This article demonstrates how the production of fantastic imagery in Les Chants de Maldoror is often accompanied by the most salient auditory elements of this poem. Through close analysis of the poet‘s exotic “menagerie,” in particular, we observe how dense and jarring phonetic textures contribute to the reader‘s sense of encounter with a strange and menacing reality. If such manipulation of language does help to amplify effects produced on the visual, figural plane of the text however, this study concludes that the author is ultimately unable to control the proliferation of linguistic matter initiated in the process of composition, thus ensuring the legacy of excess, as well as force, of this seminal text.
Author Biography
Scott Shinabargar
Scott Shinabargar received his Ph.D. in French from Emory University and is a Professor and Chair of the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Winthrop University. His scholarship focuses on 19th- and 20th-century French poetry, and his interests include: the role of violence in modern aesthetics, the rhetoric of literary movements, and explorations of expressivity in poetic language—in particular, phonetic structures and their articulation. He has published on the work of Breton, Char, Michaux, and Jaccottet, among others, in journals such as Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, French Forum, Dalhousie French Studies, and Symposium. He has edited a special issue of La Revue des Sciences Humaines on the French poetic tradition, Résonance : l‘accord du poème, and recently published a book entitled The Revolting Body of Poetry (Leiden: BRILL | Rodopi, 2016).
