French Poetry Research Articles

Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory (review)

Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory (review)

The Language of Citizenship in the French Religious Wars

This article traces the evolution of ideas about citizenship in the ideological conflicts of late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century France. It documents the uses of the word citoyen itself in political literature intended to appeal to a wide audience, emphasizing the pamphlet literature of the religious wars. Results of the study show that the various parties involved in the civil strife employed citoyen in ways that reflected their beliefs about what membership in the French state really meant. Nonetheless, an evolution in the meaning of the word can be discerned: from being simply a synonym for bourgeois, citoyen came to also indicate membership in the national-as opposed to local-community. Finally, the article suggests how the employment and understanding of citoyen reflected the growth of absolutist ideology in the early seventeenth century. THE EVOLUTION OF MEANINGS ATTACHED TO THE WORD CITOYEN in the France of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, roughly 1560 to 1615, is worth examination. These years constituted a watershed in the development of French state and society. The French Renaissance in law and literature reached its height with an unprecedented interest in native history, language, and legal customs. The French intelligentsia began to seek the seeds of Gallic greatness in sources unique to France itself, moving beyond the Italian Renaissance's dependence on ancient Greece and Rome. The movement produced such works as Etienne Pasquier's Recherches de la France, Fran~ois Hotman's Antitribonian, an attack on Roman law as inappropriate for the unique culture of France, and the unrivaled French poetry of Pierre de Ronsard and the Pleiade.Nhat such thinkers drew from Classical sources, they adapted to reflect French values and understandings. A sort of intellectual and artistic nationalism constituted major thought trend of the time. The concept of national citizenship appeared as a manifestation of this type of thinking.Jurists working with the legal process of naturalization began to write about what it truly meant to be French, and how that status was to be achieved. They based their thinking upon the ancient Roman laws of citizenship and upon the regulations of the city-states of Renaissance Italy, adapting them by considering the entire realm of France to be one great city, and the citizen, a member of the national corporation, exactly analogous to the bourgeois on the local level.1 The result of their work, while an intellectual innovation, was not the all-inclu

Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde (review)

