Dancing the Redemption of French Literature: Rivière, Mallarmé, and Le Sacre du printemps

Abstract

Just below the surface of his 1913 review of Le Sacre du printemps, French literary critic Jacques Rivière issued a manifesto against the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his purported corruption of French literature. Mallarmé's late-nineteenth-century writing on the ballet pantomime and Loie Fuller, which positioned dance as a symbolic écriture corporelle, represented an erasure of the linguistic purity that Rivière and his colleagues at the Nouvelle Revue Française prized. Rivière's review challenges Mallarmé's conception of both dance and writing, presenting the jolting clarity of Nijinsky's choreography as a crucial recovery of literary precision.