The Stuttering Poet: A Deleuzian Reading of a Laforguian Poetics

Abstract

This article explores the complex relationship between the yankee, the Impressionist and the minoritarian in Laforgue's work and suggests that Deleuze's notions of the minor and of stuttering, and his analysis of the characteristics of Anglo-American writing, are particularly pertinent to our understanding of Laforgue's poetics. There is a nineteenth-century context for the minor, but there is a danger that we capitulate to a ‘majoritarian’ criticism if we too quickly espouse lines of filiation. The article constructs an account of Laforgue's developing perception of, and relationship with, verse prosody by examining how he scumbles the outlines and activity of syllables, how he pushes line-structure into a terrain vague, how he re-orientates accent towards the qualitative and tunes the acoustic to Hartmann's Unconscious. His uses of the imperative and infinitive, and their associated punctuations, are related to his responses to Impressionism. The argument ends with reflections on Deleuzian becoming in Laforgue.