The Sunset And The End Of Art PDF Download

This thesis aims to show why and how the text of Stephane Mallarme opened itself to the radical readings undertaken by Maurice Blanchot and then Jacques Derrida in the second half of the 20th-Century. Through analysis of Mallarme's 'crisis' period of the mid to late 1860s, the thesis shows why his text could later be taken as a key reference in the criticism of the Hegelian dialectic developed in the work of Blanchot and Derrida. After a first chapter looking at the art-historical schema developed in Hegel's Aesthetics, I go on to argue in Chapter 2 that as Mallarme develops his understanding of the auvre pure, through his work on Herodiade, he conceives a poetic absolute which coordinates perfectly with the dissolution of the artwork in the poetic form as envisaged by Hegel. I am able to do this by mapping Mallarme's own comments on the history of art, and his place in that history, onto the Hegelian schema analysed in the first chapter. In Chapter 3 I give a reading of Mallarme's Sonnet allegorique de lui-meme in which I argue that the work's achievement of perfect reflexivity is irreducibly ambiguous. On the one hand, this poem is seen to be the achievement of the poetic absolute as it 'fixes' the infinite in a completely self-sufficient work. On the other hand, I argue that this achievement is essentially impossible; a revelation that can only occur in the same instant as the apotheosis of the poetic absolute. I argue that the sunset is the 'motif of this ambiguity in Mallarme's work which, I go on to argue in Chapters 4 and 5, closes down the epoch of the 'Livre' and opens up the space of 'litterature'. In work published in the late 1960s, both Blanchot and Derrida situate Mallarme as a transitional writer whose work marks out the closure of the 'Livre' and the opening of a radically different kind of writing which they call 'literary'.