Review
Understanding French Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium (review)
Substance, Vol.32(2), pp.129-133
01/01/2003
DOI: 10.1353/sub.2003.0039
Abstract
Barbara Johnson's "Gender and Poetry" (reprinted from 1991) develops Baudelaire's reading of Desbordes-Valmore to show that, as poets "[m]en are read rhetorically; women, literally" (227) so that in the one case we shift "the domain of a poem's meaning to a higher, less referential, more abstract and theoretical level" while in the other we look for "an expression of What a Woman Wants" (227). Stamos Metzidakis boldly tries to show that "on the epistemological ground of repetition" (84), some "subtle elements of a text's material presence on the page - elements like letters, punctuation points, or [...] accent marks" (72) have the "semiotic potential" to become elements of literary style. [...]the two dots of the colon may be an icon for "two burning eyes" (76) when it announces a theme of vision in "Le Jaguar" by Leconte de Lisle and similarly in Baudelaire's "La Beauté." Unfortunately, the old material includes all the original misprints, intact. [...]we can now tell, but only from the new index, that "the Marxist critic Frederic James" (xx) was always supposed to read "Fredric Jameson." [...]a poem is seen as not providing sufficient linguistic terrain on which to build the kind of theoretical or conceptual superstructure by which [. . .] professional success is assured" (xix).
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Understanding French Poetry: Essays for a New Millennium (review)
- Creators
- Geoffrey Hope
- Resource Type
- Review
- Publication Details
- Substance, Vol.32(2), pp.129-133
- Publisher
- Johns Hopkins University Press; Baltimore
- DOI
- 10.1353/sub.2003.0039
- ISSN
- 0049-2426
- eISSN
- 1527-2095
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/2003
- Academic Unit
- French and Italian; International Programs
- Record Identifier
- 9984399038302771
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