Just What Word Did Mandel'shtam Forget? A Mnemopoetic Solution to the Problem of Saussure's Anagrams
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375095 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Mikhail Gronas (Dartmouth College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 155-205 |
| Publication date | 2009-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/03335372-2008-007 |
| OpenAlex | W2157907624 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 46 |
To the extent that memorability is one of the poet's chief (even if unconscious) concerns, poetic composition may be seen as a kind of mnemonic "reverse engineering" that utilizes the very operating procedures of verbal memory. In this article, I focus on the similarities between the cognitive operations involved in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (a frustrating failure to retrieve a known but temporarily unavailable word) and those involved in creating the anagram, a poetic device discovered by Ferdinand de Saussure, in which the phonemes of the important theme word of a poem are dispersed throughout the body of the poem, while the word itself remains unsaid. Both the retrieval of a word on the tip of one's tongue and the (re)construction of an anagram involve sorting through the phonetic and semantic cues that hint at the absent target word. I suggest that these similarities may be due to the fact that both phenomena are subserved by a common cognitive mechanism: semantic and perceptual priming. On the basis of this analogy, I argue that in both ancient and modern literary traditions the anagram, whose origin puzzled Saussure, may have served a mnemonic function. The case study is provided by Osip Mandel'shtam's poem "I have forgotten the word that I wanted to say"-which both contains an anagram and presents an introspective analysis of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
Anagram · Anagrams · Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Epistemology · Linguistics · Phenomenon · Poetry · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Linguistic Studies and Language Acquisition · Philosophy · Psychology
The Muse Learns to Write
Facilitation in recognizing pairs of words
Orality and Literacy
Andrei Belyi, Dante and "Golubye glaza i goriashchaia lobnaia kost"
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition
The Cognitive Psychology of Proper Names
The Game of the Name
A review of the tip-of-the-tongue experience
Les anagrammes cosmopolites de l'auteur dans son oeuvre, ou l'identité renversée de Vladimir Nabokov
Narcissism beyond Gestalt and awareness
Memory and the Scene of Writing in Mandelstam's Egipetskaia marka
Classical Motives in the Poetry of Osip Mandel'štam
Zur Funktion antiker Göttermythen in der Lyrik Osip Mandel'štams
Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition
La "sibilación escrita". Anagramatismo en la poesía de A. Machado
Essays on Mandel'stam
Why is it difficult to put names to faces
How Many Saussures? The question of the anagrams
Rimebaldiane Miousic
Subliminal Verbal Pattering in Poetry
Lyric Cryptography
My name or any such-like phantom
Mandel'shtam's Ode to Stalin
A Propos des anagrammes
The Theory of Oral Composition
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,07 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2012 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |