Transit, Transzendenz und Tropen

Hier zwei Auszüge aus dem Essay If: On Transit, Transcendence, and Trope von David Baker, aus: The Gettysburg Review (gefunden bei Poetry Daily)

Genres, so the argument goes, are sentimental and artificial distinctions, as false as a sense of self is to a person. All types of writing — poems, plays, advertisements for hemorrhoid medicine, political speeches — are equal, and all are equally named by the pan-generic word text. All texts are equivalent in the interrogating, clinical eyes of the poststructuralists. But in dismantling literary genres, the theorists have betrayed one of their own most important entities: the historical. A genre is a historically significant form of meaning. Literary genres do indeed overlap, and they evolve, are fluid rather than static. But part of the meaning of a poem is its form. Part of the theme or subject of a novel is its narrative shape. And these things derive from the historical progression of literature. …

I believe we put ourselves in the presence of poetic or figural language in order to experience or to represent our own and our species‘ transcendental possibilities. Literary language, the language of trope and representation, is itself a form of ecstatic or transcendental exchange. As we turn into something else, we turn into ourselves. And as we share the experience of literature, we turn into each other. We share the body.

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