Zeitschriftenartikel zum Thema „Cynicism – Poetry“

"The study proposes a rereading of the Romanian poetry written during Communist regime, in order to see how practices of derision are used in a subversive manner in relation to political power and the realities of that era. The humor, irony, sarcasm or cynicism shown by this poetry are seen as means to circumvent censorship, entering, from this perspective, the field of a particular commitment against historical events."

Poetry still exists today, through poetry the author can express his feelings and thoughts. In addition to being written, poetry can also be read, made into musicals, inserted in short stories, novels, and films. There are various studies that can be used to analize poetry, one of which is stylistics studies. Tyhrough this study, it can be seen the style of language used by the author in making poetry. The purpose of this study is to find the style of language in the collection of poems My Firl by Joko Pinurbo. This study uses a qualitative method. Data analysis was carried out using Miles and Huberman analysis techniques, namely data reduction, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. The result of the research on the use of language styles in the collection of poems My Girl by Joko Pinurbo, namely parable language style, metaphor language style, personification language style, cynicism style, and anaphoric language style.Keywords: literary works; poetry; stylistics

<p class="ABSTRACT">The transition period of the Umayyad dynasty to the Abbasid dynasty occurred in a span of 100 years. There are fifteen great poets whose poetry represents the study of this research. The results of this study indicate that there are seven types of poetry found in the transition period, namely madh, hija, naqaidh, zuhud, gazal, khamriyyat, and fakhr. These seven poems have different characteristics to fulfill different functions. Among them are diction which uses connotative words, strong imagination, uses a lot of simile/tasybih, cynicism, sarcasm, personification, and metaphor/istia'rah.</p>

Sayyeda Bakhtawar shah Shafaq’s collection of poems has a lot of good traits and many characteristics of effective poetry. In Haripur, there is a dire need of an experienced poetess like her before. This essential necessity was fulfilled by her beautiful poetry having the qualities of thought provoking subjects creativity and impact on messes. The different aspect of her poetry are about the relationship of life with this material world, exploring the mysteries of humanity prevailed throughout the global and separation of the cherished people as well as of the things and how much impressive their separation is for the inhabitants here. Her poetry also deals with human social issues and their recognition in a unique way. Melody and cynicism are also presented by her verses. Her innocence and simplicity of nature shine through her work. She portrays ups and down and many bitter realities of human life but not in a convention way aspeactised by others.

A significant motif in African poetry which critics have ignored over the years is that of motherhood. This theme has been explored by many an African writer, depicting its various manifestations – physically, psychologically, and spiritually. However, the metaphoric aggregation of the many aspects of maternity has not been met with the appropriate critical response. The aim of this study is to examine the foregrounding of motherhood in Hope Eghagha's . What is revealed is not a romanticization of motherhood, but a tear-glazed threnodic articulation of a mother's last moments on earth, though with telling glances at the past which poeticize the essence of motherhood. Also discernible in this collection are other sundry themes which, often with a certain cynicism, re-create the nature of humanity, complementing Eghagha's versification of motherhood. These themes – greed, wickedness, love, betrayal – are largely ignored in the evaluation of African poetry. The present study excavates them, arguing that they deserve critical articulation for African poetry to be seen as representing life as it is lived and experienced.

A poet often uses the style of language in composing poetry in order to achieve the desired beauty. Likewise with one of the famous Arab poets in the modern era, namely Nizar Qabbani. He often uses language styles, one of which is the figurative language style, to compose verses in his poems. One of his works which contains a lot of this style of figurative language is his poem entitled "Mansyūrātun Fidāiyyatun ā Al Judrāni Isrāīl". This study aims to analyze the style of figurative language used in the poem. In this study, researchers used stylistic analysis, to be able to find out the types of figurative language used by poets. The results of this study indicate that poets use several kinds of figurative language styles, namely equation or simile (tasybīh), metaphor or isti’ārah, antonomasia or kināyah, pars pro toto (majāz mursal juz’iyyah), irony and cynicism. The most figurative style of speech used by poets is the style of equality or simile (tasybīh), irony and cynicism. This is because the poem is a criticism and representation of expressions of bitterness, anger, and disappointment of the Palestinian people both towards Israel, America, and other world communities.

ndian English Poetry is replete with both ancient and modern elements. Pre-independent and post-independent India marked two different phases in poetry. Poets predominantly dealt with conventional themes in the past. But, one distinguishing feature of Post –independent poetry has been to portray a diversified representation of multiple themes. A careful analysis of thoughts, feelings, and psyche of the poets not only genuinely but eloquently reveals urban ‘cynicism and anguish’ and reveals ‘hope and anticipation’ quite aptly. Poets differed according to the age in which they had lived but ultimately, their poetry became a subject matter of anguish and agony. There have been obvious expressions of urban life in the beginnings but as the poets emerged in the early twentieth century, rural side of the life figured prominently in their writings. PCK Prem observes, “Poetry depicting rural background and the inner world of man is also conscious of the collapse of human bonds and aspirations even as sufferings, struggles, and failures dishearten but carry elements of hope, and thus, infuse a spirit to live life persuasively”. (2006: 21) Poetry is not only a study of thoughts or emotions but it also involves reading of a huge poetic landscape, literary yield, political thought process and its evolution, and the social and economic environment. From 1920, after taking into consideration various social and historical facts, one assumes that contemporary Indian English Poetry begins its ambitious journey --- in rising cities and other rural areas, developing towns of various regions to be more specific Indian English Poetry begins its journey. One such element is the delineation of bucolic elements in poetry. India is predominantly a rural country side with 60% of population living in villages. The countryside is a geographic area located outside the cities and towns. Indian villages have low population density and small settlements. The poetry of T.V. Reddy is rooted in bucolic elements. In fact, all his poetry collections carry the hallmarks of rural life, pastoral panorama and idyllic nature. They beautify his poetry against rural background. Rural life in India forms the very basis of economy and essential living conditions. In fact, it is the backbone of development in diversity. Life in cities is always different from life in rural areas.

