TY - JOUR

T1 - Rhetorics of transformation in Rimbaud's Illuminations.

AU - Kerr, Greg

PY - 2010/4

Y1 - 2010/4

N2 - This article considers the figure of the poet as described in the second of Rimbaud's lettres du voyant as a 'multiplicateur de progrès'. The poetic 'multiplication' to which Rimbaud refers is not intended to reflect a calculated conduct, but to suggest an uncontainable, multidirectional activity that is at variance with the uniform spatio-temporal patterns of 'Progress'. Rimbaud's Illuminations consistently reappropriate, fragment and redeploy a progressive or utopian rhetoric common to many nineteenth-century popular movements and doctrines of social reform. For Rimbaud, this rhetoric of social transformation holds a peculiar potential to solicit an economy of residual energies and the latent forces of the collectivity. It thus serves an important constitutive function in the Rimbaldian prose poem, projecting a highly suggestive vision of physical and social interaction and a miscellany of slogans, catchwords and images of social harmony that Rimbaud fragments and redeploys to catalyze the processes of imaginative ferment.

AB - This article considers the figure of the poet as described in the second of Rimbaud's lettres du voyant as a 'multiplicateur de progrès'. The poetic 'multiplication' to which Rimbaud refers is not intended to reflect a calculated conduct, but to suggest an uncontainable, multidirectional activity that is at variance with the uniform spatio-temporal patterns of 'Progress'. Rimbaud's Illuminations consistently reappropriate, fragment and redeploy a progressive or utopian rhetoric common to many nineteenth-century popular movements and doctrines of social reform. For Rimbaud, this rhetoric of social transformation holds a peculiar potential to solicit an economy of residual energies and the latent forces of the collectivity. It thus serves an important constitutive function in the Rimbaldian prose poem, projecting a highly suggestive vision of physical and social interaction and a miscellany of slogans, catchwords and images of social harmony that Rimbaud fragments and redeploys to catalyze the processes of imaginative ferment.

KW - RHETORIC

KW - RIMBAUD

KW - UTOPIA

KW - ILLUMINATIONS

KW - PROGRESS

KW - TRANSFORMATION

KW - SAINT-SIMONIAN

KW - PROSE POEM

U2 - 10.1179/147873110X12669226709990

DO - 10.1179/147873110X12669226709990

M3 - Journal article

VL - 14

SP - 20

EP - 32

JO - Dix-Neuf

JF - Dix-Neuf

SN - 1478-7318

IS - 1

ER -