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A New ‘Rhetoric’ for Modernism?

Jean Paulhan and the Ambivalences of English Criticism
  • Matthias Somers EMAIL logo and Éric Trudel
Published/Copyright: November 4, 2015
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Abstract

This article traces the emergence and evolution of ‘rhetoric’ as a historical key term of metaliterary discourse. In the modernist period, the term ‘rhetoric’ was given a conspicuously central role in the heated debate over literary style and its relation to ordinary language, not incidentally after rhetoric’s fall from grace as an academic discipline over the course of the 19th century. Scores of writers (e. g. Symons, Yeats, Hofmannsthal, Gourmont, Pound, Eliot) attacked ‘rhetoric,’ variously (and often vaguely) defined as convoluted poetic diction, moralistic or political preaching, and meaningless abstraction. Yet, the broader cultural context in which this anti-rhetorical discourse was situated reveals a climate of widespread suspicion of language as a sign system, with the term ‘rhetoric’ functioning as a receptacle for feelings of dissatisfaction with language. In contrast, Jean Paulhan’s sophisticated reappropriation of ‘rhetoric’ in Les fleurs de Tarbes (The Flowers of Tarbes) and other writings reasserted confidence in language and its commonplace expressions, and in the “arts of writing.” Paulhan’s proposed solution helps us to shed light on a demonstrable tendency in modernist poetics to incorporate rather than simply expel rhetoric – a search for a properly modernist rhetoric.

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Published Online: 2015-11-4
Published in Print: 2015-11-1

© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Contributions
  4. The Changing Vocabulary of Literature: On the Migration and Transformation of Literary Concepts in Europe (1900–1950) – an Introduction
  5. A New ‘Rhetoric’ for Modernism?
  6. « Littérature pure » et « cinéma pur » dans les années 1920: La réponse du berger à la bergère?
  7. Pessimismus, Kultur, Untergang: Nietzsche, Spengler und der Streit um den Pessimismus
  8. Frauen Identität schulden: Au Bonheur des Dames von Émile Zola und die Konsumkultur
  9. Ideofonografie und transkulturelle Homofonie bei Yoko Tawada
  10. The Poetics of White: Concepts of Greek Antiquity in the Age of the Avant-garde
  11. Schuld, Geld und Vergeltung in Arthur Schnitzlers Traumnovelle und Stanley Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut
  12. From Object to Information: The End of Collecting in the Digital Age
  13. Dublin and Istanbul: The Two Formative Forces in the Fiction of James Joyce and Orhan Pamuk
  14. Where Truth is not Itself: Laura Riding’s Life of the Dead
  15. Die affirmative Kultur des Weltschmerzes um die Jahrhundertwende
  16. Reviews
  17. Martin Jay: Kracauer l’exilé. Traduit de l’anglais par Stéphane Besson, chapitre V traduit de l’allemand par Danilo Scholz et Florian Nicodème. Lormont: Le Bord de l’eau, 2014. 248 Seiten. Antonin Wiser: Vers une langue sans terre. Adorno et l’utopie de la littérature. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2014. 466 Seiten. (Collection Philia – Série Monde)
  18. Matthew Potolsky: The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2013. 232 pages.
  19. Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney, eds. Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Nation-Building and Centenary Fever. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 320 pages.
  20. Angelika Jacobs: Stimmungskunst von Novalis bis Hofmannsthal. Hamburg: Igel Verlag, 2013. 376 Seiten.
  21. Achim Aurnhammer und Rainer Stillers, Hgg.: Giovanni Boccaccio in Europa. Studien zu seiner Rezeption in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014 (Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung 31, mit 10 Farbabbildungen und Schwarzweißbildern). 416 Seiten.
  22. Ruven Karr: Die Toten im Gespräch. Trialogische Strukturen in der Dichtung Paul Celans. Hannover: Wehrhahn-Verlag, 2015. 275 Seiten.
  23. Gernot Wimmer, Hg.: Ingeborg Bachmann und Paul Celan. Historisch-poetische Korrelationen. Berlin und Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014. 200 Seiten. (Untersuchungen zur Literaturgeschichte Bd. 145)
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