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An “Impossible Science”: Wallace Stevens and the Ecstatic Mind
- Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature
- Mosaic, an interdisciplinary critical journal
- Volume 45, Number 1, March 2012
- pp. 71-87
- 10.1353/mos.2012.a468711
- Article
- Additional Information
This essay explores Wallace Stevens’s collection Parts of a World alongside Roland Barthes’s discussion of the paradoxical “absence-as-presence” of the photograph. The collection marks an important transition toward the development of a new space beyond representation in Stevens’s poetry—where the “figure” is revealed to be nothing other than the process of its own figuration.