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Lunn-Rockliffe, Katherine. Tristan Corbière and the Poetics of Irony. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. viii + 236 pp. £50. ISBN 0–19–929588–3, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 3, JULY 2007, Pages 322–323, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm032
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Extract
This book aims to demonstrate how Corbière's “innovative use of irony contributed to the general revolution in poetic language that marked the 1870s” (p. 1). Although the actual scope of the work is more modest, it nonetheless provides a useful study of the small but dense corpus of Corbière's verse. Chapter One introduces the themes of irony, multiple voices and ludic masks, showing how Corbière problematises literal meaning and introduces ambiguities between the said and the unsaid. The next two chapters deal with depictions of Brittany and Paris respectively: the former reveals how polyphony and fragmented descriptions subvert authoritative, linear discourse with multiple perspectives; the latter explores the self-divisions of the je lyrique and Corbière's ironic reworkings of familiar nineteenth-century visions of the artist as exile, prostitute or bohemian. Next, an analysis of the love poems suggests that Corbière is a poet of “thought-feeling”, of sensations rather than ideas. The book closes with an extended series of close readings of the “Rondels pour après”. Irony is interpreted broadly, “at all levels from verbal trope to view of the world” (p. 6), and if the overall argument at times lacks focus, this allows the author to explore a wide variety of texts.
