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2 - Language-Games

Alison Mark
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Luton
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Summary

I remember the shock of recognition I felt when Edwin Morgan and I gave her the award in the second Leeds New Poets’ Competition in 1971, for her Language Games. These austerely garnished found-poems should have been frigid and unapproachable, but were the opposite – fantastic and frightening.

(Peter Porter)

Beginning in France with the ideas that informed structuralism, an enormous revolution in the conditions of knowledge in the human sciences took place during the 1960s and through the 1970s, matching the political and social unrest of the period which in Paris culminated in the événements of May 1968. Though not notably politically inclined, unlike the Language writers, nor sharing Language writing's project of social transformation, Forrest-Thomson gestures towards these events at the end of her ’Note’ to the collection Language-Games. When discussing the necessity for ‘smashing and rebuilding the forms of thought ’ in the medium of poetry, she remarks that ‘one might be permitted to feel a certain affinity with those who see the role of the University as a subversion of accepted social reality’ (CP 263). The idea that what were previously known as ‘fields of knowledge’, such as science, philosophy, medicine, and aesthetics, are constructed by the systems of language which purport to analyse them, became increasingly a focus of interest in the attempt to interrogate and subvert not just ‘accepted social reality’ but the notion of ‘reality’ itself. These discourses, which in their simpler forms Wittgenstein would have called different language-games, create apparently objective self-ratifying descriptions of reality, descriptions which both define the object of their enquiry (their subject), and construct the modes of thought by which a conceptual analysis of that object may be made. Forrest-Thomson was becoming increasingly interested in the possibilities of such languagesystems for poetry, and by 1971, at a time when most British and American theorists were just beginning to get to grips with structuralism, while in France its moment was passing, she was already declaring herself to be a poststructuralist, thus placing herself in the vanguard of what has come to be known as ‘theory’. In her writings of this period we can see the gradual inauguration of new ways of thinking about, analysing, and writing poetry and poetics, informed by poststructuralist insights into discursive practices, the condition of the subject, and her or his possibilities of experience.

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Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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