Rimbaud Research Articles

Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism: Modes of Thought and Expression in Europe, 1848-1914 by Roland N. Stromberg

Reviewed by: Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism: Modes of Thought and Expression in Europe, 1848-1914 by Roland N. Stromberg Jude P. Dougherty STROMBERG, Roland N. Realism, Naturalism, and Symbolism: Modes of Thought and Expression in Europe, 1848-1914. New York: Walker and Company, 2019 First published in 1968, the volume, given its time-transcending value, is worth its reprinting. It consists of dozens of essays by prominent and not so prominent authors, each introduced by Stromberg, who then provides a text that represent the work of the author. Under "Realism" we are introduced not only to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Ernest Renan, and Karl Marx, but also to Charles Baudelaire, Robert Browning, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. After a few words about Marx for context, Stromberg reproduces fifteen pages from Marx's The Civil War in France (1871), a text that is not often referenced. Ernest Renan is introduced as a French philologist, historian, and essayist, an all-round man in the best tradition of nineteenth-century literature. That is followed by an interesting selection from The Future of Science (1848– 49). Dostoevsky is presented as an artist, psychologist, metaphysician, and prophet, and praised for his "acute perception of human conduct." A fifteen-page passage, taken from The Devil follows. In the "Realism" section of the volume, we find an amazingly relevant passage on social realism as distinguished from socialist realism, introduced by a quotation from Edmond Goncourt for his 1871 warning, "Government is passing from the hands of the haves to the hands of the have-nots." There follows twenty pages from the rarely consulted Goncourt Journals. "Naturalism" opens with a text by David Masson and followed by others from Winwood Reade, Emile Zola, Friedrich Nietzsche, and George Bernard Shaw. Mixed within these, there is a brief section on the French school of painting, that is, "The Impressionists." Another text entitled "The Natural History of the Soul," discusses the work of Sigmund Freud, who, according to Stromberg, explained the deeper working of the human [End Page 383] psyche in the language of physical forces and laws. Freud's work began in 1880 at the peak of naturalism's success and popularity, and "shared with naturalists a basically pessimistic outlook." "Symbolism" is represented by Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarme, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, and an additional text from Baudelaire (his reflection on Richard Wagner's Tannhauser and on Wagner's influence). A critique of symbolism is provided by a passage from Leo Tolstoy. The book ends with a brief excerpt from Rupert Brooke and another from Charles Péguy "On the Death of God." The quotation is from Péguy's Clio: "What we mean is that the modern world has given up, has renounced the whole system, the whole mystique, which means from now on there is a new and different world. The modern world is not just a bad Christian world, which would be nothing, but an unchristian world, literally, absolutely, totally de-Christianized." Peguy wrote that in 1931. I cannot say this book is uplifting, but it is certainly fascinating. It may lead the reader to revisit some of the authors and books cited. It has had that effect on me. Jude P. Dougherty The Catholic University of America Copyright © 2019 The Review of Metaphysics

On Rimbaud’s "Vowels," Again: Vowels or Colors?

Arthur Rimbaud’s sonnet Vowels presents a poetic vision based ostensibly on a quasi-psychedelic or synesthetic experience. It has inspired writers, critics, painters, and singers for over a century mainly because of its often obscure form and content. From the first verse of the text, for instance, the author juxtaposes each of the normal five French vowels printed in capital letters with what appears to be a random choice of an appropriate color. As a result, the majority of readers assume that these colors somehow correspond, semantically speaking, to the selected vowels. In making such connections, however, our poet suggests that his specific fusion of basic colors and sounds is capable of generating not just one but multiple significations, be they religious, erotic, aesthetic, even anthropological. Yet the poem itself - an irregular French sonnet - already derives much of its obscurity from another odd feature: the faulty order of French vowels used by Rimbaud: A to O instead of A to U or Y. Formal explanations are often cited to justify this so-called mistake. This paper demonstrates that his poem hides a different interpretation of the words used to expand upon these sound/color combinations. After all, vowels are metonymically linked to sounds, since they constitute the minimal elements of the latter. Contemporary linguists have discovered, however, that in almost all languages, colors come in the same fixed order of words - Black, White, Red, Green and Blue - that Rimbaud proposes. Indeed, in countless documents created over millennia, people in dissimilar societies have tended to identify the same basic colors in the same sequence, for reasons we can only begin to explore here. This previously unnoticed coincidence thus provides further proof that Rimbaud’s sonnet thematically conflates ideas about the historical Beginnings and Endings of various civilizations. Thanks to this chronological conflation, the poem also develops more effectively than previously thought three major themes: the Apocalypse, the Final Judgment, and the future of poetic language. Through its form and content, it thus specifically illustrates the future of French poetry, which Rimbaud compares elsewhere, paradoxically, to Ancient Greek poetry.

