Introduction
by
Bernard McGuirk
Literary criticism as such can perhaps be
called the art of rereading.
Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference
In introducing a volume of essays on modem French poetry, the question
of where to begin was neither difficult nor, indeed, susceptible to an original answer.
For the figures OfBaudelaire and Mallarme seem no less influential now than they did
to Barbara Johnson, fifteen years ago, when she focussed on them, memorably, in The
Critical Difference, alongside her analyses OfBarthes and Balzac, Melville, Poe, Lacan
and Derrida, to remind us that 'difference and reading [... ] function as two unknowns
in a textual equation where Unresolvability is matched only by its ability to engender
more textuality?'.*
It was shortly after the appearance of Johnson’s seminal rereadings that the
editors of the present collection began to teach a course which, nominally on modem
French poetry, from the start emphasized methodologies of literary criticism and
theories of reading. About the same time, in the ∞ntext of the newly established
Postgraduate Sch∞l of Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham, a series of
critical studies began to appear, each underpinned by the notion that, in criticism, to
write is to rewrite and that redirections at once seek new trajectories and derive from
prior movements. Literary Theory at Work (1987) and Literary Theory and Poetry:
Extending the Canon (1989), with the Batsford Academic Press, and Theorizing
Modernism (1993) and Redirections in Critical Theory (1994), with Routledge, have
all been edited recently by members of the School, in the spirit of re-examining those
philosophical and literary critical dis∞urses which, ever more deprived of their
stabilizing functions amidst the multiplicities of a plural theoretical age, have
nevertheless returned to many of the texts, the terms, the insights and the inspirations
which make of criticism an activity which ever reconstructs.
Though analysis of modem French poetry featured strongly in two of the
volumes mentioned above (Mallarme and Apollinaire) and, more exclusively, in the
first Special Issue of Nottingham French Studies (1989), devoted to new readings of
the poetry OfPierre Reverdy, it is only with the present volume that a more ambitious