C. K. Scott Moncrieff, famous as the translator of Proust, began his translating career in 1918 with La Chanson de Roland. Knowing nothing of Old French, he encountered this classic text while recovering from a war wound; the work of translation was a ‘solace’ in time of war, but also a homage to his friend Wilfred Owen and others who had ‘met their Rencesvals’ as the war drew to a close. Scott Moncrieff was no jingoist, but against the cynicism of Siegfried Sassoon's war poetry, he used the Old French epic to celebrate the positive values embodied in the idea of vassalage. Like his Proust, his Song of Roland sought to bring another world to life in English-speaking culture, in all its specific difference. Here this led him to adopt an archaizing and purportedly oral style, notably in the imitation of the assonanced laisses of the original.

In his “Poetic Responses to the Death of Gumilev,” Ivan Martynov has chronicled the repercussions of Gumilev's execution by the Cheka in August 1921 in the poetry of his contemporaries. Martynov recalls those poets who remained faithful to Gumilev and marked his death with memorable poems as well as the opportunists who publicly and loudly praised his executioners. Among those who betrayed Gumilev for selfish reasons, Martynov cites such former close friends as Elizaveta Polonskaia, Mikhail Zenkevich, Larisa Reisner, and Sergei Gorodetskii. Their cynicism and cowardice were, however, more than offset by the loyalty and resourcefulness of, among others, Anna Akhmatova, Georgii Adamovich, Nikolai Otsup, Ida Nappel'baum and Irina Odoevtseva. Despite the very real danger, these poets refused to renounce Gumilev in public. Because the Soviet censor would allow no overt references to Gumilev, much less poems in commemoration of his death, his friends were able to refer to him only obliquely in the months following his execution.

Russian rock poets focus on Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment and its characters: the old woman pawnbroker, Svidrigailov and Raskolnikov. The hero of rock poetry lives in the initially given anti-space, where the state is a well-organized structure that exists due to the suppression of personality. The classic interpretation of the novel’s idea - the fall and subsequent resurrection of the human soul - is impossible for the rock poet, who is painfully focused on the root cause of social injustice, symbolically embodied in the ‘eternal’ image of the old woman pawnbroker. The emphasized motive of her immortality makes the conflict of personality and the existing system tragically insoluble. The ‘self’ of the lyrical hero coincides with the consciousness of Raskolnikov. The main character of the novel turns out to be only ‘one of many’, any of those who decide to challenge the system - and lose. The moral meaning of the novel is reinterpreted: it only maintains the existing order, showing the impossibility of struggle, because the crime turns against the rebel himself, who is not able to withstand the torment of conscience. There is a redistribution of the ‘weight’ between the characters. The heightened experience of the meaningless struggle with the existing world order and social injustice pushes rock poets to Dostoevsky’s anti-heroes, in particular to Svidrigailov, who becomes an independent tragic figure. He, like everyone, is sinful, in his extreme cynicism he is even deprived of the opportunity to deceive himself - and the last thing remaining for him is bitter irony of himself, life and even the existential problem of human afterlife. At the same time, Sonya Marmeladova - the moral antipode of Raskolnikov - is mentioned in the texts only once, since she is not included in the conflict of personality and society, but acts as its victim, like Raskolnikov himself (therefore, this place in the system of characters is already occupied by a hero, whose nature is identical to that of the rock poet, more expressive, and similar to the demonic images of gloomy, gothic romanticism).

