Why have poets played such an important role for contemporary philosophers? How can poetry link philosophy and political theory? How do formal considerations intersect with philosophical approaches? These essays seek to establish a dialogue between poetry and philosophy. Each essay contributes to our understanding of the relationships between theory and lived experience while providing new insight into important poets such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Victor Hugo, and others. The broad range of metaphysical, phenomenological, aesthetic, and ethical approaches (...) announce important new paths for a reinvigorated study of lyric poetry in the decades to come. (shrink)

Philosophy and Poetry is the 33rd volume in the Midwest Studies in Philosophy series. It begins with contributions in verse from two world class poets, JohnAshbery and Stephen Dunn, and an article by Dunn on the creative processthat issued in his poem. The volume features new work from an internationalcollection of philosophers exploring central philosophical issues pertinent topoetry as well as the connections between the two domains.

_Philosophy and Poetry_ is the 33rd volume in the _Midwest Studies in Philosophy_ series. It begins with contributions in verse from two world class poets, JohnAshbery and Stephen Dunn, and an article by Dunn on the creative processthat issued in his poem. The volume features new work from an internationalcollection of philosophers exploring central philosophical issues pertinent topoetry as well as the connections between the two domains.

At the end of the nineteenth century in France, there arose a literary movement, termed le naturisme by its founder, Saint-Georges de Bouhélier. Anti-symbolist in its conception, le naturisme contained as its tenets a return to clarity and simplicity of expression and a strict avoidance of symbolist hermeticism, characteristic of Mallarmé and others. Bouhélier and his disciples triggered a polemic that raged throughout the final years of the nineteenth century and involved writers such as Emile Zola and André Gide before (...) its demise in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of minor literature, deterritorialization and agrammaticality, this article explores the possibility of a ‘minor poetry’, considering various interpretati...

Richard Rorty has drawn a distinction between three ways philosophers in the 20th Century have conceived of the enterprise of philosophy. There are those who see it as the guardian of the sciences, those who treat it as a kina of poetry, and those who view philosophy as a political exercise. In this paper, I try to show that Wittgenstein, despite certain popular conceptions of his project, belongs more in the third group than in the other two. The paper (...) focuses on Wittgenstein's notes On Certainty in order to reveal the structure of Wittgenstein's notion of epistemological privilege and how it depends on communal agreement and behaviour. The system of conventions and commitments on which our vanouis practices are grounded is not justifiable. It is a matter of forms of life. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy was born from philosophic reflection on logic and mathematics. It has been at its strongest in these and related domains of reflection, domains that are friendly to definition and analytic clarity. From time to time, analytic philosophers, some very distinguished, have produced fine work on literature and the arts. But these areas remain underexplored in the analytic tradition. This volume is focused upon language that does not fit within the usual analytic paradigms. It's highlights include two pieces of (...) original poetry on philosophic subjects (by philosophers who are also published poets), and philosophic reflection on poetry, literature more generally, metaphor, and related subjects. (shrink)

Taking seriously Guillaume Apollinaire's wager that twentieth-century poets would one day "mechanize" poetry as modern industry has mechanized the world, Carrie Noland explores poetic attempts to redefine the relationship between subjective expression and mechanical reproduction, high art and the world of things. Noland builds upon close readings to construct a tradition of diverse lyricists--from Arthur Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, and René Char to contemporary performance artists Laurie Anderson and Patti Smith--allied in their concern with the nature of subjectivity in an (...) age of mechanical reproduction. (shrink)

