Gérard de Nerval Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John W. Kneller

Critical Essay by John W. Kneller

SOURCE: "Nerval's 'Artémis'," in Textual Analysis: Some Readers Reading, edited by Mary Ann Caws, The Modern Language Association of America, 1986, pp. 26-32.

In the following essay, Kneller studies the language, imagery, and literary devices used in "Artémis" and asserts that Nerval's poem is "the most ambitious, the most carefully elaborated, and the most beautiful of this great poet's writings."

The approaches to Les chimères of Gèrard de Nerval have followed rather than anticipated the successive stages of literary criticism in France, Great Britian, and the United States. In brief, they have been extrinsic, intrinsic, and structural. For current purposes, extrinsic method will be synonymous with projection; intrinsic procedure will also go by the name of explication or commentary; and structural system will include not only structuralism but also semiotics and theories of reading.

After the thunderous silence of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Lansonian literary historians, who hardly mentioned...
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