ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers social space of communication, rendered by the topos of the lieu commun. For poetry the 'fundamental social contradiction' which Marin makes a defining principle of myth could be argued to be the question of the sociability of the written as such, that is, of poetic utterance as a maximally transitive instance of language. The book explores referential space, ordered here around the topos of the haut lieu. It then demonstrates the maintenance within decline of the haut lieu in the Utopian logic of poetic experience. The book deals with the question of a 'textual' space and the poetic imagination of its practice as spatial in a manner specific to the text as non-lieu. There are a number of levels to the spatial analysis as it relates to the poetic text.
