Abstract

In this thesis, I undertake a rereading of Aloysius Bertrand's Gaspard de la Nuit. I approach the text from several angles which all have in common the rejection of traditional readings where Bertrand is cited as a precursor to so-called modern efforts in prose poetry. After a theoretical introduction to the problems posed by the prose poem to both literary history and genre studies, I show in my first chapter how the first preface of Gaspard de la Nuit, the most prosaic text of the book, constitutes a collection of fantasies in which narrative development is suspended. In my second chapter, I find an opposite movement: poems seem to be linked into larger, narrative structures similar to the French new novel. Bertrand's work thus constitutes not only an opening towards modern poetry, but also a prefigurement of a certain prose of modernity. The coexistence of these contradictory elements illustrates the paradox of the prose poem, in which prose and poetry, binary opposites, are supposedly unified. Such a synthesis, however, seems to eliminate the difference between the constituents, prose and poetry--and provides a point from which one may analyze the dynamics of generic determinations and the limits of critical discourse. ;In my third chapter, I examine the dialogical aspect of Bertrand's transformation of romantic poetry. Combined with the carnival elements in the texts, Bertrand's readings of both his past and his contemporaries, often parodying, produce a carnivalization of romanticism. Carnivalesque ambivalence reigns because the other is not simply erased in a synthesis but remains as a voice to be reckoned with, evidenced by the epigraphs accompanying every text of Gaspard. Finally, I present evidence in my fourth chapter of Bertrand's influence on authors from Baudelaire and Mallarme to the surrealists. This not only demonstrates the continuing movement of the dialectic of the prose poem, since Bertrand himself becomes the interlocutor in an open dialogue with his posterity, but also replaces him in the history of the prose poem from which he is often excluded