Treatise Disguised as Poem: the Border-Line Genre and its Linguistic Features
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2024-2-9
- Pages
- 144-159
Abstract
The hybrid genre of poetic treatise occupies a somewhat marginal position within the literary genres landscape. Nonetheless, it holds particular interest as a realm of interaction between artistic and scientific discourses, sometimes intertwining with everyday speech. In the twentieth century, the interplay between scientific and poetic texts, as well as between verse and prose, took on new experimental forms. Western literature saw the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and his philosophical treatise form on artistic practices, including poetry. Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" left a significant imprint on poets associated with the ‘language school’ in the USA. Furthermore, Wittgenstein's treatise and its interpretation by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko continue to reverberate in contemporary Russophone poetry, particularly within the objectivist line. The research material encompasses texts of poetic treatises from the Russian avant-garde (Ivan Terentyev, Daniil Kharms, and Yakov Druskin), contemporary Russophone objectivist poetry (Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Aleksandr Skidan, and Nikita Safonov), and American ‘language writing’ (Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, and Bob Perelman). The article scrutinizes the linguistic characteristics of such discursive interaction within the experimental form of a ‘treatise disguised as a poem’. Specific linguistic traits of the treatise genre, typically found in scientific and philosophical works, are transposed onto poetic texts. These include discourse words and expressions conveying metatextual deixis and the process of argumentation, a distinct I-We subjectivity characteristic of scientific discourse, a pronounced focus on propositionality as a determinant of truth or falsity, and a clearly delineated, mathematically ordered division of statements.
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