RILUNE Review of Literature of the European Union

Présentation

Enrico Monti — 2013-09-20

Les premiéres descriptions systematiques de l’écriture chinoise paraissent en Europe à partir de la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle et elles soulignent le caractère «universel» des idéogrammes; dans ces derniers on entreverrait en effet la «naturalité» de la langue parfaite, la langue universelle prébabelique.

About Ideography and its Implications in Poetry

Jean-Gérard Lapacherie — 2013-09-20

Ideography was born in writing, although it largely overcomes these boundaries. Ideography is related to texts, which, once printed, are not homogeneous in either signs or formatting. They may be composed of signs of different languages. Ideography has the same power that poetry is supposed to have: can words written according to the ideographic rules have a grasp on the things of the world, besides simply representing them? These implications are apparent in the passionate criticism that ideography received in linguistics, and, if we are to provide a coherent overview of this issue, ideography needs to be thought beyond the frames of modern linguistics, recovering the old linguistics from the 18th and 19th century, the works of printers and typographers from the 19th century, and also considering the crisis that poetic language underwent at the end of the 19th century, to which ideography provided an answer.

Keywords: ideography; typography; history of writing; linguistics

Three Spanish Ultraist Poets

Willard Bohn — 2013-09-23

The Ultraist movement flourished in Spain from 1919 to 1921. This article examines visual poetry composed by three individuals, who differed widely in their approaches to this fascinating genre. Depicting an imaginary villa, the design created by Pedro Raida was essentially realistic. Containing eight visual analogies, Andrés Nimero’s poem retraced the route taken by a streetcar in Seville. By contrast Eliodoro Puche’s composition utilized a single visual analogy, which was juxtaposed with a surprising metaphor.

Keywords: Ultraism; visual poetry; Raida, Pedro; Nimero, Andrés; Puche, Eliodoro

The Avant-garde calligram’s Reception in Spain: The Discourse of the New and the Sentimental Past

Jaime Barón Thaidigsmann — 2013-09-23

The matrix of the present in Apollinaire’s calligram does not exclude sentimental and Symbolist subjects. However, its reception in Spain, together with that of Futurism, tends to play this down, emphasizing a discourse of the New that precludes the ancienne musique. Nevertheless, this unilateral strategy reveals connections with the literary past. In contrast, Larrea’s calligrams («Estanque», «Sed») make use of sentimental figurations, which become the polemic historic content of the calligramatic action, and propose a modernity in dialogue with literary history.

Keywords: calligram; Apollinaire, Guillaume; Larrea, Juan; Ultraism; literary history

Reading within the Lines: Henri Michaux and the Chinese Art of Writing

Cordell D. K. Yee — 2013-09-24

Linguistic theory since the early twentieth century has been marked by a split in response to Chinese writing. In linguistics writing has often been regarded as parasitic on speech, an effort to represent the spoken word. In the area of poetics the response has been somewhat different. Ezra Pound, for example, found a structural method for constructing meaning in the composition of Chinese characters. Similar features interested Henri Michaux early in his career, but later Chinese graphs came to have extralinguistic significance. The locus of meaning for Michaux shifted from sign to line. Chinese writing helped Michaux to recover what had been lost in Western writing as a result of the modernization of textual production. The result is the need for a revision in interpretive practice. Interpreting a text becomes not a matter of reading between the lines, but within the lines.

Between Text and Image, East and West: Henri Michaux’s Signs and Christian Dotremont’s «Logogrammes»

Nina Parish — 2013-10-08

From their material manifestation on the page or canvas, it is evident that Henri Michaux’s signs and Christian Dotremont’s «logogrammes» are influenced by ideographic forms and calligraphy. Like many artists and writers, both Michaux and Dotremont were interested in this signifying system, which functions in a radically different manner to the Western alphabetic system. Many practitioners, although mesmerised by the formal aesthetic qualities of the ideogram, had little or no knowledge of how this signifying system actually worked. In this article, the reasons behind Michaux’s and Dotremont’s attraction to the creative possibilities offered by the ideogram and their respective appropriations of it will be analysed.

