Henri Meschonnic - more notes - Aug 3, 2010
I cannot wait to somehow someday find more comprehensive information on Meschonnic, but here's some cobbling together of highlights from the internet:
“Historicity = the continuous addition of others to the subject”
“A poem = a continuity,an action, not an object. A straying.”
“Subject = the mode of orality.”
More notes to come...This is an ongoing project for certain...
~*~ Stephanie Young's RePo notes on Lisa Robertson's translation of the Meschonnic Glossary -
“A poem = a continuity,an action, not an object. A straying.”
“Subject = the mode of orality.”
~*~ From an old blog about Henri Meschonnic by Piers Hugill:
the kind of thinking that he is engaged in is a poème or passion de la pensée, that is, a specific kind of thinking related to the activity that is unique to each poem and each situation, and whose most obvious characteristic is ‘the continuous movement of signifiance...constructed by the historical activity of the subject’
[For Meschonni c]ritique, then, is what refuses mastery, the status quo, and the maintenance of order; it is that which constitutes an adventure into the unknown, the unfinished, the unreachable, and therefore a movementtowards knowledge, rather than the description of a knowledge.
Poetics begins with the poem, it doesn’t end there.
his general critique of all European poetry in the last 150 years is partly what he considers to be its bias towards the lyrical, a tendency he traces to the Romantic confusion of the subject with the individual
Meschonnic has pioneered a critique of what he calls the ‘theory of the sign’...which he claims imposes a form of universalism or false totality...via the dualisms...of signifier-signified of 'traditional theory...prevents the emergence of the new, or the utopian, in favour of the status quo and the maintenance of order
Hi,
ReplyDeleteIt's good to see that the work of Henri Meschonnic is getting some interest across the Atlantic. In the UK, Piers Hugill, whom you quote above, has completed a PhD on rhythm as a theoretical concept in poetics last year. A whole section of his thesis is devoted to Meschonnic's concept of rhythm, which he then uses to read selected contemporary British poets. I wrote a MA dissertation on Meschonnic's poetry in relation to memory which is accessible here:
http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10065/1796/1/Fruteau_Emmanuel+Dissertation+Final.pdf
Although I quote Meschonnic in the original French text, my own humble contribution is in English.
Also, a few chapters and an interview have been translated by Gabriella Bedetti in the 80's and should be available online somewhere, together with more recent article-length translations by Anthony Pynn (http://www.tinet.cat/~apym/on-line/translation/2009_Meschonnic.pdf) and Deborah Cohen (http://www.informaworld.com/index/788747200.pdf).
Aside from that an interesting account of Meschonnic's poetics can also be found in Donald Wesling and Tadeusz Slawek "Literary Voice: The calling of Jonah (State University of New York Press, 1995).
That's pretty much it in terms of publications in the English language. I would say that the translations don't always do his work justice. I haven't read Lisa Robertson's translation of the "manifeste" ...
I hope you'll find some useful material in the references I've suggested.
All the best,
Manu Fruteau
Thanks so much for all these links. I appreciate the input!
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