What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st- Century French Literature and Thought (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures): 69

Description

This volume responds to important questions about the formal properties of literary texts and the agency of form. A central feature of twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone writing has been the exploration of how cultural forms (literary, philosophical and visual) create distinctive semiotic environments and at the same time engage powerfully with external realities. How does form propose a bridge between the environment of the text and the world beyond? What kinds of formal innovations have authors devised in response to the complexity of that world? How do the formal properties of texts inflect our reading of them, and perhaps also our apprehension of the real? In addressing such questions as they apply to a wide corpus of texts, including the novel, life writing, the essay, travel writing, poetry and textual/visual experiments, the chapters in this volume offer new perspectives on a wide range of creative figures including Proust, Picasso, Breton, Bataille, Ponge, Guillevic, Certeau, Camus, Barthes, Perec, Roubaud, Chauvet, Savitzkaya, Eribon, Ernaux, Laurens and Akerman. Collectively, they renew the engagement with form that has been a key feature of French cultural production and of analysis in French studies. Cover Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st-century French Literature and Thought Part 1: Interrogating Form 1. ‘Fixé par les cris des hirondelles au vol géométrique du désir’ (Picasso, 7 June 1936): Patterns and Permutations in Picasso's Wrting 2. A Gaggle of Geese or Technical Rigour: Re-forming the Novel in 1940s France 3. ‘Faire ceci ou faire cela?’: Barthes and the Choice of Form 4. The Eclipse of Form in Roland Barthes’s La Chambre claire 5. Going on, or Achieving Interruption: Jacques Roubaud's Quelque chose noir Part 2: Form and Life Writing 6. Narratives of Forgetting: Memory and Literary Form 7. The Time of Our Lives: Repetition, Variation and Fragmentation in French Women's Life Wrting 8. Vertical Travel, Listing and the Enumeration of the Everyday 9. Eugène Savitzkaya: Fictional Forms of Remembrance 10. A Voice Takes Form: The Sounds of Autobiography in Louis René des Forêts's Poèmes de Samuel Wood Part 3: Form and Social Experience 11. Circuits of Reappropriation: Accessing the Real in the Work of Didier Eribon 12. Metaphor, Parody and Madness: Two Readings of Marie Chauvet's Folie 13. Aesthetic Form and Social ‘Form’ in À la recherche du temps perdu: Proust on Taste 14. ‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’: Proust with Bourdieu Part 4: Forms and Formless: World, Movement, Thought 15. How to Think Like a Plant?: Ponge, Jaccottet, Guillevic 16. Certeau’s Landscapes: What Can Images Do? 17. A la dérive: Drifting in and out of Form in French Literature and Visual Art from Bataille to Bergvall 18. Convulsive Form: Benjamin, Bataille and the Innervated Body 19. Form and Energeia in the Work of Barbara Cassin (For M) Index