Hi, Mairead, the essential and quite simple topic behind Barthese’s Death
of the author is that there are other narratives more important than
the 'legitimate', ‘main stream’ ones.
Now we know it: there is no author more unacceptable than the patriarchal
one which Barthes
made die. I would like to start a discussion on the poets who buried their
predecessors and survived on the fruits of the robbed tree, with a focus on
those who operated in this way in the Sixties.
I would be interested in discovering how new writers are trying to revive
those fruits and
exploit those robbed trees, which have grown high by sucking the ‘lymph’ of
the
dead authors. It would be interesting to discuss these poets also from the
point of view of translation.
Barthes's claimed that we must pay attention to the elements that the text
disperses rather than to the ones the original author contemplated. Then,
where have Dylan Thomas’s fragments gone, for instance? And so on
….in Cork I presented a paper on literary travesty. That was a trans-gender
discourse, implying writing from the perspective of a different sex, as
both a masquerade and a multi-self. We had an entire section on whether the
resulting voice in a given text presented 'gendered' characteristics that
belonged to the opposite sex. I discussed several forms of literary
transvestism, especially the baroque ones. The baroque (Venetian-
Neapolitan) posture had a huge impact on my writing and research interests
(the problematic of the masquerade, the dead-mask, the vested /veiled
subjectivity, the Self as dead personae)...It has an impact on me because
theoretically it is a form of poetry which survives by suppressing the
author’s identity in the interest of the mask. If you wish, I will provide
a translation of my intervention at Cork. We are editing a book in English
though on this subject matter. This is the site with the papers and the
sessions http://www.ucc.ie/italian/sis/programma.html#participants)…The
baroque, I believe, is the language - violent, certainly, and mannered,
for sure - of the desiderata, the masqueraded Other. Its language is the
sublime language of the dead classics (as Fortini claimed), yet more
capable of producing revolutionary effects than any alleged
experimentalism.
This is my old reflections on the Baroque which appeared on Poetryect (or
British Poets in 2001, I do not remember any more). The page is just as I
wrote it at the time, so full of misspells, as usual, when I have no time
for spell-checking. I apologize for that. NEO-BAROQUE, BY Erminia
Passannanti (2001): http://www.transference.f2s.com/neo-baroque.htm
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