Abstract In this article, I argue that Shi Zhi’s 郭路生 yu’er sanbuqu 鱼儿三部曲 (“Fish Trilogy.”, 1967) is an allegory of political trauma. The poem reflects on the atrocities of the Red Guard movement. In the poem, the sun acts as an autocratic figure. It lures the fish to leap from icy water, leading to the fish’s death. The sun serves a dual role. It is an oppressive patriarch and a revolutionary symbol of freedom. This duality reflects the broader ideological conflicts of the Maoist era. The poet critiques the failures of left-wing ideology. It shows that the fish’s search for freedom is paradoxical and its utopian dreams are destined to fail. While scholars of modern Chinese literature have historically privileged the novel as the primary archive of trauma, this article reclaims poetry as a central site of witness. By applying Gordon Teskey’s theory of allegory and Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence, I move beyond biographical readings to expose the poem’s deep ideological structures.
Abstract This article takes its cue from Giorgio Agamben’s observation that verse can be distinguished from prose by the presence of ‘enjambement’, a feature absent from prose. ‘Enjambement’ replaces a metrical boundary with a syntactic one, such that signification overwrites sound. At the conclusion of a metrically structured text, however – where the end of a verse coincides with the end of a sentence – ‘enjambement’ is no longer possible: the final verse thus reveals a state of indeterminacy, even a zone of transition between verse and prose. Against this theoretical backdrop, the article asks how this relationship manifests in medieval poetry, a period in which prose had not yet become an established literary norm. Focusing on Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, it examines the applicability and limits of Agamben’s approach within the context of medieval epic.
Abstract The thesis I want to pursue is that society is produced by discourse. Far from merely mirroring what already seems to exist, discourse, I propose, is a central agency in the verbal construction and institution of social structures which we make and in which we then live. For this, I first discuss the relation between our imaginary and society, attempting to describe society as a ‘habitat’ artificially made by us and at the same time paradoxically defining and determining us as cultural beings. I then try to embed this in the sociological and philosophical discussion on constructivism, establishing what we call ‘society’ and/or ‘culture’ and/or ‘reality’ as the result of semantic processes of verbalization which we then optimistically tend to ‘reify’ into existing ‘facts’. That this is possible seems to lie anthropologically in the human faculty of cognitively understanding, and creating, arbitrary signs, which finds its first expression in the exteriorizing discovery of the self in the mirror and then serves as the main matrix of infinitely building and modifying, but also of continuously maintaining and stabilizing, our ‘world’. The emerging world-like ‘semiosphere’ is thus fabricated out of words/lexemes, texts – and, I argue, first and foremost discourses, understood as semantic ‘systems of thinking and arguing’ that, through incessant dialogic translation and re-translation, negotiatingly build a specific universe of discourse that we have made and in which we (more or less) feel at home. This is briefly demonstrated with regard to the workings of political discourse in action in order to (metonymically) illustrate that the social world is of our own making, and that it is, above all, text-generated discourses that are its main media. A last point complementarily, if not supplementarily, discusses the ‘aesthetic’ as the free and open site of what could be called an ‘adiscursive’ or ‘metadiscursive’ play, and display, of discourses in action, which is the site of ‘literature’.
Abstract The article proposes a model that conceptualizes comics and graphic novels as two distinct modes of communication. Drawing on Luhmann’s theory of mass communication, comics are described as a form of entertainment that prioritizes information processing through a plot-driven, linear narrative sequence. Graphic novels, by contrast, are situated within the art system: they emphasize the communicative message and invite a reflective, non-linear engagement with meaning. Finally, these ideal types are translated into a matrix of flexible features capable of capturing the differentiated field of contemporary graphic storytelling.
Abstract This paper challenges the communis opinio that Catullus’ carmen 16 should be interpreted as a fiction-theoretical warning against a biographical reading of lyric poetry. It argues instead that the poem’s discussion does not center on fiction, but on the license to obscenity and on mimesis – more precisely, on the relationship between the author and his poetic work. A reconsideration of Catullus’ first poem supports the thesis that, despite appearances, he does not draw a clear distinction between life and work (at least not on the basis of fiction), but rather delineates two types of poetry: his own and a pious, Muse-inspired form. Catullus’ poetological reflections subsequently became a topos adopted by later Roman authors, notably Ovid, Martial, Pliny the Younger, and Apuleius. However, these authors do not merely appropriate the ambiguous Catullan “law,” but rather invert it by asserting the moral integrity of the author in contrast to the immorality of his poems.