In the opening lines of ‘Black Orpheus’, written as a preface to an anthology of negritude poetry, Sartre challenges white readers ‘to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen’. Reading this poetry, he thinks, should undermine white people’s presumption of the objectivity of their perspective. Accordingly, the essay itself contradicts two prominent aspects of the philosophy he had so far developed: the idea that poetry could not be politically engaged; and the theory of radical freedom. (...) These changes are ultimately rooted in his realisation, upon reading this poetry, that his previous understanding of prose is mistaken. This has the consequence that his philosophical method, which derives ontological conclusions from prose descriptions of experience, has two important limitations: its premises cannot be drawn solely from his own experience; and French prose might be insufficient for formulating all relevant premises. He therefore revises his method to deploy this poetry as phenomenological grounds for ontological conclusions, which transforms his ontology of human existence to include cultural inheritance as a primary feature. We will see how this reading of negritude poetry exemplifies both the epistemic challenge involved in what he calls ‘the look’ and the use of listening in response to it. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive description of how writers, in particular poets in nineteenth-century France, became increasingly aware of the visual element in writing from the point of view both of content and of the formal organisation of the words in the text. This interest encouraged writers such as Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud to recreate in language some of the vivid, sensual impact of the graphic or painterly image. This was to be achieved by organising texts according to aesthetic criteria (...) so that as far as possible the form of the text as visually perceived would be closely interrelated to its content as reconstructed through the reading process. The result of this development was a radical redefinition of the scope and function of poetry, raising important general questions about the nature of the relationship between language and the visual image that are still very much of concern today. (shrink)

Abstract:Austin’s (in)famous characterization of poetry as parasitical has been subject to many interpretations, from Derrida’s considering it a limit of and a central problem in Austin’s theory to Cavell’s attempt to reintegrate poetic uses of language within the framework of Ordinary Language Philosophy. In this essay, I argue that poetry, rather than being excluded from the realm of the performative, can be considered as a performative dispositif that acts upon ordinary language and, through it, upon our forms of (...) life. To reevaluate poetry, I suggest moving from the ‘parasite’ metaphor (poetry is passively feeding on ordinary uses of language) to a ‘virus’ metaphor (poetry is actively disrupting ordinary uses of language). By building on works of French theorists and poets Christophe Hanna, Franck Leibovici, and Manuel Joseph among others, I explore how poetry reveals the virality of language. (shrink)

In this collection of essays, Alain Badiou revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger's famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the "age of the poets," from Holderlin to Celan. Drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, "The Autonomy (...) of the Aesthetic Process," Badiou also offers an illuminating set of readings of contemporary French prose writers, giving us fascinating insights into the theory of the novel while also accounting for the specific position of literature between science and ideology. (shrink)

This article concerns the ‘ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’. With the guidance of Leo Strauss, and with reference to French cultural anthropology and the Hebrew Bible, I offer close readings of the origin myths told by the characters of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium and Socrates in book 2 of the Republic. I contrast Aristophanes’ prudential and political esotericism with Socrates’ pedagogical esotericism, connecting the former with poetry’s affirmation of the primacy of chaos and the latter with (...) philosophy’s openness to the measures of nature or phusis. Aristophanes regards the political poetry of Olympianism as a necessary corrective of original human disorder, while Socrates traces the sickness of souls and cities to an excess of poiēsis, ‘poetry’ or ‘production’ in all of its cultural and material senses. The quarrel between Socrates and Aristophanes illuminates fundamental questions that were of central concern to Strauss: What is the status of nature? Must we orient ourselves by the forceful impressions of culture, or can we make out natural standards of how to live? Is war the primary human condition, or peace? Are human beings essentially erotic, or thumotic? Is philosophy an expression of reckless boldness, or of saving moderation? (shrink)

I recently taught an upper-division Honors class in Medicine and Literature with students ranging from a pre-physician’s assistant student and nursing student to English, French, History, and Technical Writing majors. The common thread connecting these students initially was their self-described fear of and helplessness with poetry. However, as the semester drew to a close, their class discussion and journals revealed not only increased comfort with poetry but also a preference for it. The information and insight they got (...) from poetry, they said, were the reason they took a medical humanities course in the first place and commented that the poetry we read provoked more substantial “medicine and literature” discussions than prose. Poetry provides a good starting place to analyze complex human relationships, and the focus on language and form levels the intellectual playing field: students are all unfamiliar with how to do it and are learning a new skill together. This could be accomplished, of course, with a literary short story, but for the diverse population of students in this class, the brevity of poetry made it all the more appealing. (shrink)