Hijā’ atau satire adalah salah satu genre syair yang mengandung konten sinisme atau ejekan. Jenis puisi ini berkembang pesat pada masa Dinasti Umayyah. Penyair yang sangat terkenal dengan genre ini di antaranya adalah al-Farazdaq. Kajian ini bermaksud untuk mengungkap jenis budaya satire yang berkembang pada masa Bani Umayyah melalui syair al-Farazdaq serta latar belakang munculnya budaya tersebut. Untuk mencapai tujuan tersebut, saya akan menggunakan metode penelitian qualitatif melalui pendekatan budaya dan sejarah pada teks-teks syair hija al-Farazdaq. Berdasarkan hasil analisis terungkap bahwa budaya satire yang berkembang pada masa Bani Umayah dalam puisi hija al-Farazdaq adalah jenis satire personal (al-hijā al-syakhsyi) yaitu satire yang menyerang pribadi seseorang dengan cara mengejeknya melalui hal-hal yang bersifat fisik, satire moral (al-hijā al-akhlāqi) yaitu sindiran-sindiran yang ditujukan kepada lawan karena dianggap memiliki moralitas yang rendah, satire politik (al-hijā al-siyāsi) yang digunakan untuk kepentingan politik, satire sosial (al-hijā al-ijtimāi) yaitu sindiran yang terkait perilaku sosial yang kurang lazim terjadi pada masyarakat pada umumnya dan satire agama (al-hijā al-dīnī) yaitu satire-satire yang digunakan untuk menyindir perilaku keagamaan seseorang. Adapun latar belakang munculnya budaya satire di antaranya disebabkan oleh motif politik, ekonomi dan fanatisme kesukuan. Hijā' or satire is a genre of poetry that contains cynicism or mockeries. This type of poetry developed rapidly during the Umayyad Dynasty. This study was intended to reveal the type of satirical culture in the era of Umayyads through al-Farazdaq’s poetry and the background of its emergence. To achieve this purpose, I used a qualitative research method implementing cultural and historical approaches to read critically hija al-Farazdaq's poetic texts. The result of analysis revealed there were five kinds of satirical culture developing during the Umayyads in the poetry hija al-Farazdaq. There were a personal satire (al-hijā al-syakhsyi) attacked someone by mocking him through things that were physical; a moral satire (al-hijā al-akhlāqi), namely allusions that addressed the opponents because they were considered to have low morality; a political satire (al-hijā al-siyāsi) which was used for political purposes; a social satire (al-hijā al-ijtimāi) which was an allusion related to social behavior that were less common in the society in general; and a religious satire (al-hijā al-dīnī) which was used to insinuate one's religious behavior. The background for the emergence of satire culture were due to political, economic and tribal fanaticism.

Summary Daylight has a special place in Miłosz’s poetic work: it is the first volume of poetry after his defection to the West, but it contains texts written during his first visit to the United States in the late 1940s. At that time he held a post at the Polish Embassy and looked at America from the other shore of ideology and personal experience. The article examines the author’s selection of poems for the successive editions of Daylight. The first, full edition of that volume is critical of both European nihilism and American primitivism (the latter refers to lack of concern about the horrors of war). In the following editions the poet’s perspective begins to change. The ‘American’ poems now foreground his experience of the continent’s natural landscape. Its primeval magnificence offers shelter and, through a sense of ecstatic communion with the sources of being, new strength. Likewise, the denunciation of European cynicism, which dominates the verse selected for the first edition, is later allowed to fade away. Eventually the experiences on both sides of the Atlantic are brought into balance. In the subsequent, slimmer editions of Daylight it is the ‘Song about china’ that represents the key tone of the volume. Although it may look slight, it manages to contrast the brutality of history and the vulnerability of an individual life with remarkable precision and poetic lightness. One clear stanza can take more weight / Than a whole wagon of elaborate prose.

The article presents an analysis of the existential paradigm of M. Lermontov's creativity in the light of the existential theories of S. Kierkegaard and K. Jaspers, which is considered in the context of the cultural transition in Russian literature of the 1830s-1840s. It is argued that Lermontov radically changed the nature of his literary activity by the mid-1830s, overcoming his own existential ambivalence and abandoning the subjective emotionality and exoticism of his youthful poetry in favor of objective observations and research of the surrounding world. Lermontov was aware of his existential ambivalence and sought to overcome this state in order to achieve cultural integrity, which should be considered as one of his main values. Lermontov's works reflect the concept of integrity as the integration of culture through a set of prevailing norms and ideals, as well as the feeling that this integrity was disintegrating in transitional times. This state of affairs caused a sense of disintegration in Lermontov, which is similar to the borderline situation of Jaspers. Lermontov's works illustrate the loss of cultural ideals with the decline of Romanticism. But rejecting the ideals of Romanticism, Lermontov conveys the feeling that post-Romantic disappointment generated cynicism and distorted thinking. The novel "The Hero of Our Time" has become the embodiment of such shortcomings. Lermontov's works do not belong to romanticism, nor to protorealism, nor to any combination of both. But Lermontov played his transitional role superbly. Not only did he raise questions about Romanticism that realism would later make its own, he also shed light on Romanticism itself and how it was fading. Lermontov showed how difficult it is for an artist who is aware of his own existential ambivalence to create and live in a transitional time devoid of a unifying sense of cultural integration and integrity, illustrating how badly a creative personality needs such integration and integrity.

