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As Bakhtin noted, chronotopes arise from the density and fusion of temporal and spatial indicators. In prose narrative, the density of temporal and spatial indicators arises as a natural consequence of setting scenes and explaining action, and those indicators are fused by the centripetal forces of plot, character and so on that encourage us to read the various elements of the text as aspects of a coherent story and world. In non-narrative poetry, however, there is no story to drive the setting of scene or generation of character; there may not even be scene or character. As a result, temporal and spatial indicators can be quite sparse, and there may be little centripetal force to encourage their fusion. In a textual environment bereft of character, plot, scene, in which even the centripetal forces of syntax are frayed by linebreaks and other poetic devices, how can chronotopes form and function? [...] In the centripetal environment afforded by most prose narratives, the stable chronotopes and the relationships among them define consciousness, world and values. In the centrifugal environment of non-narrative poetry, chronotopes flicker and flow in a series of hints, glimpses, dissolves, defining consciousness, world and values via evanescence rather than stability. However, as I hope to show below, the evanescence of chronotopes in non-narrative poetry can be as central to the vitality and meaning of those texts as the stability of chronotopes is to the vitality and meaning of prose narratives.
This essay identifies in the materialist strand of world literature theory, especially Pascale Casanova and the Warwick Research Collective, a reliance upon a priori structures (the worldsystem) and prioritisation of the literary registration of inequality. By contrast, I contend, world-literary critics who wish to maintain the dissident spirit of postcolonialism ought to demonstrate a shared equality. By reference to the philosophies of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, this essay sets out the case for an alternative to world-systems critique: one that maintains literature's potential for creating new forms of resistance, dissent, and, crucially, equality.
To what extent does cultural distance interfere with or limit literary experience? What kind of intimacy is needed to make a text into a work? This essay seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the writings of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. In doing so, it suggests that the challenges of cultural distance may be most acute when dealing with texts from homo-linguistic literary environments, and that we might overcome these challenges by undertaking a world literary criticism that attends to localized fields and materials without forgetting the charge of particular works.
In this brief excursion into the poetry of Dante and Montale, Rebecca West suggests some approaches to only a few issues that emerge out of the creation of both the primary beloveds of Dante and Montale and of those feminine figures that have been characterized as ostensibly 'antitranscendental' and more secondary in their roles and meanings. As regards Montale's primary feminine figure, Clizia, West argues that she is, to use Teodolinda Barolini's term for Beatrice, a 'hybrid' poetic character, and ultimately exceeds the limits of the poetic beloved as traditionally conceived and read, not only in the courtly tradition upon which she is modelled but well beyond it. In the case of the so-called secondary 'other women' in Dante's and Montale's poetry, West seeks to show that they are much less separable from the primary feminine figures than such binaries as major/minor, transcendent/erotic, soul/body, and traditional/experimental may lead us to believe. Lastly, West considers specifically the wife-figure, in her conspicuous absence from Dante's corpus and in her late appearance in Montale's. For both poets, there are complex intertwinings, interferences, and non-dualistic patterns that form a densely textured poetic weave, in which both the primary and the secondary feminine figures provide "fili rossi" as well as not so easily graspable dangling threads of meaning. These threads have to do with the preoccupation of both poets with the possible integration of immanence and transcendence, embodiment and abstraction, and with the very limits of poetic language. West's topic is also motivated by a feminist-oriented search for modes of deciphering the figure of the feminine beloved in lyric poetry that are not conditioned exclusively by the traditional emphasis on the male poet-creator, but which allow for a shift in focus onto the female figure who is, of course, the creature of the poet's imagination and skill, but who also often takes him into regions in which the excesses (commonly associated with the female) of non-binary thought and the mysteries of alterity - the feminine symbolic sphere, in short - do not so much allow the emergence of neatly squared-off meanings as the evolution of more oblique, circular conduits of potential significance. As a specialist of modern literature, Rebecca West concentrates on Montale more than on Dante, mainly noting the Dantesque aspects of the former's poetry.
Who's afraid of ideology?
(2023)
Artist Marwa Arsanios shares textual fragments from research she conducted for the first and second parts of a video trilogy titled "Who's Afraid of Ideology?" Meditating on the voiding effects of war, and the ecological and affective texture of communal resistance and eco-feminist praxis as they emerge in Iraqi Kurdistan, Lebanon, and northern Syria, the text takes us to ecological milieux made of wild medicinal plants, fig trees, Kurdish guerrillas, and farmers in a women-only commune.
This short essay offers thoughts on bell hooks's use of the list form in the phrase 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy'. While this list suggests that the social forces it contains work together in one unified direction, we can also look to instances in which they pull in opposing directions. However, the function of the list may not be to faithfully map the complexities of social life, but, rather, in its reduction and simplicity, to enable us to believe that social transformation is possible.
This chapter examines the meaning of the term 'aperire' ('to open') in the schools of the twelfth century and within early scholastic thought. It argues for a shift from a traditional understanding of opening as a revelation received from God, towards a more technical definition of opening as applying dialectical logic to a text. The act of opening was employed polemically, both in debates between scholastic masters and to distinguish Christian from Jewish exegetical practices.
This chapter argues that paying attention to the weather and its associated processes of geological, biological, and social weathering can destabilize knowledge traditions that insist on dichotomies. Looking to specific histories and current conditions in Guyana and Suriname, this chapter shows how notions of weathering can accommodate a wide range of referents, ranging from the weathering of rock to socio-political and historical afterlives of violent colonial displacements.
The essay investigates the meteorological phenomena represented in Dante Alighieri's Commedia and their interrelation with the subjectivity of the dead in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Examining how the dead weather the afterlife and how the elements affect them, in turn, the essay takes the complex enantiosemy of the word 'weathering' as a conceptual guiding thread for the exploration of dynamics of exposure ('Inferno'), vulnerability ('Purgatorio'), and receptivity ('Paradiso').
The chapter engages the nature-culture divide with the generative ambivalences of weathering in both language and physics. Taking the different uses of the enantiosemic and ambitransitive verb as indicative of the human's fraught relationship with its environment and itself, it analyses multiple ways in which 'weathering' can involve subject-object relations, objectless subject-predicate relations, or even subjectless processes, and proposes to think them with mechanics, thermodynamics, and chaos theory.