Reflets réciproques: A Prismatic Reading of Stéphane Mallarmé and Hélène Cixous evokes the refractory aspect of a prism that bends and deflects light in order to produce a spectrum of twentieth-century thought emanating from the late nineteenth-century French literary avant-garde. Because the works of Mallarmé and Cixous are often described as hermetic and illisible, Jacques Derrida intervenes to play the role of intermediary through his separate writings on these poets. Important questions arise: How does the elliptical writing of Mallarmé relate to the hyperbolic writing of Cixous? What common strategies emerge and how do these strategies address the critical areas of sexual difference and political testimony for each writer?

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.

"Although Mallarme is commonly viewed as the high priest of the autonomous work of art, by far the bulk of his actual poetic writing was occasional verse. With few exceptions the works written after 1873 manifest a reinvestment in the world subsequent to the metaphysical crises of the 1860's. In addition to the "Tombeaux," the toasts, and certain of the "Eventails," Mallarme composed the Vers de circonstance, more than 450 quatrains and distichs inscribed on envelopes, postcards, calling cards, Easter eggs, small stones, photographs, and jugs of Calvados. This is the first comprehensive reading and analysis of the neglected late poetry, heretofore dismissed as of marginal interest." "This book has a dual purpose. By exploring the occasional verse of Mallarme, which itself thematizes the problematics of the occasion, the author seeks to rehabilitate such writing for critical study. She does this not by proclaiming its high seriousness, but by insisting on its casual, amenable, public nature. Unlike previous critics, who have often apologized for straying into the fringes of the canon, the author delights in the marginal, insisting that in a poetics of the occasion, traditional oppositions such as center/margin become skewed and break down." "The author's second purpose is to come to a better understanding of Mallarme in light of what he actually wrote, rather than the work projected in his correspondence and prose articles, which has claimed so much critical attention. Each of the chapters of the book highlights one aspect of occasional poetry through an investigation of representative texts, both canonical and occasional. The author also discusses the relationship between Mallarme's poetics and the plastic arts, tracing the changing conception of the representation of the monument from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as well as the correspondences between the more radical aspects of Mallarme's practice of writing and the contemporary arts." "Far more than a study of a single writer, this book is the first to propose a pragmatic definition of occasional literature, to undertake a broad study of the problem of occasion in literature, and to trace the historical trajectory of occasional writing as a specific discourse. The book is illustrated with 27 halftones."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Yenser ranges over all of Merrill's writing to date, from a precocious book printed when its author was fifteen to his most recent publication, a verse play. He writes about both of the poet's novels and pays particular attention to the epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover.

This innovative analysis of the role of imagination as a central concept in both literary and art criticism studies works by Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Kandinsky, and Mondrian.

This book is concerned with the relocation of the concept of the ordinary within the works of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98). It engages with much of Mallarmé’s oeuvre, concentrating on the textual features which reveal that, even in his most difficult texts, the ordinary as conceptual tool, as textual matter and as contemporary environment is never dismissed, but re-invented and invested with new and lively meaning. The instability of the concept in the texts, its qualities which range from the threatening to the immensely fertile make it a particularly rewarding area of study, against the background of a critical corpus which has in the past seen Mallarmé’s work at best as unconcerned with ordinary life, at worst as irremediably removed from it. Here is presented for the first time a study of a metalanguage which appears surprisingly frequently in the Mallarmé corpus. The complex metaphorisation of the banal in Mallarmé’s oeuvre, as well as the ideological discourse of the journalistic writings in their engagement with contemporary life are analysed and contribute to the demonstration of the existence within the corpus of an idealised ordinary world re-invented by the poet.

Treatments of synesthesia in the arts and humanities generally assume a clear distinction between the neurological condition and the literary device. Synesthetes’ descriptions of colors seen in connection with music, for example, are thought to differ fundamentally from common expressions that rely on transpositions across sensory dimensions (“bright vowels”). This has not always been the case. The distinction emerged over the course of the twentieth century, as scientists sought to constitute “synesthesia” as a legitimate object of modern science. On the Colors of Vowels investigates the ambiguity of visual descriptions of vowels across a wide range of disciplines, casting several landmark texts in a wholly new light. The book traces the migration of sound-color correspondence from its ancient host (music) to its modern one (vowels), investigating the vocalic Klangfarben of Hermann von Helmholtz’s monumental Sensations of Tone, the vowel colors reported in early psychology surveys into audition colorée (colored hearing), the mis-matched timbres that form poetry’s condition of possibility in Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse,” and the vowel-color analogy central to both the universal alphabets of the nineteenth century and the phonological universals of the twentieth. The book’s final chapter turns to an intricately detailed account of vowel-color correspondence by Ferdinand de Saussure, suggesting how the linguist’s sensitivity to vowel coloration may have guided his groundbreaking study of Indo-European vocalism. Bringing out the diverse ways in which visual conceptions of vowels have inflected the arts and sciences of modernity, On the Colors of Vowels makes it possible to see how discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries crafted the enigma we now readily recognize as “synesthesia.”

What does it mean for poetry and music to turn to each other, in the shadow of the Holocaust, as a means of aesthetic self-reflection? How can their mutual mirroring, of such paramount importance to German Romanticism, be reconfigured to retain its validity after the Second World War? These are the core questions of Axel Englund's book, which is the first to address the topic of Paul Celan and music. Celan, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who has long been recognized as one of the most important poets of the German language, persistently evoked music and song in his oeuvre, from the juvenilia to the posthumous collections. Conversely, few post-war writers have inspired as large a body of contemporary music, including works by Harrison Birtwistle, György Kurtág, Wolfgang Rihm, Peter Ruzicka and many others. Through rich close readings of poems and musical compositions, Englund's book engages the artistic media in a critical dialogue about the conditions of their existence. In so doing, it reveals their intersection as a site of profound conflict, where the very possibility of musical and poetic meaning is at stake, and confrontations of aesthetic transcendentality and historical remembrance are played out in the wake of twentieth-century trauma.

Essays on various aspects of the work of the French poet Stephane Mallarme on the centenary of his death (1998).

While Baudelaire's 'Le Peintre de la vie moderne' is often cited as the first expression of our theory of modernism, his choice of Constantin Guys as that painter has caused consternation from the moment of the essay's publication in 1863. Worse still, in his 'Salon de 1859', Baudelaire had also chosen to condemn photography in terms that echo to this day. Why did the excellent critic choose a mere reporter and illustrator as the painter of modern life? How could he have overlooked photography as the painting of modern life? In this study of modernity and photography in Baudelaire's writing, Timothy Raser, who has written on the art criticism of Baudelaire, Proust, Claudel and Sartre, shows how these two aberrations of critical judgment are related, and how they underlie current discussions of both photography and modernism. Timothy Raser is Professor of French at the University of Georgia (USA).