??? COHPAnATIST BOOK NOTES WILLARD BOHN. Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde. Albany : SUNY Press, 1997. xi + 369 pp. Apollinaire and the International Avant-Garde builds a comprehensive literary history (seven chapters following the introduction) ofApollinaire's reception and influence in the Western world during the early twentieth century. Examining his impact on a worldwide network ofwriters, artists, and critics, Willard Botin reveals his central role as patron saint ofthe avant-garde, cultural innovator, and literary and cultural arbiter ofhis generation. Focused on the major European and American nations, the book discusses in rough chronological order Apollinaire's connections with the British avant-garde, extends the investigation to North America, returns to Europe to chart the poet's presence in the German-speaking world, and then details Apollinaire's Hispanic reception from Catalonia and Spain to Argentina , Uruguay, and Mexico. Framing this avant-garde Odyssey are interesting discussions about the specifics ofvarious movements—Cubism, Simultanism, Dada, Surrealism, Ultraism, Creationism, and the Contemporary School, among others. According to Bohn, Apollinaire's reputation began to grow with F. S. Flint's August 1912 article on contemporary French poetry in The Poetry Review. With Les Peintres cubistes in 1913 he became known as a serious art critic while publication ofAlcools in the same year established him as a serious poet. As a result, in England and elsewhere, Apollinaire was quickly embraced as an aesthetician of the new, revolutionary art, with Richard Aldington and Ezra Pound as key intermediaries in Great Britain. Relying on compelling evidence, Bohn reveals that although both Aldington and Pound started by emulating Apollinaire (the first issue ofBlast, for instance, was inspired by L 'Antitraditionfuturiste), they ultimately dissociated themselves from him: Aldington called Apollinaire "the first French apostle ofSteinism" (27) while Pound refused even to mention his name in the 1930s. In North America, as Bohn shows in the third chapter, Apollinaire was virtually unknown before 1913, and this neglect continued even afterAlcools. In 1914 and 1915 the situation was partially rectified by Marius de Zayas, an artist and critic ofMexican origin, who after being introduced to Apollinaire in Paris succeeded in establishing better relations upon returning to New York. De Zayas's high regard for Apollinaire's visual poetry led him to associate the latter's poetry with Picasso's paintings, a connection that was developed further by William Huntington Wright, especially in Modern Painting: Its Tendency andMeaning, and by Henry McBride, another influential American art critic and defender of modern aesthetics, who published "Apollinaire's Cubistic Authority" in the New York Herald. Given Apollinaire's more complicated relationship with Germany, where he spent his first idyllic Wanderjahr as a French tutor in the Rhineland and where he abandoned his given name for a nom de plume, the fourth chapter offers a detailed and intellectuallysatisfyingdiscussion ofthepoet's significantpresenceamong the German Expressionists in the pre- and post-war period. Far from merely listing the names ofthose connected with Apollinaire or his work, Bohn provides compelling information on the poet's reception in Germany, from his publications in DerSturm to the German praise ofthe avant-garde that elevated him to a cult figure. VcH. 23 (1999): 187 BOOK NOTES In a vivid and interesting tapestry, Bonn's last four chapters interweave Apollinaire 's reception in Old and New World Spanish-speaking cultures. Especially engaging are the subchapters on Guillermo de Torre's discussions ofApollinaire's iconoclasm, audacity, and revolutionary aesthetics (most notably in Literaturas europeas de vanguardia, with its focus on Cubism and Ultraism), as well as his final homage in "Epiceyo a Apollinaire" ("Elegy for Apollinaire"). Also striking are the sections on Bartolomé Galindez, the editor ofthe short-lived literary review Los Raros who connected Apollinaire with the latest discoveries in art and literature , on Ildefonso Perreda Valdes, one of the editors of Los Nuevos (The New Breed), who used Apollinaire's "Les Cloches" to establish thejournal's avant-garde credentials, and on the representatives ofla nueva sensibilidad ("the new sensibility "). Ofspecial interest here is Bonn's discussion ofBorges whose return from his sojourn in Spain marked the genesis ofUltraism in Argentina and whose enthusiasm and reservations about Apollinaire as poet and critic are fully analyzed. The information in this thoroughly...

