The Work of Art and Other Kinds of Work

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media II: Marxism, Poetry and Poetics

Abstract

Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is written in stanzas of iambic tetrameter, with three exceptions. The slightest of these, but perhaps the most interesting, is a supposedly ethnographic document of peasant girls singing at their work, composed in the trochaic meters that marked folk poetry in Romantic verse. The peasants are forced to sing, the narrator comments, to ensure that they are not sampling the master’s berries, which they are harvesting for market; their compelled song is contrasted with the narrator’s aristocratic indolence when he complains that he is tired from so much writing and must eat and rest before he writes any longer. In this presentation, I approach the trope of the mise-en-abyme, or text-within-the-text, as a way of imagining the work of art in relation to productive labor, using as my point of origin Pushkin’s impersonation of a peasant voice to identify himself simultaneously with the toiling producers of song and the aristocratic audience that demands poetic performance. Metafictional form here articulates poetry’s precarious condition between leisure activity, product of labor, and market commodity—concepts very much in flux in the early nineteenth century context of feudalism’s troubled transition into an uneven form of capitalism. Ultimately, I argue that one of the chief functions of the mise-en-abyme more generally is to make visible how artworks communicate with or can be read as traces of other kinds of work.

Author

• Jacob Emery, Indiana U Bloomington