Midterm

Question 1

Structuralism

Answer 1

The structure is a system, it is not a natural thing. Zukofsky is a structuralist.

Question 2

Semiotics

Answer 2

The study of signs and symbols in language.

Question 3

Sign

Answer 3

The sign is made up of signified and the signifier

Question 4

Signifier

Answer 4

The word that means something. It is the sound that calls the image to mind.

Question 5

Signified

Answer 5

The signified is the object or the concept that is being named.

Question 6

Literary Cubism

Answer 6

Steins objects poems are cubist. The object of these poems is to call the noun to mind without directly naming it. It has a focus on what the essence of the thing is.

Question 7

Hérisson

Answer 7

The hedgehog metaphor from Derrida.
“Untranslatable, the experience of reading a poem is like a hedgehog crossing the room”

Question 8

Metaphysics

Answer 8

The idea that poetry comes from within. It goes beyond science/study of language. It can not be rationalized.

Question 9

Formalism

Answer 9

I don’t understand this.

Question 10

Projective Verse

Answer 10

Charles Olson. Turns away from metered verse. Back to the basics of poetry, the syllable, the line, the body.

BODY - Projective verse sees the poem as a storing and realize of energy - the emotion the “boom” what makes it FEEL is his focus.

SYLLABLE - it is born between the connection of the ear (the sound) and the mind (what it means). The sound brings us closer to the signified.

LINE - controlled by the heart via the breath, this means that the breath is what shapes the line. The body reacts to the emotion, heart rate creates the breath and that creates the line.

FORMAT - The way that it is written done so so that the way that the poet felt when they were writing can be relayed to their readers through spaces. This is a projection of the poets body on the page. These spaces are a composition of breaths, the long spaces are breaths. The type writer made this possible due to the specific nature of the machine.

Question 11

Translation (Derrida)

Question 12

Poetics

Answer 12

The theory of poetry. What is poetry?

Question 13

Synchronic

Answer 13

The relationship current with language.

Question 14

Diachronic

Answer 14

The definition/historical view of language.

Question 15

The Poetic Function

Answer 15

A system of interconnected sub-codes.
Poetics make the functions of language clear to us. The function of language rather than an art. Jakobson says that these systems can not be collapsed.

Question 16

Symbolist (Poetry)

Answer 16

Symbols in poetry are important. The symbol reflects the world that it comes from. Yeats believed that the symbol is a better version of a metaphor. Colour, form, sound; all carry emotional and/or intellectual idea.

Symbolist poetry contains juxtaposition through placing images side by side. The symbols carry distinct but nameless emotional impacts. The power of the symbol is in the combination of those things.

Question 17

Yeats

Answer 17

Was anxious about modernity, the prevalence and role of science, and how it will affect artists and poets. He felt that the pressure put on poets to include scientific descriptions in poems emptied it of its inherent power to express metaphysical ideas. He liked the occult, and the spiritual movement.

He thought that poetry did not have to accomplish anything. He thought the world is full of things we don’t understand but that we can give voice to the things that we cannot see. to him form mattered and overly formed poems can not induce awe.

Question 18

Heaney

Question 19

Moore

Question 20

Stein

Question 21

Cesaire

Question 22

Olsen

Question 23

Derrida

Answer 23

He asks the question, “what it is to experience a poem”. He has a philosophy of deconstruction and did not align himself with the post modernists. He believed that the value of a word is given by what it is, “a cat is a cat because it is not a dog.”

He believes that the linguistic signs are concrete.

Question 24

Genette

Answer 24

Loosely associated with structuralism. Saw inadequacy of the sign but also accepted that the arbitrariness of the sign is the reason that poetry exist to overcome that very arbitrariness.

Genette wanted to collapse the system of signs by bringing the signified closer to the signifier. This is possible due to “semi potentialities” (the representations of a sign or symbol) or bending the meaning of the signifier. Displacing the signifier in the semantic order can also do this.

For example the way we represent the signifier itself changes the signified - ie CAT or cat - there are versions of the animal that intended with each representation.

Question 25

Zukofsky

Answer 25

Modernist poet. Known for his unclear nature, “A”, and the term “objectivist”. He was interested in the forms of the poem and the poem itself.

He believes that it is difficult to describe a poem, that good poetry is information of existence and its existence.

He feels that technique is more important than meaning. He sees it as a good poem is almost mathematical, they announce their own existence. Furthermore the poem is an obsession of relations, the object is made from those relations. Existence is captured in a way that math, history, and science is unable to.

There is no free verse, they all fall victim to the phoneme, syllable, foot, word, line, and stanza. Symmetry exists in some form in all good poetry. To know a anxious poem is to experience it.

Question 26

Jakobson