Poetry at Stake: Blaise Cendrars, Cultural Studies, and the Future of Poetry in the Literature Classroom

• Published in: PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 1997-01, Vol.112 (1), p.40-55
• Main Author: Noland, Carrie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cultural studies; Discourse; Imagist poetry; Literary criticism; Literary style; Lyric poetry; Modernist art; Modernist poetry; Poetic forms; Poetry; Special Topic: The Teaching of Literature
• ISSN: 0030-8129; 1938-1530
• DOI: 10.2307/463052

Cultural studies has tended to neglect poetic texts, but poetry is in fact well suited to provoke classroom debates concerning the cultural construction of the aesthetic object, as Blaise Cendrars's Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (Nineteen Elastic Poems) confirms. Bakhtin's notion of the heteroglossic helps to demonstrate that Cendrars's poems are also "rejoinders" in a dialogue with their institutional other: advertising. But Cendrars does not merely claim advertising as poetic material; he identifies poetry as a form of advertisement. Cendrars suggests that the symbolic capital of poetry cannot exist unless the poem brings attention to itself by means of a practice that it posits, paradoxically, as its other. However, the fact that poetry is constructed by advertising its difference does not make poetry equivalent to advertising. Cultural studies reveals the institutional construction of poetry, but only close textual analysis can highlight the semiotic distinctions between poetry and advertising that institutional boundaries engender.