What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st- Century French Literature and Thought

This volume explores the formal properties of literary texts and the agency of form in French and Francophone writing, addressing questions about how cultural forms create semiotic environments and engage with external realities. It offers new perspectives on a wide range of creative figures, renewing the engagement with form that has been a key feature of French cultural production and analysis.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 342 pages
Publication date: 01 September 2022
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

This comprehensive volume delves into profound inquiries concerning the formal characteristics of literary texts and the agency of form. A notable aspect of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French and Francophone writing has been the exploration of how cultural forms, including literature, philosophy, and visual art, establish distinct semiotic environments while also engaging deeply with external realities. The central question revolves around how form serves as a conduit between the text's environment and the broader world beyond. What innovative formal approaches have authors devised in response to the intricate complexities of that world? How do the formal properties of texts shape our interpretation and perhaps even our perception of the real? By addressing these critical questions in relation to a diverse range of texts, encompassing novels, life writing, essays, travel writing, poetry, and textual/visual experiments, the chapters in this volume present fresh perspectives on a wide array of creative figures, including Proust, Picasso, Breton, Bataille, Ponge, Guillevic, Certeau, Camus, Barthes, Perec, Roubaud, Chauvet, Savitzkaya, Eribon, Ernaux, Laurens, and Akerman. Together, they revitalize the ongoing engagement with form that has been a defining feature of French cultural production and scholarly analysis in French studies.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781802077407