Though his dance criticism constitutes no more than a few pages, the nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé has come to be considered an important dance theorist. His dance essays set forth a complex and original view of dance as a poetry of the body and prefigure contemporary efforts to study dance as a system of signs. Mallarmé's prose style is, however, notoriously obscure and resistant to translation. Thus despite the power and beauty of their literary expression, his ideas on dance remain largely inaccessible without critical examination. Through a close reading and translation of several of his key passages on dance, this essay will seek to clarify his theory of the aesthetico-metaphysical function of dance and his concept of its relationship to his own art, poetry.
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