General Line

Georges Perec's Early Essays on Art and Politics

Häftad, Engelska, 2026

449 kr

Kommande

In these essays, Perec forges a new critical discourse faithful to radical imperatives, while remaining independent of the French Communist Party, and at some remove from Jean-Paul Sartre, who had dominated the Left's understanding of literature's relation to politics since the Liberation. These bold essays traverse topics as diverse as Alain Robbe-Grillet's "New Novel" and Sartre's pursuit of a "committed literature" to Alban Berg's Wozzeck, Free Jazz, Science Fiction, and more. Set against a background of domestic division and geopolitical instability in France, Perec provides an exciting pathway to imagine new worlds and methods of collective organising and action. In this edition, editor Rob Halpern provides a key historical context for understanding Perec as both a political actor and cultural mover. Taking its name from the Sergei Eisenstein film, the essays in the collection highlight an early, politically motivated Perec. They reveal not only a hidden side of the endlessly fascinating writer, but also the wider cultural imperative of the twentieth century Left. This is Perec as we've never seen him before, effortlessly expanding beyond aesthetics to the sphere of political action.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-10-06
Mått140 x 210 x undefined mm
Vikt200 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor224
FörlagVerso Books
ISBN9781839768910
ÖversättareRob Halpern

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Georges Perec (1936-82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec's other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce's Ulysses. It won the Prix Médicis and established Perec's international reputation.Rob Halpern is Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University. He coordinates The Writers' Bloc, a poetry writing workshop inside Huron Valley Women's Prison. His books include Music for Porn (Nightboat 2012) and Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World (Kenning Editions 2021).

Beyond the Terms of Engagement: Georges Perec's Critique of the Cultural Field, circa 1960; Or, The General Line in ContextIntroduction by Rob Halpern Essays from L.G.: A 1960s AffairThe "New Novel" and the Refusal of the RealFor a Realist LiteratureEngagement or Crisis of LanguageRobert Antelme, or the Truth of LiteratureThe Universe of Science FictionThe Perpetual Recovery (Hiroshima mon amour)Wozzeck, or The Apocalyptic Method*All of the above essays follow the text in L.G. Une aventure des années soixante (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992).Fugitive TextsDefense of Paul Klee The Robbe-Grillet MysteryThe 6th Congress of the Communist Student Union: Discussions and PerspectivesThe Thing (Free Jazz)Powers and Limits of the Contemporary French Novelist