‘André Gide en Égypte : l’inachèvement et la créativité’

Cet article analyse un ouvrage d’André Gide, 'Carnets d’Égypte', dans le contexte de ‘late style’, un concept adornien développé par Edward Said. Bien que 'Carnets d’Égypte' représente un des derniers ouvrages de Gide, il ne s’agit ni d’une tentative de créer une impression de complétude ni de couronner un œuvre varié. C’est plutôt un espace créatif où il peut se permettre de se concentrer sur l’inachèvement. Nous examinons donc ce que Gide a choisi de ne pas ‘terminer’ ou même de ne pas ‘finaliser’ – le voyage lui-même et surtout le processus d'écriture qui s'ensuit. Pour Said, ‘late style’ est une attitude que nous pouvons déceler chez certains auteurs qui se trouvent devant la mort. Se concentrer sur l’inachèvement et non sur la complétude dans un tel cas révèle une certaine résistance chez Gide qui est tout de même productive, car elle arrive à faire avancer le processus d’écriture. This article analyses a work by André Gide, 'Carnets d’Égypte', in the context of late style, an Adornian concept developed by Edward Said. Although 'Carnets d’Égypte' is one of Gide’s final works, it does not attempt to create a sense of completeness nor does it attempt to crown a varied body of work. It is instead a creative space where he can allow himself to concentrate on the incomplete or the unfinished. I therefore examine what Gide has chosen not to ‘finish’ or even not to ‘finalise’ – that is, the journey itself and more particularly, the related writing process. For Said, ‘late style’ is an attitude that can be detected in certain authors facing death. Concentrating in such a case on what remains unfinished, instead of on completeness, reveals a certain resistance on Gide’s part which is nonetheless productive, since it manages to advance the writing process

Queering and querying the “Voyage South”: André Gide and Robert Dessaix in North Africa

This article puts geography back into the frame in its consideration of the travel texts of two gay authors and public intellectuals, André Gide (1869–1951) and Robert Dessaix (b. 1944). Gide undertook formative trips to the Maghreb from the 1890s onwards, and Dessaix, while not his first visit to the region, retraces Gide’s itineraries in the 2000s. Mary Louise Pratt, in her essay “Mapping Ideology” (1981), speaks of the “Voyage South” to describe those narratives that “involve the discovery of a false Utopia, where a cornucopia of Europe’s forbidden fruits – illicit sex, crime, sloth, irrationality, sensuality, excessive power, cruelty, lost childhood – is offered up to the questing hero”. I explore the ways Gide and Dessaix frame and interrogate travel to and around the Maghreb according to some of these terms, and shed light on their engagement with this region as a means of affirming their identity as gay men. Since Dessaix appropriates an essentially colonial author, Gide, in a supposedly postcolonial age, I also examine key questions Dessaix raises about travel and sexuality in the modern-day Maghreb

L’interrogation du départ : entamer un aller-retour chez André Gide et chez Henri Michaux

Cet article examine les récits de voyage d’André Gide et d’Henri Michaux afin de répondre aux questions suivantes : comment entamer un aller-retour ? Comment entamer le récit de voyage qui le représente ? Lors de leurs voyages respectifs en Afrique équatoriale et en Amérique du Sud, Gide et Michaux montrent que la difficulté d’établir le commencement du périple devient un obstacle à la rédaction du récit. Les deux auteurs découvrent que la double difficulté de commencer un voyage et de commencer un récit de voyage soulève maintes questions sur l’exotisme, l’inspiration littéraire, la productivité et la construction du texte. L’interrogation du départ dans leurs ouvrages leur permet donc de remettre en question le concept du voyage ainsi que le rôle du récit de voyage

‘André Gide en Égypte : l’inachèvement et la créativité’

