Itineraries - Conference Papers

On Bartók and Brancusi

“Symbol and Reverberation: Patterns of Re/Cognition in the Work of Bartók, Rilke, and Brancusi”

This paper probes the intersemiotic implications of categories that are refractory to usual analytic 'verification'. Musical, verbal, and visual procedures taken from works of Bartók. Rilke, and Brancusi are juxtaposed, and shared patterns of signification are examined. Movement (rate, direction), gravity (weightlessness), image (feature, shape), are explored as categories com/prehended by other than metaphor and correspondence, and re/cognition strategies are identified.

Version read at Symbolicity, An International Semioticians’ Conference in Honour of Thomas A. Sebeok’s 70th Birthday, Budapest (Hungary), September 1990.