ON TRANSIENCE, PRESENCE AND ANTICIPATION: NOTES TOWARDS A PALIMPSESTIC APPROACH TO TEMPORAL LITERARY STUDY, WITH REFERENCE TO 1915

ferdian syah ramadhan;

This article concentrates on issues a rising from our engagement with synchrony and diachrony in global literary and art scholarship, and on the use of anniversaries as purported ‘points of puncture’ that may bridge these two modes of scholarly enquiry. Taking the year 1915 as its flexible case study, the article focuses on two types of text – artistic and critical/theoretical: Victor Shklovsky’s review of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem ‘A Cloud in Trousers’ (‘Oblako v shtanakh’), Roman Jakobson’s poem‘mzglybzhvuo …/Distraction’ (‘Razsieianost’), Kazimir Malevich’s paintingThe Black Suprematist Square (‘Chernyi suprematic heskii kvadrat’), Constantine Cavafy’s poem‘But the wise perceive things about to happen’ (‘Σοwοί δε προσιόντων’), and Sigmund Freud’s article ‘On Transience’ (‘Vergänglichkeit’). All these texts/artworks, it is argued, emphatically concern themselves with the issues of synchrony and diachrony, and each of them has something specific to contribute to our thinking about the vitality and value of these hermeneutic postures and tools.