Sociopoetic discourses, literary responses to the systematization of modern culture

grantor: University of TorontoThe modernization of the nineteenth-century German, French and English university systems resulted in the application of classical values to modern literary texts. In response, what I will call sociopoetic discourses promoted alternate literary values, less rigidly controlled cultural practices, not reducible to a systematic code. To conceptualize these unofficial cultural practices, my first chapter criticizes several modern and post-modern cultural theorists who, because they continue to segregate literary from everyday language practices, overlook this sociopoetic element in modern writing. These theorists all imagine modern poetry to be a communicative act distinct from the everyday one, while sociopoetic discourses participate in a refusal of this distinction. They are linked to life-worlds in which the everyday is literary, and they, therefore, anticipate their continued inclusion in day-to-day communicative actions, insofar as they present themselves not as full texts but as parts of speech acts to be completed by readers. This transformation from a complete utterance to one component in a communicative sequence provides a basis for a literary life-world's renovation and regeneration, as the cultural values implicated in the text are propagated by the work's continued existence as an object of reading and discussion. My discussion in chapter two then focuses on the fact that the anti-systematic, sociopoetic discursive quality is frequently mistrusted in modern European poetic treatises. These treatises tended to subordinate poetry to rational activity, although some also affiliated poetic discourse with intuitive knowledge as a means of confirming the workings of reason. Such subservience of poetic to rational discourses is, however, undone in two ways: (1) by the repression of poetry in nineteenth-century urban cultures, a form of negation that accompanies the systematization of modern societies and their stores of knowledge, and (2) by the affirmation of autonomous artistic and literary subcultures in opposition to this systematic negation. The subsequent chapter examines the poetry of Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire and Walt Whitman in order to outline three ways in which modern poetry resists both the systematization of modern life and the affirmation of autonomous cultural institutions. Heine's work exemplifies the assimilation of poetry into the modern world system. His Nordseezyklen record the dissolution of a North-Sea-Island community and its absorption into modern Germany. He makes this cultural revolution parallel his own transformation from a late romantic poet to modern journalist and writer of neuen Gedichten. Baudelaire's Spleen de Paris presents a selection of fragmented prose representations of an uprooted modern city, which the readership is ironically invited to restructure at will. The invitation is a defiant one, as the disjunction of the various prose passages prevents any convincing systematic integration of them. Whitman's sweeping work, in contrast, addresses the entire American nation in order to unify the various transplanted cultures and followers of "absolute individualism" by addressing them as the community of his readers. He, at the same time, questions the possibility of this national community, as he constantly reminds his reader that his I is beyond their understanding. In the conclusion, I use Marcel Proust's discussion of his own reading activity to show how the twentieth century transforms the distinction between literary and everyday discourses into an ontological division between worlds. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)Ph.D