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Ed Emshwiller's Mixed Mode of Cinema Contrasted with the Lyrical Film
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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The Theory of Transformation 113 standing as the concepts of the Imagination are indeterminate, while the concepts of the understanding are determinate. And although indeterminate concepts cannot be translated into determinate concepts, they are nonetheless genuine, and the human beings who strive for knowledge of the supersensible realm—of death, freedom, the soul, god, and eternity—will avail themselves of them. Critics who are wont to claim that the destabilizing power of irony is akin to those subversive powers of scientific thinking that Marx and Engels extolled, inasmuch as it can transform the given, should be much distressed that the New Critics (most of whom positioned themselves somewhere on the right side of the political spectrum, and many very far on the right) mined Kant's theory for its radical theory of meaning. The New Critics argued that the formal integrity of a work of art so transformed the elements that enter it that they retained hardly a vestige of their everyday significance . The formidable Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye was intimately familiar with and drew upon the same intellectual sources as the New Critics did, but fashioned the ideas he took from them into a distinctive system. He points out how important to literary theory Blake's famous remark in A Vision of the Last Judgment is. "What," it will be Question'd, "When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat "like a Guinea?" 0 no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy is Lord God Almighty."85 Frye proposes that what distinguishes the Hallelujah Chorus perception of the sun and makes it far more real than the Guinea sun is that far more imagination has gone into perceiving it. The time span over which Frye offered this idea indicates the importance it had for him. Frye announced the conviction at least as early as Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947), the book that made Frye's worldwide reputation and helped make Blake understandable to the community of readers, critics, and academics who, until that book's appearance, had considered Blake a minor English romantic poet of questionable mental stability . Frye made the same idea the subject of his final book, The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (1991), a work that has all the features of a valedictorian work, for one gets the impression when reading it that Frye, still under the sway of his early homiletical training, has gathered his flock and is expounding, in clear, simple language the fundamental beliefs that had given his life meaning—attempting, really, to impart his vision of the Good before taking his final leave. 114 A Body of Vision The New Critics' basic interest was in how the intratextual relations that an element (a word, or an image, or any morpheme, even a patch of colour in a painting) assumes when it is incorporated into a work ofart strip that element of whatever meanings it might possess independently of that structure— denude it of conventional significance and endow it with new significances. They used this idea to show that poetic meaning defied paraphrase (that is, in Kant's terminology,translation into determinate concepts). A poetic structure imbues words taken from ordinary language with new meanings; poetic language therefore possesses a multiplicity of meanings. This indeterminacy,New Critics argued, allowed more imagination into the poem and permitted the poet to speak of the realms that lie beyond the point where ordinary language breaks off.They showed that a lexeme that we use in everyday language, when inserted into a network of poetic relations, no longer correlates with the same sememe. The poetic relations it takes on have the power to remake (poesis, from which "poetry" derives, means simply "making") meaning. When the lexeme becomes a part of an articulated composition, the entirety of the composition, the whole network of relations of which it becomes a part, is altered and is given a new meaning. At their most radical, New Critics considered this reworking to be ceaseless . The network ofrelations is so complex that each reading or reconsideration of the text in memory reveals new figures and new relations that again transform the lexeme, creating a new sememe that is then re-incorporated into the network, thus altering the network itself, and this change reworks the lexeme.... So begins an unending process that imbues poetic language with multiplemeanings—meanings that are endless innumber. Kant was just...