Engaging the poetic to expand our imagination of Maghrebi literature in French
Poetry, as the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi describes it, is a form of dissymmetry that exposes readers to the unexpected, and to the possibility of a transformative encounter with the text. Drawing on literary, philosophical, theoretical, and theological texts in multiple languages and scripts, as well as on the visual arts, Thomas C. Connolly delves into the poetic works of Khatibi and six other major Maghrebi authors—Jean Amrouche, Tahar Djaout, Nabile Farès, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Jean Sénac—as well as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, to think anew about the origins and legacy of Francophone poetry in the Maghreb. Instead of turning away from the poetic when it becomes indecipherable, A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature engages poetic texts on their own terms, allowing them to dictate the search for meaning, thereby expanding our understanding of what Maghrebi literature in French was, is, and might become.
The story of Paris in the 1930s seems straightforward enough, with the Popular Front movement leading toward the inspiring 1936 election of a leftist coalition government. The socialist victory, which resulted in fundamental improvements in the lives of workers, was then derailed in a precipitous descent that culminated in France's capitulation before the Nazis in June 1940. Yet no matter how minutely recounted, this "straight story" clarifies only the political activity behind which turbulent cultural currents brought about far-reaching changes in everyday life and the way it is represented.
In this book, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. They highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film—technologies that converged with efforts among writers (Gide, Malraux, Céline), artists (Renoir, Dalí), and other intellectuals (Mounier, de Rougemont, Leiris) to respond to the decade's crises.
Their analysis takes them to expositions and music halls, to upscale architecture and fashion sites, to traditional neighborhoods, and to overseas territories, the latter portrayed in metropolitan exhibits and colonial cinema. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.
We assume that words are posted (mailed or, in another sense, positioned) to communicate with others, to bridge distance and “wish you were here.” But Vincent Kaufmann discovers in his chosen letter writers the urgency not to communicate, to keep their correspondents away and, as it were, posted. The writer avoids real-life dialogue by way of letters, which then become proving grounds for the work to come. Whatever their intellectual, biographical, or aesthetic value—compare Flaubert’s passionate dogmatizing to Baudelaire’s peevish nagging for money—letters teach writers how to appreciate the sound of their own voice and how to make a workable literary space. Distance gives the relentless letter writer the chance to become a writer. Kaufmann, with Lacan, says that what characterizes the literary text is the ability to get beyond a particular other to address the Other, which must be no one in particular.
Kaufmann features several European writers, all of them avidly concerned about the destination of speech when it passes into writing. Among them: Kafka, obsessions spilling over, adoring his fiancee for her emptiness; Proust, master of suffering, with his interminable health bulletins, cancellations, and condolences; Flaubert, an extraordinary letter writer, abandoning his mistress for the more seductive Emma Bovary; Baudelaire, determined in squalor, writing letters almost exclusively about his debts, as if to practice the art of escape and defiance; Mallarmé, patron saint of littérateurs, whose vaunted Book disappears into salons and letters; Artaud, speaker in tongues, who wildly searched for authenticity through letters.
Unending attention has been devoted to these important writers, but they seem new again when viewed in Kaufmann’s epistolary mirror. What they share is a taste, or need, for distance and perversion; we see them becoming “inhuman” in order to textualize their lives. They are all modernists, and the definition of Modernism is thereby deepened. This book—rich in anecdote and humor—escorts literary theory into the no-man’s-land stretching between the life and the word.
Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time. In Proust among the Nations, she takes the development of her thought on this crisis a stage further, revealing it as a distinctly Western problem.
Marcel Proust’s multivolume masterpiece, À la recherche du temps perdu, began to appear in 1913. Over the next fifty years, it gained a reputation as one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century. But the novel’s classic image as a completed work was later shattered by the discovery of unpublished drafts, and the “war of the Prousts” has kept scholars arguing over its definitive form ever since.
Christine M. Cano’s Proust’s Deadline presents a concise history of the publishing and reception of À la recherche du temps perdu, and sorts out the most important issues that have arisen from the ensuing debates about the text. She ultimately shows how this quintessential “book about time” tells another story about time’s passage: the story of Proust’s mortal confrontation with the temporality of writing, publishing, and reading.
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