Frameworks for Mallarme
The Photo and the Graphic of an Interdisciplinary Aesthetic
Description:... 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.
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