood, Mancini juxtaposes the late-thirteenth and fourteenth century fatras, translatable as “mess” or “jumble of stuff”—literally, a poetics of “nonsense”—with twentieth-century experimental writing. Mancini revises the conventional account of literary experimentation as “symptomatic of late capitalist society,” instead leveraging his own experience translating fatras into English to reveal its expansive inventiveness and avant-garde impulses. Multimedia in nature, fatras and their close derivative, fatrasie, were likely performed and/or part of poetic games, challenging a poetics based on textuality alone. Mancini and Ted Bryne are the first to translate the few extant manuscripts containing fatras, which ranges from c. 1280-1329, forthcoming from Black Widow Press in 2019.
David Hobbs’ paper, “Inhabiting Alternative Laokoöns: Ezra Pound, Aimé Césaire, and the Pseudomorphic Epic,” examines Pound and Césaire’s engagements with German ethnologist Leo Frobenius (1873-1938), noted for his commitments to anti-colonialism and indigenous orality. Pound spread Frobenius’ work in North America, while Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme draws upon Frobenius’ characterization of the indigenous cultures of present-day Cameroon and Nigeria. Hobbs argues that Frobenius exerted an unrecognized influence on Pound and Césaire’s ideas of epic poetry, specifically on their interpolations of “pseudomorphosis”—the aesthetic changes that accompany cultural tectonics—in depictions of urban space in their long poems. By doing so, Hobbs forms an account of a late-Modernist Laokoön, an understanding of urban experience based upon an unmediated, distinct aesthetics of its own.
Among exciting developments in South Asian studies, Apala Das’s paper, “The Politics and Poetics of Askesis in Wallace Stevens and Sri Aurobindo,” presents a comparative study of Anglo-American and South Asian modernist poetics via the idea of asceticism, or askesis, in the late poetics of Stevens (1879-1955) and Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950). Though askesis appears apolitical in the Western, canonical tradition (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Foucault), Das argues that Aurobindo’s asceticism is in fact a form of anti-colonial, peaceable-activist, political action. Revising Stevens’ account of asceticism, Aurobindo’s poetics intervenes in modernist aesthetics by serving as a crux for a postcolonial, “glocal” subjectivity based on a revised mode of temporality.
Each presentation is limited to 12 minutes, allowing at least 30 minutes for introductory remarks and discussion.