On transience, presence and anticipation: Notes towards a palimpsestic approach to temporal literary study, with reference to 1915

Abstract

This article concentrates on issues arising 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'), RomanJakobson's poem 'mzglybzhvuo .../Distraction' ('Razsieianost'), Kazimir Malevich's painting The Black Suprematist Square ('Chernyi suprematicheskii kvadrat'), Constantine Cavafy's poem 'But the wise perceive things about to happen' ('Zocpoi Se Ttpooiovxcov'), 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.