Dear Classmates:
If you’re reviewing the materials, please only take note of:
- Highlighted passages in the piece from Allegories on Captions
- The piece “Lines” is only 4 pages—a quick read
- First stanza of From the Distance
Thesis: How Dante’s discourse on the inefficacy of language informs postmodern poetics.. (Proto-Hermeneutics)—working title- do not have ironed out a thesis thus no fixed title…
Looking to examine Hejinian’s reading of “Mode”Z”—”Mode” Z” reading Dante, Hejinain reading “Mode Z”, Hejinian reinterpreting Dante through the lens of the postmodern idea of “allegorical activism”… HMMMM
The Commedia which informs her poetics–the exploration of his poetics in From the Distance… key commonality: Euone—transformative moment—propels writing which is generative and not prescriptive —
Highlight the similarities:
- My starting point:
- Perrill’s parataxis—not as novel as he M-A-K-E-S It
- The last stanza in the anthology
- Saga/Circus: Divina/Commedia (Are we for real—who doesn’t see this?)
- Theoretical parallels from Dante’s Paradisio and his last Cantos of Purgatorio
- Structural—all three poems start in media res etc.; journey motif-theoretical—”Mode Z” basis for LANGUAGE poets as explained in “The Sad Note In a Poetics Of Consciousness”…
- Theory on rhetorical devices
- allegory (Dante’s Epistola Can Grande de la Scala seemingly as a key to the Divine Comedy analogous to postmodern discourses on allegory—thus interpretation of motifs: sleep, dream, awakening
- irony
- other devices include conjunctive and parataxis, as discussed in Perrill and Hejinian stessa.
- line versus sentence within the structure of the poem—transitive nature
- autobiographical-anti-narrative—anti-autobiography as “allegorical activism, which necessitates the loss of memory thus the use of the above motifs—journey, sleep, dream, awakening: all correspond to the same use in Dante, pointing towards “open”… (Agamben) not sure if need/works—but reinforces the reception in postmodernism..
- How these elements manifest in “From the Distance”
- This is a work in progress
- I really don’t expect you to think through any of this gibberish…
Stef,
I want to start out by saying that your thinking process never ceases to amaze me. I do not see this as gibberish at all. Instead, I can see how this post is a display of your thinking process and the ways in which you are actively connecting the dots between Dante’s work and Hejinain’s work in an attempt to highlight Dante’s high level of influence.
I appreciated Hejinain’s “The Line” and how articulate and adamant she was that form and the organization of a poem is so vital to its meaning, which I greatly agree with. She even takes things a step further to explain that “the absorbing discontinuities that often appear between the lines” (Hejinian 134), which I interpret as the white space on the page due to indentations or line breaks, are indicative of the poet’s experience and the poem’s meaning. This proves how intentional Language poetry truly is, so I appreciate you sharing her outlook on her work with us.
I think this topic is complex and intricate, which is what will make your paper so special and insightful. I can’t wait to see where you take this!