ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author draws on the work to argue for an accommodation between individual uniqueness and social negotiation that is particularly important in theorising literary production and reading. Stylisticians have periodically revisited earlier work from central and eastern Europe for complementary approaches, and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin has been prominent especially for those stylisticians with a sociolinguistic or sociological training. One of the paradoxes of imagist poetics is that a poetry ostensibly concerned with definition and specificity emerges as a discourse of mutability, paraphrase, redefinition, metaphorical respecification, and of metamorphosis. One can suggest reasons why many problems of modernist poetics seem to centre round co-reference: this is a poetry concerned with world reference and it makes little concession to discourse reference or ‘information-packaging’. Coreferential identity has only a discourse status, the links indicated are purely textual, not those of the real world.