BILD-DING-GEDICHTE: Mörike - C. F. Meyer - Nietzsche - Rilke - Morgenstern

Peter André Bloch — 2013-10-08

This essay sets out to highlight problems and possibilities arising in some German lyrical poets, within the frame of the European traditions and the different poetical conceptions of the 20th century. Already by the end of the 19th century, Mörike et Meyer practised poetical meditation: they described the energy of artistic creation in order to show the polyvalent relations among word, form and meaning. In a few poems, Nietzsche tried to show the tension between the perspective of the external world and the virtual fullness of the creative moment; so did Rilke, who tried to represent the great, troubling complexity of his vision of the real world, calling upon his memories, his aesthetical reflection, and the objectivising force of his imagination. Morgenstern parodied the illusory appearance of the concrete world playing, in a humourous way, on the first and figurative meanings of the words, as well as on the ambiguity of all apparently plausible definitions.

“Il ne peut pas être tout dans une seule langue”: La Poésie et le langage “verbivocovisuel” chez Joyce et Pound

Federico Sabatini — 2013-10-08

Cette étude analyse la relation entre musique, langage verbal et langage visuel dans les innovations littéraires de Joyce et Pound. Les deux auteurs préconisaient une nouvelle conception de poésie, une nouvelle façon de décrire le temps et l’espace dans leurs aspects fragmentés de simultanéité et de juxtaposition. On met en relation certains des premiers poèmes de Pound avec Chamber Music de Joyce, en soulignant la combinaison de melopoeia, phanopoeia et logopoeia qui trouve son écho naturel dans la catégorie du «verbivocovisual» chez Joyce. Enfin, la technique idéogrammatique de Pound, dérivée des idéogrammes chinois, est comparée à la méthode étymologique de Joyce, puisque les deux sont utilisées pour accomplir ce que Joyce appelait une concreation, et Pound un compendius, de significations et de cultures.

The Orientation Principle: Surrealism and Poetry

Laurent Bazin — 2013-10-09

In its quest for new forms capable of reinventing the relation between world and language, Surrealism (conceived as a movement beyond the differences among its members) sought in the dialogue between text and image new interactions towards a regenerated symbolisation. Thus it recovered older codes, in particular ideography, which provided both a conceptual and an aesthetical model, orienting its choices of representation. This essay sets out to retrace the history of that encounter, investigating the theoretical and poetical activity of the movement in search of any signs of the influence that ideograms – notably Chinese ideograms – had on the artistic avant-gardes at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ideogrammaticity in Stèles and Plasticity in Cent Phrases pour éventails

Yin Yongda — 2013-10-09

Chinese ideograms have two main properties. The first one, which consists mainly in the structurality, the dynamism and the rationality of Chinese ideograms, may be named “ideogrammaticity”, while the second one, grouping together palpable or visual effects of the ideogrammatic structure and movement that the ideogrammatic structure needs and produces, may be called “plasticity”. This essay sets out to analyze how these two properties emerge from Victor Segalen’s Stèles and Paul Claudel’s Cent Phrases pour éventails. In Stèles the first property is prominent, while in Cent Phrases pour éventails the second property is more apparent.

The Ideographic Poetry of Pierre Albert-Birot

Marianne Simon-Oikawa — 2013-10-09

A pioneer of French visual poetry, Pierre Albert-Birot (1876-1967) discovered the word «ideogram», which was a synonym for «calligram» to him, through his relations with Apollinaire. He liked the term, and wrote himself «ideogrammatic poems» for a short period, before giving up. Yet, the ideogram was not mere fancy to him. Even though he abandoned the word itself, he did not dismiss the principles of the ideogram itself. The paper discusses the forms and the meanings of the ideogram in the works of a poet who was not interested in the Chinese writing as such, but found an original way, under other names and inside the alphabetic system itself, to go back to the very principles of the ideogram as a form of visual writing.