Semiotics and City Poetics (eBook)

Jakobson’s Theory and Praxis

Mary Coghill (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022
372 Seiten
De Gruyter (Verlag)
978-3-11-061480-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Roman Jakobson stands alone in his semiotic theory of poetic analysis which combines semiotics, linguistics and structuralist poetics. This groundbreaking book proposes methods for developing Jakobson's theories of communication and poetic function. It provides an extensive range of examples of the kinds of Formalist praxis that have been neglected in recent years, developing them for the analysis of all poetry but, especially, the poetry of our urban future. Throughout the book the parameters of a city poetic genre are proposed and established; the book also develops the theory of the function of shifters and deixis with special reference to women as narrators. It also instantiates an experimental poetic praxis based on the work of one of Jakobson's great influences, Charles Sanders Peirce. Steadfastly adhering to the text in itself, this volume reveals the often surprising, hitherto unconsidered structural and semiotic patterns within poems as a whole.

Mary Coghill, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Humanities, Russian Department, Exeter University UK.

Textauszug

Introduction

The purpose of this book is firstly, to re-examine, and then develop, Jakobson’s theories of Poetic Function and Communication (Chapters One and Two); secondly, to provide an increased range of examples of Formalist praxis; thirdly, to apply these theories to the analysis of city poetry with the intention of establishing a city poetic genre; and, lastly, to provide a basis for understanding Formalist praxis as a structural process which does not force the analyst to either use the full range of Formalist techniques, nor apply them to an entire poem. The current author’s principal focus is semiotic rather than linguistic. Jakobson’s legacy is extensive. The focus here is to take advantage of his research – to revisit, re-­investigate, apply and develop it – adding to the body of knowledge in the fields of linguistics, semiotics and poetics. It is accepted throughout this book that Roman Jakobson’s theory of Poetic Function combines semiotics, linguistics and poetics. An additional focus is the application of these theories and praxis to city poetry, with a specific emphasis on the woman narrator. These areas of research provide further material for the establishment of a city poetic genre.

Roman Jakobson’s interest in linguistics, when considering poetry, was constantly super-imposed by the demands of the poetic text. From his early days he recognised that both pictorial art and, to a lesser extent, mathematics, played a part in enabling analysis of the text. From these two disciplines he derived his interest in the shape of poetry – its form and linked meanings; and from mathematics he derived his interest in the possibility of expressing those shapes in diagrammatic form. His interest in linguistics, especially phonemes, was largely shaped by his contemporary in Prague – Trubetzkoy (1939). His series of lectures “Six Lectures in Sound and Meaning” (1978[1942]) develop his links with Saussure and the axes of language. Jakobson continued to be inspired by Saussure’s work throughout his life, adding to it, amongst others, an interest in the semiotic systems of Charles Sanders Peirce. But his linguistic interest was always placed within the context of the larger units of word, sentence and textual whole. His interest in poetry further pushed him towards analysis of the construction of the whole poem as a unit. His interest in phonemes, for example, was expressed through his interest in the bigger picture. He writes in his lecture: “Linguistics and Poetics”:

No doubt, verse is primarily a recurrent “figure of sound”. Primarily always, but never uniquely. Any attempts to confine such poetic conventions as meters, alliteration, or rhyme to the sound level are speculative reasonings without any empirical justification. The projection of the equational principle into the sequence has a much deeper and wider significance. Valéry’s view of poetry as “hesitation between the sound and the sense” is much more realistic and scientific than any bias of phonetic isolationism.//Although rhyme by definition is based on a regular recurrence of equivalent phonemes or phonemic groups, it would be an unsound oversimplification to treat rhyme merely from the standpoint of sound. Rhyme necessarily involves a semantic relationship between rhyming units (“rhyme-fellows” in Hopkins nomenclature).

(1987: 81[1960])

Jakobson’s engagement in poetry naturally included an interest in sound. In the same lecture, he also writes: “In poetry, any conspicuous similarity in sound is evaluated in respect to similarity and/or dissimilarity in meaning . . . [for ex­­ample] Pope’s alliterative precept to poets – ‘the sound must seem an echo of the sense’.” (1987: 87). He further states: “The analysis of a poetic sound texture must consistently take into account the phonological structure of the given language and, beside the overall code, the hierarchy of phonological distinctions in the given poetic convention as well.” (1987: 88/9). Once again, he uses linguistics as a stepping stone to assist in analysing not only the larger unit of text but also the differing languages available to the poet.

