Search

During World War II in France some poets considered themselves to have a significant social role and became porte-paroles of the oppressed. They took part in hand-to-hand fight, but also with a pencil in hand, raising their voices to declare their faith in freedom and show that their patriotic verses could become a deadly weapon against the Nazi occupation and the suffering of the people. The poets therefore became messengers of peace and hope, and the fighters memorized their poems or distributed them legally or secretly. But it's possible to look at things from a different angle: there were a number of poets who refused any literary engagement, as was the case with the former Surrealists, then there were poets engaged on the side of the Collaboration, and there were those who refused to or even they couldn't publish their works under the Occupation for various reasons: material, moral or other. This paper deals with this topic, which is in fact very large and complex, taking into account the limitations of the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways some of Stéphane Mallarmé's famous sayings - "the world was created to end in a wonderful book", "the blank sheet, best protected by its whiteness", are used in various literary and artistic contexts in the works of some authors referring, directly or indirectly, to this Symbolist poet, either with the idea of praising him or distancing themselves from him (André Malraux, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, André Gide, René Magritte, Michel Butor, Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Gaétan Brulotte). The destiny of these sayings which reflect the attitude to literary and artistic creation as a quest for the absolute but which also expose all the difficulties in the way to such an endeavor, outline the history of French literature and art in their development from Symbolism to Postmodernism: they step away from the concrete object (suppression of emotions in poetry, rejection of the plot and the characters in the novel, domination of the interior over the exterior model in painting), in order to explore their own resources and capacities, which will be in turn also brought into question and reduced to the "zero point." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]