Biographism, Confession, Individuation. Poetry between Psychocriticism and Sociopoetics
The present study departs from the refutal of Proust’s famous distinction between the artistic and the social egos from Contre Sainte-Beuve. The social person and the creative ego cannot be perfectly isolated, as the French writer states, since the psyche which creates comes within the text and instils it with a whole psychological (and therefore social, and political, and economical a.s.o.) context. Recent literary theory has developed a new type of biographical and social approach free from the mechanical determinism of the old biographical school, and therefore fertile and useful in its approaches. Understood as the confession of a psyche with social and political extensions, literature is fruitfully approachable via these new theories regarding the „modern mises-en-scènes of the author”, as Jérôme Meizoz calls them in his influential studies.
Keywords: biographical theories of literature, biographism, sociopoetics, psychocriticism, confessional poetry, literature as confession, Jérôme Meizoz
1. Michel Onfray, Le désir d’être un volcan. Journal hédoniste, Grasset, 1996.
2. Judith Harris, Signifying Pain. Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing, State University of New York Press, 2003, p. 69.
3. Alain Viala, Eléments de sociopoétique, în Alain Viala, Georges Molinié, Approches de la réception. Sociopoétique et sémiostilistique de Le Clézio, PUF, 1993, pp. 139-220.
4. Jérôme Meizoz, Postures littéraires. Mises en scènes modernes de l’auteur. Essai, Slatkine Erudition, Genève, 2007, p. 2011. De asemenea, pentru clarificarea conceptului de „postură literară”, v. şi Jérôme Meizoz, La Fabrique de singularités. Postures littéraires II, Slatkine Erudition, Genève, 2011.
5. R.D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, Tavistock Publications, 1960, p. 117: „In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.” 6. Claudia Rankine, The First Person in the Twenty-First Century în After Confession. Poetry as Autobiography, editat de Kate Sontag & David Graham, Saint Paul, Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2001, pp. 133-134.
7. Kate Sontag, David Graham (editori), After Confession. Poetry as Autobiography, Graywolf Press, 2001.
8. Pentru a se înţelege limpede cât de decisivă e „reîntoarcerea biograficului” la Meizoz, citez dintr-o convorbire a lui cu David Martens, purtată pe marginea cărţii recente a lui Meizoz, La Fabrique des singularités. Postures II (Slatkine Érudition, 2011): „La « posture » des écrivains relève de formes de vie (au sens de Wittgenstein) acquises au cours de leur socialisation littéraire et nous pouvons décrire, à différentes époques, les éléments de ces formes de vie. Leur manière de se présenter au public, leurs conduites physiques, vestimentaires, gestuelles, verbales, tout ce que j’inclus sous le nom de « posture », ne prennent sens que relationnellement aux autres normes et pratiques de leur
champ intellectuel”. Convorbirea, destul de amplă şi foarte utilă, e de găsit în Interférences littéraires, nr. 6, mai 2011, pp. 199-212.
9. Antonio Patraş, Literatură şi biografie. În căutarea omului din carte, Iaşi, Timpul, 2011, pp. 9-10.
