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Mallarme and the Language of Ideas
- Nineteenth-Century French Studies
- University of Nebraska Press
- Volume 29, Number 3&4, Spring-Summer 2001
- pp. 302-317
- 10.1353/ncf.2001.0028
- Article
- Additional Information
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Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) marks the emergence of a new type of writing. A close reading of his great poem "Prose (pour des Esseintes)" (1885) shows how Mallarmé is moving away from the language of philosophy, represented here by the word "Idées," and toward a new relationship between abstract ideas and poetic textures. The true excitement of Mallarmé's abstract ideas, and his originality, is inseparable from his verbal inventiveness and daring, which finds in poetic textures a new way of working with concepts. (HMW)