Unmapping Poetry: The Poetics of Space in the French Nineteenth Century
2019-08
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Unmapping Poetry: The Poetics of Space in the French Nineteenth Century
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2019-08
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My dissertation deals with the notion of space in late nineteenth-century French poetry. I understand this notion in three ways. First, space as commonly related to geography and dimensions of height, depth and width. In the history of modern geography, space is reduced to coordinates on a map, to ultra-connected points of departures and destinations. Reading space in such a way equates to reducing it to its visibility, to its public display so that sight traverses it at a glance, in the same manner as sight traverses and defines landscapes in the modern world. Second, I understand space as the marker and threshold between literature and everything else. This second perspective on the notion defines literary space as resolutely different from other writing mediums. Moreover, it requires the awareness of the role of the reader/commentator in helping to define a text as literary, that is a text where hermeneutics is of central importance. In a way, this perspective asks about the space of poetry, a space that seeks to withdraw itself from the language of newspapers on the one hand, and of realistic and naturalist novels on the other. Poetic space strives to impede any fixed linear reading in profit of a re-arranged and unconventional syntax, so that sight cannot grasp the whole of the literary text and thus cannot traverse it with ease. The act of reading, in such a context, does not lead to fixed and true meanings, since it only triggers more interpretations. Third, and correlated to the second and first points, if the role of the reader is mentioned and analyzed in my dissertation, so is the distanced role of the twenty-first century commentator looking at nineteenth-century texts. The gap lying between the two also constitutes a space that ought to be pondered, because the poetry I study is defined by the space between it and its readers, whether they belong to the same century or to our contemporary one. Talking about the space between distant centuries allows for distant readings, so that the poetry I refer to, the one of Lautréamont, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, has to do with a specific distance that can never be crossed, and that makes us—the contemporary readers—witness a literary space that eludes domination and control over its understanding. It is not to say that poetry refutes interpretation, but that it constantly reminds the reader of its opacity, of its distance that none can traverse. The understanding of poetry then has to do with the impossibility of understanding. This aporia is what defines poetry, what makes it understandable through the awareness of an unreachable space that separates the reader from the text. This unreachable-space-that-defines-poetry is also correlated to geographic space because it allows to conceive that reading space is done with limitations and distance rather than domination and control. The question of the unreachable not only opposes poetry to modern geography, it also defines nineteenth-century poetry in space and time. Since poetry could not stop the geographic advancements and conceptions of the modern times, it summoned a remote, far-off reader figure, any reader who comes after the writing of poetry. It means that as soon as poetry is written, as soon as Poetics appears, it is of Space because of the spatial gap it creates in the very moment it appears. To recapitulate and put differently, my dissertation argues that nineteenth-century poets devised anti-communicative styles and dreamed of unreachable spaces in order to resist modernization and geographical expansionism. Since the railway and modern geography rose in popularity and became the emblems for the colonization and domestication of space, my dissertation shows how French poets re-imagined aesthetic wonderment as the obverse of a cartographic, mechanical and networked world. This work, thus, dives into geographical matters where the role of the railway is clearly perceivable, transforming space into a mathematical grid that ought to be traversed with the highest mechanical efficiency, that is an efficiency that disregards any in-between for it only focuses on the connection between cities. The expansion of the urban over the rural and with it, the ultra-connectedness and domestication of the world were a strong concern for many poets of the time, who rejected objective and accurate descriptions so to disconnect language and through it, an empirical understanding of the world. Such rejection extends to maps and geographical conceptions of the French nineteenth century, and a consideration of these materials allows us to claim that poetry is a literary form that interrupts the hyper-connectivity displayed in modern maps. Numerous geographers of the period gave a representation of space that turned toward objective descriptions and modeled maps in a way that maintains a mastery over space that the railway could traverse and dominate. I investigate the influence of the rise of empirical methods and of the railway’s infrastructure on maps and literary texts, by pointing to their effects on the reader’s sight which is entirely guided from one coordinate to another, going through territories and texts with an efficiency that discards other possible territorial and textual identities. My work claims that poetry obstructs this indoctrinated way of reading, by being displayed under new and non-linear forms that rehabilitate the reader’s sight and endow it with the ability to wander and wonder, that is to escape fixed landmarks and objective descriptions. Geography is subsequently an important part in this dissertation, but so is literary space. Poetry, in a way, asks a question: when does one enter the space of literature, leaving ordinary language in profit of an unfixed and ever-changing meaning, space, poetics?
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2019. Major: French. Advisor: Bruno Chaouat. 1 computer file (PDF); iii, 235 pages.
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Dubois, Alexandre. (2019). Unmapping Poetry: The Poetics of Space in the French Nineteenth Century. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/259708.
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