The confession quoted above by way of introduction reveals with tragic sincerity the fatal passion of an overly avid reader, unlimited in curiosity certainly but fully conscious of the demanding finality of the work he had to accomplish: the scientific critique of an international system of social organization, “in which man is a humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and scornful being” (1844). Cultivating poetry and philosophy in a world felt to be unlivable meant becoming an accomplice of those individuals and institutions (...) principally responsible for the barbarity called modern civilization. But to combat this, it was necessary to scour the murky historical horizon issued from a distant past where only great social revolutions marked the stages of a progression seen as ambiguous because realized by means of unspeakable phenomena of regression. Only one revolution took place under the contradictory sign of an emancipation with universal ambitions and of a decline with indelible consequences: the French Revolution. Conclusion as well as beginning, it was studied by Marx as a unique event, both in relation to its antecedents as well as its liberating promises. Although it is true that Marx “never wrote a history of the ancien régime”, a hardly significant remark, it is no less true that he studied and compiled, with the eagerness of a schoolboy enthralled by history, an enormous mass of documentation that can “help understand how (the ancien regime) gave birth to the Revolution”, despite what François Furet might think (Marx et la Révolution française, Paris, 1986, p. 79). Moreover, the author of Das Kapital drew from the revolutionary history of France the inspiration for a “poetry of the future” in which the following vision was designed:“The old bourgeois society, with its classes and its class antagonism, gave way to an association in which the free development of each individual is the condition for the free development of the whole” (1848). (shrink)

Originally titled Frontières de la poésie (1935), This book by Jacques Maritain, whose philosophical writings read as interestingly as a novel, will be welcomed by all who are seeking a better understanding of the art of our time. The book delves into Maritain's thoughts on the nature and subjectivity of art and poetry. As a philosopher, Maritain attempts to define the two concepts, describing art and poetry as "virtues," and as primarily concerned with beauty. Rather than focus on (...) aesthetic theory, Maritain examines the concepts at a more tangible level, including a discussion of how they are made. The principles established with such precision and brilliance in his earlier work "Art and Scholasticism," which has had such a deep influence on contemporary artists, are successfully put to the test in illuminating the creative works of such diverse artists as Rouault, Marc Chagall, Gino Sevirini, and Arthur Lourie. Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and political thinker. He was born in Paris in 1882, where he spent most of his life. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother the daughter of a statesman. He attended the Sorbonne to study philosophy and natural science, and after marrying, he and his wife converted to Catholicism. It was after this he became a well-known scholar of St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomistic philosophy. He published widely on philosophical and political thought, and by the 1930s, he was an established thinker in the Catholic community. After the outbreak of WWII, Maritain relocated to the United States, where he taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. Later in life, he and his wife returned to France, where he continued to write and study Catholic scholarship until his death in 1973. (shrink)

Two recent French poets, Henri Meschonnic and Jacques Roubaud, have found in Wittgenstein's philosophy an alternative to post-structuralist poetics. Meschonnic's poetry and his theoretical writings show a sustained critical engagement with Wittgenstein, whom he reads in conjunction with Emile Benveniste. The writers inform his theory of poetic rhythm and his practice of biblical translation. Roubaud's use of Wittgenstein, by contrast, here examined in the collection Quelque chose noir, is linked partly with the poet's grief following the death of (...) his wife Alix Cléo Roubaud, a photographer and an avid reader of Wittgenstein. In Roubaud, Wittgenstein opens up the space for a meditation on disappearance and absence. Roubaud reformulates passages from Wittgenstein's On Certainty in poems evoking Alix's memory. (shrink)

