PEARSON, ROGER. Stephane Mallarme. London: Reaktion (Critical Lives), 2010. 224 pp.  10.95. ISBN 9781861896599

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-226
Keyword(s):  
Stephane Mallarme

Reverie, Schmaltz, and the Modernist Imagination

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-363
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kieffer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mass Production ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Stephane Mallarme ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
French Music ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
Harmonic Language

Abstract In a review of 1895, Henry Gauthier-Villars described Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune as “musique de rêve,” a descriptor that has been attached to Debussy’s style ever since. Partly because of the importance of the Prélude within his compositional development, the distinctive sound of Debussy’s “dream music” has often been understood as a response to the hermetic and difficult literary style of French Symbolists, especially that of Stéphane Mallarmé. Yet Gauthier-Villars’s appellation of “musique de rêve” also invoked a specifically sonic (and largely forgotten) set of cultural reference points, an aural backdrop crucial for understanding Debussy’s early style in the 1880s and early 1890s—the widespread cultivation of the topos of reverie in French music in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. Settings of Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarmé by Debussy and his young contemporaries around 1890 were infused with signifiers of dream and reverie that trace back to salon genres of the 1870s and that cross-pollinated with the harmonic language of the newly fashionable valse lente in the early 1880s. Hearing Debussy’s early works in the context of this reverie topos and its aural kinship to the popular valse lente sheds light on the extent to which the radical idiosyncrasy so vaunted by modernists was constantly evolving in tandem with—and could never truly free itself from—an aural culture defined by mass production, repetition, and cliché.

STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ

1976 ◽  
Vol XXX (3) ◽  
pp. 287-300
Author(s):  
D. J. MOSSOP
Keyword(s):  
Stephane Mallarme

scholarly journals Versekrise

1996 ◽  
Vol 11 (23) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphane Mallarmé
Keyword(s):  
Stephane Mallarme

Stéphane Mallarmé: Versekrise

Stephane Mallarme

2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-262
Author(s):  
C. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Stephane Mallarme

Stéphane Mallarmé

1994 ◽  
pp. 43-144
Author(s):  
Petra Leutner
Keyword(s):  
Stephane Mallarme

The Degenerate in Falling Slowly (1998)

2020 ◽  
pp. 192-223
Author(s):  
Peta Mayer
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Stephane Mallarme ◽  
Domestic Fiction ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Discursive Practices ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Sister Relationship ◽  
Rhetorical Form ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Way

Silence and rereading are key discursive practices of Miriam and Beatrice Sharpe, the sister protagonists of Falling Slowly. Their forms of absence and excess cause critics to herald the decline of Brookner’s powers in her early reception.The sisters also share a number of behaviours with the aesthetes and Decadents labelled degenerate in Max Nordau’s Degeneration including Joris-Karl Huysmans, Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Such behaviours include dullness, decline, ennui, inactivity, boredom, invisibility, anxiety, restlessness and absence. This chapter spins the hierarchical figure of the degenerate across the sister relationship of the domestic fiction to produce a queering of the domestic fiction. Rejecting the normative impulse of the figure, it instead engages its deconstructive capacity to render transparent the mechanisms of epistemological production and expose the way in which subjects and objects attain status as real or unreal, healthy or sick, visible or invisible, literal or figurative, heterosexual or lesbian. Inspired by Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, it mobilises a ‘no future’ narrative as the narrative form of the degenerate. The rhetorical form of syllepsis, which governs shifts between the literal and figurative, is reappropriated from the male canon to underscore the open-ended nature of signification.

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