TRANSINTERAVANT Rhetoric, semiotics and poetics of avantgarde and experimental literature

1
TRANSINTERAVANTRhetoric, semiotics and poetics
of avant-garde and experimental literature

• Harri Veivo
• Spring term, 2009

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Rhetoric of the Avant-garde I

• The notion of rhetoric
• Definition, origin and genres
• Central elements or tools of rhetoric
• Motivations for rhetoric in the avant-garde
• Naming, definition and anti-definition
• Legitimization, polemics and power
• Contesting the canon and creating an anti-canon
• Narrativization and history, rupture and
  continuity
• The rhetoric of manifestoes

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RhetoricDefinition, origin and genres

• Rhetoric the art of persuasion (by the use of
  language)
• Three genres of rhetoric in the Ancient Greece
  and Rome
• Political war or not?
• Judicial guilty or not?
• Epideictic praising / balming can function as
  part of political and judicial rhetoric
• Not only a theory of speech or discourse, but
  also sociological, aesthetical, ethical,
  pedagogical and pragmatic aspects
• Rhetoric vs. philosophy the credible, the
  plausible and the probable vs. the necessary and
  the calculable
• The problem with rhetoric can be used to wrong
  purposes
• Plato condemened rhetoric
• Aristolte defined it as an art, a skill that has
  no ethical dimension in itself
• Rhetoric part of school curricula until end of
  the 19th or beginning of the 20th century

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Central elements or tools of rhetoric

• The contact of minds as essential contact or
  community must be established before specific
  cases can be debated
• Textual level different strategies to establish
  a contact with the reader (we)
• Manifestoes making manifest or public also
  performances
• Exemples
• Permit inferences from one case (which is known
  and accepted) to another (which is new and needs
  backing)
• Can function as example word, notion, case,
  event, person ( imago in lat.)
• Arguments (and enthymema)
• Logically valid argumentation can function as
  part of rhetoric persuasion
• Arguments used in rhetoric are typically weak
  based on probable premises but not necessary or
  truthful ( enthymema)
• Arguments in rhetoric are typically incomplete
  they lack elements that bind different premises
  together
• Assumed values, stereotypes, folk theories
• Assumed general values necessary for the common
  ground of communication but values can also be
  contested
• Stereotypes and folk theories rhetoric works
  with what is generally though to be true, with
  what is credible (doxa vs. philosophical or
  scientific truth)

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Central elements or tools of rhetoric

• Loci premises of very general nature that can be
  used for different rhetoric purposes
• Mediates between what is general and accepted and
  what is singular and in need or persuasion
• Loci of quantity and quality for ex. more
  useful is more desirable (quantity), rare and
  difficult is valuable (quality)
• Stories, narratives
• Function subjected to persuasion supports,
  prepares for the argument
• Hidden meaning developed (interpreted) in
  argumentation
• Metaphors, analogies (and other figures)
• Traditionally figures were parts of elocution,
  i.e. of verbal expression were considered as
  ornaments rather than constitutive elements
• However, metaphors have creative power since they
  lead the listener / reader to perceive
  similarities
• Metaphors can function to ground reasoning based
  on analogy if a is like b in this respect, it
  can be alike also in other respects

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Motivations for rhetoric in the avant-garde

• Why is rhetoric important in avant-garde?
• A-g is an operation on the existing situation, on
  the values and practices of established
  literature transformation, revolution, change
• Needs to be communicated, defined, justified
• Needs to be situated in relation to literary
  history and in relation to other movements or
  isms
• Commercial and career-based necessities also
• Naming, definition and anti-definition
• The naming of the movements expresses its
  identity, for example
• In relation to aesthetic principles, a theory, or
  an ideology futurism, surrealism, oulipo
• In relation to a historical moment the different
  groups XX
• Related to a definition developed in manifestoes,
  essays, performances
• However, a-g movements are often typically
  anti-definitional, i.e. seek to resist
  definitions that are considered as tools for
  control and limiting
• Dada and its contradictory definitions
• Cobra against all theories of art and literature
• Names or definitions can be given and developed
  by critics

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Example naming and defining surrealism

• In homage to Guillaume Apollinaire, who had just
  died and who, on several occasions, seemed to us
  to have followed a discipline of this kind,
  without however having sacrificed to it any
  mediocre literary means, Soupault and I baptized
  the new mode of pure expression which we had at
  our disposal and which we wished to pass on to
  our friends, by the name of SURREALISM. I believe
  that there is no point today in dwelling any
  further on this word and that the meaning we gave
  it initially has generally prevailed over its
  Apollinarian sense. Those who might dispute
  our right to employ the term SURREALISM in the
  very special sense that we understand it are
  being extremely dishonest, for there can be no
  doubt that this word had no currency before we
  came along. Therefore, I am defining it once and
  for all
• SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure
  state, by which one proposes to express
  verbally, by means of the written word, or in any
  other manner the actual functioning of thought.
  Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any
  control exercised by reason, exempt from any
  aesthetic or moral concern.
• ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on
  the belief in the superior reality of certain
  forms of previously neglected associations, in
  the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested
  play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for
  all all other psychic mechanisms and to
  substitute itself for them in solving all the
  principal problems of life.
• (André Breton Surrealist manifesto, 1924)

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Legitimization, polemics and power

