Forms of Formalism
Poetics, Play, and Prescription in Modern and Contemporary French Literature
Friday May 12, 2006Rosenwald 405, The University of Chicago, 1101 E. 58th Street
This one-day conference will focus on the ways in which French literary texts in the 20th and 21st centuries are shaped by distinctive formalist projects or by contemporary critical debates on the problem of form. The term “formalism” is understood here in a general sense as referring to procedural approaches to composition as well as to tendencies in criticism. The goal will be both a critical reappraisal of particular literary and theoretical explorations of form (Oulipo, the New Novel, Tel Quel, structuralism), and an evaluation of the notion of literary form itself. While offering a variety of perspectives on French literary texts and movements, this conference will highlight a wider set of concerns relevant to literature and poetics in general.
10:00 a.m.
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Panel 1: French Formalisms
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Moderator: Françoise Meltzer, University of Chicago
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Warren F. Motte, Jr., University of Colorado at Boulder.
Shapes of Things.
Jean-Jacques Thomas, Duke University.
Sténopé de Jean-Marie Gleize.
Michel Sirvent, University of North Texas.
Entre Oulipo et Nouveau Roman textuel : vers une conception transformaliste du texte.
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12:00 p.m.
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Lunch
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1:00 p.m.
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Panel 2: Form in Literature: Genres, Concepts, Debates
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Moderator: Robert Buch, University of Chicago
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Martin Rueff, Université de Paris VII.
Qu’est-ce qu’une forme ? Structuralisme et poétiques formalistes.
Alison James, University of Chicago.
Grids and Transparencies: Forms of Realism.
Andrea Goulet, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Malet’s Maps and Butor’s Bleston: Space and Formal Play in the Roman Policier.
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3:00 p.m.
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Break
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3:30 p.m.
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Roundtable discussion: Formalism’s Future
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Robert von Hallberg, Srikanth Reddy, Anne Winters, Warren Motte, Jean-Jacques Thomas, Michel Sirvent, Martin Rueff, Andrea Goulet, Alison James.
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5:00 p.m.
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Reception
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Event sponsored by the France Chicago Center, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Program in Poetry and Poetics. This event is free and open to the public. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance are requested to call 773-834-8739.
Françoise Meltzer: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/depts/romance/faculty/meltzer.html
Warren F. Motte, Jr. is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is author of The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec (French Forum Monographs, 1984), Questioning Edmond Jabès (University of Nebraska Press, 1990), Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1995), Small Worlds: Minimalism in Contemporary French Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), and Fables of the Novel: French Fiction Since 1990 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2003). Edited volumes include Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 1986; revised edition 1998); Literary Ludics (special issue of L’Esprit Créateur 31. 4, 1991); Alteratives (French Forum Monographs, 1993), with Gerald Prince; Jacques Jouet (special issue of SubStance, 96, 2001, Pereckonings: Reading Georges Perec (special issue of Yale French Studies, 105, 2004), with Jean-Jacques Poucel; and The French Novel Now (special issue of SubStance, forthcoming).
Jean-Jacques Thomas is Professor of Romance Studies, Literature and Linguistics at Duke University. He is the Director of Canadian and North American Studies. Since 1990 he is also the Director of the Summer Institute of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has taught at the Université de Paris-VIII, the University of Michigan and at Columbia University; for three years he was a Visiting Professor at UQAM; in 2005 he was appointed Associate Faculty Member at the Centre d’Etudes Poétiques of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He is a member of the COS (Comité d’Orientation Scientifique - International Expert, Humanities) for the French Universities of Aix-Marseille (Provence, Méditerranée, Paul Cézanne). He has published several books on poetics and contemporary French literature: Lire Leiris: essai d’étude poétique d’un fonctionnement analinguistique (Paris, 1972); Poétique générative (Paris, 1978); Poética Générativa (Buenos Aires, 1982; new and augmented edition, 1989); La langue, la poésie (Lille, 1989); Yves Bonnefoy: A Concordance (New York, 1990); La langue volée (Berne, 1990). With Steven Winspur he co-authored Poeticized Language (Penn State Press, 2000). He translated into French The Semiotic Web [La Toile sémiotique] by Thomas Sebeok (Bruxelles, 1981) and Semiotics of Poetry [Sémiotique de la poésie] by Michael Riffaterre (Paris, 1983). He is a founding editor and a member of the editorial board of the European journal Formes Poétiques Contemporaines (2003) and an associate editor of Poetics Today; he is a member of the editorial boards of Studies in 20th-Century Literature, Sub-Stance, and a former member of the Advisory Editorial Committee of PMLA. He is Directeur Littéraire (Editor-in-chief) of PUNM (New Orleans).
