Stéphane Mallarmé

The other week we also discussed the poems of Stéphane Mallarmé, precursor of concrete poetry. Mallarmé died in 1898, but was a key inspiration for a number of avant-garde movements such as the Dadaists and the Surrealists. As well as a poet Mallarmé was a critic and theorist.

Mallarmé's experiments with visual / poetic form challenged the boundaries between media/disciplines, and also stand as a themselves a theoretical investigation into the nature of poetry, language, art and thought.

Barbara Johnson has written of Mallarmé's influence on theory:

"It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics like Roland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature. Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions, structuralists and deconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguistic signifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing, intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and especially Jacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem.'" (Barbara Johnson, "Translator's Note," Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations [Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 2007], 301.)