Poetry's Appeal: Nineteenth-Century French Lyric and the Political Space (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics Series) FROM THE PUBLISHER
Socrates banished poetry from the ideal republic, adopting the philosophical position that poetic language operates outside the conventions of public discourse and is private in expression. But what does the banished language of poetry say about its relation to public space? Is it possible to draw a line severing the language of beauty from the language of truth?" "In chapters on Chenier, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery, the book details some of the struggles between the ideological and material sides of poetry with the nineteenth-century remappings of political space: memory and the archive, the censorship of material history, the propping of founding performatives, the legibility of founding texts, the need to redefine action where technique is productive, and the recognition and assimilation of zones owed to technique.
SYNOPSIS
Burt (French, U. of California, Irvine) argues that revolutionary and post-revolutionary French poetry is not, as Socrates would likely maintain, a discourse unfit for the republic, or more generally, for public space. Asserting that poetrydespite perceptions to the contrarybelongs more to public space than private, Burt maintains that poetry can draw attention to and critique the symbolic and metaphorical language deployed for ideological warfare in the public sphere. Poets examined include Chénier, Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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