“Little music” or “rough music”?: Ishion Hutchinson, modernist poet
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John Hopkins
Abstract
In this essay I will suggest that part of what makes the young Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson so remarkable is the fact that much of his work – in this age of “anything goes” post-postmodernism – is clearly modernist poetry, in both structure and effect. This structure will be that explained in my expanded version of Michael Riffaterre’s semiotic theory of poetry, which deals with modernist work. I will suggest that one of the distinctive features of the latter is that a modern poetic text is distinguished by two underlying “matricial” propositions, each of which generates a set of variant images having the same underlying semantic structure. This paradigmatic method of signifying is unique to poetry. Each matrix is reassembled by the reader from a comparison of the images of each set. The matrices are linked syntagmatically in a variety of relations such as negation or difference of scale. This bimatricial relation (subject-sign) has an intertextual counterpart (object-sign) of similar structure but different lexicon. The interpretant of these two complex signs has a sociolectic counterpart of similar lexicon but different structure. The semantic contrast thus established produces innovation, which is the other distinctive feature of modern poetry. It turns out that much of Hutchinson’s innovative work is structured in this way.
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- A pragmatic view of the poetic function of language
- “Little music” or “rough music”?: Ishion Hutchinson, modernist poet
- How binding and bonding communicate interpersonal meanings in a children’s museum to address Jordan’s energy and water challenges
- Autocommunication in crib speech and private speech
- From action to performative gesture: the Slapping movement used by children at the age of four to six
- An important chapter in the history of semiotics: inference from signs in Philodemus’ De signis
- Meaning and the evolution of signification and objectivity
- Shielding the learned body: a semiotic analysis of school badges in New South Wales, Australia
- The primordiality of representation
- The existential signs through the works of Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye
- Paratexts and the reframing of a classic: Korean translations of the Japanese Women’s Analects
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- A pragmatic view of the poetic function of language
- “Little music” or “rough music”?: Ishion Hutchinson, modernist poet
- How binding and bonding communicate interpersonal meanings in a children’s museum to address Jordan’s energy and water challenges
- Autocommunication in crib speech and private speech
- From action to performative gesture: the Slapping movement used by children at the age of four to six
- An important chapter in the history of semiotics: inference from signs in Philodemus’ De signis
- Meaning and the evolution of signification and objectivity
- Shielding the learned body: a semiotic analysis of school badges in New South Wales, Australia
- The primordiality of representation
- The existential signs through the works of Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye
- Paratexts and the reframing of a classic: Korean translations of the Japanese Women’s Analects
