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Abstract
This dissertation focuses critical attention on the work of Yves Bonnefoy and Philippe Jaccottet in an effort to define an important trend in contemporary French poetry. I argue that the post-surrealist poetics of Bonnefoy and Jaccottet are informed, and in some cases determined, by their reaction to surrealism. Bonnefoy and Jaccottet concentrate on exactly those aspects of experience which surrealism suppresses--decay, the passage of time, and the ordinary rhythms of daily life.
In the first chapter I describe the evolution of a poetic practice that departs from surrealist writing techniques, and I discuss the early work of Bonnefoy and Jaccottet in relation to the post-World War II climate.
Chapters Two and Three explore Bonnefoy's critique of the surrealist image. Against the aesthetics of Breton and the psychoanalytic thought of Lacan, Bonnefoy outlines a poetics of the broken or bleeding image. However, as my readings of Anti-Platon and Du mouvement et de l'immobilite de Douve demonstrate, poetry can only narrate the rupture of the image through an allegorical reenactment of the moment in which this rupture occurs. The narrative of Douve's metamorphosis is an allegory of the process through which a material world is subjected to verbal expression.
Chapters Four and Five focus on the work of Jaccottet. While Bonnefoy refers to the passage of time through specific images, Jaccottet traces the action of time on the writing process itself. In La Semaison Jaccottet includes all his revisions as signs of the passage of time and its effects on perception. To accommodate the perspective of each succeeding moment, the structure of the poem must be altered; thus, the ruptured forms of Jaccottet's later work allegorize an experience of the passage of time. However, the seductive presence of a female figure in Paysages avec figures absentes is a sign not only of intertextual mediation, but of the recurrence of a surrealist perspective as well. Jaccottet's work dramatizes the difficulty of distinguishing the Imaginary discourse of surrealism from a post-surrealist poetics of the "real."
