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POETRY, POLITICS, AND THE BODY IN RIMBAUD Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud Lyrical Material ROBERT ST. CLAIR 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Robert St. Clair 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937600 ISBN 978–0–19–882658–3 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. For Ross Chambers (1932–2017) Acknowledgments This book is the product of many years of reading, reflecting on, and discussing Rimbaud’s poetry with a long list of mentors and teachers, students and colleagues, peers, friends, and family members. For their steadfast moral and intellectual support at crucial moments, as well as for the patient willingness of many named here to read countless early and chaotic drafts of this work at a moment’s notice and to share critical insights or recommendations which have helped foster, shape, and sustain this work, I gladly acknowledge my debt and thanks to: Césare Akuetey, Mária Minich Brewer, Bruno Chaouat, John Mowitt, Eileen Sivert, James and Susanne St. Clair, Sophie, Caroline and Luc Cazanave, Audrey Evrard, Andrea Gyenge, Christian Haines, Steve Jaksa, Ross Kelly, Magali Compan, Rob Leventhal, Silvia Tandeciarz, Sara Pappas, David Evans (along with Emma, Nia, and FJM), Benoît de Cornulier, Philippe Rocher, Nathalie Ravonneaux, Denis Saint-Amand (inestimable comrade-in-editorial-arms), Anna Lambdin, E.S. Burt, Katherine Hornstein, Elissa Marder, Maria Scott, Brian Reilly, Jessica Tanner, Alain Vaillant, and Marina van Zuylen. For their kind invitations to share early versions of this work with students, colleagues and readers, I thank Dana Lindaman, Joseph Acquisto, Adrianna Paliyenko, and Catherine Witt, Andrew Clark at Fordham University (with friendly apologies again for never sticking to the plan), and Jonathan Strauss at Miami University. Finally, the way we read Rimbaud (to stick to him) simply would not be what it is today were it not for Steve Murphy’s work in nineteenth-century French poetry and cultural history over the past three decades. For the hermeneutic revolution that he was instrumental in ushering in, as well as for his ebullient sense of solidarity and unfaltering commitment to helping new schol- arly voices reach a critical audience, he has my enduring gratitude and thanks. I place Seth Whidden, an inspiring intellectual interlocutor and generous reader whose advice and encouragement have proved invaluable over the years, in a similar category of people it would be preposterously difficult to thank sufficiently here. I am especially grateful to my colleagues in the Department of French and Italian and the Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at Dartmouth College. It is no exag- geration to say that their unflagging institutional and personal support made it possible for me to write this book. I extend earnest and enduring thanks to: Faith Beasely, yasser elhariry, for his writerly solidarity as this book first went out the door, Lucas Hollister, who read and commented on drafts of individual chapters with his customary mix of good humor, patience, and perspicacity, Lynn Higgins, for her well-timed encouragement and indispensable counsel, Larry Kritzman, for his inimitable friendship and collegiality, as well as for the 2007 summer institute at Dartmouth that helped to mold me—like scores of scholars before and after— into the thinker and reader I am today, David LaGuardia, Scott Sanders, Andrea Tarnowski, Roxana Verona, Keith Walker, from whose enthusiastic readiness to converse about nineteenth-century French poetry at a moment’s notice I have so viii Acknowledgments regularly benefited, Kathleen Wine, Nancy Canepa, Laurence Hooper, Graziella Parati, and Dean Barbara Will. Special thanks are due to the two anonymous readers for Oxford whose incisive critiques, helpful prodding, and percipient recommendations proved invaluable in guiding and strengthening the book’s arguments and focus, as well as to Jacqueline Norton for her vital and impeccable editorial advocacy in bringing this project to fruition. Parts or preliminary versions of Chapters 2 and 5 have appeared previously in the Romanic Review, 104, nos. 1–2 (January–March 2013) [Copyright: Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York], Parade sauvage 25 (Classiques Garnier, 2015), and in a collection entitled Poets and Readers in Nineteenth-Century France: Critical Reflections (IMLR, 2015). They appear here by permission of the publishers. Translations and excerpts from Wallace Fowlie’s Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters: A Bilingual Edition are used with the kind permission of the University of Chicago Press. Henri Fantin-Latour’s (two) Coin de table are repro- duced with permission from Art Resource. Steven Monte’s translation of Hugo’s “Souvenir de la nuit du 4” is partially reprinted here with permission from Taylor and Francis. Appropriately enough for a book that is largely about the sorts of relations that poetry makes legible (or that make poetry readable, interpretable), I owe a consid- erable debt to Ross Chambers, who first encouraged me to write this book some five years ago and then continued strategically and tenderly to nudge it along all the way. (“Be brave and be strong” were words he would sign off on when the pro- ject seemed to hit one of any number of impasses on its way to publication.) Ross Chambers was more than a universally admired scholar, a reader with a mind as luminescent and as swift as a comet leaving in its wake a body of work which trans- formed the fields of nineteenth-century French studies, comparative literature, literary theory, and cultural studies. He was a profoundly kind and generous per- son, one whose presence will be grievously missed by multitudes of scholars and students, young and old. And though it pains me that he will not hold this book in his hands, it is my hope that some infinitesimal yet material trace of his ideas lingers in its pages, causing trouble—or occasions for pleasure—here and there. I dedicate this book to his fond and cherished memory, and to Arthur for all that is to come. Contents List of Illustrations xi Introduction 1 1. (Departures). Natural Bodies: (Eco)Poetics and the Politics of the Aesthetic: “Sensation” 26 2. (Diagnostic). Impoverished Bodies: “Les Effarés” and the Misery of the Nineteenth-Century Lyric 72 3. (Prognosis). Happy Bodies, Happy Hours: “Au Cabaret-vert, cinq heures du soir” 123 4. (Anamnesis). Revolting Bodies: “Le Forgeron” and the Poetry of the Past 165 5. (Conclusion). Other Bodies: Rimbaud, Verlaine, and L’Idole—Le Sonnet du trou du cul 209 Selected Bibliography 249 Index 265 General Index 266

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Bodies abound in Rimbaud's poetry in a way that is nearly unprecedented in the nineteenth-century poetic canon: lazy, creative, rule-breaking bodies, queer bodies, marginalized and impoverished bodies, revolting and revolutionary, historical bodies. The question that Poetry, Politics, and the Body s
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