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Populär Culture Review
16- Söllers was the chief editor of the avant-garde joumal Tel Quel—since then
re-baptized L Tnfini—in the pages of which Derrida published some of his early
work.
17- The critical trajectory of a fervent proponent of radical reader’s response
theory such as Stanley Fish is highly representative of the general disorientation
of our field when it comes to the definition of both our corpus of study and our
occupation: after claiming that literature is solely created by the reader (Is There
a Text in the Class?), Fish tumed his attention towards a classic TV series (The
Fugitive in Flight), most likely in order to capitalize upon recent, authoritative
scholarly interest in populär culture, and is of late admonishing the profession
for neglecting the study of literature to promote political agendas (Save the
World on Your Own Time); in other words, after denying the possible intrinsic
existence of literary texts and tuming the English department at Duke university
into a post-structuralist, ideologically oriented theoretical powerhouse, Fish
criticizes his peers for no longer studying literature, having shown the way by
taking on a classic TV series: in the true spirit of reader’s response theory, Fish
is creating the discipline and the corpus of study as he goes.
18- “All art is quite useless.” The Picture ofDorian Gray, 4.
19- As pointed out by Brice Parain as early as 1942, no language besides that of
mathematics can be deemed to function in a strictly monosemic manner; all
human exchanges are constantly subject to semiotic variations which may ränge
from slight semantic ambiguity to total misunderstanding.
20- These two categories, i.e., narrative and poetic, often intersect and so, poetry
can be narrative and narrative prose poetized; French romantic poet Lamartine’s
long narration in verse Jocelyn and any of Victor Hugo’s novels, for instance,
present very comparable levels of semiotic violence and, given that the
somewhat grandiloquent tone of Lamartine has not aged well, one could argue
than Hugo’s prose remains more poetic today than Lamartine’s poetry.
Baudelaire’s prose poems or Lautreamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror are
convincing illustrations of a perfect balance between poetic semiotic violence
and narrative construction; although both are generally deemed to be poetry, the
former could also be considered as highly poetized short stories and the latter as
a semiotically ultra-violent novel. In the same fashion, although from the other
side of the spectrum, novels such James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Luis
Martin Santos’ Time o f Silence could be as well described as poetic, or at least
linguistically defamiliarizing, for both exhibit, each in its own way, strong
semiotic violence. We find equivalent values in the cinematographic language,
and we can oppose for instance Terry Gillian or Tim Burton’s “poetic”
conception of cinematography to a more prosaic, down-to-earth type of cinema,
exemplified by the action and adventure genre.
21- Recent developments in quantum physics and String theory seem to point
towards the existence of a physical multiverse, i.e., a set of parallel worlds or
dimensions; however, benefiting from the mistakes of my elders, I will not
venture to establish any relationship between my theory of narrative worlds and