Books, Fans, and Mallarmé's Butterfly

In this introduction to part three of the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur,” the journal’s editor argues that blur is not a medium of concealment, confusion, or evasion. Making distinctions between kinds of relative unclarity (for instance, haze, wool, and fudge), he reserves the word blur for the kind that results from de-differentiating objects or qualities or states of affairs whose differences have been overstated. To refine what blur is and is not, he compares kinds of unclarity found in images by Giotto, Rubens, Hokusai, Kunitora, Manet, Zeshin, and Richter. With reference to art criticism by Hubert Damisch, Wayne Andersen, Anthony Hughes, Robert Storr, Julian Bell, Christopher Prendergast, and especially T. J. Clark, he agrees that choosing between focus and blur can be a moral decision, though not in the sense for which Clark arraigns the Impressionists. Characterizing the way of seeing that Clark encourages in The Painting of Modern Life as a form of staring, this essay argues that “lean and hungry looking” is indecent, whereas unfocused receptivity is irenic. What Bell calls the “aestheticized halfheartedness” of Manet is redescribed here as a genre of moral heroism, and the essay concludes that it is differentiation (rather than de-differentiation and lack of moral focus) that is on morally shaky ground.

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Re-Orienting the fête galante in Mallarmé’s éventails

Edgington¹

2015

ncf

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This article situates Mallarmé’s éventails within the fête galante tradition pioneered by Watteau and identifies a link between the neo-rococo and japoniste aesthetics in these poems. It begins by identifying the folding fan’s unique position at the boundary of the two styles within a discussion of Mallarmé’s fashion writing in La Dernière Mode . It moves on to consider in detail a number of the shorter, little-studied éventails of the Vers de circonstance focusing on the ways in which they engage with both aesthetics via neo-rococo textual imagery and japoniste paratextual imagery before concluding with a brief comparison of Mallarmé’s éventails with Verlaine’s Fêtes galantes that underlines the novelty of Mallarmé’s approach to the genre. Throughout, it references the rich visual tradition of the fête galante including some of Watteau’s painted works as well as some of the fans upon which Mallarmé inscribed his verse.

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Books, Fans, and Mallarmé's Butterfly

Cited by 3 publications

References 4 publications

Octave Uzanne’s L’Éventail: A Literary Mythology of the Fan

Octave Uzanne’s L’Éventail: A Literary Mythology of the Fan

Introduction: de-Differentiation

Re-Orienting the fête galante in Mallarmé’s éventails

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