Frameworks for Mallarme: The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic - Hardcover

Zachmann, Gayle

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 079147593X ISBN 13: 9780791475935

Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr, 2008

Synopsis

The influence of photography and visual culture on the French poet, journalist, and critic.

Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure “ivory-tower poet,” Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé’s quest for “scientific” language, and convincingly links the poet’s production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé’s poetry and his circumstantial writings.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure "ivory-tower poet," Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé's quest for "scientific" language, and convincingly links the poet's production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé's poetry and his circumstantial writings.

"Zachmann's work represents a truly excellent cultural and literary analysis of Mallarmé as a poet very much of his time, in tune both with the technological innovations and aesthetic ramifications of the art of photography and with the strategic innovations of the impressionist painters, who, like contemporary photographers, placed great emphasis on perception. By situating Mallarmé within his aesthetic cultural context, Zachmann succeeds in shedding convincing light on some of his more `obscure' writings and also in presenting a compelling total portrait of Mallarmé as an artist whose aesthetic vision remained remarkably consistent throughout his life." -- Katharine Conley, author of Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life

About the Author:

Gayle Zachmann is Director of the University of Florida’s Paris Research Center and Associate Professor of French at the University of Florida.

About this edition

• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 079147593X
• ISBN 13: 9780791475935
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 209