Dominique Viart

Literature and Criticism: Taking Stock

In the U.S. as well as abroad, Jonathan Culler has long been a practitioner and representative of literary criticism, more particularly of “theory.” In fact, he played a significant role in the transmission of “French theory” to American campuses, and witnessed both the enthusiasm it inspired and, sometimes, what he perceived as the abuse of theory. Bemoaning what we might call theory’s “colonization” of literature, he astutely questioned: “Where is the literary in theory?” In addition, Culler’s words point to the necessary limits of the “purely” literary, that is, of the inevitable blurring of the frontiers that would separate it from other disciplines, other practices. This question and these considerations are at the heart of this double issue of CF&FS on the theme of “Literature and Criticism: Taking Stock,” the theme that gathered participants at the International Colloquium in 20and 21-Century French and Francophone Studies held at Louisiana State University in March 2015. Taking stock of what?—one might ask: the short version, which will be developed below is this: taking stock of the mutations of our discipline, faire le point on its evolution this past century and the new one we have just entered. The collaboration between CF&FS and the annual colloquium is particularly fitting in this case. CF&FS has been at the forefront and crossroads of these mutations for the past twenty years, if we judge not only by the journal’s stated objectives: “CF&FS provides a forum, not only for academics, but for novelists, poets, artists, journalists, and filmmakers as

Fieldwork in Contemporary French Literature

ABSTRACT Many writers are no longer satisfied with telling about or representing the real, but envision literature as a means of testing, studying, even experimenting with it. Instead of proposing novels nurtured by their observations, their books narrate the practical experience, difficulties, and reflections that their very composition entails. Such works invent singular forms, irreducible to either the novel or the essay, opening a new literary space, based on their shared use of fieldwork, and therefore closer to the Humanities and Social Sciences. Rather than vainly searching to determine this genre, this essay attempts to establish a corpus of works that I name “Literary Fieldwork,” and to define their characteristics in terms of forms, systems, objects, practices, poetics, and aesthetics.

Claude Simon et l’improbable récit de l’histoire

Abstract Reconstitutions, hypotheses, corrections, conjectures, analogies, speculations…: these are the forms of an improbable account of History in the work of Claude Simon. Starting from snippets, traces, fragments, received accounts, and scattered documents, writing attempts to say what it does not know, what it knows it will never know, and from this very un-knowing all writing proceeds, against any positivism, against every certainty. What are the strategies deployed? What implicit forms of historiography are mobilized or rejected? How does the books very organization circumvent the impossibility confronting it? From one book to the next, Simon solicits the traces, documents, archives, and other “remains” of the History placed in fragments in his narrative investigation. Always finding his own techniques insufficient, his methods evolve throughout his work.

Des mondes de chiens : littérature et cynisme totalitaire

« Bandes de chiens ! » : qu’il s’agisse de disqualifier ceux que l’on martyrise ou d’insulter les bourreaux, l’invective fonctionne dans les deux sens. Cette ambivalence explique le recours préférentiel à cet animal, le chien, pour traiter des tragédies du vingtième siècle hors de tout témoignage historique direct. Au-delà de l’apologue de Franck Pavloff, Matin brun (Cheyne, 1998), cette intervention étudie l’évocation indirecte de la peste brune dans les œuvres de François Bon (Calvaire des chiens, Minuit, 1990) et de Bernard Lamarche-Vadel (Vétérinaires, Gallimard, 1993 ; Tout casse, Gallimard, 1995). Les travaux de Peter Sloterdijk sur « le parc humain » et ceux de Michel Foucault sur le « bio-pouvoir » éclairent ces récits heuristiques qui, par le truchement de l’étymologie, mettent en évidence les syndromes du cynisme totalitaire.

Les Énergies Animales. Entretien avec Luc Lang

Luc Lang : Je ne suis pas du tout un écrivain « animalier », et j’ai beau réfléchir à l’ensemble des différents romans que j’ai pu écrire, ce n’est jamais même un motif, à l’exception du roman Esprit chien, d’une nouvelle qui s’intitule Initiation et, non plus dans le motif mais dans l’usage d’un champ métaphorique constant (celui du poisson et des crustacés), dans une autre nouvelle : La chaı̂ne du froid. Ces deux nouvelles se trouvant dans le recueil Cruels, 13.