Aristotle said - intriguingly, I think - that plot was the "argument"
of a play. Which is not quite how people conventionally think of
narrative...
On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 8:11 AM, Douglas Barbour
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Well, it's unending because people get so confused, Jon. And far too many
> end p discussing only what they perceive t be 'meaning' or something, which
> ends up being content -- because they're dis-content?
>
> I agree that the dichotomy form/content does nothing except start arguments
> unending(ly).
>
> I like your take on style/form, although I suspect it might start as many
> arguments once we try to get down to details, especially as to who works the
> beat best. On the other hand, perhaps I have learned so much from Pound only
> at what you're calling the style level, in the micro-, not the macro-cosm of
> his work; not sure about that. What bothers me is that limiting, I think,
> factor 'plot' which you introduced.
>
> Alison is right, it's so much easier to get away from teh problem in music
> or visual art....
>
> We're domed to work with words....
>
> Doug
> On 8-Apr-09, at 5:18 PM, Jon Corelis wrote:
>
>> Two comments orthogonal to how this unending aesthetic dispute is
>> usually considered:
>>
>> 1) The argument about the relationship between poetic form and
>> content assumes that a poem is an utterance, that is, essentially an
>> utterance and not some other sort of thing which uses utterance.
>> Today this means a text. A text consists of what is being said, which
>> is its content, and how it is being said, which is its form.
>> Aristotle, however, conceived of a poem not as an utterance but as an
>> action. From this viewpoint, the distinction between form and content
>> disappears: the poem's action is not a linguistic one but a mental
>> and emotional enactment (existing at the boundary of the conscious and
>> unconscious, though A. couldn't have put it that way) which is
>> expressed by utterance. Talking about the content of a poem makes as
>> little sense as talking about the content of a religious ritual. Or
>> to put it another way, it's like trying to separate the dancer from
>> the dance.
>>
>> 2) Which brings us designedly to Yeats, who in a famous passage in
>> his introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Poetry said that Pound
>> had more style than anyone, but more style than form. Yeats seems to
>> be talking about a different fundamental dichotomy than form and
>> content: what could the relationship between form and style be? I
>> think the clue might be to consider the issue in visual arts. Take a
>> drawing: the way the lines look is the style, and the way the picture
>> looks is the form. (This suggests why Pound's verse is so impressive
>> examined through a magnifying glass and so frustrating viewed at arm's
>> length.) In poetry, form would be what the poem does (its enactment
>> or Aristotelian plot) and style would be how it communicates what it
>> does -- a distinction which seems to me more useful to contemplate
>> than the posthumously abused equine of form/content.
>>
>> --
>> ===============================================
>>
>> Jon Corelis http://jcorelis.googlepages.com/joncorelis
>>
>> ===============================================
>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
> The covers of this book are too far apart.
>
> Ambrose Bierce
>
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
|