FRE 363: 19th & 20th Century French Poetry

In this concise and illuminating study, Jacques Rancière, one of the world's most popular and influential living philosophers, examines the life and work of the celebrated nineteenth-century French poet and critic, Ranciere presents Mallarme; as neither an aesthete in need of rare essences and unheard-of words, nor the silent and nocturnal thinker of some poem too pure to be written. Mallarme; is the contemporary of a republic that is seeking out forms of civic worship to replace the pomp of religions and kings. If his writing is difficult, it is because it complies with a demanding and delicate poetics that is itself responding to an exceptional awareness of the complexity of an historical moment as well as the role that poetry ought to play in it.

Baudelaire, Mallarm and Valry, three central poets of the modern French tradition, form a noble poetic lineage: Mallarm proceeded from Baudelaire, Valry from Mallarm; yet each went his separate way and attained a high degree of originality. All three reflected deeply on the principles of poetic creation; all three sought to apply these principles in the practice of writing. The central theme of the eighteen papers collected here is the constant confrontation of theory and practice. The majority are close studies of individual poems, based on rigourous textual analysis, but placing each poem, implicitly or explicitly, in the total context of each poet's work as a whole.

This study explores the interrelationship between spatiality and subjecthood in the work of Stephane Mallarme, Guillaume Apollinaire, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Alfred Jarry. Concerned with various modes of poetry and drama, it also examines the cross-pollination that can occur between these modes, focusing on a range of core texts including Mallarme's Igitur and Un Coup de des; Apollinaire's 'Zone' and various of his calligrammes; Maeterlinck's early one-act plays: L'Intruse, Les Aveugles, and Interieur; and Jarry's Ubu roi and Cesar-Antechrist.. The poetic and dramatic practices of these four authors are assessed against the broader cultural and philosophical contexts of the fin de siecle. The fin de siecle witnessed a profound epistemological shift: the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm, increasingly challenged throughout the nineteenth century, was largely dismantled, with ramifications beyond physics, philosophy, and psychology. Chapter 1 introduces three foundational notionsNewtonian absolute space, the unitary Cartesian subject, and subject-object dualismthat were challenged and ultimately overthrown in turn-of-the-century science and art. Developments in theatre architecture and typographic design are examined against this philosophical backdrop with a view to establishing a diachronic and interdisciplinary framework of the authors in question. Chapter 2 focuses on the spatial dimension of Mallarme's Un Coup de des and Apollinaire's calligrammesworks which defamiliarise page-space by undermining various (naturalised) conventions of paginal configuration. In Chapter 3, the notion of liminality is implemented in an analysis of character and diegetic space as constructed in Jarry's Ubu roi and Maeterlinck's one-acts. Chapters 4 and Chapter 5 undertake a more abstract investigation of parallel inverse processes-the subjectivisation of space and the spatialisation of the subjectmanifest not only in the works of Mallarme, Maeterlinck, Apollinaire, and Jarry, but in the period's poetry and drama more generally.

This volume of essays, written by scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical viewpoints, presents a fresh approach to the study of nineteenth-century French poetry. Each of the eleven essays, on different poets from Lamartine to Mallarm and Laforgue, focuses on the detailed organisation of a single poem. The method of close reading has been adopted in order to effect an introduction to the analysis of the 'basics' of poetic language (sound, metre, syntax, etc.), and in order to explore and illustrate some of the claims and arguments about poetry arising from developments in the prevailing literary theory. Theoretical positions are posed and tested in the terms of practical analysis and interpretation. Christopher Prendergast's introduction to the volume situates the essays in a series of general perspectives and contexts, and Clive Scott has provided an appendix on French versification.

The recent enthusiasm for things postmodern has often produced a caricature of Modernism as monolithic and reactionary. Peter Nicholls argues instead that the distinctive feature of Modernism is its diversity. Through a lively analysis of each of Modernism's main literary movements, he explores the connections between the new stylistic developments and the shifting politics of gender and authority. Nicholls introduces a wealth of literary experimentation, beginning with Baudelaire and Mallarme; and moving forward to the first avant-gardes. Close readings of key texts monitor the explosive histories of Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, histories that allow Anglo-American Modernism to be seen in a strikingly different light. In revealing Modernism's broad and varied terrain, Nicholls evokes the richness of a cultural moment that continues to shape our own.

Challenging traditional histories of the nineteenth-century French lyric, Laurence M. Porter maintains that from 1851 to 1875 Symbolism constituted neither a movement nor a system, but rather represented a crisis of confidence in the powers of poetry as a communicative act. The Crisis of French Symbolism offers a provocative reinterpretation of the four acknowledged masters of Symbolist poetry: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarm.