The protean ptyx: nonsense, non-translation and word magic in Mallarme's 'Sonnet en yx'
December 2019
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Chapter
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Modernism and Non-Translation
This chapter presents an extensive analysis of questions of translation and non-translation through the focal point of Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Sonnet en yx’. It traces early responses to this poem that highlighted the challenge to interpretation posed by ‘ptyx’: was this a nonsensical neologism or an untranslated derivation from another language? The chapter shows how the term resonated with other artists and moved ‘from the category of the untranslated to the untranslatable’. The term exemplifies a kind of ‘word magic’ that modernism conjures out of non-translation, a quasi-mysticism of unfamiliar noises that prompts readers to dwell on formal and sonic capacities as well as the conceptual contours of language.
ptyx, surrealism, pataphysics, Alfred Jarry, impossibility of translation, Mallarmé, Basic English
Seven Remarks on the Seventh Angel
October 2017
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Journal article
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PMLA
A translation of Michel Foucault's "Sept propos sur le septième ange".
'Oulipo', 'Pataphysics', and 'Acéphale'
June 2017
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Chapter
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Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism
Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays
December 2016
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Book
Hoggs that sh-te soap, p. 66
January 2016
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Journal article
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imes Literary Supplement
SBTMR
Theory of the Great Game Writings from Le Grand Jeu
June 2015
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Book
The theory of Le Grand Jeu is presented in the group's own words, through the essays and articles which formed the magazine.
"Joyce, un pornographe": Ulysses, A portrait of the artist as a young man, and the Sally Mara novels of Raymond Queneau
January 2015
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Journal article
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James Joyce Quarterly
This essay looks at two postwar novels published in Paris under the pseudonym Sally Mara. The novels—On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes and Journal intime—are both by Raymond Queneau, a former Surrealist and later founder of the experimental literary workshop, the Oulipo. Both novels are pornographic pulp fiction, but both also exhibit a profound and playful debt to Joyce. The essay argues that, while the first novel explicitly draws on Ulysses, borrowing its characters and pitching them into the Easter Uprising, the second owes a subtler debt to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man since it tells the story of its fictionalized author's literary and sexual coming of age in Dublin.
SBTMR
As If We Were Reading a Good Novel: Fiction and the Index from Richardson to Ballard
Calvino, Llull, Lucretius: Two Models of Literary Combinatorics
March 2012
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Journal article
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Comparative Literature
4705 Literary Studies, 36 Creative Arts and Writing, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies, 3602 Creative and Professional Writing
Pataphysical Letters Correspondence Between René Daumal and Julien Torma with an Additional Letter from Julien Torma to Jean Montmort
January 2012
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Book
Authors, French
Exegesis of Mallarmé’s Ptyx
December 2011
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Journal article
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LIP: Journal of the London Institute of ’Pataphysics
Form and Anxiety in Translation: Two Case Studies
January 2011
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Journal article
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PEER English
Filiger
December 2010
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Journal article
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LIP: Journal of the London Institute of ’Pataphysics
Urchin, Coney, Rock Badger: Genus Hopping with the Choirogrullios