期刊名称：E-rea : Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1638-1718
出版年度：2004
卷号：2
期号：2
页码：1
出版社：Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
摘要：“Poetics” is a notoriously slippery and all-purpose word, which can in turn designate a collection of artistic rules and precepts, the linguistic and representational universe of a particular writer1, and even the descriptive analysis of a state of feeling or substance conducive to creativeness2. Although in the course of the twentieth century the term “poetics” usually became synonymous with the general theory of literary forms and the exploration of the virtually endless possibilities of literary discourse, there still lurks within its foundations the memory of its (long prevalent) normative power. Poetics as the spelling out of rules of artistic conduct (including rules of formal composition) is one acceptation of the word, but one that remains an essential component of the poetics of the literature of the 1940s in Britain. With unprecedented intensity, that decade problematised the predicament of literature in the face of events that were both out of its range and central to its concerns, if only because the outcome of the war was felt to determine the possibility of literature’s survival. George Orwell’s essay “Inside the Whale” is a famous but ultimately unsatisfactory survey of the position of writers in the early months of 1940. Stoically embracing the view that “literature, in the [liberal] form in which we know it, must suffer at least a temporary death,” (48) Orwell also insists that writers’ attitudes at the outbreak of the war should not be oversimplified into a mere conflict between “progressive” versus “reactionary”, or again “left -wing” versus “fascist” world-views. The authentic artistic stance does not in fact so much depend on “political truth” (always illusory and ephemeral) as on emotional sincerity. More often than not, that emotional sincerity can only be obtained in an atmosphere “‘innocent of public-spiritedness’”. Thus, taking to task Louis MacNeice who, in the 1930s, criticised T.S. Eliot’s selfish unconcern for the trench war in Prufock (1917), he declares:
