The controversial French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan frequently invoked Mallarmé, and what many took to be the obscurantist style of the former was attributed in no small part to the latter’s influence. Mallarmé was a favorite of both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, whose own stylistic achievements compared favorably with his. Mallarmé’s firm belief in the self-sufficiency and self-referentiality of literary language, to which his own eccentric, stylistically innovative poetry and prose attested, came to fruition most dramatically in the structuralism and poststructuralism of the 1960s and 1970s in France. The great French poet’s notoriously refined aestheticism and fervent devotion to language led him to expound a view of literature and literary meaning that profoundly influenced the modernist avant-garde from Symbolism through surrealism and on into postmodern cultural theory. It is no accident that references to the literary ideas and example of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) abound in contemporary literary criticism and theory.
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