Michel Sirvent is the author of a critical monography on New Novelist and theoretician Jean Ricardou published by Rodopi in 2001. His book is subtitled De Tel Quel au Nouveau Roman textuel. He has a new book forthcoming this year on Georges Perec at Rodopi. From 1990 to 2003 Michel Sirvent has regularly contributed to the annual seminars on Textics organized by Jean Ricardou (Centre Culturel International de Cerisy). He has also published articles on Nabokov, Poe, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, and the Post-Nouveau Roman Detective novel. Among recent essays, one shows the multilevel numerical infrastructure underlying Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (Romanic Review). His current research includes a new book project on Mallarmé, Tel Quel writer Maurice Roche, and typography.
Martin Rueff teaches at the Université de Paris VII and is also a regular visiting scholar at the University of Bologna. His research interests include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, contemporary philosophy, the relations between literature, literary theory and philosophy, literature and anthropology, and contemporary poetry and poetics. He directs the research group Théorie Littéraire et Sciences Humaines and is part of the Centre Roland Barthes as well as the l’Institut de la pensée contemporaine. He is co-editor of the journal Po&sie (éditions Belin, directed by Michel Deguy), and a member of the editorial boards of Studi di estetica (CLUEB editions, Bologna) and the Revue française d’esthétique. Martin Rueff is also a translator of philosophy and poetry. The author of a two-volume book Anthropologie et poétique de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (forthcoming from the series Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century), he has published numerous articles on Rousseau and 18th-century literature, moral philosophy, contemporary aesthetics and philosophy, and contemporary poetry. Edited volumes include Le plaisir des formes and Donner à penser, Roland Barthes Lectures (Paris: Seuil, 2003 and 2004); Morales et politique (Paris, Champion, 2005, 640p) and Pierre Pachet, les occasions de la réflexion (special issue of Critique, n° 702, November 2005).
Alison James, Assistant Professor of French, University of Chicago, has published articles on the myth of Icarus in Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (Romanic Review, 2000) and on the theoretical problems posed by the Oulipian constraint. Her article “Pour un modèle diagrammatique de la contrainte: l’écriture oulipienne de Georges Perec,” published in Théorie, Littérature, enseignement 22 (2004), was selected for the Prix de l’Association internationale des études françaises in 2005. She is working on a book manuscript on the thematic and formal functions of chance in the works of Georges Perec. Her research and teaching interests include forms and formalisms in contemporary literature, the Oulipo group, the connections between philosophy and fiction, and representations of the everyday.
Andrea Goulet is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and faculty affiliate of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretative theory. Her book Optiques: The Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction will be coming out this June with the University of Pennsylvania Press. She co-edited a special issue of Yale French Studies on “Crime Fictions,” that came out this past Fall. She is currently a Mellon faculty fellow beginning research on second book tentatively titled Mapping Murder: Geographies of Violence in Modern French Crime Fiction.
Srikanth Reddy’s first collection of poetry, Facts for Visitors, was awarded the Asian American Literary Award for poetry in 2005. His poems have appeared in various journals, including APR, Grand Street, Fence, and Ploughshares, and his critical writing has been featured in publications such as The New Republic, The Chicago Tribune, and American Literature. He has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation (in the Humanities) and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and doctoral candidate at Harvard University, Reddy is an Assistant Professor in English at the University of Chicago.
Anne Winters: Poet Anne Winters is the author of THE DISPLACED OF CAPITAL (Chicago, 2004), which last year was awarded both the William Carlos Williams Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the American Academy of Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize of $25,000 for "the most distinguished book of poetry of the previous year." In 2006-7 she will be taking a Guggenheim year of leave from the University of Illinois at Chicago Anne Winters is also the author of THE KEY TO THE CITY (Chicago,1986), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her translations of contemporary French poet Robert Marteau (published in SALAMANDER, Princeton University Press 1979), were awarded POETRY Magazine's Jacob Glatstein Memorial Prize. She has published poems and essays in "The New Republic," "The New Yorker," "Paris Review," "Poetry," and the "Yale Review," etc., as well as journals in France, Canada and Italy. She was a recipient in 2003 of the Academy Award for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant, Wellesley College's Sara Teasdale Poetry Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts grant; she has also been a Fellow of the Fondation Camargo, Cassis, Bouches-du Rhône, where she worked on translations of the poetry of Robert Marteau, published by Princeton University Press, and of the Fondation Károlyi, Vence, Alpes-Maritimes, in France. Her doctorate in English is from the University of California at Berkeley, and she teaches courses in poetry writing, literary translation, and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago.