For Next Week: Paper #1 and Culler, Chapter 5: "Rhetoric, Poetics, and Poetry"

REMEMBER to bring your Paper #1 assignment to class on Wednesday to turn in. We'll also discuss it in class, because I want to see all the different ways you used Sappho as a theory to examine other works of art. Remember, too, that you should basically use 'poetics' to analyze the poem, and then use 'hermeneutics' to examine your selected work of art. The paper assignment is a few posts down, but remember what we discussed on Friday from Chapter 4 of Culler. 

Below are the questions for Chapter 5, which you can start reading/answering if you have nothing else to do over the three-day weekend. But they won't be due until Friday, of course. 

Answer TWO of the following:

Q1: Culler writes that poetry is not only the "making strange" of language, but it is the "abundant use of figures of speech and language that aims to be powerfully persuasive" (69). How can poetry be "persuasive" if it has more than one meaning? Isn't persuading someone of something the very essence of propaganda? Also, how might Sappho's poems be "powerfully persuasive" even in their fragmentary state?

Q2: On page 70, Culler, quoting theoretical debates on language, asks if a metaphor is "literal or figurative?" Why is this a very hard question to answer? And how does this tie into the larger question about literature: are cliches just metaphors we've forgotten to see? Is anything in literature NOT figurative? Is anything in literature TRULY literal?

Q3: Most of Sappho's poems can be considered 'lyric poems,' which Culler defines as "fictional imitations of personal utterance" (75). Because of this, he argues that "lyric poems strive to be an event" (77). What do you think he means by this? What 'event' are they trying to create, and how does this relate to the "fictional" aspect of the speaker's "real" emotions? In other words, what makes lyric poetry so much trickier to read and interpret than most other literature?

Q4: Culler advises us to read a poem not as a fragment of a larger conversation, but to "assume that it has a structure of its own" (79). How do we do that in practice, especially for Sappho, whose poems literally are fragments? Can we assume that even Sappho's poetry is an "aesthetic whole" (79)? What would be the advantage of doing this?