The medieval motet arose around 1200 with the addition of texts to clausulae, which were polyphonic pieces of two or three parts constructed upon tenors drawn from the melismas of liturgical chants. The upper voices of three-part motets were usually given different texts. According to the traditional account, religious motets with Latin texts came first, followed soon by secular motets with French texts and bilingual double motets, but this chronological sequence has recently been called into question. There is no (...) clear evidence that French motets arose later than Latin ones, and much to suggest that French motets flourished from the beginning. In the Latin motets the texts of the upper part or parts are almost always tropes of the chant tenors. They often incorporate words from the original chants and elaborate on their meaning, just as tropes of Kyries, Alleluias, and other monophonic chants had done. The French texts, on the other hand, are pastourelles, courtly love poems, or other genres of secular poetry similar to those found in the troubadour and trouvère repertory. French motets are thus thought to be unrelated to the chant tenors upon which they are based. The fragment of chant that serves as the tenor of a French motet is seen as merely a compositional device. Its origin as part of a larger melody and text and its connection with the liturgy are irrelevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Medieval Troubadour Mobilized in the French Resistance *Roy RosensteinIntroduction: The Place of Poetry under VichyRien ne semblait plus anachronique que d’interroger, inter arma, le silence des Muses médiévales....Frank 1In Chantons sous l’occupation André Halimi details how raucously the band played on in wartime Paris. 2 If Vercors in 1941 advocated the practice of silence and Sartre in 1945 maintained that Paris had been dead for the (...) four years of the Nazi occupation, Halimi and others have shown that Parisians [End Page 499] sang, danced, and laughed during the Occupation as never before. 3 Rarely had so many plays been staged, so many movies been produced. 4 While in other Nazi-occupied countries the theaters and restaurants remained closed, thus preserving a modicum of national dignity in defeat, in France the arts thrived and la vie mondaine accelerated its pace. Journalist Henri Amouroux rightly explains how cinema and theater provided more than entertainment and why they were periodically the target of curfews. In these wartime performances a seemingly insignificant phrase could take on a rich contemporary context. Thus a line like “toute la fleur du royaume se trouve en prison” in Montherlant’s La reine morte invariably provoked applause. Whether the text was classical or contemporary in origin, the audience “seized upon all the passages that could be linked to the current situation.” 5 In this broad sense, Resistance literature came to include any “poetry written and/or distributed in France during the Occupation, and which the reader sees as implicitly or explicitly conveying hostility to Nazism and Collaboration.” 6Between 1940 and 1944 French audiences escaped their national misfortunes more through literature than through film and drama combined. “Never, perhaps, had literature played such a momentous part in the daily life of French readers,” wrote the late Henri Peyre in 1945. 7 As is often noted, the intellectual Resistance “fut surtout poétique.” 8 Every page of poetry, past or present, seemed to remind wartime readers of their current circumstances. One young poète résistant is categorical: “Never before had poetry played such a decisive role in history.” 9 Pierre Brunel of the Sorbonne is just as emphatic in confirming [End Page 500] the judgment of contemporary scholars and Resistance fighters alike: “During the war years, French poetry found a singleness of purpose and an audience that it had never enjoyed before.” 10In anticipation of more comprehensive treatments of French Resistance poetry sens large, the present study proposes a necessarily modest and certainly partial approach to the role of poetry in the French Resistance. Following the general groundwork of Seghers, Gaucheron, Higgins, and others, it undertakes to track, if only schematically, the reaction to France’s fall as polarized across three territories—in American exile, in Vichy France, and in German camps—through a focus on one exemplary twelfth-century troubadour. Concurrently with the “nouvelle floraison poétique” hailed by André Rousseaux in 1941, 11 Jaufre Rudel was one earlier poet who enjoyed a resurgence of interest during the war. With respect to this troubadour, to date only Dietmar Rieger has mentioned in passing an oblique reference to Rudel’s trademark distant love in Aragon’s “Pour un chant (national)”: “Jaufre’s love from afar is set against a love for France.” 