James Uden's impressive new study of Juvenal's Satires opens up our understanding not only of the poetry itself but also of the world in which it was written, the confusing cosmopolitan world of the Roman Empire under Trajan and Hadrian, with its flourishing of Greek intellectualism, and its dissolution of old certainties about identity and values. Juvenal is revealed as very much a poet of his day, and while Uden is alert to the ‘affected timelessness’ and ‘ambiguous referentiality’ (203) of the Satires, he also shows how Juvenal's poetry resonates with the historical and cultural context of the second century ad, inhabiting different areas of contemporary anxiety at different stages of his career. The first book, for instance, engages with the issues surrounding free speech and punishment in the Trajanic period, as Rome recovers from the recent trauma of Domitian's reign and the devastation wrought by the informers, while satires written under Hadrian move beyond the urban melting pot of Rome into a decentralized empire, and respond to a world in which what it means to be Roman is less and less clear, boundaries and distinctions dissolve, and certainties about Roman superiority, virtue, hierarchies, and centrality are shaken from their anchorage. These later Satires are about the failure of boundaries (social, cultural, ethnic), as the final discussion of Satires 15 demonstrates. For Uden, Juvenal's satirical project lies not so much in asserting distinctions and critiquing those who are different, as in demonstrating over and again how impossible it is to draw such distinctions effectively in the context of second-century Rome, where ‘Romanness’ and ‘Greekness’ are revealed as rhetorical constructions, generated by performance rather than tied to origin: ‘the ties that once bound Romans and Rome have now irreparably dissolved’ (105). Looking beyond the literary space of this allegedly most Roman of genres, and alongside his acute discussions of Juvenal's own poetry, Uden reads Juvenal against his contemporaries – especially prose writers, Greek as well as Roman. Tacitus’ Dialogus is brought in to elucidate the first satire, and the complex bind in which Romans found themselves in a post-Domitianic world: yearning to denounce crime, fearing to be seen as informers, needing neither to allow wrongdoing to go unpunished nor to attract critical attention to themselves. The Letters of Pliny the Younger articulate the tensions within Roman society aroused by the competition between the new excitement of Greek sophistic performance and the waning tradition of Roman recitation. The self-fashioned ‘Greeks’ arriving in Rome from every corner of the empire are admired for their cultural prestige, but are also met by a Roman need to put them in their place, to assert political, administrative, and moral dominance. This picture help us to understand the subtleties of Juvenal's depiction of the literary scene at Rome; when the poet's satiric persona moans about the ubiquitous tedium of recitationes, this constitutes a nostalgic and defensive construction of the dying practice of recitatio as a Roman space from which to critique Greek ‘outsiders’, as much as an attack on the recitatio itself. Close analysis of Dio Chrysostom's orations helps Uden to explore themes of disguise, performance, and the construction of invisibility. Greek intellectual arguments about the universality of virtue are shown to challenge traditional Roman ideas about the moral prestige of the Roman nobility, a challenge to which Juvenal responds in Satires 8. Throughout his study, Uden's nuanced approach shows how the Satires work on several levels simultaneously. Thus Satires 8, in this compelling analysis, is not merely an attack on elite hypocrisy but itself enacts the problem facing the Roman elite: how to keep the values of the past alive without indulging in empty imitation. The Roman nobility boast about their lineage and cram their halls with ancestral busts, but this is very different from reproducing what is really valuable about their ancestors and cultivating real nobility – namely virtue. In addition, Uden shows how Juvenal teases readers with the possibility that this poem itself mirrors this elite hollowness, as it parades its own indebtedness to moralists of old such as Sallust, Cicero, and Seneca, without ever exposing its own moral centre. In this satire, Uden suggests, Juvenal explores ‘the notion that the link between a Roman present and a Roman past may be merely “irony” or “fiction”’ (120). Satires 3's xenophobic attack on Greeks can also be read as a more subtle critique of the erudite philhellenism of the Roman elite; furthermore, Umbricius’ Romanness is revealed in the poem to be as constructed and elusive as the Greekness against which he pits himself. Satires 10 is a Cynic attack upon Roman vice, but hard-line Cynicism itself is a target, as the satire reveals the harsh implications of its philosophical approach, so incompatible with Roman values and conventions, so that the poem can also be read as mocking the popularity of the softer form of Cynicism peddled in Hadrianic Rome by the likes of Epictetus and Dio Chrysostom (169). Both Juvenal's invisibility and the multiplicity of competing voices found in every poem are thematized as their own interpretative provocation that invites readers to question their own positions and self-identification. Ultimately Juvenal the satirist remains elusive, but Uden's sensitive, contextualized reading of the poems not only generates specific new insights but makes sense of Juvenal's whole satirical project, and of this very slipperiness.

No Greek of any calibre, at least in the fifth century, could remain intellectually or spiritually altogether unconditioned by a conscious feeling for, or awareness of, the tragic in human affairs. His poetry and his art, indeed his history, were saturated with the idea of the tragic. Thucydides is certainly no exception, and the most uninformed reader of his History will come away from the work with a keen sense of the immediately perceptible tragic coloration with which it is permeated. Interpreted from any leading, unifying thematic idea the explanation of Thucydides' work must include as central and dominant the tragic deterioration of Athens from the Periclean ideals so well expressed in the Funeral Oration, through the nadir of cynicism and moral decline of the Melian Dialogue, to the utter demoralization expressed through the catastrophe of the Sicilian campaign and its aftermath. One has merely to examine the obvious and purposefully wrought antitheses throughout the History to determine the dramatic nature of Thucydides' work. The drastic metamorphosis in Athenian character that occurs between Books One and Five, for instance, points up such a tragic contrast. The Athenians of the first assembly at Sparta claim that they more than any others were the saviors of Hellas (1.74.2), fearless and self-sacrificing in the common cause of all allies, that they acted with sagacity of judgement (1.75.1), that the empire had not been acquired by force (1.75.2) but by necessity of circumstances, that they had been more observant of justice than actually required, the overwhelming balance of power being in their favor (1.76.3), that in the courts in Athens suits of allies are judged under the same laws (1.77.1). If we compare these same Athenians with the Athenians of the Melian Dialogue it becomes abundantly clear that a deterioration of character and moral standards has taken place and that Thucydides has linked the moral with the tragic. The earlier Athenians, in spite of their desire for imperial expansion, were at least concerned with a minimum of justice and fair play in their international dealings. The Athenians of the Melian Dialogue do not even make a pretence of upholding the commonly accepted nomoi which had from time immemorial been established among men to protect the weaker. Thucydides' strong editorial statements on the effects of anomia (‘lawlessness’) during and following the plague (2.52-53), and during the stasis on Corcyra (3.81ff.) also make firm the link between the moral and the tragic.

