The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self

'The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self is one of the best pieces of scholarship on modernist poetry to have been written in the last twenty years. Susan Harrow offers thorough, fascinating, and lucid commentary on the representative texts of this poetic tradition, while highlighting concerns - such as the inscription of the body in language - that have a particular resonance in contemporary literary studies. On every page, Harrow offers fascinating and thought-provoking insights into the work of these poets, and in each case, her arguments are original and convincing.' -- John Stout, Comparative Literature Programme, McMaster University 'Susan Harrow's The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self constitutes a serious and valuable contribution to the current scholarship devoted to poetic modernity. This is a fine piece of critical thinking that invites us to rethink in subtle but very important ways the work of the three canonical writers and one, R da, whose crowning is imminent.' -- Michael Bishop, Department of French, Dalhousie University

Probing the activity of textual self-recovery among the debris of history and fantasy, visuality and desire, and culture and corporeality, The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self imparts something of the startling beauty and the raw urgency of poetry writing across the broad modern period.

In The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self, Susan Harrow explores the fascinating interrelation of subjectivity, materiality, and representation in the poetry and related texts of four modern French writers: Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Francis Ponge, and Jacques Réda. She demonstrates the richness and the relevance of modern French poetry for today's readers, putting contemporary thought to work on the fractured self emerging in the post-Baudelairian lyric.

Harrow addresses the widely perceived marginalization of poetry in the writing/theory debate, demonstrating that the emergence of a self at once shaped by and straining against material, historical, subjective, and cultural impediments reveals fertile relations between theory and poetry. Where purer forms of postmodernist thinking have stressed the dissolution and dispersal of the human subject, new approaches informed by cultural studies, autobiography theory, and gender studies work to recover fictions of experience and retrieve submerged narratives of the self. Probing the activity of textual self-recovery among the debris of history and fantasy, visuality and desire, and culture and corporeality, The Material, the Real, and the Fractured Self imparts something of the startling beauty and the raw urgency of poetry writing across the broad modern period.