German Romantic Tradition in John Ashbery’s "Where Shall I Wander"

In popular critical and readerly reception, the New York School of poetry was shaped mostly by what Marjorie Perloff calls the tradition of indeterminacy. This was started by Arthur Rimbaud and, a few decades later, developed by Dadaists and Surrealists. Therefore, the tradition of French modernism seems to have been vital for John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuler, and Barbara Guest, and the poets themselves appeared to confirm this fact. They often visited France privately and as scholars, and lived there for extended periods of time. In the case of John Ashbery, his year-long Fulbright fellowship was prolonged to a decade. Moreover, the New York School poets contributed to the propagation of French literature, being translators, critics and editors of French authors. However, as John Ashbery’s late works prove, literary genealogies are far more complex. German Romantic tradition always exerted an important influence on John Ashbery, and it inspired the New York experimenter to contribute two major poems to the twenty-first century American literature: “Where Shall I Wander” and “Hölderlin Marginalia”.

Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material. By Robert St. Clair

Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material. By Robert St. Clair

Poetry, Politics & the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material by Robert St. Clair, and: Arthur Rimbaud by Seth Whidden

Reviewed by: Poetry, Politics & the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material by Robert St. Clair, and: Arthur Rimbaud by Seth Whidden Thomas C. Connolly Robert St. Clair, Poetry, Politics & the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material. Oxford University Press, 2018. 271pp. and Seth Whidden, Arthur Rimbaud. London: Reaktion Books, ‘Critical Lives,’ 2018. 204pp. Robert St. Clair’s brilliant new book Poetry, Politics & the Body in Rimbaud: Lyrical Material, takes as its point of departure a letter—not one of the “lettres du voyant” addressed to Georges Izambard and Paul Demeny, dated May 13 and 15, 1871 respectively, but another—sent to Izambard the previous August, during the Franco-Prussian war. Here, Rimbaud complains: “Ma ville natale est supérieurement idiote entre les petites villes de province” (1). This missive precedes, and to some degree explains, Rim-baud first flight to Paris, which ends almost before it begins with his arrest, brief imprisonment, and a ticket back home. St. Clair calls this Rimbaud’s initial attempt “to make his way in the capital” (1), but it soon becomes clear that the formulation also lends itself—catachrestically—to St. Clair’s book. In Poetry, Politics & the Body, the reader is invited to see how Rim-baud initially “make[s] his way in (. . .) capital.” As such, the book might be considered a highly erudite and persuasive response to Steve Murphy’s remark—made in his landmark Rimbaud et la Commune: microlectures et perspectives (2010)—that “on a généralement minoré la dimension idéologique de l’œuvre” (162). Instead of returning to the more overtly political poems written during and in the immediate aftermath of the Commune, such as “Chant de guerre parisien,” St. Clair seeks to show how Rimbaud’s poems were already ideologically charged—albeit in mostly hidden ways—as early as 1870. Specifically, and most strikingly, St. Clair makes the case that “the nineteenth-century thinker of emancipatory politics, history and indeed embodiment” to whom this early Rimbaud comes closest is Karl Marx, and that, together, the poet and the philosopher are part of “a common discursive, historical, and epistemological ‘ecosystem’ ” (20). As a study of Rimbaud’s verse poems, Poetry, Politics & the Body examines a domain that “remains curiously under-interrogated in English-language scholarship” (13). Each chapter provides an extensive interpretation of a single verse poem, four composed during 1870 and one in the fall of 1871. Of the five poems, only one—whose eponymous smithy challenges a timid Louis XVI to don the red bonnet, offering a transparent allegory for class conflict—might be considered political. They are for the most part “joke poems and parodies, (. . .) sonnets about drinking beer and [End Page 456] eating ham tartines in a bar, (. . .) quatrains about nothing in particular” (15). They are also all texts that trouble—rather than radically contest—rules of French versification, rules that Rimbaud will shatter in the years that follow, culminating with the creation of “Marine” and “Mouvement,” the first examples of “vers libre” ever written in French. But here, St. Clair skillfully demonstrates how even poems from 1870 contain stresses and cracks, formal imperfections that discreetly make the irruption to come little more than a matter of time. Chapter One, “Natural Bodies,” proposes to read one of three poems the fifteen-year-old Rimbaud sent to Théodore de Banville, a leading figure of Parnassian poetry, in May 1870. “Sensation” is a slight poem, consisting of just two quatrains, but in St. Clair’s hands it becomes the pretext to a series of highly intelligent and informative examinations of “the complex historical and poetic moment in which Rimbaud composed the poem” (22). St. Clair’s method consists in “following the unexpected ways in which such texts insistently link themselves to political and literary contexts and intertexts” (15). Specifically, he draws on the importance to the early Rimbaud of Parnassian poetry, arguing that Rimbaud’s brief flirtation with the movement—particularly although not exclusively through the figure of Banville—was not entirely antagonistic or parodic as is commonly presumed. Unlike the young Mallarmé or Théophile Gautier, for instance, Banville was not disconnected from political concerns. From as early as 1846, the poet espoused a “kind of...

