Christian R. Gelder – författare

From large-scale quantitative studies in the digital humanities to AI-generated poetry, scientific reading seemingly reigns supreme. However, these reading practices preceded, and often shaped, modern literary criticism and the rise of close reading. The Search for a Science of Verse restores this history, tracing the unruly and deeply political attempts to fashion a scientific account of poetry from 1880 onwards. It also investigates a set of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who thought about how their verse offers a form of knowledge not reducible to scientific explanation. It gives an account of the singularity of poetic thinking in their work, which actualises instances of meaning-making that prioritise the singular over the rule-governed. The Search for a Science of Verse is thus a historical inquiry into how techno-scientific reason sought to exert its full domination over the poetic imagination-and how that imagination, in turn, responded.

From the post-War writings of Sartre and Blanchot to the post-structuralism of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva, French philosophers have consistently debated the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, almost as a rite of passage. Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner and Jacques Rancière — three of the most important philosophers alive today — are no exception, having written extensively about the poet since the 1960’s and 70’s up until today. This book contains a series of interviews with these three figures on Mallarmé, as well as an extended introduction that places their thought on literature into dialogue. Speaking about their personal and philosophical relationships with each other, on methods of reading, on poetry and politics, and poetry and mathematics, each philosopher reflects on their life-long engagement with Mallarmé, as well as on the different, often incommensurable, images of the poet their philosophies have generated. As Rancière, Milner and Badiou point to the past importance and future directions Mallarmé gives to thought, these interviews lend credence to Barthes’ remark that “all we can do is repeat Mallarmé – and it is good that we do so”.