Thesis (PhD)--Macquarie University, Faculty of Arts, Department of Media, Music, and Cultural Studies, 2009. / Bibliography: p. 303-332.

Pour saisir l’importance et le champ d’action du hasard dans la poésie mallarméenne, nous allons procéder selon une démarche triple, recomposer l’histoire politique, poétique et philosophique qui a rendu possible l’apparition et l’instauration du hasard comme événement, à la fois révolutionnaire, créateur et conceptuel. À partir de Baudelaire, la poésie chante les révolutions échouées, mais pour maintenir vivant le désir d’un monde différent. Le hasard dans ce contexte est d’abord l’irruption imprévisible, fulgurante et éphémère d’un désir qui ne trouve pas un espace propre à l’intérieur de la vie sociale, Pour maintenir vivant et vivace le rêve d’un monde différent, la poésie doit : fournir la preuve que son action, tout en étant restreinte, compte ; faire durer un hasard voué à l’évanouissement, en constituant un espace où il puisse demeurer, se multiplier et ainsi retrouver la consistance qui le fera durer. Faire durer le hasard à l’origine de toute nouveauté, c’est la tâche que Mallarmé attribue à sa poésie. Sur le plan philosophique, cette démarche requiert une critique radicale de la raison et de la représentation. Dans ce contexte, Mallarmé a non seulement annoncé le hasard, mais il a cherché à découvrir la logique de ce qui échappe à la raison en composant une oeuvre capable de rendre réel, visible et intelligible, la puissance imprévisible et inépuisable que le hasard enserre. / The purpose of this work is to comprehend the importance and scope of chance in the poetry of Mallarmé. In order to do that, we will proceed according to a three-pronged approach; recompose the political, poetic and philosophical context that made possible the emergence and establishment of chance as an event both revolutionary, creative and conceptual. Since Baudelaire, poetry sings the failed revolutions, but willing to preserve the desire for a different world. Chance in this context is the unpredictable bursts, lightning and transient of a desire that can not find its place within the social life, to keep alive and vivid the dream of a different world, poetry must: provide evidence that its action, even restricted, counts; make last chance doomed to fade, constituting a space where it can remain, multiply itself and thus find the consistency to remain. Prolonging a contingency that creates novelty is the task that Mallarmé attributes to his poetry. Philosophically, this approach requires a radical critique of reason and representation. In this context, Mallarmé has not only announced chance, but he sought to discover the logic of what escapes from reason composing a work capable of making real, visible and intelligible, the unpredictable and inexhaustible power that chance grips.

Si de nombreuses études ont envisagé l’importance décisive de l’œuvre de Mallarmé dans la modernité littéraire, poétique et artistique, plus rares sont celles qui se sont attachées aux lectures que les poètes ont pu donner d’elle. Or, il apparaît que, pour beaucoup de poètes après 1945, écrire n’a pas lieu sans que Mallarmé n’y soit présent, à titre d’objet de réflexion sur la poésie et le langage et, plus largement, comme un interlocuteur avec lequel l’écriture chemine et s’invente. L’étude s’articule principalement autour de quatre œuvres qui posent, avec acuité et parfois même gravité, la question de la poésie : Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Deguy, Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Henri Meschonnic. Il s’agira de faire dialoguer les points de vue et de parcourir les discours poétiques sur et avec Mallarmé. Et notre but est de montrer que l’œuvre de l’auteur d’un « Tombeau d’Edgar Poe » parle aussi bien pour elle-même que pour notre temps. Nous serons pour cela attentif à l’idée selon laquelle une œuvre est elle-même parce qu’elle est vécue à travers l’expérience de ses lecteurs. / While many studies have considered the decisive importance of Mallarme's work in literary, poetic and artistic modernity, those who have attached themselves to the readings that poets have given of it are rarer. But it appears that, for many poets after 1945, writing is not done without Mallarme being present, as an object of reflection on poetry and language and, more broadly, as an interlocutor with which the act of writing makes its own way and invents itself. The study focuses mainly on four works that pose, with acuity and sometimes even gravity and deepness, the question of poetry: Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Deguy, Jean-Michel Maulpoix, Henri Meschonnic. It is about making dialogue the points of view and going through the poetic discourses on and with Mallarme’s work. And our goal is to show that the work of the author of "Tomb of Edgar Poe" speaks as well for itself as for our present. For that, we will be attentive to the idea that a work is itself because it is lived through the experience of its readers.

This dissertation offers the first extended study of the work of the Welsh-French poet Heather Dohollau, whose substantial œuvre in French, published since 1974, has recently received international critical recognition. My thesis centres on the idea of traversée, which originates in Dohollau’s experience of exiles, returns and bilingualism. My chapters elucidate five interconnected themes which all relate to that overarching paradigm. Chapter 1 focuses on Dohollau’s trajectories as reflected in poems on the memory of place, concentrating on South Wales and the island. The quest for place is also a quest for the past, which is handled as an after-image capable of upwelling into the present. Chapter 2 investigates the visual-verbal bilingualism towards which Dohollau’s texts on specific artworks (or ekphrastic texts) seem to strive. Dohollau revitalizes the ekphrastic tradition and challenges its conventional connotations of power struggle (W. J. T. Mitchell) in favour of a poetics of hospitality. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Dohollau’s ethos and practice of slowness. It undertakes a close-reading analysis of her syntactic and sound-related rhythms, connecting them with Derrida’s différance. The idea of poetry as a foreign language is discussed in chapter 4: Dohollau’s adoption of French as her main poetic language in the mid-1960s, her handling of motherhood and daughterhood, and her quest for a poetics of mourning and fidelity are examined in their interrelations. The concluding chapter explores the boundaries between language and the unsaid. Dohollau has been uniquely placed to engage with postwar reassessments of language and its limits (Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot), poised as she is between languages and media. As her poems show, such limits constitute a poetic resource in their own right. Her carefully cultivated liminal stance has given her important insights into the creative process as a passage into words from an unwritten, yet not utterly inchoate other of the poem.