Hi Jon
I reckon you're onto something there. I've long thought that mimesis
is better understood as an action of a human body, rather than a
reflection in a mirror (which is how it's largely been understood).
Which changes the emphasis of poiesis towards dynamic performance and
away from static image, or mere imitation, and opens up the subtleties
and actualities of interpreted reality (I would say, crucially, a
physically mediated reality). And as you say, this totally calls into
question any clear distinction between form and content, a distinction
I personally have a great deal of difficulty in understanding in
questions of art... (Which bit is form, which bit is content? Aspects
so dynamically fused into one thing are hard to separate without,
well, killing the body).
Style might be something else altogether. I'm not sure. I think it was
Peter Handke who said that a writer's ethics were in his style, which
is an intriguing notion.
xA
On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 9:18 AM, Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]> 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
>
> ===============================================
>
--
Editor, Masthead: http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
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