Mallarme's Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience - Hardcover

Richard Candida Smith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520218280 ISBN 13: 9780520218284

Publisher: University of California Press, 2000

Synopsis

In a narrative gracefully combining intellectual and cultural history, Richard Cándida Smith unfolds the legacy of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), the poet who fathered the symbolist movement in poetry and art. The symbolists found themselves in the midst of the transition to a world in which new media devoured cultural products and delivered them to an ever-growing public. Their goal was to create and oversee a new elite culture, one that elevated poetry by removing it from a direct relationship to experience. Instead, symbolist poetry was dedicated to exploring discourse itself, and its practitioners to understanding how language shapes consciousness.

Cándida Smith investigates the intellectual context in which symbolists came to view artistic practice as a form of knowledge. He relates their work to psychology, especially the ideas of William James, and to language and the emergence of semantics. Through the lens of symbolism, he focuses on a variety of subjects: sexual liberation and the erotic, anarchism, utopianism, labor, and women's creative role. Paradoxically, the symbolists' reconfiguration of elite culture fit effectively into the modern commercial media. After Mallarmé was rescued from obscurity, symbolism became a valuable commodity, exported by France to America and elsewhere in the market-driven turn-of-the-century world. Mallarmé's Children traces not only how poets regarded their poetry and artists their art but also how the public learned to think in new ways about cultural work and to behave differently as a result.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"A critically important contribution to the debate of the last ten years over the nature and status of experience. . . Cndida Smith's range of knowledge is extraordinarily broad." (Leora Auslander, University of Chicago)

About the Author:

Richard Cándida Smith is Director of the Program in American Culture and Associate Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California (California, 1995).

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0520218280
• ISBN 13: 9780520218284
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328