Antoine Compagnon

Auprès de la question théorique ou historique traditionnelle : "Qu'est-ce que la littérature ?", se pose avec plus d'urgence aujourd'hui une question critique et politique : "Que peut la littérature ?". Quelle valeur la société et la culture contemporaines attribuent-elles à la littérature ? Quelle utilité ? Quel rôle ? "Ma confiance en l'avenir de la littérature, déclarait Italo Calvino, repose sur la certitude qu'il y a des choses que seule la littérature peut nous donner." Ce credo sera-t-il encore le nôtre ? --

"In the late twentieth century, the commonsense approach to literature was deemed naive. Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and Hillis Miller declared that all interpretation is theoretical. In many a literature department, graduate students spent far more time on Derrida and Foucault than on Shakespeare and Milton. Despite this, commonsense approaches to literature - including the belief that literature represents reality and authorial intentions matter - have resisted theory with tenacity. As a result, argues Antoine Compagnon, theorists have gone to extremes, boxed themselves into paradoxes, and distanced others from their ideas. Eloquently assessing the accomplishments and failings of literary theory, Compagnon ultimately defends the methods and goals of a theoretical commitment tempered by the wisdom of common sense." "While it constitutes an engaging introduction to recent theoretical debates, the book is organized not by school of thought but around seven central issues: literariness, the author, the world, the reader, style, history, and value. What makes a work literature? Does fiction imitate reality? Is the reader present in the text? What constitutes style? Is the context in which a work is written important to its apprehension? Are literary values universal?" "As he examines how theory has wrestled these themes, Compagnon establishes not a simple middle ground but a state of productive tension between high theory and common sense. The result is a book that will be met with both controversy and sighs of relief."--BOOK JACKET.

Early in the nineteenth century Hegel pronounced that the greatness of art was past and that art was at an end. Is it this end, Antoine Compagnon asks, that we are now witnessing, almost two centuries later? Or is the present postmodern moment a result of the failure of doctrines to "explain" art, that is, to give it an "end" and to construe its history as "progress"? Is the postmodern the cutting edge of the modern or a breaking away from it? In this elegant, highly readable book, Compagnon confronts the postmodern's co-optation of the modern by tracing paradoxical elements in the aesthetic of the new - particularly the aesthetic and moral contradictions built into the enthusiasm for the new - in the "five paradoxes of modernity": the superstition of the new, the religion of the future, the mania for theory, the appeal to mass culture, and the passion for repudiation. Beginning with the writings of Nietzsche and Baudelaire, Compagnon considers Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe and Olympia, Apollinaire's calligrams, Duchamp's readymades, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, and Warhol's silkscreens, in addition to the writings of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Venturi, and Calinescu, The analysis and clarification continues with discussions of conformism and nonconformism, modernity versus the avant-garde, the distinction between the aesthetic and political avant-garde, theoretical terrorism, the movement of the center of art from Paris to New York after 1945, and the modern's incorporation of popular culture to "purify [art] of its conventions." These insightful discussions illuminate the works of major American and European architects, critics, novelists, painters, and poets who emblematize each of the five paradoxes of modernity.

314 p. ; 21 cm

Débarquant des Amériques au milieu des années 1960, le narrateur découvre la sévérité des écoles françaises.--[Memento].

Œuvre dédiée au mouvement même de la mémoire, À la recherche du temps perdu laisse une large place aussi bien à la mémoire de l{u2019}histoire qu{u2019}à celle de la littérature même. ± Toute la littérature vit dans À la recherche du temps perdu. La littérature donne vie à la littérature comme ?résurrection de la vie intégrale? à la manière de l{u2019}histoire de Michelet ?, écrit Antoine Compagnon. Proust et le mythe d{u2019}Orphée ; l{u2019}effacement d{u2019}une source flaubertienne ; l{u2019}interpolation ; la reconnaissance ; le pastiche ou la mémoire des styles ; les réminiscences travesties ; l{u2019}allusion littéraire : des spécialistes français et étrangers explorent toutes ces pistes essentielles dans l{u2019}écriture de Proust. --