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...

French Prose in 2000 stems in some important measure from work presented in September 1998 at the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990's held at Dalhousie University. A good number of papers given at that time, and since revisited in the light of exchanges, join here certain others specifically written for the purposes of this book. Together they constitute a wide-ranging and modally varied interrogation of the current state of French and francophone prose writing, its multifaceted manners, its richly divergent fascinations, its many theoretical or...

In the Name of Friendship: Deguy, Derrida and Salut centres on the relationship between poet Michel Deguy and philosopher Jacques Derrida. Translations of two essays, "Of Contemporaneity" by Deguy and "How to Name" by Derrida, allow Christopher Elson and Garry Sherbert to develop the implications of this singular intellectual friendship. In these thinkers' efforts to reinvent secular forms of the sacred, such as the singularity of the name, and especially poetic naming, Deguy, by adopting a Derridean programme of the impossible, and Derrida, by developing Deguy's ethics of naming...