Suttee Revisited: From the Iconography of Martyrdom to the Burkean Sublime

Suttee Revisited: From the Iconography of Martyrdom to the Burkean Sublime Monika Fludernik (bio) In a recent article entitled “The Iconographies of Sati,” 1 Paul B. Courtright proposed three schemata of interpretation of that most disturbing Indian practice of a wife’s self-immolation on her husband’s funeral pyre: 2 (a) the religious iconography of the sati whose blessings ensure fertility for her devotees; (b) the colonial scenario of the bigoted yet heroic widow forced on the pyre by the superstitious doctrines and demonic machinations of the Brahmin priests; and (c) the present-day feminist iconography of the practice of suttee in which the deification of satis serves as a screen for the material greed of both priests and the women’s families. 3 Another essay in the same volume, Dorothy M. Figueira’s “Die flambierte Frau,” complements Courtright’s three schemata by an additional European scenario which flourished in German and French poetry, prose, and opera during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 4 Unlike the use of suttee as a motif in British literature, where it is extremely rare before the late nineteenth century, these noncolonial European deployments of suttee are clearly exoticist and document Western clichés, fantasies, and obsessions rather than providing factual information about the Indian custom itself. 5 Indeed, the suttee love tragedy has been tailored to fit traditional Western conceptions of heroic death and saintly womanhood, symbolizing the sublimation of erotic impulse. The German and French scenario deploys, for instance, the cliché of the prostitute whose repentance and martyr-like love-sacrifice convert her into a saint (a motif that, in the figure of the fallen woman, will haunt much Victorian prose) and glorifies satis’ death as Liebestod. Thus, the German and French treatments of suttee, particularly in the melodramatic operatic versions that Figueira discusses, can be traced back to the quasi-religious portrayal of (sublimated) love, a tradition that extends from the chivalric medieval formula to Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. 6 In this article, which is written from a nonspecialist position, I want to consider early nineteenth-century British depictions of suttee as determined by English literary traditions which have, as I will argue, decisively [End Page 411] influenced the “colonial iconography” (Courtright’s term) of self-immolation. I will compare the discourse about suttee with two prominent literary traditions: the representation of martyrdom, and the aesthetics of the sublime. Accounts of suttee, first, relate to the Elizabethan tradition of hagiography, much of which is filled with detailed accounts of Catholics and Protestants bravely meeting their death at the stake. There are obvious parallels between the Liebestod motif and the heroics of martyrdom; however, the aspect that will concern me most is that of the representational choices and of the selectivity brought to bear upon the hagiographic material by the standard British literature on the subject. My second line of approach, which likewise concentrates on representational issues, involves the aesthetics of the sublime. I will argue that the bulk of British representations of suttee can be classified as an exoticist watered-down version of the generic features prominent in the eighteenth-century literary traditions of the Burkean sublime with some affinities to the sentimental novel. As has been noted by Rajan and Sabin, 7 the figure of the British officer in accounts of suttee recalls that of a would-be knight of honor come to rescue the virtuous maiden in distress. In the reality of the historical documents, on the contrary, one encounters no British heroes; British witnesses mostly engage in merely halfhearted and futile verbal interventions. More frequently the British spectator does not even attempt interference. The British witness therefore resembles less the chivalrous knight of honor than the sentimental hero whose ineffectual emotional involvement in the misery with which he is confronted renders him a laughingstock and, from a latter-day perspective, makes him subject to moral reproach and condemnation. 8 Even more centrally, witness accounts deploy the Burkean analysis of the sublime, which makes a stunning reappearance in representations of suttee, particularly in the prevalent evocation of the “horrors” of the scene. Moreover, the emotional reaction of the British bystander can be argued to reflect...

The Rhythmicity of the French Prose Poem

The Rhythmicity of the French Prose Poem Clive Scott THE TASK OF DEFINING THE PROSE POEM has generated much critical anxiety. The transformation of the medium (poetic prose) into the genre (prose poem) seems to require sharp differentiations, and the clearing of a space around the form. But it is doubtful whether the terms of differentiation most often resorted to—brevity, intensity, autonomy (e.g., Chapelan, Bernard, Decaunes)1—can be applied with sufficient persuasiveness , or whether such a differentiation is historically justified.2 Brevity, for example, has perhaps turned out to be a token criterion, a conventional sign whose validity has never been really tested. At what point exactly does a prose poem become too long? Did Maurice de Guérin manage to restrain himself sufficiently to be saved, or does his work drift into some generical no man's land? What disqualifying sea-change, at what limit, does the structure suddenly undergo? Is there then no such thing as the epic prose poem (Chateaubriand's translation of Paradise Lost, Lautréamont 's Les Chants de Maldoror)! Even Yves Vadé ends by paying only lip-service to brevity as a formal criterion, and turns to an alternative, semantics-based principe de tension , as guarantor of the coherence of the genre; but this is no more compelling: Un poème en prose court toujours le risque de se diluer dans une page de prose quelconque. Il semble qu'il ne puisse être considéré comme poème en l'absence d'un principe qui en assure la cohérence. Certes le poème en prose doit être bref, on l'a dit. Mais cette condition nécessaire n'est pas suffisante pour assurer ce que les commentateurs nomment d'un commun accord la tension poétique.' The "commun accord" makes the argument a little too easy; the fact is that tension, significant for the prose poem if only on account of its unresolved formal status, has enjoyed a privileged critical standing as an organisational principle, in verse as much as in prose, ever since New Criticism. For a literary critical Darwinist of my persuasion, the very survival of the prose poem lies in its refusal to locate itself on a generical map, which would absorb it into some food chain of formal characteristics and expressivity. For the purposes of defining the prose poem in general, and the rhythmicity of the prose poem in particular, we may be better advised to worry less about what it is than about the frame of mind in which it is most profitably read. In describing what takes place when a verse-poem becomes a prose poem, it is usual to propose that (a) rhyme and (b) "mesure" are removed (where 26 Spring 1999 Scott "mesure" refers to those rhythmic measures whose constitution and combinations are more or less predicted by a presiding isosyllabic principle). For Roger Little,4 the disappearance of rhyme has to do with the shift from oral/aural to visual transmission, while rhythm is already less central to French verse than to English. With both these views we shall have cause to disagree. (a) The removal of rhyme reminds us that the prose poem has little interest in mnemonicity: it remembers but does not ask to be remembered. Those gestures of effacement that we encounter in the Rimbaldian prose poem, Fargue's suspension points, or other kinds of dispersive closure (dissonance, irony, metalinguistic turns) are all perhaps expressions of this characteristic. Mnemonicity is ultimately about textual survival, that is, the survival of a text in its non-interpreted, or pre-interpreted, integrity. This is perhaps to argue that the prose poem is under greater readerly pressure than the verse-poem, the pressure of comprehension, of consumption, the pressure to be entirely coincident with itself in the moment of reading. What this last might mean is the reader's attempting to confine, to close down, the prose poem's ontological flexibility, which its rhythmicity is there to protect. Rhythm's presence as metre in the verse-poem is pre-interpretative; it preserves the existence of the verse-poem and at the same time maps out/stakes out/measures out its textuality ; the...

