Lautreamont and the poetics of indeterminacy.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Hadlock, Philip Gerald.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Romance-language literature.

0313.

Penn dissertations--Romance languages.

Romance languages--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Romance languages.

Romance languages--Penn dissertations.

0313.

Physical Description:

240 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 58-07A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

Though unified in their presentation of a collective consciousness and their common emphasis on cultural, religious, and literary mythologies, the two components of Ducasse's literary corpus are anything but consistent in tone: Lautreamont's Chants de Maldoror contrast with (and frequently contradict) the pronouncements of Ducasse's Poesies. Lautreamont/Ducasse's reliance on citations of preexisting poetry as well as popular fiction, sacred texts, and encyclopedia entries further complicates his vision of poetic production. In one sense, the poetic act is meta-discursive: it consists in confirming discursive homogeneity through the intertextual practices evidenced in Ducasse's oeuvre. However, this only reflects Lautreamont/Ducasse's larger tendency to discern poeticity in any evaluation of the codal expression of an underlying law. This is especially apparent in Lautreamont's reverence for mathematics, an eminently poetic domain. In Lautreamont's estimation, the poetic act must entail the same suppression of any locus of enunciation that mathematical laws exhibit. Ducasse's conception of the poetic act thus inverts the conventions of poetic discourse's enunciatory paradigm; that is, the poetic enunciation gains poetic specificity as it loses individuality, and becomes anonymous or collective. The corruption of the enunciatory act troubles Ducasse and prompts him to consider its roots in discursive prototypes (sacred discourse) and the texts (sacred and literary) which derive from these prototypes, and Maldoror illustrates the implications of this corruption on the hermeneutic process: the determinate readings resulting from Maldoror's determinate utterances largely enable him to annihilate humanity. Determinate enunciation allows for the privatization and partitioning of knowledge which ultimately undermine the capacity of discourse to stabilize human existence. In effect, poetry is highly susceptible to corruption, and is continually on the verge of degenerating into mere noise. Lautreamont/Ducasse thus suggests that humanity's greatest purpose resides in making applications of poetic utterances which are compatible with the human condition, and constructing one's own voice through the encounter with the poetic text (or utterance). In this sense, Ducasse opines, the production of poetry is not only a literary imperative, but an ontological requirement for human survival.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Romance Languages) -- University of Pennsylvania, 1997.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-07, Section: A, page: 2683.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9780591501810

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.