| "Form as Transgression: Structuring a Modern Poetics" traces the development of a modern poetics in terms of literary transgression "before Bataille" and remaps the temporal, generic, and geographic parameters for this poetics. It demonstrates that the Prague Structuralist precept "poetic language radically violates the norm" articulates an already extant tradition connecting innovation with aesthetic value and locating both in the transgression of formal, linguistic, and social and sexual codes. In the works of Charles Baudelaire and Christina Rossetti, two distinct, equally constitutive models for literary transgression arise in 1860s Paris and London: Baudelaire's performative poetics of "shock" and the poetics of "stealth" that characterize Rossetti's Goblin Market. These models reflect differences in the prosodic and social constraints faced by each writer, constraints which vary with national culture and gender. In Kafka's Prague in the 1920s, literary transgression enters a closing or reflective mode, its theoretical framework codified and pushed to its outer limits. At the same time that the Prague Structuralists openly define poetic discourse as the transgressive use of language, Kafka's Castle engages both "stealth" and "shock" models at multiple levels, cubing linear transgression to posit a transgressive architectonics. The novel exemplifies but also ultimately deconstructs transgression as a literary mode, revealing it to be dependent on unstable social and sexual models.;Traditionally understood as the champion of poesie pure , Baudelaire emerges as the practitioner of a radical and violently hybridizing poetics, while Rossetti, often dismissed or celebrated for sentimentality and abject self-denial, pioneers a non-representational, non-subjective, formal poetics. Rossetti is crucial to an understanding of literary modernism that accounts for gender not only because she recognized and manipulated a tenacious gender-coded poetics to form a model of transgressive innovation, but because the same system so long continued to obscure the innovative qualities that influenced her contemporaries---including those, such as Swinburne and Hopkins, singled out as precursors to modernism. Kafka's last novel further demonstrates the importance of accounting for gender at the scene of writing and reading; texts by Czech women writers influence the text structurally and conceptually but have been little recognized to do so. In response to issues posed in these texts, however, The Castle interrogates the notion that language can provide boundaries stable enough to transgress or observe. |