КОНЦЕПТ НОЧІ У СТРУКТУРІ ПОЕТИЧНОГО МИСЛЕННЯ ОСТАПА ТАРНАВСЬКОГО

The article deals with the poetical legacy of the Ukrainian writer in Exile Ostap Tarnawsky from the point of view of his philosophic vision. The main attention is drawn to the poetic and semantic representation of the artistic image of the Night, which is revealing its evolution from symbolically-allegorical to philosophically universal meaning. Poet’s lyric is analyzed in the key of the hermeneutical methodology with the dominant aspect of the intermedial sphere in the meaning of interrelation of the verbal and musical arts. It is stressed that the theme of night travelling is one of the dominant in the works of Ukrainian writers in Exile at large. A person is viewed in the poetical works of the Ukrainian emigrants as a nomad at the eternal way of life. Thus it touches the problems of human being and reveals them in existential focus (namely in the aspects of the human destiny, suffering, death etc.). Poetic of the lyrics is analyzed at the different text levels such as nigh landscapes, phonic figures (alliteration, as- sonance, and dissonance), personification etc. Imagery level is out viewed from the position of its connection with folk- lore imagery as well as the old Ukrainian literature (“The Tale of Igor`s Campaign”) and world masterpieces (“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare, “The Drunken Boat” by Arthur Rimbaud, poems by T.S.Eliot and others). Much attention is paid to the main colours of the O.Tarnawsky’s artistic world with its subjective understanding where the contrary to the black is blue. The author of the paper comes to conclusion that the lyrics of O.Tarnawsky is deeply philosophic and reveals the main concept of the poet about the Myth of death and immortality of human being. The most vivid this concept is embodied in the poems “Ballad about the Myth of the Death”, “Ballad about the Black Night”, “Ballad about Eternal Guard”, “Universe of the Heart”, “Under the Window of Eternity”, “Phantoms in the Emptiness” and others. Symbolic theme of the night way according to the words of Bertrand Russell “The life of Man is a long march through the night” is extended in O.Tarnawsky’s poetry to the concept of the generation succession as the death march of the whole nation with existential questions (Who will lead us to eternity? Will silent sky speak to us? etc.). Nocturnal world out view was formed by his emigrant destiny and understanding of historical injustice of his nation. And in that aspect O.Tarnawsky is the most representative poet among the Ukrainian writers in Exile in the second half of the 20th century.

