Contemporary French Poetics finds its origin in part in the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990's held at Dalhousie University in September 1998. A certain number of the papers given at that time, and since reworked in some fair measure, take their place here alongside other studies subsequently invited. In all they form a broad and varyingly focused set of cogent and pertinent appraisals of very recent French, and to some degree francophone, poetic practice and its shifting, becoming conceptual underpinnings. Studies offered range from those devoted to...

In a clearing of the great forest of the planet Bosk Veld, a strange, ape-like species of alien, the Asadi, act out their almost-incomprehensible rituals, rainbow eyes flashing, spinning like pinwheels. Egon Chaney, in his anthropological study, 'Death and Designation Among the Asadi' has shown how their life-style has apparently degenerated from a level of complex technological sophistication and devolved to a primal simplicity. Long after his disappearance in the forest, his daughter, Elegy Cather, comes to Bosk Veld to carry on his studies of the Asadi where he left off. With her is an...

Joshua Kampa is torn between two worlds - the Early Pleistocene Africa of his dreams and the 20th-century reality of his waking life. These worlds are transposed when a government experiment sends him over a million years back in time. Here, John builds a new life as part of a tribe of protohumans. But the reality of early Africa is much more challenging than his fantasies. With the landscape, the species, and John himself evolving, he reaches a temporal crossroads where he must decide whether the past or the future will be his present.

Reconnu depuis longtemps comme un des grands écrivains exemplaires de notre modernité, André du Bouchet nous lègue une oeuvre richement diversifiée, dense et transparente à la fois, transgénérique à bien des égards mais incontestablement poiétique dans sa conception et sa pratique. La présente étude cherche à privilégier les nombreux textes – essais, traductions, notes de carnet et autres accompagnements - où s’enlacent et s’entretissent une méditation critique profondément sentie, parfois obsessivement vécue, et une écriture poétique étonnamment originale visant...