A poetics of ricochets: Călin Mihăilescu

A poetics of ricochets

September-December, 2004

What the Greeks called “the art of creating in accordance with nature,” poetics, has been tackled head-on in twentieth-century humaniora. Assured formalists, structuralists, poeticians, and semioticians and their many post’s have produced a myriad of poetics: of cinema, death, composition, decadence, desire, empire, enclosure, exile, expressiveness, gender, literary theory, literature, love, metaphor, modernity, music, myth, nationhood, personification, perspective, place, plot, poetry, postmodernism, prose, reading, reason, resistance, reverie, science fiction, self consciousness, space, tragedy, the holy, the new, and many others, among which a sizeable amounts of authors’ oeuvres. This inflation of ‘poetics’ is largely due to: (i) the assumption that the conditions of aesthetic production are similar to those of aesthetic understanding; (ii) the belief that consistent correlations can be shown between description and interpretation of aesthetic processes and products; (iii) the tendency to make methodological practices appear to have inherent theoretical validity; (iv) the belief in the secondary character of aesthetic production (a belief recently amplified by the postmodern erasure of the differences between high- and low-brow art); and (v) the faith in art as a significant means of resistance against alienating political, economic and military processes. Sections dealing with this problematics include:

Aristotelianism bound

Aristotle, Poetics, Rhetoric

Peirce, Saussure

Groupe μ, General Rhetoric

PostAristotelian poetics:

Shklovskij, Tomashevskij, Jakobson, Mukařovský, Lévy-Strauss

Barthes, Genette, Todorov, Kristeva, Doležel

After contextualizing historically and theoretically these five “propositions,” the course will proceed by developing the necessary building blocks of a “poetics of ricochets,” which will attempt to relativize the principles of Aristotelian and postAristotelian poetics, and to also allow for a more flexible understanding of art. The principles of this understanding include the indirectness of aesthetic knowledge (cf. Adorno), the incorporation of art’s ‘marginality’ and ‘resistance’ into a more comprehensive theory of derivation and mobility (‘ricochet’), and the disassembling of traditional hermeneutics, which presupposes the correspondence between the work of art as a hole and the unity of aesthetic experience. A ricochet is a becoming produced by a movement, rather than by a divine principle, an axiom, or a rule – be that rule of a particular form, genre or “literary system.” In the realm of aesthetic meaning, ricochets include the distinctions between synchrony and diachrony, as well as questions regarding filiation, influence, and intertextuality within a field of immanence where all the moves can be glimpsed at once. The sessions of this second part of the course include:

Realms overwhelmed: transcendence as immanence

Dante, John Donne, Quevedo, Dickinson, Maupassant

Pseudo-Longinus (On the Sublime)

Kant (Critique of Judgment §§ 22-29)

The baroque double vision:

Velázquez

Deleuze for Leibniz

Calderón

No exit (deconstruction)
            Gorky, The Night Asylum
            Celan
            Beckett, En attendant Godot
            de Man (“Rhetoric of Temporality”)

Redemptions & parables
            1. I dollatry: Kleist, Kafka, Borges
            Heidegger (“The Origin of the Work of Art,
                        “The Question Concerning Technology”)
            Benjamin, “Kafka”

Crisscross your rhizome

Cortázar, Kathy Acker
Deleuze & Guattari, One Thousand Plateaus

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