The Political, Cultural, and Ecological Challenges Posed by the Paris Commune

The Political, Cultural, and Ecological Challenges Posed by the Paris Commune Eugene W. Holland (bio) COMMUNAL LUXURY: THE POLITICAL IMAGINARY OF THE PARIS COMMUNE BY KRISTIN ROSS Verso Books, 2016 Communal Luxury can be thought of as a companion volume to two earlier works of cultural history by Professor Ross: The Emergence of Social Space, which examined Arthur Rimbaud’s relationship to the Paris Commune, and May ‘68 and Its Afterlives, which exposed the ways what actually transpired in France in the spring of 1968 was quickly erased or distorted in retrospective accounts of it by the conservative French media. This book combines an abiding interest in the Paris Commune of 1871 with a new focus on its theoretical afterlives—on what Ross calls the “centrifugal effects” (2) of that momentous historical event as they register in the thought of those who participated or were closely associated with it. Agreeing with Marx (among others) that the Communards had “no ideals to realize . . . no ready-made utopias to introduce” but were struggling in the heat of the moment to “work out their own emancipation” by “improvising the free organization of . . . social life” (1), she proposes in one striking formulation that “actions produce dreams and ideas, and not the reverse” (7; see also 25). So her focus here will be on the dreams and ideas produced by the myriad actions that comprised the Commune, on the “[political] imaginary that fueled and outlived the event” (1). While Ross declares her “structuring themes” to be “internationalis[m], . . . the future of education, labor and . . . art, [and] the commune form and its relation to ecological theory and practice” (3), the book’s chapters follow a distinctly centrifugal pattern: chapter 1 treats the prehistory and emergence of the Commune; chapter 2 recounts aspects of its enactment; [End Page 161] chapter 3 examines the echoes of the Commune form that Kropotkin, Morris, and Marx discovered in popular culture and rural social forms from Finland, Iceland, and Russia, respectively, later in 1871 and 1872; chapter 4 examines the further development of Commune-inspired thought during the 1870s and 1880s among Communards exiled in London and Geneva; chapter 5 addresses the expansion of the principle of solidarity from the urban space of the Commune to include not just the agricultural sector in the countryside and humanity as a whole, but also nature itself and on a global scale. Selecting a moment or point of origin for a historical event like the Commune may be largely arbitrary, but Ross’s warning against the standard historical account, which sees the Commune as originating with the French state’s failed attempt on March 18 to confiscate the cannons belonging to the Parisian National Guard, is important: for “if we begin with the state, we end with the state” (14), and it is crucial to understand the Commune not as a response to the state, but as an out-and-out alternative to it. As a contemporary participant put it, as soon as the French government left Paris for Bordeaux (following the victory of Prussian forces in 1870), “the Commune already in fact existed” (cited 21, emphasis in original). This claim can be sustained in light of the growing impact, during the last two years of the Second Empire, of social reunions and political clubs, part of whose popularity was due, ironically enough, to the kind of politically charged entertainment they provided when the state closed down the theaters themselves for being too seditious. In another irony noted by Ross, the state’s ban on discussing explicitly political events and topics led popular orators to question broader principles, such as private property and popular sovereignty. Fully two years before the Commune was officially declared in late March 1871, then, “Vive la Commune” had already become a rallying-cry common in many of the political clubs in Paris, loosely federated because of the impact of the “ambulatory orators” who circulated among them. A practically identical structure—“a kind of decentralized federation of local, independent worker-based committees organized by arrondissement” (19)—would characterize both the Paris section of the International and the Parisian National Guard by the time the official French government abandoned Paris, leaving...

Sasenarine PersaudMonsoon on the Fingers of God

Books in Review full of pity for the killed creature. Arnar is a wonderful hero to follow as he maneuvers to win over Eir and acquire a farm of his own. The latter dream is fulfilled when he trades his stockpiled driftwood in exchange for a farm. Bergfinn, its owner, needs a seagoing ship to save his large household from death by starvation. Bergfinn’s enterprise is doomed, however. The sea goddess Ran smiles with white teeth as his primitive ark sinks in the cold, raging sea. Nature’s ways of revenge are terrible, but people can match each one, death for death. Arnar, for one, is the target of too much envy and resentment, driven by tribal hatred and religious schism, to be the savior he might have become. Somehow, it feels only too plausible. Everything in this remarkable book has the ring of truth. Anna Paterson Aberdeenshire, United Kingdom Sasenarine Persaud Monsoon on the Fingers of God Toronto, Ontario. Mawenzi House. 2018. 112 pages. Reading Sasenarine Persaud’s newest collection , Monsoon on the Fingers of God, is like stepping inside a clock and running a thumb along each gear and dial in order to better understand time. These poems open with tenderness, as petals unfurl after rain—a rain that finds the speaker everywhere , from Hadrian’s Wall to the internet, gathering pieces of myth and history from all corners of the world to stage an inquiry into identity, language, and empire. With the 2014 Scottish Referendum as an impetus, Persaud calls upon both Lord and Lady Macbeth alongside “SheshaNarayana / serpent god and serpent king kundalini / keeper and guardian,” finding common ground within the fraught history between India and England, Scotland and England: We will never make it to India, you say we are different—our heart is painted Gaelic and yours Britannic, our liver Scoti, yours Sanskrit we know the bile of a thousand years. Muslims dreaming of Mecca—except when we touch arms and our eyes sing: never let me go, never let me go. Readers never know, leaping from one poem to the next, in which century they might end up, speaking what language in what poetic form, to whose deity. Yet what prevails in each moment is the tenderness that is Persaud’s perspective, whether Suzanne Dracius The Dancing Other Trans. Nancy Naomi Carlson & Catherine Maigret Kellogg. Calcutta. Seagull Books. 2018. 256 pages. Who am I? And who are you? Suzanne Dracius explores identity in her recently translated novel, The Dancing Other. First published in French as L’autre qui danse (1989), the book enlarges the individual story of a woman named Rehvana into the universal search for belonging. Dracius employs culture, race, and gender to deconstruct love. Like the author, protagonist Rehvana grew up in Paris but was born in Martinique . Harking back to a colonial past, this eastern Caribbean island is one of France’s eighteen regions, making its residents full French citizens. Hence, decisions affecting them occur over four thousand miles away. No wonder ethnic, class, and economic tensions there are deep-seated. Dracius foreshadows her narrative with two apt epigrams, one by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén and the other by French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The prologue is a monologue— a two-page “Promonologue” that Rehvana hallucinates while fleeing the rituals of an African sect in Paris conducted by a man she loves named Abdoulaye. Jérémie rescues her, offering protection and love, which Rehvana rejects when she meets Enryck. Feeling alienated in Paris, Rehvana moves back to Martinique with Enryck, thinking a return to her roots will recover her self. The island’s beauty and Creole food help, but its dogma of male domination turns a blind eye to Enryck’s domestic violence—for he and his pal Chabin are macho men. Even her kindly neighbor, Ma Cidalise, is no help. Proud she’s been beaten much worse, Ma tells Rehvana: “You got to harden your body.” To complicate matters, Rehvana realizes she’s pregnant with Jérémie’s baby. Dracius paints a different Martinique than artist Paul Gauguin in his scenes of this windward island. Gauguin’s canvases exhibit no intimate-partner violence, but Dracius...