From "word-images' to "chapter-shots": The imaginist montage of Anatolij Mariengof. The article discusses the three dominant imaginist principles of Anatolij Mariengofs (1897-1962) poetic technique, as they are translated into prose in his first fictional novel Cynics (1928). These principles include the "catalogue of images", a genre introduced by Vadim Shershenevich, i.e. poetry formed of nouns, which Mariengof makes use of in his longer imaginist poems. Another dominant imaginist principle, to which Mariengof referred in his theoretic articles and poetic texts, is similar to the creating of shocking images typical of Russian futurism. Mariengofs application is the juxtaposition of "pure" (chistyj) and "impure" (nechistyj), either a conflict between the vehicle and the object within a metaphor or a conflict between metaphors. This is an essential poetic feature in both Mariengofs poetry and prose. The third, maybe the most Mariengofian imaginist principle, relevant to the study of Cynics, is the poetics of transition (poetika sdviga), i.e. a certain fragmented structure of the text, which is related to Mariengors use of heteroaccentual rhyme. All these principles can be treated as fundamental elements in Mariengofs use of montage technique in his fictional prose.

The article discusses the concept of montage as used by the Russian Imaginist poetic group: the montage principle in their poetry, theoretical writings and theatre articles. The leading Imaginist figures Vadim Shershenevich and Anatolij Mariengof were active both in theorizing and practising montage in their oeuvre at the beginning of the 1920s. Shershenevich’s application of the principle in poetry was called “image catalogue”, a radical poetic experiment in the spirit of both Walt Whitman and Sergei Eisenstein. Mariengof ’s main contribution to the montage poetics was his first fictional novel The Cynics (1928). The article also discusses the Imaginists’ writings on the essence of theatre as an autonomous art form – Shershenevich’s actitivy in the OGT (Experimental Heroic Theatre) and Mariengof ’s participation in the work of the MKT (Moscow Kamerny Theatre).

Protecting nature is important to prevent disasters. It is necessary to shape the environmental values in a person to encourage nature preservation to have positive attitudes and behavior toward nature. The positive attitudes and behavior toward nature can be expressed through literature in poetry. Snyder's Mother Earth: Whales is a poem that promotes environmental values. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate how literary devices reveal environmental values in Snyder's Mother Earth: Whales. This study used an Ecocriticim approach and environmental values concept by Stern and Dietz to analyze on of Gary Snyder's poems in Turtle Island anthology of poems entitled Mother Earth: Whales. This study found that, in Mother Earth: Whales, Snyder endeavored to reveal environmental value of biospheric value by using figurative languages. In this poem, he used seven cynicisms, three similes, two allusions, two personifications and four metaphors. Furthermore, the researcher suggests a future researcher to use pragmatic approach and VBN theory.

Abstract The paper focuses on the ethical teachings of Classical Antiquity philosophers in the poetry of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, especially on the parallels between the author’s work and the Cynics and the Stoics. The syncretic nature of Gregory’s work, reflected in the assimilation of the teachings of ancient philosophical schools and the then expanding Christianity creates conditions for the explanation and highlighting of basic human virtues. Gregory of Nazianzus’ legacy also draws on the teachings of such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle, but he always approaches them from the perspective of a strictly Christian worldview. He understands philosophy as a moral underlying basis from which one can draw inspiration for a virtuous and happy life. Gregory thinks that philosophy cannot harm Christians in the pursuit of a virtuous life. Nevertheless, Christian teachings and God are the highest authority. They stand above all philosophical schools or ideas advanced by specific philosophers. Gregory’s moral poetry thus directs his readers, if they are to deserve eternal life, to follow the commandments, which is possible only if one lives a practical and virtuous life.

The article conducts a comparative discussion on the strategic poetic and political similarities/differences between the respective contexts of neo-avant-garde and retro-avant-garde practices in relation to aesthetic, artistic, and cultural revolutions. I juxtapose two revolutionary potentials and effects of their actualisation: the utopias and projections of the international revolution relating to the “new sensibility” and the unity of “art and life” of 1968, and several projects and practices that undermine totalitarian systems, from punk cynicism to the national revolutions of 1989 that overthrew real socialism in the Eastern and Central Europe. In my comparative discussion I focus on two specific cases in Slovenian art and alternative cultures, highlighting the position of “experimental poetry,” “new sensibility,” and “conceptual art” of the OHO group, active between 1966 and 1971, and the position of “political cynicism” and “retro-avant-garde art” in the Neue Slowenische Kunst movement founded in 1984.

