Greg Kerr

Dream Cities: Utopia and Prose by Poets in Nineteenth-Century France

To a backdrop of dizzying urbanization, French utopian thinkers of the nineteenth century set out to explore the transformative possibilities of the modern metropolis. Linking literary analyses with diverse strands of cultural and intellectual history, this study considers how the utopian vision of the city in turn came to impinge on prose writing by poets: in Saint-Simonian literature, and in texts by Theophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. At points steeped in the hyperbolic rhetoric of utopian projects, these texts nonetheless wear away at the internal coherence of that rhetoric and the idealizing meanings it supports. What emerges from Greg Kerr’s analysis is a hitherto unfamiliar dimension of these writings, revealing the alertness of some of the greatest exponents of nineteenth-century poetry to the dynamic possibilities of utopian writing, and suggesting new ways to understand the evolution of poetic discourse across the century.

'Travail d’abolition': illness and statelessness in Armen Lubin

This article explores the poetry of Chahnour Kerestedjian (1903–74), an Istanbul-born writer and member of the Armenian diaspora, who emigrated to France in 1922 following the Armenian Genocide, and in whose French-language poet-persona, Armen Lubin, the horizons of writer, invalid and stateless person come to intersect. Consigned by chronic tuberculosis of the bones to a lengthy cycle of sojourns in French hospitals and sanatoria, Lubins poor health rendered him unfit for military service, thereby obstructing his attempts to secure naturalization in France. Eliciting an underlying connection between the medical and juridical domains in Lubins poetry and prose, the article shows how this poet-patient produced a body of work which inflects the condition of statelessness with a lingering opacity and ironic deflation, and which does so in a language which figures, and deflects, those disciplinary logics of which the stateless individual finds himself the object.

Utopia and iconicity: reading Saint-Simonian texts

Abstract In his study of Thomas More’s Utopia, Louis Marin identifies a productive discontinuity peculiar to that work. The discontinuity arises from the tension between, on the one hand, the textual objective of delimiting the complex social reality of the egalitarian island state within a given conceptual language and, on the other, the capacity of the reader of More’s work to visualize mentally the referential content of that language in the form of an iconic representation, as a map of the island. This article develops the tension identified by Marin between discourse and iconicity by reference to some examples of texts by members of the Saint-Simonian movement, one of the chief currents of ‘utopian’ socialism in nineteenth-century France. While Marin’s analysis is based on a cartographic conception of the utopian text’s iconic elements, however, this article argues that in Saint-Simonian discourse, the iconic function is not supplied by a real or imagined map, but transfers instead to the opaque (typo)graphic support of that discourse. Shapes and patterns are produced by the graphic disposition of signifiers across the page that are surplus to their tacit referential function, but which point to something that Saint-Simonian doctrine cannot yet affirm via the conceptual antithesis of ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ which underpins it.