Voices made of paper, ink, light: research of the materiality of words in literature

Abstract

The history of literature usually gives little prominence to the textual productions that erect their voice on the border between the arts and the Letters. However, since the late nineteenth century, the materiality of the words was emphasized by Mallarmé and later exponents of the European vanguard as Apollinaire, Zdanovitch, and Marinetti. This emphasis on the visual aspect of the text was recovered, on national soil, by concrete poetry. Anchored in the theorization of their presuppositions, the concrete poets were as much the object of admiration as of rejection by the literary critic. As a strategy of resistance to this polemic vocation, their heroes objectified their ideas with the help of the Poundian concept of paideuma, establishing criteria for their work from the identification of creative procedures in a select roll of authors that preceded them. Should we follow this self-established lineage of the poetry of invention or would it be better to insert them into the legacy of expanded textuality that walked parallel to traditional literary history and anticipated inter-mediatic potentialities?