I. The early twentieth century may seem, at first glance, a strange place to begin a survey of attitudes towards deafness. At this point, the American Deaf community was just forming, American Sign Language was not yet recognised as a language, and most Americans who did consider deafness thought of it as a disability, an affliction to be pitied. As I will demonstrate, however, modernist writers actually had a great deal of insight into issues central to the experience of many deaf people: physical and visual language. While these writers were not thinking of such language in relation to deafness, their experimentations into the merging of the body and language can offer us fresh perspectives on the potential of manual languages to impact mainstream society today. In the early decades of the twentieth century deafness was becoming visible in new ways, due in large part to the rapid expansion of schools for the deaf. This increased visibility led to increased representation in popular culture. Unfortunately, as Trent Batson and Eugene Bergman point out, these literal portrayals of deafness were predictable and clichéd. According to them, deaf characters in literature functioned almost exclusively “to heighten interest, to represent the plight of the individual in a technocratic society, or simply to express a sense of the absurd” (140). In all of these cases, such characters were presented as pitiable. In the least derogatory accounts, like Isabel Adams’ 1928 Heart of the Woods, characters stoically overcome their “disability,” usually by displaying miraculous proficiency with lip-reading and the ability to assimilate into hearing society. Other texts portray deaf people as grotesques, as in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1919 “God’s fool,” or as the butts of jokes, as in Anatole France’s 1926 The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, a Comedy in Two Acts. Constructed as pathetic and disgusting, deaf characters were used thematically to invoke a sense of revulsion at the unknowable other, at those perceived as languageless and therefore cut off from full access to humanity. Literature was not the only medium in which representations of deaf people were appearing with greater frequency. Early filmmakers also demonstrated a fascination with the idea of deafness. But as John S. Schuchman points out in Hollywood Speaks, as in literature, these portrayals were nearly always one-dimensional. Depicted as mutes, fakers, comically clueless, and deeply unhappy individuals, with few exceptions these characters created a very negative image of deafness. In Siege (1925), for example, a deaf character is driven to suicide by cruel mockery. In The Silent Voice (1915), another deaf character contemplates suicide. In the 1932 version of The Man Who Played God, a deaf character falls into a deep depression, sends away his fiancé, and declares “I am not a man. I am just an empty shell…I am only an animal now” (qtd. in Schuchman 48). Without the solidarity of Deaf culture, community, or pride, these characters become morbidly depressed and alienated; they experience their hearing loss as a subject of shame, and it was this image of deafness that was presented to the public. Despite these unpromising literal references to deafness, however, the early twentieth century does in fact offer intriguing and productive ideas about how we might understand deafness today. In the years separating the beginning of the last century from this one, public perceptions of deafness have undergone a significant shift. Buoyed by developments in American Sign Language research and the political activism of the Deaf President Now movement (1988), Deaf people are increasingly viewed as a linguistic minority with a distinct and valuable cultural identity and history, whose communicative differences have much to teach us about how we all interact with language. Deafness (the capital D signaling the distinction between Deafness as a culture and deafness as an audiological condition) is now understood in many circles as a linguistic difference, rather than as a deficiency. And hearing modernist writers had very interesting things to say about the value of linguistic and communicative difference. Modernists’ interest in communication emerged in large part because the same cultural movement toward linguistic homogenisation that led to the denigration of sign language and the exclusive focus on speech and lip-reading in American deaf education also sought to draw a line around the kinds of language considered acceptable for usage in writing. Many of modernism’s formal innovations developed as responses to the push for conformity that we see evidenced in the thinking behind the Oxford English Dictionary, which was completed between the 1880s and the 1920s—notably the period during which most modernist writers were born and began publishing. The 1858 proposal for the dictionary was, in fact, one of the first instances in which the term “standard language” was used (North 12). A desire to establish “standard language” usage was also the goal of the American Academy of Arts, established in 1916 and dedicated to maintaining the integrity of English. Such projects strove to consolidate American national identity around the standardised use of the English language, thereby eliminating spaces for linguistic and communicative diversity within the national body politic. Within literary circles, many rebelled against both the political and aesthetic underpinnings of this movement by experimenting in increasingly dramatic ways with how written language could represent the fragmentation many associated with modern life. As part of their experimentation, some of these writers attempted to develop the idea of embodied language. While they were ignorant of the actual manual languages used by the deaf, the ways they were thinking outside the box in relation to communication can give us both a new perspective on manual languages and new insights into their relevance to mainstream society today. II. One writer whose poems engaged such themes was the poet Hart Crane. Though he worked during the period we think of as high modernist, publishing major volumes of verse in 1926 and 1930, his work challenges our definitions of modernist poetry. Unlike the sparse language and cynicism of his contemporaries, Crane’s poems were decadent and lush. As Eliza New has noted, “Hart Crane is the American poet of Awe” (184); his work reflected his belief in the power of the written word to change the world. Crane viewed poets as inheritors of an ecstatic tradition of prophesy, to which he hoped his own poems would contribute. It is because of this overflowing of sentiment that Crane