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In this concise and illuminating study, Jacques Ranciere, 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, Stephane Mallarme. 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.
List of contents
Foreword 1. The Foam of Verse i. The White Preoccupation 2. The Poetics of Mystery i. The Terms of Mystery ii. The Scene of Dream iii. From Nothingness to Nothing iv. Method of Fiction v. The Fan's Poem 3. Hymns of the Spiritual Chorus i. The Religion of the Century ii. Two Theses on Divinity iii. The Poet and the Worker iv. Musical Religion v. Wagner the God: Poem, Music and Politics 4. The Duty of the Book i. The Poem as Thought: A Secular History ii. Music, Dance, Poem: The Circle of 'Mimesis' iii. The Authentic Page Selection of Texts Index.
Summary
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, Stéphane Mallarmé.
Ranciere presents Mallarmé 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. Mallarmé 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.
Report
'[The author] seeks-through several intricate, close readings-to reinterpret the poet as one whose complexity lent light and lightness to a civilization deprived of spiritual and monarchic anchors.'-Choice Magazine
