What Forms Can Do

Patrick Crowley is Senior Lecturer in French at University College Cork. Shirley Jordan is Professor of French Studies at the University of Newcastle and Co-Director of the Centre for Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW) in the School of Advanced Studies, University of London.

• Table of ContentsIntroduction: What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st- Century French Literature and Thought.Part 1: Interrogating FormChapter 1: Peter Read, ‘Fixé par les cris des hirondelles au vol géométrique du désir’ (Picasso, 7th June 1936): Patterns and Permutations in Picasso’s Writing.Chapter 2: Ann Jefferson, A Gaggle of Geese or Technical Rigour: Re-forming the Novel in 1940s FranceChapter 3: Diana Knight, ‘Faire ceci ou faire cela?’: Barthes and the Choice of FormChapter 4: Johnnie Gratton, The Eclipse of Form in Roland Barthes’ La Chambre ClaireChapter 5: Mairéad Hanrahan, Going on, or Achieving Interruption: Jacques Roubaud’s Quelque chose noirPart 2: Form and Life WritingChapter 6: Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir, Narratives of Forgetting: Memory and Literary FormChapter 7: Shirley Jordan, The Time of our Lives: Repetition, Variation and Fragmentation in French Women’s Life WritingChapter 8: Charles Forsdick, Vertical Travel, Listing and the Enumeration of the EverydayChapter 9: Patrick Crowley, Eugène Savitzkaya: Fictional Forms of RemembranceChapter 10: Ian Maclaclan, A Voice Takes Form: The Sounds of Autobiography in Louis-René des Forêts’s Poèmes de Samuel WoodPart 3: Form and Social ExperienceChapter 11: Eddie Hughes, Circuits of Re-appropriation: Accessing the Real in the Work of Didier EribonChapter 12: Celia Britton, Metaphor, Parody and Madness: Two Readings of Marie Chauvet’s FolieChapter 13: Alison Finch, Aesthetic Form and Social ‘Form’ in À la recherche du temps perdu: Proust on TasteChapter 14: Michael Lucey, ‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’: Proust with BourdieuPart 4: Forms and Formless: World, Movement, ThoughtChapter 15: Emily McLaughlin, How To Think Like a Plant? Ponge, Jaccottet, GuillevicChapter 16: Patrick O’Donovan, Certeau’s Landscapes: What can Images do?Chapter 17: Eric Robertson, À la dérive: Drifting in and out of Form in French Literature and Visual Art from Bataille to BergvallChapter 18: Patrick ffrench, Convulsive Form: Benjamin, Bataille and the Innervated BodyChapter 19: Michael Syrotinski, Form and energeia in the Work of Barbara Cassin (For M)

Reviews'This volume is of a very high calibre. It offers a broad cross-section of readings in French and Francophone Studies, bringing together a vibrant range of texts through a collective endeavor to rethink the concept and practice of literary form.'Anna-Louise Milne, The University of London Institute in Paris