Thinking Poetry

Joseph Acquisto is an associate professor of French at the Univeristy of Vermont.

• Introduction; J.Acquisto Baudelaire through Kierkegaard: Art, Fallibility, and Faith; E.Kaplan Passages through Baudelaire – from Poetry to Thought and Back; C.Witt Otherwise than Being: Levinassian Ethics in Victor Hugo's 'La Force des Choses,'; B.Stephens 'Je est un autre': Identity, Alterity, and Drug Use in Baudelaire and DeQuincey; A.Toumayan 'Poésie-boucherie': Baudelaire's Aesthetics and Ethics of Execution; E.Morisi Absolutely Absolute: Mallarmé, Blanchot, and the Absence de livre; J.McKeane Blank Phenomenality; C.Chi-ah Lyu Mallarmé's Tragico-Poetic Modernism; E.F.de Rosnay Mallarmé and the Ontologization of the Poem; D.N.Smith Poetic Form and the Crisis of Community: Revisiting Rancière's Aesthetics; A.James Baudelaire with Badiou: Event and Subjectivity in 'L'Héautontimorouménos,'; J.Acquisto 'Mesure parfaite et réinventée': Edouard Glissant Reinvents 19th-century French Poetry; H.Azerad

"Evocative and weighty, this is not so much a book about poetry for philosophers as it is a book about philosophy for readers well acquainted with canonical French poetry." - CHOICE"Acquisto's very useful collection helps us better appreciate the precedents behind a form of analysis that gave rise to what structuralists and poststructuralists called 'reader-response' criticism. Such criticism invites, indeed forces, readers of modern poems, including their authors, to think long and hard both about what they express as well as what they do." - Nineteenth-Century French Studies