• Avant-garde and experimental movements seek for
  legitimization discourse that establishes value
  and justifies poetics and action
• The change in the writers status in the modern
  society from a court poet to a producer in a
  market
• New or anti- and counter-aesthetic texts
  legitimization cannot be derived directly from
  established hierarchies
• Different possibilities for legitimization
• With reference to the historical situation
• With reference to the development of literature
  or the arts
• Often a combination of these two
• A-g and the market of novelty and symbolical
  capital polemics against mainstream and other
  movements, struggle for power
• Effort to combine intellectual or ideological
  authority and aesthetic novelty
• The identity of the movement is developed also
  and to a great measure in opposition to other
  movements
• A-g is often engaged in a battle for symbolical
  power (which can also be economical success)
  within the literary field polemics or
  collaboration with other movements important

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Starting from rejection Cobra

• The Belgian, Danish and Dutch representants at
  the conference of the Centre International de
  Documentation sur lArt dAvant-Garde in Paris
  judge that it has lead to nowhere. The resolution
  that was voted at the closing session can only
  express the total lack of sufficient agreement
  that would justify the very existence of the
  meeting. We have been able to realize that
  our ways of living, working, feeling are shared,
  we understand each other at the practical level
  and refuse to enlist in a artificial theoretical
  unit. We work together, we will work together.
• Dotremont, Noiret, Jorn, Appel, Constant and
  Corneille La cause était entendue, 1948.

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Contesting the canon creating an anti-canon

• Avant-garde rhetorics often contains an act of
  contesting the canon and of creating a new or an
  anti-canon
• Can take the agressive form of an attack and
  insult (in texts, but also in performances)
• Often however contestation is less explicit and
  the naming of forerunners or historical examples
  is dominant
• The operations on canon can be understood to have
  two functions
• Serves to legitimate and evaluate the new
  movement
• Offers models that make the new texts readable or
  interpretable
• Often reference to earlier works and writers is
  accompanied by new interpretations or readings
• Work not only on recognized values, but also on
  forms of understanding

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Forerunners for surrealism

• Swift is Surrealist in malice,
• Sade is Surrealist in sadism.
• Chateaubriand is Surrealist in exoticism.
• Constant is Surrealist in politics.
• Hugo is Surrealist when he isn't stupid.
• Desbordes-Valmore is Surrealist in love.
• Bertrand is Surrealist in the past.
• Rabbe is Surrealist in death.
• Poe is Surrealist in adventure.
• Baudelaire is Surrealist in morality.
• Rimbaud is Surrealist in the way he lived, and
  elsewhere.
• Mallarmé is Surrealist when he is confiding.
• Jarry is Surrealist in absinthe.
• Nouveau is Surrealist in the kiss.
• Saint-Pol-Roux is Surrealist in his use of
  symbols.
• Fargue is Surrealist in the atmosphere.
• Vaché is Surrealist in me.
• Reverdy is Surrealist at home.
• Saint-Jean-Perse is Surrealist at a distance.

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Russian futurism clearing way for new poetics

• To the readers of our New First Unexpected.
• We alone are the face of our Time. Through us
  the horn of time blows in the art of the word.
• The past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin
  are less intelligible than hieroglyphics.
• Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc.
  overboard from the Ship of Modernity.
• He who does not forget his first love will not
  recognize his last.
• Who, trustingly, would turn his last love toward
  Balmont's perfumed lechery? Is this the
  reflection of today's virile soul?
• Who, faintheartedly, would fear tearing from
  warrior Bryusov's black tuxedo the paper
  armorplate? Or does the dawn of unknown beauties
  shine from it?
• Wash Your hands which have touched the filthy
  slime of the books written by those countless
  Leonid Andreyevs.
• All those Maxim Gorkys, Kuprins, Bloks,
  Sologubs, Remizovs, Averchenkos, Chornys,
  Kuzmins, Bunins, etc. need only a dacha on the
  river. Such is the reward fate gives tailors.
• From the heights of skyscrapers we gaze at their
  insignificance!...
• Burliuk, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov
  Slap in the face of
• public taste, 15th december 1913.

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Narrativization and history, rupture and
continuity

• An important part of avant-garde rhetoric is to
  tell a story that makes the movement
  understandable
• Two levels of narration
• The internal story of the movement
• Usually comes when the movement has achieved a
  certain maturity or is in the decline
• Can serve different purposes, for example to
  explain and justify choices or to establish or
  contest reputation
• The movement in literary or general history
• Usually comes at the beginning of the movement,
  when the movement seeks to legitimate its
  existence
• Establishes moments of rupture, but also lines of
  continuity
• Manifestoes and essays can also incorporate
  stories that give a fictive and imaginary account
  of rupture and / or continuity
• Representations of fundamental or formative
  experiences

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Literary history as analoguous to other histories

• I am going to argue (1) that the recent history
  of imaginative literature say during the past
  100 years is closely parallel to the history of
  mathematics during the same period (2) that a
  number of poets and novelists in the last century
  stumbled upon special applications of what I
  shall call, by mathematical analogy, the closed
  field (3) that this principle has since been
  repeatedly extended, to produce wholly new kinds
  of literary works
• Hugh Kenner Art in a Closed Field, 1962.

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Homework The rhetoric of manifestoes

• Read Luca Somiglis text and answer the following
  questions
• What is he trying to tell with his reading of
  Baudelaires story?
• What are the main characteristics of a manifesto?
• Read Marinettis The Futurist manifesto (1909)
  and
• Make a list of oppositions that characterize
  Marinettis way of thinking
• Try to explain what is the function of the long
  narrative passage that precedes the actual
  manifesto
• Read pilot plan for concrete poetry by de
  Campos, Pignatari and de Campos (1958) and
• Pick from the text following items
• Historical forerunners of concrete poetry
• Notions that are specific for the movement
• Explain to yourself what is meant by concrete
  poetry, what characteristics a concrete poem has