Taking up the time of my encounter with Benjamin Harshav, which was also when PTL became Poetics Today and a key moment in the development of literary studies toward a more theoretical grounding, this essay raises the issue of the place and status of poetics in today's field of literary studies. Through probing a passage from Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, the claim is put forward that the literary text itself,in addition to being poetic, is doing poetics. The passage, in other words,offers an experiment in semiotic sign-making that is fully capable of participating in theoretical debate.

The debate, in this case, concerns the status of visuality in linguistic texts. This is a happy coincidence, since this is a hotly debated issue in today's humanities. After the linguistic and anthropological turns, we are now in the middle of the visual turn. In an attempt to articulate what could be a genuinely visual moment in literature, narrativity and visuality are brought together in the notion of a visual act. To that effect, two standard equations concerning the visual are scrutinized. On the one hand, the equation between image and iconicity is criticized. On the other, the equation between speech acts and acts of looking is underlined. Attending to the subtleties of Proust's text helps understand what a visual act can be instead.

The example allows us to speculate that, among the many advantages the work around the notion of poetics has offered as a tool toward a more theoretical and more scientific literary scholarship, the continued attention to poetic practice as potentially also a theoretical practice is particularly important today, another key moment, when we are turning to interdisciplinarity.

The text of this article is only available as a PDF.
Adams, Parveen
1996
The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences
(London:Routledge).
Armstrong, Tim
1998
Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study
(New York: Cambridge University Press).
Bal, Mieke
1991a
“The Point of Narratology,”
Poetics Today
11
:
727
-53.
1991b
(1994)
Reading“Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition
(New York: Cambridge University Press).
1993
“Light in Painting: Dis-seminating Art History,” in
Deconstruction in the Visual Arts: Art, Media,Architecture
, edited by Peter Brunette and David Wills (New York:Cambridge University Press).
1994
“Lots of Writing.”
Poetics Today
15
:
89
-114.
1996
Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis
(New York: Routledge).
1997
The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
1999
“All in the Family: Familiarity and Estrangement According to Marcel Proust,” in
The Familial Gaze
, ed. Marianne Hirsch,
223
-47(Dartmouth, NH: University Press of New England).
Bertho, Sophie
1990
“Asservir l'image, fonctions du tableau dans le récit,”
CRIN
23
:
25
-36.
Bloom, Harold
1973
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry
(New York: Oxford University Press).
Bucknall, Barbara
1969
The Religion of Art in Proust
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press).
Code, Lorraine
1991
What Can She Know?Feminist Epistemology and the Construction of Knowledge
(Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press).
Collier, Peter
1991
“La mise en abyme chez Proust,” in
Ecrire la peinture
, edited by Philippe Delaveau,
125
-40 (Paris: Editions Universitaires).
Compagnon, Antoine
1992
Proust: Between Two Centuries
, translated by Richard E. Goodkin (New York: Columbia University Press).
Crystal, David, ed.
1990
The Cambridge Encyclopedia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Dällenbach, Lucien
1977
Le récit spéculaire: Essai sur la mise en abyme
(Paris: Seuil). (English: The Mirror in the Text, translated by Jeremy Whiteley with Emma Hughes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1989).
Damisch, Hubert
1987
L'origine de la perspective
(Paris: Flammarion). (English: The Origin of Perspective, translated by John Goodman. Cambridge: MIT Press,1994).
Derrida, Jacques
1978
Writing and Difference
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
1981
Dissemination
,translated, with an introduction and additional notes, by Barbara Johnson(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Descombes, Vincent
1992
Proust: Philosophy of the Novel
, translated by Catherine Chance Macksey (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press).
Eco, Umberto
1976
A Theory of Semiotics
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Eriksson, Yvonne
1998
Tactile Pictures:Pictorial Representations for the Blind 1874–1940
.” Ph.D. diss., Goteborg University.
Foucault, Michel
1973
“Las Meninas,” in
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences
,translated by Alan Sheridan,
3
-16 (New York: Vintage Books).
Georgin, Rosine
1991
Contre Proust
(Paris: Cistre/Essais).
Guillerm, Jean-Pierre
1987
“Le goût en peinture: Les références à la peinture dans A la recherche du temps perdu,” in
Des mots et des couleurs II
, edited by Jean-Pierre Guillerm,
125
-66 (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille).
Henry, Anne
1981
Marcel Proust:Théories pour une esthétique
(Paris:Klincksieck).
1983
“Quand une peinture métaphysique sert de propédeutique à l'écriture: Les métaphores d'Elstir dans A la recherche du temps perdu,” in
La critique artistique: Un genre, littéraire
, Centre d'art,esthétique et littérature, Publications de l'Universitéde Rouen,
205
-26 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France).
Hrushovski (Harshav), Benjamin
1976
“Poetics,Criticism, Science: Remarks on the Fields and Responsibilities of the Study of Literature,”
PTL
1
(1):
i
-xxxv.
1982
“An Outline of Integral Semantics: An Understander's Theory of Meaning in Context,”
Poetics Today
3
:
59
-88.
1984
“Poetic Metaphor and Frames of Reference,”
Poetics Today
5
:
5
-43.
Innis, R. E., ed.
1984
Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Iser, Wolfgang
1978
The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
Jay, Martin
1993
Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Kristeva, Julia
1994
Le temps sensible:Proust et l'expérience littéraire
(Paris:Gallimard).
Lacan, Jacques
1977
Ecrits: A Selection
, edited and translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton).
Lord, Catherine
1999
The Intimacy of Influence: Narrative and Theoretical Fictions in the Works of George Eliot,Virginia Woolf, and Jeanette Winterson
(Amsterdam: ASCA Press).
Marin, Louis
1983
“The Iconic Text and the Theory of Enunciation: Luca Signorelli at Loreto (circa 1479–1484),”
New Literary History
14
(3):
253
-96.
1988
“Towards a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds,” in
Calligram: Essays in the New Art History from France
,edited by Norman Bryson,
63
-90 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
1993
Les pouvoirs de l'image:Gloses
(Paris: Seuil).
McDonald, Christie
1991
The Proustian Fabric: Associations of Memory
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press).
McHale, Brian
1987
Postmodernist Fiction
(London: Methuen).
Poulet, Georges
1963
L'espace proustien
(Paris: Gallimard).
Proust, Marcel
1981
Remembrance of Things Past
(London: Penguin Books).
Searle, John
1980
“Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation,”
Critical Inquiry
6
:
477
-88.
Snyder, Joel, and Ted Cohen
1980
“Reflections onLas Meninas: Paradox Lost,”
Critical Inquiry
7
:
429
-47.
Stengers, Isabelle, ed.
1987
D'une scienceà l'autre: Des concepts nomades
(Paris:Seuil).
Stengers, Isabelle, and Judith Schlanger
1991
Les concepts scientifiques: Invention et pouvoir
(Paris: Gallimard).
Uenishi, Taeko
1988
Lestyle de Proust et la peinture
(Paris: SEDES).
This content is made freely available by the publisher. It may not be redistributed or altered. All rights reserved.