Robert Boncardo investigates how Stéphane Mallarmé, one of modernity's most ingenious yet obscure poets, became an object of major political significance for French intellectuals. He asks how this ...most refined and seemingly aristocratic of poets became the writer of choice for leftist intellectuals and reflects on the ambivalent relation between literature and its political destiny in modernity. With in-depth studies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, along with shorter analyses of Jean-Claude Milner and Quentin Meillassoux, he situates Mallarmé within the philosophical and political projects of some of France's greatest thinkers.
Winner of the SCMLA 2017 Book AwardBeginning in the late nineteenth century, French visual artists began incorporating Japanese forms into their work. The style, known asJaponisme, spanned the arts.
...Identifying a general critical move from a literal to a more metaphoric understanding and presentation ofJaponisme, Pamela A. Genova applies a theory of "aesthetic translation" to a broad response to Japanese aesthetics within French culture. She crosses the borders of genre, field, and form to explore the relationship of Japanese visual art to French prose writing of the mid- to late 1800s.Writing Japonismefocuses on the work of Edmond de Goncourt, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Émile Zola, and Stéphane Mallarmé as they witnessed, incorporated, and participated in an unprecedented cultural exchange between France and Japan, as both creators and critics. Genova's original research opens new perspectives on a fertile and influential period of intercultural dynamics.
Between present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. ...Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists' masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty's thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty's most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.
A close reading, with text and translation, of each of the thirteen prose poems which Mallarme published during his life and grouped together in 1897 as the "Anecdotes ou Poemes" ofDivagations. The ...analysis, the first full interpretation of these poems, demonstrates that they should be considered a unified cycle, centering about the themes of the poet's creative process and his relationship to society.
Tragedy as Symbolism It is the symbolic nature of Oedipus' quest which most centrally links the notions of Tragedy and Symbolism in the Oedipus Tyrannus, and that under the aegis of the concepts of ...home and homing.
How do the writings of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé speak to
our time? Why should we continue to read these poets today? How
might a contemporary reading of their poetry differ from readings
...delivered in previous centuries? Twenty-First-Century
Symbolism argues that Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé
prefigure a view of human subjectivity that is appropriate for our
times: we cannot be separated from the worlds in which we live and
evolve; human beings both mediate and are mediations of the
environments we traverse and that traverse us, whether these are
natural, urban, linguistic, or technological environments. The
ambition of the book is therefore twofold: on the one hand, it aims
to offer new readings of the three poets, demonstrating their
continued relevance for contemporary debates, putting them into
dialogue with a philosophical corpus that has not yet played a role
in the study of nineteenth century French poetry; on the other, the
book relies on the three poets to establish an understanding of
human subjectivity that is in tune with our twenty-first century
concerns.
Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure "ivory-tower poet, " Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the ...sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé's quest for "scientific" language, and convincingly links the poet's production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé's poetry and his circumstantial writings.
