Abstract
Poetry and theory are ways of making and seeing. There are various kinds of ways of writing and reading in the realm of interpretation. The notion of recognition or “discovery” as an uncovering is germane. This chapter amplifies this context of mimesis—theory as seeing, poetry as making, recognition, reading and otherness—ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Derrida, de Man, Iser, Rorty and others; in a compressed fashion the chapter will discuss some of these issues and range from antiquity to a contemporary theorist, Jean Bessière, to amplify earlier chapters and look forward to East-West poetics. Bessière suggests there is an assumption that an individual literature or culture is produced not according to its limits, but to the relation with an other. Culture is a key to Bessière’s view.
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Notes
The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (1941; New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1945, rpt. 1968), 80. My thanks to Jean Bessiere and to Editions Honore Champion in Paris and Slakine for permission to reprint with revisions Jonathan Hart, “Between Seeing and Making: The Theory and Poetics of Jean Bessiere,” Philippe Daros et Miceala Symington (eds.), Épistémologie du fait littéraire et rénovation des paradigmes critiques. Autour de l’oeuvre de Jean Bessière (Paris: Honore Champion, collection “Colloques, congres et conferences-Litterature comparee”, 2011), 95–201. This chapter attempts to bridge the view of making between that in the twentieth and that in the twenty-first century.
See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford, 1928), 67–73;
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979) and his Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983);
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 293–95; for the original, see L’Écriture et la différence (Paris, 1967).
Aristotle’s Poetics, trans. George Walley, ed. John Baxter and Patrick Atherton (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 87; see also 87–91.
Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 1–9.
On value-judgments, see, for instance, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 3.
See, for example, Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978);
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (1982; New York: Harper & Row, 1984);
Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Aristotle, The Poetics / Aristotle: On the sublime / “Longinus”: On style / Demetrius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927).
In Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), Roland Barthes attacked mythology, the same year Northrop Frye was defending it in Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Barthes’ idea of mythology has some similarities to Frye’s notion of ideology. For a discussion of Frye, Barthes, mythology and ideology, see my Northrop Frye: The Theoretical Imagination (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), see especially 194–95.
See, for instance, Jean Bessiere, Quel statut pour la littérature? (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), 119–27.
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader, trans. David Henry Wilson (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 21.
See Jean Bessiere, “Comparative Literature and Common Knowledge Against the Ideologies of the Absolute Power of Literature,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32.1 (March/ mars 2005), 37–64; and his Qu’est-il arrive aux écrivains français? (Loveral: Editions Labor, 2006).
See Richard Rorty, “Looking Back at ‘Literary Theory’,” in Haun Saussy, Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 63–68.
Jean Bessiere, “Rationalites en litterature comparee: Notes pour une redefinition des moyens et des buts de la discipline,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 35.3 (2008), 212.
Bessiere, “Rationalites,” 219–20. See Jean Bessiere, Principes de la théorie littéraire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005).
See, for instance (from the most recent), Jonathan Hart, Fictional and Historical Worlds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Literature, Theory, History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Interpreting Culture: Literature, Religion, and the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Contesting Empires: Promotion, Opposition and Slavery (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005); Comparing Empires: European Colonialism from Portuguese Expansion to the Spanish-American War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan/St Martin’s Press, 2003).
Wladimir Krysinski, “Introducing Jean Bessiere—Beyond and Around Paradigms—A New Cognition of Literary Work,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature /Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32.1 (2005), 10–11. This is Krysinski’s introduction to a special issue devoted to Bessiere.
Philippe Daros, “Increasing the Probable in the Improbable: An Enquiry into the Other Night of Literature,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32.1 (2005), 65.
The passage Daros highlights occurs in Jean Bessiere, Quel statut pour la littérature? (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 2001), 15.
Michel Meyer, “Some Remarks on the Foundation of Literary Rhetoric,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32.1 (2005), 85.
Philippe Roussin, “Literature of Exceptional Status, Literature Outside Exceptional Status,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32.1 (2005), 91, 93, 122.
See also Jean Bessiere, La Littérature et sa rhétorique (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1999).
Monika Schmitz-Emans, “Literature as ‘Self-translation’ and the Concept of ‘enigmaticite’ in Jean Bessiere’s ‘Enigmaticite de la litterature’ (Chapter III: ‘Concept d’ecriture et enigmatique’),” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32.1 (2005), 126.
The passage that Schmitz-Emans is referring to is in Jean Bessiere, Enigmaticité de la littérature. Pour une anatomic de la fiction au XX’ siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1993), x.
Tania Franco Carvalhal, “Questions in Literary Theory: Jean Bessiere’s Contribution to Comparatism,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/ Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 32.1 (2005), 152.
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© 2013 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2013). Making and Seeing. In: Textual Imitation: Making and Seeing in Literature. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137301352_5
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