Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions; How to Do Things with Fictions discusses a series of texts (by Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Mark) that function as training-grounds for the mental capacities.
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun), composition by Claude Debussy, inspired by Mallarmé's poem
In his arrangements for voices, he used text freely, for example a combination of a French poem by Rilke with poetry by Mallarmé in his arrangement of Debussy's prelude for piano Des pas sur la neige.
In making this argument he was drawing on the early work of Julia Kristeva who also found such subversion of meaning in French poets such as Mallarmé and Lautréamont.
In Joyce's Ulysses, the librarian Richard Best says, "Mallarmé, don't you know, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris" (9.112).