Rhetoric had been the usual form of analysis of language construction but it was superseded by the emerging discipline of linguistics. Jakobson’s Formalism is derived, not from this ancient art of rhetoric, but from his interest in linguistics. He made this clear in his reference to Mayakovsky’s influence:

When in 1919 the Moscow Linguistic Circle discussed how to define and delimit the range of epithet ornantia, the poet Majakovskij rebuked us by saying that for him any adjective appearing in a poem was thereby a poetic epithet, even “great” in the Great Bear of “big” and “little” in such names of Moscow streets . . . . “I live on the Big Presnja, 34, 24. Apparently it’s not my business that somewhere in the stormy world people went and invented war”. And the poem ends: “The war has killed one more, the poet from the Big Presnja” Briefly, poeticalness is not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical adornments but a total reevaluation of the discourse and of all its components whatsoever.

(1987: 93)

Formalism was not only an early major influence on Jakobson, it remained of primary importance for his lifelong research. He expressed his early commitment very clearly in his 1921 essay, “Novešaja russkaja poèzija. Nabtosok pervyi.­Podstupy k Xlebnikovu.” [“The Newest Russian Poetry. First draft with Viktor Khlebnikov”], which is, as yet, not fully translated into English. The paragraph below was translated for “Russian Formalism”, 4. 1977: 17; trans. Ann Shukman and L.M.O’Toole):

The subject of literary science is not literature, but literariness, i.e. that which makes a given work a literary work. Up till now, however, historians of literature have mostly behaved like the police who when they want to arrest someone take in everyone and everything found in the apartment and even chance passers-by. Historians of literature have in the same way felt the need to take in everything – everyday life, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature we have fetched up with a conglomeration of cottage industries.

(1979b [1921]: 299–354)

In another early lecture, “The Dominant” [1935], he writes: “With the further development of Formalism, there arose the accurate conception of a poetic work as a structured system, a regularly ordered hierarchical set of artistic devices.” (1987: 44). He further indicates his linguistic interest in diachronic and synchronic methods. These are not confined to phonemes or linguistics but are used to understand how innovation is constructed in art forms:

The shifting, the transformation, of the relationship between individual artistic components became the central issue in Formalist investigations. This aspect of Formalist analysis in the field of poetic language had a pioneering significance for linguistic research in general, since it provided important impulses toward overcoming and bridging the gap between the diachronic historical method and the synchronic method of chronological cross section. It was the Formalist research which clearly demonstrated that shifting and change are not only historical statements . . . but that shift is also a directly experienced synchronic phenomenon, a relevant artistic value. The reader of a poem or the viewer of a painting has a vivid awareness of two orders: the traditional canon and the artistic novelty as a deviation from that canon. It is precisely against the background of the tradition that innovation is conceived.

(1987: 46)

Linda Waugh’s chapter, “Roman Jakobson’s work on semiotics and language”, in (Re)considering Jakobson (eds. Sütiste, Grampigna, Griffin, Salupere. 2022: 15–32), provides an overview of the differing influences expressed by Jakobson in his work:

Since, for Jakobson, language is a pure system of signs, not only sound, but also grammar and syntax, [it] must be subjected to a semantic/semiotic analysis; the study of meaning cannot be excluded from linguistics, not from other semiotic systems such as music and non-representational painting . . . . That is, any formal analysis of signs necessitates a concomitant semantic analysis whether the object of study is phonological elements, morphological systems, syntactic structures, discursive aspects of texts, formal structure of poems, and so forth. Concomitantly, no semantic analysis can be done without close attention to form: e.g., the meaning/interpretation of a sentence or of a whole text depends crucially on how that meaning is interrelated with the formal elements.

(1922: 17)

Linguistic and semiotic theoretical research is now well-established. These disciplines are constantly developing in complexity and range. Fundamentally, it is generally accepted that linguistics is the scientific study of language (Cuddon 1999). The Introduction of The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics (Matthews 2005), states that linguistics is the study of grammar, syntax, sound systems, and the comparison of different language systems and their history and development. Semiotics is the ‘science of signs’, of which linguistics forms a part. Things and signs signify...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.12.2022
• Reihe/Serie: ISSN
• Reihe/Serie: ISSN
• Reihe/Serie: Semiotics, Communication and Cognition [SCC]
• Reihe/Serie: Semiotics, Communication and Cognition [SCC]
• Zusatzinfo: 10 b/w and 7 col. ill., 8 b/w tbl.
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
• Schlagworte: Linguistics • Poetics • Roman Jakobson • Semiotics
• ISBN-10: 3-11-061480-4 / 3110614804
• ISBN-13: 978-3-11-061480-0 / 9783110614800