frequently found both himself and his work mocked. He was accused of overreaching and falling short of his goals, of being nothing more than what Edward Brunner termed a “splendid failure” in the title of his 1985 book. Critics and ordinary readers alike were frustrated with Crane’s arcane language and convoluted syntax, as well as the fact that each word, each image, in his poems was packed with multiple meanings that made the works impossible to summarise. Far from constituting a failure, however, this tangled web of language was Crane’s way of experimenting with a new form of communication, one that would allow him to access the transformative power of poetry. What makes Crane instructive for our purposes is that he repeatedly linked this new conception of language with embodiment. Driven in part by his sense of feeling, as a gay man, a cultural outsider, he attempted to find at the intersection of words and bodies a new site for both personal and cultural expression, one in which he could play a central role. In “General Aim and Theories,” Crane explains his desire to imagine a new kind of language in response to the conditions of modernity. “It is a terrific problem that faces the poet today—a world that is so in transition from a decayed culture toward a reorganization of human evaluations that there are few common terms, general denominators of speech that are solid enough or that ring with any vibration or spiritual conviction” (218). Later in the same essay, Crane stresses that these new common terms could not be expressed in conventional ways, but would need to constitute “a new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate” (221). For Crane, such words were “impossible to enunciate” because they were not actually spoken through the mouth, but rather expressed in other ways through the body. In “Voyages,” a six-part poem that appeared in his first book, The White Building, Crane explores the potential of these embodied words. Drawing in the influence of Walt Whitman, the work is an extended meditation on the intersection of languages, bodies, and love. The poem was inspired by his relationship with the merchant seaman Emil Oppfer. In it, embodied language appears as a privileged site of connection between individuals and the world. The first section of “Voyages,” which Crane had originally titled “Poster,” predated the composition of the rest of the poem by several years. It opens with a scene on a beach, “bright striped urchins” (I. 2) playing in the sand with their dog, “flay[ing] each other with sand” (I. 2). The speaker observes them on the border between land and sea. He attempts to communicate to them his sense of the sea’s danger, but is unsuccessful. And in answer to their treble interjectionsThe sun beats lightning on the waves,The waves fold thunder on the sand;And could they hear me I would tell them: O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,Fondle your shells and sticks, bleachedBy time and the elements; but there is a lineYou must not cross nor ever trust beyond itSpry cordage of your bodies to caressesToo lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.The bottom of the sea is cruel. (I. 6-16) The speaker’s warning is incomprehensible to the children, not because they cannot literally hear him, but because he is unable to present his previous experience with the sea in a way that makes sense to the them. As Evelyn J. Hintz notes, “the child’s mode of communication is alogical and nonsyntactical—‘treble interjections.’ To tell them one would have to speak their language” (323). In the first section of the poem, the speaker is unable to do this, unable to get beyond linear verbal speech or to conceive of alternative modes of conveying his message. This frustrated communication in the first section gives rise to the need for the remaining five, as the poet explores what such alternatives might look like. In sections II through VI, the language becomes more difficult to follow as Crane breaks away from linearity in an attempt to present his newly conceived language on the page. The shift is apparent in the stanza immediately following the first section. –And yet this great wink of eternity,Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,Samite sheeted and processioned whereHer undinal vast belly moonward bendsLaughing the wrapt inflections of our love; (II. 1-5). It is not only that Crane’s diction has become more difficult and archaic, which it has, but also that he creates words that exist between two known meanings. “Wrapt,” for example, both visually and aurally calls to mind ‘wrapped’ as well as ‘rapt.’ “Leewardings” points both toward ships and something positioned away from the wind. What it means to be unrestrained or “unfettered” in this position, Crane leaves unclear. Throughout the remainder of the poem, he repeatedly employs these counterintuitive word pairings. Words are often connected not through logic, but through a kind of intuitive leap. As Brian Reed describes it, “the verse can…be said to progress ‘madly…logically,’ satisfying a reader’s intuition, perhaps, but rarely satisfying her or his rage for order” (115). The lines move according to what Crane called a “logic of metaphor” (General 63). Like his curving syntax, which draws the reader into the beautiful melody before pulling back, withholding definitive meaning like the sea’s waves lapping and teasing, Crane’s metaphoric associations endlessly defer definitive meaning. In “Voyages,” Crane associates this proliferation of meaning and lack of linear progression with physicality, with a language more corporeal and visceral that transcends the restrictions of everyday speech. In a letter to Waldo Frank describing the romantic relationship that inspired the poem, Crane declared “I have seen the Word made Flesh. I mean nothing less, and I know now that there is such a thing as indestructibility” (O 186). Throughout “Voyages,” Crane highlights such words made flesh. The sea with whom the speaker seeks to communicate is embodied, given “eyes and lips” (III.12), a “vast belly” (II. 4-5), “shoulders” (II. 16), and “veins” (II. 15). What’s more, it is precisely through the body that communication occurs. “Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal, / Complete the dark confessions her veins spell” (II. 14-15, emphasis mine), the poet entreats. He describes the sea’s “Portending eyes and lips” IV. 12), her “dialogue with eyes” (VI. 23), and declares that “In signature of the incarnate word / The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling / Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown” (IV. 17-19, emphasis mine). It is only through this wordless communication that the kind of sublime