The poetic is an abiding yet elusive qualification within the discursive system of twentieth-century French literature. No longer amenable to formal assignment, its recurrences delimit a shifting, multi-layered practice of artistic and intellectual (self-) invention. This study attempts to outline certain durable properties of that practice by confronting it with the complex theoretical and spatial metaphor of utopia. Drawing, in particular, upon the oeuvres of Victor Segalen (1878-1919), Rene Daumal (1908-44) and Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923), it traces poetic work - work done in support of poetic...

Ce volume vise a questionner les fondements et le sens (direction, teneur heuristique) de la pratique poetique moderne et contemporaine. Il s interroge sur ce qui serait essentiel a cette pratique aujourd hui et sur les composantes d eventuelles identites du poete et de la poesie alors meme que ces deux entites hypothetiques se decomposent et se conjuguent selon de nouvelles appellations, s arrimant a d autres arts comme a une bouee de secours, ou s en servant au contraire comme d un tremplin. De quels nouveaux attributs la poesie chercherait-elle a s affubler ? Se veut-elle photographique,...

Utopia, Equity and Ideology in Urban Texts: Fair and Unfair Citiesexplores the complex interrelations of three key critical topics across a diverse range of urban writing. Interrogating the links and tensions between aesthetic and political priorities in the representation and imagining of urban life, the volume engages with work from a wide variety of linguistic and cultural origins and across a range of textual practices having the urban phenomenon as a common framing concern. Individual contributions discussing genre and literary fiction, poetic writing, documentary and essayistic texts,...

«Given that most scholarship on cinema and utopia focuses on the subgenre of dystopia and its pessimistic discourses, Mónica Martín’s volume could not be more timely. It is a pioneering work; arguably the first book in English devoted to systematically analysing the utopian impulse as a textual feature in contemporary Anglophone cinema. Discussing a wide range of films, from mainstream blockbusters to independent, low-budget productions, this is a fascinating comparative study on the potential for cinema to engage with the phenomenon of social dreaming and the search for a better...