L'Enfant Peuple: Rimbaud, Valles, Literary Politics, and the Legacy of the Commune

This thesis proposes a model of reading Arthur Rimbaud's early poems in verse and Jules Valles's novels at the intersections of cultural historiography and contemporary continental political theory and philosophy, from Michel Foucault to Jacques Ranciere, in order to argue that they represent and deploy a revolutionary literary politics capable of giving voice to a subject theorized as the "infans".