meaning Crane seeks can be transmitted. For him, this “imaged Word” (VI.29) permits access to knowledge that conventional language obscures, knowledge that can only be transmitted through manual connection, as the speaker asks the sea to “Permit me voyage, love, into your hands…” (III.19). Crane saw the proliferation of meanings that he believed accompanied such embodied language as a response against the movement toward a standardisation of language that threatened to edit out modes of communication and identities that did not fit within its confines. As Thomas Yingling notes, “meaning, such as it occurs in Crane, is a process of indeterminacy, is constituted precisely in the abrupt disfigurements and dislocations, in the sudden clarities and semantic possibilities” (30). It was in large part these “semantic possibilities,” these indeterminate and multiple meanings that refused to line up, which led critics to characterise Crane’s work as a “poetics of failure” (Riddel). As later research into sign languages has revealed, however, far from representing a failure of poetic vision, Crane was actually incredibly forward thinking in associating embodied languages with a non-linear construction. Conventional spoken and written languages, those Crane was attempting to complicate, are necessarily linear. Letters and sounds must proceed one after another in order for an utterance to make sense. Manual languages, however, are not bound by this linearity. As Margalit Fox explained nearly a century later in Talking Hands, Because the human visual system is better than the auditory system at processing simultaneous information, a language in the visual mode can exploit this potential and encode its signals simultaneously. This is exactly what all signed languages do. Whereas words are linear strings, signs are compact bundles of data, in which multiple unites of code—handshapes, location and movement—are conveyed in virtually the same moment. (101) Such accounts of actual embodied languages help to explain the frustrating density that attends Crane’s words. Morphologically rich physical languages like the kind Crane was trying to imagine possess the ability for an increased layering of meaning. While limited by the page on which he writes, Crane attempted to create this layered affect through convoluted syntax and deliberately difficult vocabulary which led readers away from both a sense of fixed meaning and from normative standards usually applied to written words. Understanding this rebellion against standardisation is key to the turn in “Voyages.” It is when the speaker figures the sea’s language in conventional terms, when he returns to the more straightforward communication that failed in the first section, that the spell is broken. “What words / Can strangle this deaf moonlight?” (V. 8-9), he asks, and is almost instantly answered when the sea’s language switches for the first time into dialogue. Rather than the passionate and revelatory interaction it had been before, the language becomes banal, an imitation of tired words exchanged by lovers throughout history: “‘There’s // Nothing like this in the world,’ you say” (V. 13-14). “ ‘—And never to quite understand!’” (V. 18). There is “Nothing so flagless as this piracy” (V.20), this loss of meaningful communication, and the speaker bemoans the “Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved / And changed…” (V. 12-13). With the reversion to conventional language comes the loss of any intimate knowledge of both the sea and the lover. The speaker’s projection of verbal speech onto the sea causes it to “Draw in your head… / Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam; / Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know” (V. 22-24). The imposition of normative language marks the end of the speaker’s experiment with new communicative modes. III. As he demonstrates by situating it in opposition to the enforced standardisation of language, for Crane embodied language—with its non-linear syntax and layered meanings—represented the future in terms of linguistic development. He saw such non-normative languages as having the potential to drastically change the ways human relationality was structured, specifically by creating a new level of intimacy through a merging of the semantic and the physical. In this way, he offers us productive new ways to think about the potential of manual languages, or any other non-normative means of human expression, to fundamentally impact society by challenging our assumptions about how we all relate to one another through language. When asked to define deafness, most people’s first response is to think of levels of hearing loss, of deficiency, or disability. By contrast, Crane’s approach presents a more constructive understanding of what communicative difference can mean. His poem provides an intense mediation on the possibilities of communication through the body, one that subsequent research into signed languages allows us to push even further. Crane believed that communicative diversity was necessary to move language into the next century. From this perspective, embodied language becomes not “merely” the concern of a “disabled” minority but, rather, integral to our understanding of language itself. References Batson, Trent, and Eugene Bergman, eds. Angels and Outcasts: An Anthology of Deaf Characters in Literature. 3rd ed. Washington DC: Gallaudet UP, 1985. Brunner, Edward J. Splendid Failure: Hart Crane and the Making of The Bridge. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1985. Crane, Hart. “Voyages.” The Complete Poems of Hart Crane: The Centennial Edition. New York: Liveright, 2001. ———. “General Aims and Theories.” Hart Crane: Complete Poems and Selected Letters. Ed. Langdon Hammer. New York: The Library of America, 2006. 160-164. ———. O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane. Eds. Langdon Hammer and Brom Weber. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997. Fox, Margalit. Talking Hands. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007. Hinz, Evelyn J. “Hart Crane’s ‘Voyages’ Reconsidered.” Contemporary Literature 13.3 (1972): 315-333. New, Elisa. “Hand of Fire: Crane.” The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 182-263. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Reed, Brian M. Hart Crane: After His Lights. Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2006. Riddel, Joseph. “Hart Crane’s Poetics of Failure.” ELH 33.4 (1966): 473-496. Schuchman, John S. Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. Yingling, Thomas. Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text: New Thresholds, New Anatomies. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.