L Puisement Du Biographique

Pourquoi penser le biographique? N'est-il pas épuisé? Le siècle passé semble l'avoir vidé de son contenu et de sa substance et l'a réduit à un état d'affaiblissement presque complet dans le domaine des sciences sociales comme dans celui de la critique littéraire. L'enjeu de cet ouvrage est d'affirmer que le biographique déborde la biographie et de considérer le biographique comme une condition du retour de la biographie au moyen de son dépassement. Cet ouvrage rassemble des travaux abordant ...

New creative forms of life writing have emerged over the past four decades. Following in the footsteps of the “New Biographers,” who more than half a century earlier had trusted art and imagination to uncover some truth about a singular existence, some late-twentieth and twenty-first century novelists, playwrights and essayists staged the lives of writers they loved, wanted to vindicate, or whose influence they needed to acknowledge and ward off. In other cases, they turned to another sort of genealogy and, blurring the lines between biography and autobiography, told the story of their parents’ lives. This volume includes ten essays on American, British and Canadian writers’ biographies and family histories, ranging, chronologically speaking, from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) to Lila Azam Zanganeh’s The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness (2011). The connection between biography and fiction is explored, and analysed in the light of different veins of postmodernism—ludic, nostalgic and subversive. The contributors give pride of place to those biographical enterprises in which generic distinctions yield to transgeneric recompositions, ontological frontiers are crossed, genders are queered, women artists empowered, and the creating subject revealed to be fundamentally elusive and plural.

French political culture has long been seen as a model of leftist militancy, while the left in the United States is often perceived in terms of organizational discontinuity. Yet, the crisis of social democracy today suggests that at a time when the archetypal European welfare state is in danger, critics and citizens interested in understanding or reviving progressive politics are invited to consider the United States, where modes of creative activism recurrently demonstrate potentialities for a renewed leftist culture. Using a transatlantic perspective, this volume identifies activist influence through the designation or rejection of specific intellectual and militant figures across generations, and it examines various narrative modes used by militants to write their own history.

In the Footsteps of Flora Tristan is the first ever study devoted to Jules Puech (1879-1957), and is a double biography that examines his life's work on Flora Tristan (1803-1844), feminist and socialist. It begins by examining newly found press reports of Flora Tristan during her lifetime and subsequently, then positions Puech's discovery of her, as a postgraduate student in Paris in the 1900s. It continues with an account of how he embarked on the first in-depth biography published in 1925. Puech was unmatched in his expertise as a writer on Flora Tristan having discovered her papers through his numerous political connections and having become a historian of Proudhon's legacy on the international aspirations of the labour movement. Together with his wife Marie-Louise Milhau (1876-1966), suffragist feminist, he was a militant in the early twentieth-century pacifist movement that advocated international arbitration. His research on Flora Tristan was enriched by his other projects but was thwarted by the wars of 1914-1918 and 1940-1945. The circumstances of the long gestation of Puech's biography are drawn from his letters and papers, hitherto unseen. The correspondence curated brings a new understanding to the multi-faceted nature of Puech's activism and rate of progress in the publication of his findings on his subject, Flora Tristan.