Abstract

Staging of Language is a reassessment of Mallarmé's poetics that demonstrates how Mallarmé and Artaud redefine the traditional frontiers of the arts and literature. Focusing on the relation Mallarmé establishes between language, sketches, musicality and virtual theater, Dominique Fisher reveals a new Mallarmé whose poetics cannot be defined simply within the framework of blanks and silence. She demonstrates how Mallarmé's quest for non-verbal modes of representation of poetic language initiates a definite revolution in the treatment of poetry and theater in the modern period. Her analysis of Artaud's language of signs adds new dimensions to his search for a poetic construction of space. The book also presents central statements about the evolution of poetics and semiology.