Cet article analyse un ouvrage d’André Gide, 'Carnets d’Égypte', dans le contexte de ‘late style’, un concept adornien développé par Edward Said. Bien que 'Carnets d’Égypte' représente un des derniers ouvrages de Gide, il ne s’agit ni d’une tentative de créer une impression de complétude ni de couronner un œuvre varié. C’est plutôt un espace créatif où il peut se permettre de se concentrer sur l’inachèvement. Nous examinons donc ce que Gide a choisi de ne pas ‘terminer’ ou même de ne pas ‘finaliser’ – le voyage lui-même et surtout le processus d'écriture qui s'ensuit. Pour Said, ‘late style’ est une attitude que nous pouvons déceler chez certains auteurs qui se trouvent devant la mort. Se concentrer sur l’inachèvement et non sur la complétude dans un tel cas révèle une certaine résistance chez Gide qui est tout de même productive, car elle arrive à faire avancer le processus d’écriture. This article analyses a work by André Gide, 'Carnets d’Égypte', in the context of late style, an Adornian concept developed by Edward Said. Although 'Carnets d’Égypte' is one of Gide’s final works, it does not attempt to create a sense of completeness nor does it attempt to crown a varied body of work. It is instead a creative space where he can allow himself to concentrate on the incomplete or the unfinished. I therefore examine what Gide has chosen not to ‘finish’ or even not to ‘finalise’ – that is, the journey itself and more particularly, the related writing process. For Said, ‘late style’ is an attitude that can be detected in certain authors facing death. Concentrating in such a case on what remains unfinished, instead of on completeness, reveals a certain resistance on Gide’s part which is nonetheless productive, since it manages to advance the writing process

<italic>(Dé)doublement</italic> as Radical Aesthetic in <italic>Le Voyage d’Urien</italic>: Gide, Denis and Latour

Building on a tantalizing footnote by Anne-Marie Christin, my article analyses the illustrated editions of André Gide's Le Voyage d'Urien in tandem. It looks at the 1893 edition, a collaboration between Gide and Maurice Denis, and the 1928 edition, featuring illustrations by Alfred Latour. I explore the impact the two sets of illustrations might have on our reading of Urien's travels, demonstrating the potential these divergent visuals have to (re)shape our perceptions of the narrative's central journey. The co-existence of these editions also helps us ask how the illustrations add to and even disrupt conceptions of the reading process

‘Michel Butor’s 'Les Mots dans la peinture': A ‘Museum of Words’?’

This article examines Michel Butor's 1969 work 'Les Mots dans la peinture', asserting that its inventive structure has been largely passed over by critics due to its primary use as a key text in word-image studies. Butor proposes to examine words in paintings in this work and in so doing, focuses at length on the museum space. I suggest that Butor’s text sets itself up as an imaginary art museum for its reader, and organises itself spatially in such a way as to emulate the visitor’s passage through an exhibition space. Butor thus creates what will be termed, following James A.W. Heffernan, a ‘museum of words’, ‘a gallery of art constructed by language alone’. In arguing that the museum space informs the structure as much as the content of 'Les Mots dans la peinture', my article also offers insights into the work's interrogation both of ekphrasis and the role of illustration. Moreover, this piece’s sensitivity to Butor’s poetic endeavours and experimentation with the essay form, as well as to his thoughts on the interconnected activities of writing, reading, and travelling, further challenges the way in which the aesthetic value of 'Les Mots dans la peinture' in its own right has long been overlooked

A return trip in the writer’s imagination: Gide’s 'Le Voyage d’Urien' (1893)

No abstract available

Gide, André (1869–1951)

No abstract available

Ekphrastic reimaginings of 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus': Revisiting Butor through Auden and Williams

This contribution considers three ekphrastic pieces on the painting traditionally attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'. The pieces are W. H. Auden’s 1938 poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, William Carlos Williams’s poem, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, first published in 1960, and Michel Butor’s section on the painting in his 1969 essay 'Les Mots dans la peinture', entitled ‘la chute d’Icare’. I favour the simplicity of James W. Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis, that is, as a ‘verbal representation of visual representation’, since it offers scope for a more inclusive interpretation of the concept, which has generally been understood to be rooted primarily in poetry [1]. In this way, a protean piece of writing such as Butor’s lyrical yet exceptionally fragmented essay (containing no fewer than fifty-one sections) might also be contemplated in terms of ekphrasis. Indeed, I have elsewhere argued that 'Les Mots dans la peinture' has an ‘ekphrastic bent’, and that the work merits further attention beyond its use as a key analytic text in the study of word and image relations [2]. Exploring Butor’s treatment of the Icarus painting alongside the approaches put forward in two poems on the same work of art then not only brings out the common problems faced by writers attempting to engage in ekphrasis, but allows us to rethink the way in which we might read 'Les Mots dans la peinture'. In analysing these three pieces of writing alongside one another, I argue that, in the wake of Heffernan’s definition, ekphrasis can be seen as a mood rather than simply as a mode. [1] James A.W. Heffernan, 'Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 8. [2] Elizabeth Geary Keohane, ‘Michel Butor’s 'Les Mots dans la peinture': A ‘Museum of Words’?’, MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 9 (2014), 57-66 (60)

Dismembering and remembering childhood in Bruno Dumont’s P’tit Quinquin (2014)

No abstract available