12 This particular troubadour’s legend and lyrics assumed new dimensions through their immediate relevance not only for Aragon but for all French nationals, both imprisoned at home and exiled abroad. Literary historian René Dumesnil observed as early as 1941 with respect to pre-war French classics: “Present circumstances give them new depth and extend their range.” 13 Regarding France’s medieval literature, a modern critic has noted how “the troubadours, just as much as Tristan, Roland, Lancelot, Perceval, or even Yseult..., emerge as agents of unity, even of unanimity, around whom it is still possible to muster the French people in 1940.” 14 [End Page 501]As has been observed for centuries, “Frenchmen abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time or other.” 15 All French patriots and expatriates, wherever they found themselves after the Armistice in June 1940, whether... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 142-154 [Access article in PDF] Critical Discussions The Fortunes of Avant-Garde Poetry Mary Anne O'Neil Invisible Fences. Prose Poetry as a Genre in French and American Literature, by Steven Monte; xii & 298 pp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, $50.00. Modern Visual Poetry, by Willard Bohn; 321 pp. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000, $47.00. The situation of (...) class='Hi'>French poetry at the turn of the twenty-first century is far different from what it was during the last fin de siècle. In 1900, poetry was a booming art, and France was home to numerous poets of varied inspiration and expression. The religious verse of Claudel and Péguy shared the attention of the reading public with the philosophical poetry of Valéry and the futuristic celebrations of Paris and modern life found in Apollinaire's Alcools and Calligrammes. Long poems, short poems, poems written in standard verse, free verse, prose, and even published as drawings, suggested that the golden age of poetry begun in the early nineteenth century by the Romantics and continued after 1850 by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, would not soon come to an end. This indeed proved to be the case, for the heirs of the Symbolist tradition of the first decade of the twentieth century were soon followed by the Surrealist revolutionaries of the 1920s and 1930s, many of whom directed their talents to the composition of political verse at the time of the Second World War. Political poetry by and large disappeared from France after 1950, only to be [End Page 142] succeeded over the next two decades by two very different types of verse. On the one hand, writers like St. John Perse and Pierre Jean Jouve produced difficult works whose appeal was limited to a sophisticated audience, while lyricists, such as Jacques Prévert and even the songwriter Georges Brassens, made poetry more accessible to the general public, often through popular songs. The fact that, during the days of May 1968, students scrawled verses of the Surrealist-Communist poet Paul Eluard on the walls of the Sorbonne to encourage efforts to bring down the social order attests to the power exerted by poetry on the intellectual life of France well into the second half of the twentieth century. Such, however, is no longer the case today. There are only two well-known living French poets, Francis Ponge and Yves Bonnefoy. While reviews dedicated to original poetry do still exist, especially in the south of France where the poetic arm of the French Resistance was most active in the 1940s, poetry attracts many fewer readers--and fewer writers--than it did even fifty years ago.Such a radical change merits some reflection. What has happened to French poetry since the mid-twentieth century? In a sense, all good things must come to an end sometime, and a century and a half of inventiveness and poetic energy may simply have run its natural course. French publishing houses, well aware that prose sells better than verse, have done little to encourage young poets. However, certain trends in the subject matter and form of contemporary French poetry have probably contributed to the current lack of interest. Since the end of the Second World War, French poets have concerned themselves almost uniquely with everyday life--common objects, geographical locales, and ordinary people. This obsession with the ordinary has produced some excellent poetry, especially René Char's evocations of Provençal landscapes and Yves Bonnefoy's treatments of childhood. Yet, this concentration on everyday life has severed poetry from the traditional subjects that have sustained it ever since classical antiquity, such as the celebration of heroic figures and heroic deeds, philosophical and religious inquiry, love, loss, prophetic vision. This very narrow range of subject risks consigning poetry to the status of a minor art. At the turn of the twenty-first century, French poetry also finds itself at the end of a very long period of formal experimentation that began in the second half of the nineteenth century and which includes... (shrink)

