Radical eye rhymes: visual strategies in Modernist poetry

• Autores: Martin Heusser
• Localización: Relational designs in literature and the arts: page and stage, canvas and screen / Rui Carvalho Homem (ed. lit.), 2012, ISBN 978-90-420-3581-2, págs. 221-235
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In "The Origin of the German Tragic Drama", Walter Benjamin makes a remarkable observation on the visual aspect of text when he contends that 'there is nothing subordinate about written script, it is not cast away in reading, like dross. It is absorbed along with what is read, as its "pattern.'" The visual aspect of writing, he argues, is not subservient to the phonological or symbolic sgnified and, the visual dimension of writing invariably somehow enters the reading process. It does not simply transmute into the sound pattern or 'meaning' without leaving a trace, but rather becomes part and parcel of that other signified it evokes, suffusing it completely and thus modifying what it stands for. Poets interested in the visuality of text have always exploited that aspect - very often in the guise of iconicity. Modernist poetry, I would like to argue, introduces a new attitude towards the visual dimension of writing by using it not only to complement but to disturb, undermine or even annihilate the linguistic signifié. The resulting visuality - suggestive of imperfection, inaccuracy, deviation, lack and ineptitude if not incompetence - is radical in two senses of the word: it goes back to the roots, Romanticism, and it moves forward in a way that affects the fundamental nature of things - to Postmodernism.