Remnants of Poetic Dreams

Critical Quarterly, 2019

Are dreams a kind of poetry? This question is raised, although never definitively answered, by The Interpretation of Dreams. At times, Freud treats dreams not as symptoms to be unravelled, but as evocative, indeterminate, nocturnal compositions. Where dreams are handled as aesthetic objects rather than clinical problems, a different kind of analysis ensues, at odds with the book’s more dominant hermeneutic style. The resulting poetics of dreams suggests an alternate route from dream interpretation to literary criticism: an associative, rather than symptomatic, Freudian reading.

2020

An article now cultivated in each of the four quarters of the globe: this is silk! The work of that little worm which clothes mankind with the leaves of trees digested in its entrails. Silk! That double prodigy of nature and of art.

1998

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Rilune - Revue des littératures européennes, 2018

Pour citer cet article Tania Collani, « Modern Imagery of Dreams-A Critical Enquiry », in RILUNE-Revue des littératures européennes, no 12, Dormir, transcrire, créer : le rêve littéraire à travers les genres, les domaines et les époques, p. 1-18 (Mirta Cimmino, Maria Teresa De Palma, Isabella Del Monte, éds.), 2018 (version en ligne, www.rilune.org). Résumé | Abstract FR Les rêves en littérature sont-ils toujours les mêmes ? Ou changent-ils avec le temps, en suivant les évolutions du contexte social, politique et culturel ? S'il est vrai que l'homme a toujours rêvé, faut-il encore se demander s'il a toujours rêvé de la même manière. Et surtout si le rêve après les théories de Freud (1900) présente le même degré d'innocence qu'avant. Quels sont les outils que la critique littéraire peut utiliser pour analyser la présence des rêves, à un niveau formel et thématique, avec un corpus tiré de la production avant-gardiste européenne du début du XXe siècle-entre autres, des auteurs surréalistes comme André Breton, Giorgio De Chirico, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, ou des futuristes et des imagistes comme Filippo Tommaso Marinetti et Ezra Pound ? Une étude critique sur la modernité des rêves en littérature doit pouvoir aller au-delà d'une approche ciblée uniquement sur le rêve comme thème et objet, parce qu'il touche l'imaginaire humain et poétique en même temps, en ayant recours à un dénominateur commun, l'image. Mots-clés: Rêve, Littérature, Imaginaire, Avant-garde, Poétique. EN Are dreams in literature the same at any time? Or do they evolve as time passes by, with different social, political and cultural settings? Indeed, men have always dreamt; but have they always dreamt in the same way? Is dreaming after Freud's theories (1900) as innocent as it was before? Which tools can literary criticism use to analyse the presence of dreams, at both formal and thematic level, within a corpus of early 20th century European avant-garde literature-including, among others, Surrealist authors such as André Breton, Giorgio De Chirico, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, or Futurists and Imagists such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Ezra Pound? A critical enquiry on the modernity of dreams in literature should go beyond a sole thematic approach, because it deals with human and poetical imaginary-where the image is the common denominator between these two dimensions.

International Journal of Dream Research, 2015

Poligrafi, 2023

TEXT

This paper explores the dream-inspired poetry and video poetry of award-winning Brisbane poet Anna Jacobson. Jacobson’s surreal poetic narratives draw on memory, dreams, desires and destiny, using simple language and vivid imagery to evoke strong emotional responses. Her manner of exploring dreams in a number of poetic and narrative forms allows whimsical, gentle but also vigorous creative work of personal resilience and understanding. Her work is framed also by explorations of her Jewish culture and family and driven by unbridled imagination. In particular, the paper investigates Jacobson’s process of interweaving visions and memories for the purpose of tracing personal histories lost through periods of mental illness, exploring how she mines dreams for the purpose of writing and healing. It questions how her poetic process allows her to reclaim agency through unpacking experiences she wants to recover or further understand. Distilled from a series of interviews with the poet, the ...

Dreams are visual, vivid and active experiences, produced by our sleeping selves in various forms, throughout a sleep cycle. Writers and poets are known to harness these experiences as anchors and inspiration for their creative products. There are, however, many issues surrounding the metamorphosis of, or leap from, a dream experience to text. I have been working with dreams as the foundation for the creative component of my thesis and this has led me to encounter particular problems. While it is widely acknowledged that a dream report constitutes a narrative , Webb (1992) draws a direct comparison between dreams and poetry by highlighting common qualities. For example, both tend to be fragmented, vague, contain symbolism and metaphor, and rarely have a clear beginning or endcloser to the poetic than the narratival. Other issues involve the relaying of and capturing of emotions and atmosphere, the inevitable question of interpretation, a consciousness of the life of the dreamer (including socio-cultural environment, physical environment, on-going projects), or the dreamer's identity narrative, as a context for the dream. By considering samples of both dream narratives and dream poems through the lenses of dream studies and narrative theory, I will begin an exploration of these issues.

2023

TEXT Journal, 2022

This Special Issue of TEXT explores the capacity of dreamscapes to function as powerful literary devices within an array of creative writing forms, while also informing and shaping creative arts practice more broadly. Its authors demonstrate diverse curiosities about creative practice as a kind of dreaming, where a practitioner's engagements might constitute a quasi dreamwork-on-the-page. In addition to this, creative thinking itself can pass via registers reminiscent of the dream and of its atmospheres and formation, broaching unconscious material, experiences, and paradigms. Suffice to say, an inherent connection between dreams, storytelling and the production of artwork more generally is tested and expanded upon in these articles. The unconscious processes that unfold during dreaming may harvest their contents and compositions from the conscious processes engaged and activated intentionally by established practitioners when working in literary, narrative and poetic forms, but also vice versa. The poietic strategies fundamental to crafting dream sequences for written forms entail far more than a simple duplication of any real dreams' narrative potential, associative chains, structures, or uncanny atmospheres: they require writers to translate dream-like elements into tangible sequences, rhythms, or scenes, to bring material substance to the oneiric.