French Literature Reviews - 2026

V. Elfakir, Le Ravissement de la langue : la question du poète
Poetry and Poetics

Véronique Elfakir, Le Ravissement de la langue : la question du poète

L'Harmattan, "Literary Critics" series, 2008

EAN : 9782296054257

13 €

Publisher's description:

The poet is the ecstatic or sometimes captive witness of a language opening up to the abyss of the sign. Poetry plays with meaning and shares with the unconscious the fact that it abides in a literality that transcends any notion of pre-established knowledge. The poet acts as a messenger of an untranslatable Real, like a tightrope stretched between two shores: between the visible and the invisible, the momentary and the eternal, unity and diversity. The vertigo of this duality, which no resolution ever softens, pushes language to the very limits of representation. Amidst the deafening silence of signification, the poem dreams of being otherwise: music, painting, ideogram, and seems to yearn to dissolve into its opposite. The space of the poem is therefore one of irreducible alterity that bears the mark of its own division like a tear. It is this ever-singular dimension of poetic speech that is explored here through the works of V. Segalen, H. Michaux, F. Hölderlin, R. M. Rilke, E. Jabès, E. Dickinson, and S. Plath.

Véronique Elfakir explores the question of the poet and poetic speech through close engagement with authors such as Victor Segalen, Henri Michaux, Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke, Edmond Jabès, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath. Readers interested in modern poetry, literary theory, and the philosophy of language may find this volume relevant to their pursuits in understanding the singular dimensions of poetic speech across diverse linguistic and cultural traditions.