News on Campus

REMEMBERING MALLARMÉ

obert Greer Cohn, professor emeritus of French, wants the world to mark the centenary of the death of poet Stéphane Mallarmé on Sept. 9, 1898.

Celebrations began in 1996 with "A Mallarmé Festival'' on the Farm. They climax this fall with events from Paris
to Philadelphia.

"Most readers know of Mallarmé as the leader of the Symbolist movement and the author of 'The Afternoon of a Faun,' which powerfully influenced modern music through Debussy," Cohn, who is acknowledged as the world authority on the French author, has written. "They also may be aware of his friendship and kinship with major Impressionists . . . and of his influence on all sorts of moderns, from Proust and Valéry to Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Faulkner, Picasso, Apollinaire, Matisse and Boulez." But Cohn thinks that the public is less likely to know that practically all the major critics of our time have assigned Mallarmé a central role in the formation of the 20th-century mindset altogether.

"Like the Impressionists, he eliminated all but light, essential touches and vibrant suggestions from his pages," Cohn says.

Although Mallarmé's mature work, like that of Joyce, is intricate and difficult, the early poems are widely known and anthologized. Also like Joyce, he has a devoted following of readers. Cohn's publications include L'Oeuvre de Mallarmé: Un Coup de dés and Toward the Poems of Mallarmé .

For more information on the Mallarmé Centennial contact Cohn at 650-323-7983.

Mallarmé (Plain text)

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