ISLT 5                       
LIMINAL POETICS                                   
26-27  March 2007

It is becoming increasingly clear that the nature and behaviour of thresholds constitute one of the thorniest and most exciting problems in textual and cultural studies. There is therefore an urgent need to formulate the precise role played by the limen on all levels, ranging from those involving plot, action, setting, character, atmosphere, narrative structure and poetic composition, imagery and symbol, to the levels of inter- and paratextual phenomena, ritual and performance, intergenre and interdisciplinary issues.
We submit that one of the concepts which can be said best to unify the problems raised by the threshold on these different levels is the concept of poetics. If we need a description of the principles which govern the production of meaning on and by the limen, we need a poetics of the threshold. 
By text we mean not static, passive or ‘dead’ constructs but dynamic, open, ‘unfinished’ constructions. Not just literature but also film, comic book, videogame, performance, and others constitute texts in this sense. Ritual itself, as Clifford Geertz pointed out, may be seen to fall within the category of text. Text in its broadest sense designates any sign system and is therefore the province of history and anthropology as much as of literature, linguistics, music or art studies. The limen, too, is textual or relates to text in ways to be determined by research. Ultimately, perhaps, texts themselves will be found to be conditioned by the nature of the thresholds they verge upon, harbour, or deny.
If the threshold is textualized, then the study of its principles may be the proper object of a poetics. By poetics we mean the conditions that generate textual sense, the system of principles which explain the construction of meaning in texts. A fortiori, we are concerned with the way meanings, values and ideologies are projected onto liminal sites, as with the way these may seem to give rise to aesthetic, ideological or moral positions. We have no axes to grind in the matter, and are merely interested in exploring the possibilities and limitations of the concept of poetics as it may be applied to thresholds in or around texts.