Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The critical formation: science, formalism, and aesthetic contemplation
- Part II Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- A Critical works of Charles Mauron referred to in this study
- B Translations by Charles Mauron
- C Published poetry and prose of Charles Mauron
- D Works of Sigmund Freud referred to in this study
- Notes
- Index
C - Published poetry and prose of Charles Mauron
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I The critical formation: science, formalism, and aesthetic contemplation
- Part II Psychoanalysis and literary criticism
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- A Critical works of Charles Mauron referred to in this study
- B Translations by Charles Mauron
- C Published poetry and prose of Charles Mauron
- D Works of Sigmund Freud referred to in this study
- Notes
- Index
Summary
MAURON'S PUBLISHED literary writings date mostly from his early prcpsychocritique period. Like Mallarmé and others of the symbolists, and no doubt because of them, Mauron was first drawn to the prose poem as a form. He did try his hand at a kind of short-story format, but perhaps the response of Roger Fry, his friend, translator, and promoter, had something to do with his turning back to the accepted and more personally congenial form of the prose poem. Fry wrote to Charles and Marie Mauron:
Charles' story has great literary qualities and I must re-read it several times to get all the flavour of it, but at the first glance I am not very sure that the idea and the form are perfectly matched. Basically it's a poem rather than a story, and I imagine that perhaps the essentials would come out with greater clarity in a more concentrated, more elliptical, form where one would have to guess the events. In fact, there are no happenings: it's a succession of states of mind and everything related only serves to indicate these states of mind.
Perhaps Fry had a similar response to the work of Virginia Woolf, who felt it was precisely the duty of fiction to present such states of mind, but, in any event, Mauron did take his advice and turn to more elliptical and concentrated forms, collecting them together in a 1930 volume.
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- Information
- Formalism and the Freudian AestheticThe Example of Charles Mauron, pp. 211 - 213Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1984