The oxymoron as generative model. A study of Petrarch's "Rime Sparse", Hofmannswaldau's "Teutsche Uebersetzungen und Gedichte", and Musil's "Drei Frauen".
Item
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Title
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The oxymoron as generative model. A study of Petrarch's "Rime Sparse", Hofmannswaldau's "Teutsche Uebersetzungen und Gedichte", and Musil's "Drei Frauen".
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Identifier
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AAI9405546
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identifier
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9405546
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Creator
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Leupold, Dagmar Gisela.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Fred J. Nichols
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Date
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1993
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, Romance | Literature, Germanic
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Abstract
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Within an inquiry about how literary texts are generated, rhetoric must play an important part. Rhetoric--as a system of tropes--consists of pre-organized, linguistic units--figures--that structure and generate the text in a way comparable to the construction of an edifice made of finished parts, of building blocks. Paradoxical figures as the oxymoron are particularly interesting "building blocks" since they lack--not having a literal meaning--the possibility of a translation that all analogical figures have.;The oxymoron might be interpreted as the literary analog of the "special effects" in science fiction movies whose purpose on first sight seems solely to be to draw the viewer's attention to itself by stubbornly refusing to mean anything but its own mise en scene. It is the perfect artificial construct, the "purest" of all fictions. It exists solely in the realm of artificiality, the very quality which constitutes the text itself. Thus thinking about the oxymoron necessarily becomes a reflection of the conditions which generate a text--a reflection that is triggered by a high degree of self-reflexiveness contained, "modelled" already in the texts themselves. The self-reflexiveness (as a strategy, a "cover-story") is set-off and represented by the oxymoron. Self-reflexiveness of a text is, of course, one of many possible masks a text may choose in order to face the world. This mask serves very different purposes in the three authors chosen: in Petrarch, it highlights the artificiality and the autonomy of the poetic text; all the more as it is written in a "new" idiom, the vernacular Italian. For Hofmannswaldau the most important aspect of the mask is the playful-carnivalesque. Poetical language becomes an accessory on stage, and is best equipped to satisfy the Baroque need for tension, drama, sensuality, and paradox.;Musil's affinity is rather philosophical in nature: the mask is the secret of the face behind it that cannot be revealed: neither through mystical intuition nor through rational calculation. It can be only pointed at, through an ecstatic, yet disciplined effort that comprises rational and non-rational forces: this effort, to Musil, is an ethical enterprise, to be accomplished by aesthetic means.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
