Versekrise

Stéphane Mallarmé: Versekris

Translating Rhythm into the Rhythm of Translation

This paper proposes that Meschonnic's writing, and particularly his writing on translation, does not do justice to the richly suggestive conceptual framework he constructs around the notion of ‘discourse’. It is perhaps peculiarly translation, at least in the version canvassed here, that reveals what is insufficiently developed and too defensively protected in Meschonnic's thinking about discourse, rhythm and related concepts. This is, then, an attempt to better understand, within a critique of Meschonnic's albeit wonderfully enriching vision of translation, not only what distinguishes rhythm as it acts in discourse, from rhythm as it acts in translation, but also what rhythm's relation with orality and vocal values is, and how translation might translate across those values

The Stuttering Poet: A Deleuzian Reading of a Laforguian Poetics

This article explores the complex relationship between the yankee, the Impressionist and the minoritarian in Laforgue's work and suggests that Deleuze's notions of the minor and of stuttering, and his analysis of the characteristics of Anglo-American writing, are particularly pertinent to our understanding of Laforgue's poetics. There is a nineteenth-century context for the minor, but there is a danger that we capitulate to a ‘majoritarian’ criticism if we too quickly espouse lines of filiation. The article constructs an account of Laforgue's developing perception of, and relationship with, verse prosody by examining how he scumbles the outlines and activity of syllables, how he pushes line-structure into a terrain vague, how he re-orientates accent towards the qualitative and tunes the acoustic to Hartmann's Unconscious. His uses of the imperative and infinitive, and their associated punctuations, are related to his responses to Impressionism. The argument ends with reflections on Deleuzian becoming in Laforgue

‘George Eliot’s French’: transcending the monocultural self in Daniel Deronda

Focusing on an analysis of French lexical items in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, this article examines the nature of composite textuality. More precisely, it proposes a way of describing the use of an intercultural idiom in Daniel Deronda as a way of shedding light on the nature of linguistic borrowing in the context of dialogical identity. This will provide the basis for the claim that the characters’ use of mixed utterances generates inferences which make the transcending of the monocultural self possible and create alternatives of being

The poetry of Celtic places

This paper examines the radical shift in the place of Celts in the French imagination during the course of the nineteenth century, by focusing on two versions of a passage describing Wales by Michelet: the first written in his travel journal (1834), the second published by his widow (1893). Wales, by virtue of being a Celtic place, allows Michelet to deepen his understanding of France. Whereas juxtaposition of the two versions of his text reveals something of the French state’s attitude toward the ambiguously domestic and exotic Celtic “other.