Way Beyond Berets

Way Beyond Berets Hassan Melehy (bio) The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac's Appropriations of Modern Literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux Véronique Lane Bloomsbury www.bloomsbury.com 280 Pages; Print, $39.95 The last decade or so has seen a Renaissance of Beat Generation scholarship, appropriately taking place on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite persistent caricatures among journalists and professors alike of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and a host of others as scribblers peddling literary stunts to a wide-eyed following, critics have explored the capacious reading and often elaborate techniques that were integral to these writers' practice. This recent critical focus has illuminated a dimension of beat writing patent to anyone who pays attention to the density of allusion in, say, Kerouac's and Ginsberg's work: the conception of literature as a transnational and even global phenomenon. Increasingly, scholars recognize the Beat Generation as far more than a midcentury countercultural movement, presenting them as readers of and contributors to literature that extends across national borders. Seen in this light, they become major figures in the global literary currents of the twentieth century. Véronique Lane's The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation is a welcome addition to this reassessment. Although its title modestly suggests a catalogue of sources, Lane's book is much more; by examining Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac's wide-ranging interest in modern French literature, she not only documents its mark on their work but arrives at a perspective on modernist and postmodernist literature that underscores its complicated international itinerary. In her introduction, "Beyond 'Rimbaud in a Raincoat'" (the quoted phrase is from Kenneth Alsop's 1960 description of Burroughs), she begins with the fact of these writers' "intense" Francophilia. Although their early habit of writing to each other using French phrases could be explained away as college pretentiousness bolstered by Kerouac's bilingual heritage, over the next few pages she details the ways that they self-consciously gravitated toward French literature, philosophy, and cinema as aesthetic and critical sources. From Sartrean existentialism to authors who, more than most, define modern avant-garde and experimental literature—Arthur Rimbaud, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean Cocteau, St.-John Perse, Guillaume Apollinaire, and many others—Lane considers not just the obsession of the Beat Generation "big three" with such sources but also the social, historical, and cultural reasons for it. Their specific interest in French material, Lane explains, stems from an identification with the outsider status of all the authors on their list. Hence, the three are "worthy successors" to Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, and Henri Michaux, who addressed their work to "misfits," "illiterates," "human trash." This strain of French literature offered Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac a means of articulating their own sense of disaffection. Moreover, it suggested a way out of the constriction of national borders, "an identification with those who resisted, even betrayed national identity through writing." Lane shows that viewing the Beat Generation as a transnational phenomenon doesn't merely supplement the contexts in which their work has already been viewed; rather, these authors' transnationalism is a basic characteristic of their writing, their mark of distinction in twentieth-century American letters. In this respect, Lane's is a breakthrough book in beat criticism: in addition to demonstrating, against lingering commonplace, that Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were sophisticated, fully schooled writers, The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation shows the shortcomings of viewing them primarily as heirs of Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner. In fact, continuing to bind them to this lineage, at the expense of a global perspective on literature, thins them out to the point where they're barely distinguishable from the juvenile hacks that many still take them for. In concert with critical efforts to see Burroughs's exile in Mexico and Morocco and Kerouac's recourse to his native French not only as parts of their biographical background but as essential to their work, Lane demonstrates the paramount importance of transnationalism in beat writing. In contrast to a source...