The poetics of French verse: studies in reading

The poetics of French verse: studies in reading

Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory

Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory

Review. Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory. Brandt, Joan

Review. Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Poetry and Theory. Brandt, Joan

Poésie pour « un peuple qui manque »

Poetry for "A People Lacking" Generally, modern poetry seems for hyperliterate people — or no people at all. Yet, following Anne-Marie Albiach, or Philippe Jacottet, or Georges Perros and Jacques Réda, contemporary poets — William Cliff, James Sacré, Guy Gofette — seem to be "repopulating" modern French poetry.

Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance

List of illustrations Preface 1. The displaced reader: the female audience of Old French romance 2. The question of women in Yvain and Le Chevalier de la Charrette 3. Playing to the ladies: chivalry and misogyny in Ipomedon, Le Chevalier ... l'Epee, and La Vengeance Raguidel 4. Women readers and the politics of gender in Le roman de Silence 5. Double jeopardy: the appropriation of women in four romances from the cycle de la gageure 6. Constructing sexual identities in Robert de Blois' didactic poetry 7. The reader as object of desire in Le roman du Castelain de Couci et de la dame de Fayel 8. A Woman's Response: Christine de Pizan's Le livre du Duc des Vrais Amans and the limits of romance Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index.

Review. Anthology of First World War French Poetry. Higgins, Ian (ed,)

Review. Anthology of First World War French Poetry. Higgins, Ian (ed,)

:Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture

Introduction Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass Part I. Priority of Objects: 1. The ideology of superfluous things: King Lear as period piece Margreta de Grazia 2. Rude mechanicals Patricia Parker 3. Spenser's domestic domain: poetry property and the Early Modern subject Louis A. Montrose Part II. Materialisations: 4. Gendering the Crown Stephen Orgel 5. The unauthored 1539 volume in which is printed the Hecatomphile, The Flowers of French Poetry and Other Soothing Things Nancy J. Vickers 6. Dematerialisations: textile and textual properties in Ovid, Sandys, and Spenser Ann Rosalind Jones Part III. Appropriations: 7. Freedom service and the trade in slaves: the problem of labour in Paradise Lost Maureen Quilligan 8. Feathers and flies: Aphra Behn and the seventeenth-century trade in exotica Margaret W. Ferguson 9. Unlearning the Aztec Cantares (Preliminaries to a postcolonial history) Gary Tomlinson Part IV. Fetishisms: 10. Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage Peter Stallybrass 11. The Countess of Pembroke's literal translation Jonathan Goldberg 12. Remnants of the sacred in early modern England Stephen Greenblatt Part V. Objections: 13. The insincerity of women Marjorie Garber 14. Desire is death Jonathan Dollimore Index.