The human brain is divided into two hemispheres, right and left, that are joined by a thick ‘cable’ of neural fibres called the corpus callosum. It has long been observed that injury to the left hemisphere in the average adult damages speech, speech comprehension, and reading, and causes paralysis on the right side of the body. Injury to the right hemisphere, on the other hand, seems to leave linguistic capabilities intact, but causes paralysis on the left side of the body. (...) These observations have given rise to the twin concepts of contralaterality of hemispheric control and cognitive specialization of hemispheric function. As far back as the nineteenth century, it was recognized that the left hemisphere’s specialty was language. Pioneering British neurologist John Hughlings Jackson asserted in 1868 that the left hemisphere was the ‘leading side’ in most people, responsible for the control of speech and will. In the decade of the 1940s, French neurologist Henry Hecaen and British psychologist Oliver Zangwill demonstrated that the right hemisphere, far from being passive, controlled visuospatial processing. (shrink)

As in other countries, the public in Argentina became aware of the existence of something called “the theory of relativity” only after November 1919. Although the news of Arthur Eddington's eclipse expedition, which provided the first confirmation of Einstein's theory, was poorly reported in the newspapers, by the end of 1920 Einstein had become a household name for the educated middle class of Buenos Aires, the capital city of the country. This was in great measure the result of the activity (...) of a few enthusiastic lecturers. Significantly, none of them belonged to the prestigious Institute of Physics of the University of La Plata, which during the decade of the 1910s was considered the most important center of physical research in Latin America. Between July and August 1920 the Spanish physicist Blas Cabrera – perhaps the greatest popularizer of Einstein's theory in Spain – visited Argentina and talked about relativity. In September Georges Duclout, a French engineer who had graduated from the Zurich Polytechnic and by then was professor of applied mechanics at the School of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires, also gave a series of conferences on the subject. That same month José Ubach, a Jesuit astronomer trained at the Ebro Observatory in Spain, and established in Buenos Aires, lectured on relativity at the Colegio del Salvador. (shrink)

W. H. Auden, the sometimes Greta Garbo of twentieth-century poetry, once told Stephen Spender that he liked America better than England because in America one could be alone. Further, in his introduction to The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse Auden remarked that while in England poets are considered members of a “clerkly caste,” in America they are an “aristocracy of one.” Certainly it does seem to be the individual poet—Whitman, Williams, Olson, Plath, O’Hara, Ginsberg—who has altered the landscape (...) of American poetry and prosody, not the group. And most American literary “movements,” as Robert Creeley has pointed out, are simply comprised of a few people who on occasion drink together, and who are as likely as not to end the evening in violent argument over an aesthetic or political point. Yet the notion of schools or movements remains, in mainstream historical criticism at least, a vital one. How many introductions to anthologies of American poetry, for example, continue to use such rubrics as the Transcendentals, the Populists, the Black Mountain poets, the Beats, the New York group? And while established poets often rebel from any sense that they are part of a larger community, which by definition is self-limiting, they are often complicit in their initial categorization. For poets as well as critics the idea of a school is often a useful fiction serving as both a kind of protective hothouse and a platform for getting a hearing.The most recent “group” of American poets—the first since the anthology wars of the early sixties really to be of more than passing interest and perhaps to be actually capable of bringing about a major shift of attention in American poetry and poetics—is the so-called “Language” school. Individual volumes by poets often considered part of this group number well into three figures now and there have been important journals and anthologies produced in a serious and sustained fashion by these writers. Yet in part because of what seems the essentially hermetic character of the project , there has been little notice of this activity by academic critics or reviewers.1 What I’d like to do here is briefly map a few major aspects of the territory, describing some of the practical and theoretical questions which seem to occupy many of these writers in their ongoing critique of the “workshop poem.” 1. Two important exceptions are discussions of some of this work in Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse and Marjorie Perloff’s review “The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties,” American Poetry Review 13 : 15-22. All further references to Perloff’s article, abbreviated “WS,” will be included in the text. For a discussion of the various Language poetry journals and anthologies, see my chapter “American Poetry, 1940s to the Present” in American Literary Scholarship: An Annual/1983, ed. Warren French , pp. 349-74. Lee Bartlett, an associate professor of English, has directed the University of New Mexico’s creative writing program for five years. Coeditor of the critical journal American Poetry, his Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets will be published this fall. Currently he is writing a biography of William Everson. (shrink)