Le traduzioni di Rimbaud in Italia

Rimbaud translations in Italy This essay intends to outline a balance of the critical fortune of Arthur Rimbaud in Italy through the history of his translation. The study, which is based on the electronic data-base TRALYT – Translation and Lyrical Tradition between Italy and France (19th - 21st Century), under development at the University of Padua, intends to offer a complete bibliographic overview of the translations of Rimbaud’s poems, published in Italy between the end of the 19th century and the second decade of the new millennium. Within the history of these Italian translations, it identifies six main seasons: the first concerns the twenty years that extend from the late 19th century to the early 1920s, which sees the first diffusion of the works of the French poet in our country; the second coincides with the fifteen years that goes from the beginning of the 1930s to the mid-1940s, with the first translation of hermetic poets; the third one is placed in the post-war period, between the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s; the fourth embraces the decade that goes from the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Rimbaud in 1954, to the first complete Italian edition of his works in 1964; the fifth is related to the 1970s and 1980s, marked by the publication of the full edition of Rimbaud at the main publishing houses; finally, the sixth season involves the period from the last decade of the 20th century to the present day.

Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education After the "Turn": At the Limits of Metaphysics by James M. Magrini and Elias Schweiler

Reviewed by: Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education After the "Turn": At the Limits of Metaphysics by James M. Magrini and Elias Schweiler Shawn Loht MAGRINI, James M. and Elias Schweiler. Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education After the "Turn": At the Limits of Metaphysics. New York: Routledge, 2018. xi + 234 pp. Cloth, $140.00 This study provides an overview of principal themes in Martin Heidegger's philosophy in the post-Being and Time work of the 1930s and 1940s. It also considers these themes as they offer new ways of regarding poetry, literature, and education according to the post-metaphysical turn contained in Heidegger's notions of Ereignis (commonly translated as "the event of Being") and philosophy's "other beginning." Although the book is branded within the series Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education, only one chapter addresses the subject of education. In the introductory chapter, the authors survey current perspectives on the "turn" in Heidegger. A middle-ground approach is adopted, according to which Heidegger's post-Being and Time thought is characterized by an engagement with thinking conceived from out of the domain of truth, rather than the transcendental subjectivism of Dasein; a receptivity to Being, as seen in notions like Gelassenheit and Being's "mystery"; a concentration on the "event" of Being, understood communally and historically; and philosophy conceived as a practice rather than an academic exercise. For the authors, the concept of language is an especial locus around which Heidegger's post-turn thinking takes shape. The first main chapter of the book examines the issues prompting Heidegger's turn by contrasting the Cartesian-Kantian framework pervading Being and Time's portrayal of Dasein with the historical, destiny-laden conception of being-there Heidegger comes to formulate in 1936's Contributions to Philosophy, the various Hölderlin lectures, and 1938's "The Origin of the Work of Art." The authors suggest that in these works, Heidegger aims to articulate a conception of Being not predicated on the metaphysical confines of describing Dasein; as a result, Heidegger's accomplishment is to articulate Being's aspect of transcending human existence, where Being is understood as an event, and where language is of a piece with this event. On the whole this chapter provides a very balanced and informative account of precisely why Being and Time's approach is problematic and the manner in which the later Heidegger attempts to correct it. The second main chapter, on the topic of Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin and Rilke, takes up the question of how Heidegger conceives poetry to exhibit a saving power from the dangers of modern technology, and why Hölderlin in particular reinvigorates the nonmetaphysical poetic thinking initially fostered in Presocratic thought. The authors hold that Hölderlin's poetry is nonrepresentational; it gestures toward images that communicate clues about the original event of Being and a time when gods were present to the human realm. The book's second half begins with a chapter on the poetry of French Arthur Rimbaud and the twentieth-century Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. What may seem an arbitrary pairing bears a fruitful [End Page 393] outcome; the authors read selections from these two poets in light of the later Heidegger's suggestion emphasizing the "path" or "way" of thought rather than its content (not out of step with the adage "ways, not works" with which Heidegger prefaces the Gesamtausgabe). Indeed, although greater poets could have been chosen from the canon of Western poetry, the authors aim to illustrate through modern and contemporary poets the "ways" poetic thinking can take when it is nonmetaphysical. Whereas, too often scholars rely on Heidegger's own preferred poets without making an effort to consider whether other poets might equally exhibit poetry expressive of the kind of poetic thinking the later Heidegger envisions. The penultimate chapter of the book explores a similar track with a reading of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, a novel whose main character appears to transcend metaphysical analysis. The book's final chapter, on education, is slightly out of step with the rest of the book; however, this chapter comes off as the most original in that...

