Description
Book SynopsisSocrates banished poetry from the ideal republic, adopting the philosophical position that poetic language operates outside the conventions of public discourse and is private in expression. But what does the banished language of poetry say about its relation to public space? Is it possible to draw a line severing the language of beauty from the language of truth? Derrida asks whether the line ought rather to pass between Western metaphysics, with its logic of polar opposites, and another way that does not organize everything in oppositional terms. The verbal economy organized around the poem as inscription, for instance, fits awkwardly with a division between a public discourse under the aegis of truth and a private one regulated by aesthetic pleasure.
Poetry''s Appeal takes the reemergence of a viable poetry in the politicized culture of revolutionary and post-revolutionary France as a signal that poetry''s sentence of exile from the public arena is unresolved. It find
Trade Review
"Poetry's Appeal situates itself in what might be considered the single most significant critical debate in Romanticism over the last two or so decades. Its principal concern being the relation between (poetic) language and history, it reconsiders what has been characterized as the retreat of literature, and in particular the lyric, from politics. . . . Burt's readings follow in the line of important critics such as Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and Kevin Newmark, who have brought the most finely tuned rhetorical readings to nineteenth-century French literature." -- European Romantic Review
Table of Contents
Part I. On Shifting Ground: Poetry's Orders: 1. (Dis)arming Minerva: of performatives and prosthetics in Chenier's 'La Jeune captive'; 2. Mallarmes 'bound action': the orders of the garter; Part II. Memories of the Poem: Histories, Chances: 3. Cracking the code: the poetical and political legacy of Chenier's 'antique verse'; 4. Hallucinatory history: Hugo's Revolution; 5. 'An immoderate taste for truth': censoring history in Baudelaire's 'les bijoux'; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
