(Mis)reading music: Rewriting French symbolist poetry (Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Rene Ghil, Jean Royere)

This dissertation interrogates the origin, development, and demise of French symbolism, using poets' conceptions of music as a point of departure. Rather than focusing on “musicality” in verse or the attempt to rival Wagnerian synesthesia, I address the consequences of choosing music, a nonsemantic signifying system, as a site of dialogue with poetry, the most intensely semantic of signifying practices. I argue that music functions as an unassimilable “other” against which the symbolists crafted a new poetics, and that music gradually disappears from early twentieth-century poetic discourse as the symbolists transform music into questions of intertextuality, performativity, and especially cultural memory. I focus both on major figures Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé and on two neglected figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, René Ghil and Jean Royère. Each of these poets questions the role of the lyric in the modern world through an ever-shifting set of intertexts and cultural arts and therefore closer to an ideal of esthetic purity, music ultimately permits symbolist poetry to surpass romantic conceptions of the ideal. This results not in the devaluation of poetic production but in its revitalization based on a new value assigned to the concrete performativity of the poetic text.; The development of the symbolist movement, traditionally described as concerned with nothing beyond art and beauty, is intimately tied up with both intertextual and extra-textual influences, including even the crudest of twentieth-century political movements. Ironically, it is through engagement with music, supposedly the textual and cultural transformations accomplished by the symbolist tradition. By extension, these poets' own rethinking of poetics is an occasion for present-day critics to reexamine assumptions, not only about the intersections of music and poetry, but also about the role that the esthetic implicitly plays in the creation, preservation, or reshaping of cultural memory.