Kinski Speaks Villon: Literary Media and the Poète Maudit, 1952–1962

In the late 1950s, well before his association with Werner Herzog had made him the most internationally recognizable German screen actor of his generation, Klaus Kinski was a phenomenon. Between 1957 and 1962, his concert-style recitations and studio recordings of work by François Villon, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Gerhart Hauptmann, Bertolt Brecht, and a range of

New York Drifters

This article examines the legacy of the 'drift' in the work of two artists based in New York in the 1980s: Tehching Hsieh and David Wojnarowicz. Although distinctive in their methods and practices, both Hsieh and Wojnarowicz interrogate vagrancy as an extreme of urban walking, the unspoken endpoint of drifting. Wojnarowicz, who lived on the streets as an adolescent, reworks his experience of aimlessness into his fragmented, autobiographical prose work and his photographic project 'Arthur Rimbaud in New York'. Hsieh, a performance artist, embarked upon a durational work for which he vowed not to enter an interior of any kind for one year, and was thus forced to live on the streets of New York during this time. This article argues that these works re-assert the experience of the homeless, which is often elided or glossed over in accounts of urban walking and the traditions of thought that stem from Walter Benjamin's work on the flâneur and Guy Debord's theory of the dérive. Hsieh and Wojnarowicz also cast light upon the theatricality of the street, where social deviance or alterity is inferred according to outward appearances, and upon the mythologised figure of the 'drifter'. The article concludes by addressing tensions surrounding the ways that evanescent performance works like Hsieh's come to be immortalised, as well as the domesticating of once provocative works in gallery spaces caught up in networks of gentrification and/or erasure. It suggests that 'haunting' offers a way to conceive of the relationship between walking and vagrancy and the drift and its ghosts, obscured from view.

Destabilizing the Other in Baudelaire-Bertrand-Rimbaud

This joint article proposes a comparative encounter involving Baudelaire-Bertrand-Rimbaud to show that pieces of verse and prose by Charles Baudelaire and Aloysius Bertrand are as much about split identities as Arthur Rimbaud's poetry foregrounding the demise of Cartesian unity in the I. We assess the other as a locus of contrasts in the verse of Bertrand's Boutade bacchique and Baudelaire's Alchimie de la douleur from Les fleurs du mal, then distinguish prose-based manifestations of the other in Baudelaire's Le spleen de Paris alongside Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit, before considering others as a heterogeneous collective in Rimbaud's Parade from Illuminations.

Arthur Rimbaud: "The Man with Wind Soles" - Riders' Osteosarcoma with Postamputation Stump Pain.

The famous poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) stopped writing poetry at 21 years and subsequently had a rather adventurous life mainly in the Arabic peninsula and Ethiopia. He died at 37 years, only a few months after the amputation of his right lower limb due to a developing tumor in the knee, which probably was an osteosarcoma in the lower third of the femur. His letters to his sister Isabelle suggest that he suffered from severe stump pain rather than phantom limb, but since he lived only shortly after surgery (he developed extensive carcinomatosis), one does not know whether a full phantom would have developed and how this would have affected his subsequent life.

Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast

The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews by Maurice Samuels

Reviews 195 and geography schoolbook, Le tour de la France par deux enfants, G. Bruno (the pseudonym of Augustine Tuillerie) instills a sense of French identity in generations of French pupils by means of a tale of travel and adventure throughout France. In it, two orphaned boys set out from their village in Lorraine, recently annexed by the victorious Prussians, to rejoin France and to keep their French citizenship. Through numerous encounters, the work imparts lessons of patriotism, practicality and morality. Finally, Arthur Rimbaud’s poetic voice in Une saison en enfer is interpreted as the mapping of an individual psyche as it resists the values of an oppressive school system and the colonizing influence of the new capitalist economy. Fittingly, Rimbaud fled Western society for a life in Abyssinia. In conclusion, Lindaman notes that the expressions of psychic geography studied in this work are specific to the first twothirds of the Third Republic and represent authoritarian attitudes no longer accepted by today’s public.Yet some views of the two geographers, Reclus and Vidal, are relevant even in today’s cynical age. The principles of organic ties endure as a feature of identity, not as a static ideal but in the fluidity of constant movement, amid the influx of immigrants and the growing sense of European identity. The implications of this study will resonate with scholars of the nineteenth century and with others interested in theories of identity. Southeast Missouri State University Alice J. Strange Samuels, Maurice. The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews. Chicago: UP of Chicago, 2016. ISBN 978-0-226-39705-4. Pp. 241. In this textual and cultural analysis of seven key moments in France’s postrevolutionary history, Samuels shows that the concept of French universalism has undergone numerous semantic shifts, which he sees as the direct consequence of France’s characterization of its Jewish population: “Jewish difference has always been essential to the elaboration of French universalism, whether as its dialectal opposite or as proof of universalism’s reach” (5). Although the current definition of French universalism implies that citizens“must be shorn of all particularities”(3) to embody the universal values of equality and liberty, Revolutionary thinkers held, despite common contemporary belief, less restrictive views. Lacretelle, l’Abbé Grégoire, or even Robespierre had called for the economic assimilation of the Jews (by excluding them from certain professions), but never did they require cultural assimilation, nor the relegation of religion to the private sphere. For these Revolutionaries, assimilation would be the result, rather than the condition, of Jewish inclusion, thus defining the nation “by ideology rather than blood or ancestry” (37). Frenchness was universal in that it became attainable by all those who chose it. Universalism’s first major semantic shift occurred under the First Empire. Napoleon, fearing that French Jews might identify primarily with a (then non-existent) Jewish nation, created a Jewish consistory as he had done for Protestants and Catholics, putting religious authority in the hands of the State, and relegating religion to the private sphere. In the mid-nineteenth century however, Jews became a more visible minority in France, especially in the theater. Jewish actress Rachel, for instance, became one of the brightest stars of the Comédie-Française. Her performances of Racine and Corneille’s heroines raised the question as to the compatibility of French culture and Jewishness. While some critics viewed Rachel’s success as a corruption of Frenchness, many more saw her success as proof of universalism’s success, but a universalism that allowed (once again) for particularisms.Yet, in his chapter on Algeria, Samuels notes that despite the pluralistic model of universalism that permitted Rachel’s rise to fame, erasure of difference would become the condition for the naturalization of Algerian Jews and the reason for denying Muslims citizenship (it was believed that Muslims would never assimilate into French culture). This differential treatment of Jews and Muslims reinforced the idea that Frenchness was a (universal) choice. Samuels also reveals that Zola’s apparent philosemitism hid strong assimilationist views, while the supposed stereotyping of Jews in Renoir’s La grande illusion served on the contrary to undermine the differences that did not, in...

“Da una modernità all’altra”. Sull’ultimo libro di Sandra Teroni

A review of Sandra Teroni’s last book (Da una modernita all’altra. Tra Baudelaire e Sartre. Marsilio, Venezia: 2017), this article focuses on the critical debate on the notions of “modernity” and “modernism”, in particular in French culture. The theme of the “modern” is pervasive in the works by authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarme, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Morand, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Henri Michaux, Andre Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre. These writers expressed their breakage of the tradition very differently, but they all insisted upon a common question: what does the notion of subjectivity mean in the modern society?

The Influence of Arthur Rimbaud on Dai Wang Shu and Nakahara Chūya’s Poetry— The Construction of their Poetic Decadent World

The Influence of Arthur Rimbaud on Dai Wang Shu and Nakahara Chūya’s Poetry— The Construction of their Poetic Decadent World

The Early Beckett's Approach to Reality through a Textual Struggle with Rimbaud

In his early career, Beckett often mentioned an aesthetic of ‘incoherent reality’, which he felt was characteristic of Arthur Rimbaud. Critics have agreed that Rimbaud influenced on Beckett in the ‘incoherent’ use of language, while the importance of the idea of ‘reality’ has yet to be explored. In this article, I attempt to elucidate Beckett's view of incoherent reality and how he formulated it through Rimbaud. The early part of my analysis, drawing on Proust, differentiates young Beckett's perspective of reality from literary symbolism and explains why he found elements of reality in Proust and Rimbaud rather than Mallarmé and W.B. Yeats. Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson, a classical study of literary symbolism, supports this differentiation; Wilson addresses Rimbaud's social and mercantile activity, which is barely seen in other reclusive symbolists. I speculate that Beckett may have read Wilson's book because descriptions about symbolism, which are quite similar to Wilson's, are present in the notes taken by Leslie Daiken as a student of Beckett's at Trinity College Dublin. Moreover, allusions to Rimbaud in works such as ‘Enueg I’ or Mercier et Camier show how Beckett focussed on the incoherent reality and was distanced from Rimbaud's mysterious side. On the basis of these arguments, the final part of the article examines the meaning of the ‘reality of insane areas of silence’ discussed in Beckett's first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, to prove that he began to diverge from Rimbaud with an aesthetic of indolence, which would shape his own view of incoherent reality.