Geopoetics: the politics of mimesis in poststructuralist French poetry and theory

By focusing on the problematic of mimesis in its linguistic, psychoanalytical, and cultural incarnations this book argues, in opposition to those who stress the political inadequacies of the French poststructuralists' privileging of language, that what leads to a theoretical or practical apoliticism is not the emphasis on language and mimetic representation. Rather, it is the failure to examine closely the relationship between mimesis and politics that closes off the possibility of articulating an adequate response to any form of political imperative. To make this point, the book begins by considering the revolution in poetic language of the late 1960's and early 1970's waged by the politically motivated group of poets and theorists associated with the French journal Tel Quel. It examines the impact of its political radicalism on the writings of the major theoretician of the Tel Quel group, Julia Kristeva, and on the work of the most important Tel Quel poets, Marcelin Pleynet and Denis Roche. It also examines the writings of those more closely associated with deconstruction, whose resistance to the highly charged political rhetoric of the period led many critics to denounce the deconstructive approach for its failure to come to terms with the sociopolitical.

Reconceptions: Reading Modern French Poetry

Reconceptions: Reading Modern French Poetry

‘It’s a man’s world’: Recent Studies of Male Representation of the Female in the Middle Ages

Blamires, Alcuin (ed.) Woman Defamed and Woman Defended. An Anthology of Medieval TextsBaldwin, John W. The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200Kay, Sarah and Rubin, Miri (eds) Framing Medieval BodiesLomperis, Linda and Stanbury, Sarah (eds) Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval LiteratureBurns, E. Jane Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French LiteratureKrueger, Roberta L. Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse RomanceCazelles, Brigitte The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth CenturyMeale, Carol M. (ed.) Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500Cherewatuk, Karen and Wiethaus, Ulrike (eds) Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistology Genre

Et pui conmencha a canter: refrains, motets and melody in the thirteenth-century narrativeRenart le nouvel

In many surviving thirteenth-century romances, short segments of lyric poetry, called ‘refrains’ by present-day scholars, interrupt the narrative with the implication of song. In the romanceRenart le nouvel, attributed to Jacquemart Giélée (fl. 1290), refrains take their place among a wide variety of literary registers and forms.Renart le nouvelis a late derivative of a long and international tradition of adapting, elaborating and making reference to the stories from theRoman de Renart. TheRoman de Renartrefers to a collection of approximately fifteen Old French verse narratives, written between 1174 and 1205, that recount the exploits of the cunning fox Renart and various other anthropomorphized members of the animal kingdom.

Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance. Roberta L. Krueger

<i>Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance</i>. Roberta L. Krueger

The New French Poetry

The New French Poetry

The Art of Poetry: Poems, Parodies, Interviews, Essays, and Other Work

A charter member of the legendary New York School of poets that includes John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler, Kenneth has become one of America's best known and best loved poets. His apt parodies and zany poetic conceits have earned him the distinction of being the funniest poet in America, and his extravagant imagination and knack high hilarity have pleased generations of readers.Here, in Art of Poetry, Koch offers amusing and thought-provoking essays on the nature of thepoetic moment, from its heartfelt emergence in an elementary school classroom to its raucous display in a set of satirical cartoons drawn by the author. Also included are interviews with Allen Ginsberg and Jordan Davis in which discusses a range of diverse topics, including literary criticism, French poetry, and Santa Claus. Art of Poetry provides Koch's audience with not only the musings and mischievous thoughts of the poetic mind, but also the reflections of the most respected poetry teacher in America.Kenneth Koch's other books include On the Great Atlantic Rainway: Selected Poems 1950-1988; Seasons on Earth, Days and Nights, The Art of Love, Thousand Avant-Garde Plays, and One Train, for which he won the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry. He is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance.Roberta L. Krueger

<i>Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance.</i>Roberta L. Krueger