Six Contemporary French Women Poets

Although many practice the art, contemporary French women poets generally have been vastly underrepresented in periodicals and anthologies. In the only anthology to feature avant-garde French women poets exclusively, Gavronsky shows how Kaplan, Grangaud, Portugal, Lapeyrère, Giraudon, and Risset differ from their American counterparts. Before presenting his translations of the poems, Gavronsky gives each poet the opportunity to define herself in terms of major influences on her poetry, distinctive traits in her writing, major themes in her work, and the influence of gender on her art. The poets also speculate about the relative underrepresentation of women poets in French periodicals and anthologies as well as about the form poetry might take in the twenty-first century. The poems in this volume are simultaneously delightful, informative, and combative. They typify, according to Gavronsky, some of the main currents of a poetics in the making, a poetics little known in the United States. In reaffirming women's involvement with poetry, Gavronsky believes that he has "reconnected today's work with an immemorial tradition that, in France, clearly goes back to [the] Middle Ages."

In the 1990s the French literary arena was enlivened by the emergence of a new generation of women writers. This book selects six of its most distinctive voices and addresses important questions about the very new in French women's writing. What are young women choosing to write about? What do they tell us about changing perceptions of feminine identities? What does it mean to write (and to read) as women at the start of the new millennium? An introductory chapter explores key issues such as the woman writer in the public imagination and continuity and change within French women's writing since the 1970s. It also highlights thematic threads which recur across the work of the authors studied: history and time, wandering and exile, self and other, the body and sexuality and writing and telling. The remaining chapters propose productive approaches to the fictional worlds of Marie Darrieussecq, Virginie Despentes, Marie Ndiaye, Agnès Desarthe, Lorette Nobécourt and Amélie Nothomb through close readings of their most challenging, popular or telling texts. They focus on perennial preoccupations in women's writing which are given new treatment by these writers and discuss important developments such as uses of the pornographic, myth and fairy tale and parody and irony in new women's writing.

At least since the Romantic era, poetry has often been understood as a powerful vector of collective belonging. The idea that certain poets are emblematic of a national culture is one of the chief means by which literature historicizes itself, inscribes itself in a shared cultural past and supplies modes of belonging to those who consume it. But what, then, of the exiled, migrant or translingual poet? How might writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue complicate this picture of the relation between poet, language and literary system? What of those for whom the practice of poetry is inseparable from a sense of restlessness or unease, suggesting a condition of not being at home in any one language, even that of their mother tongue? These questions are crucial for four French-language poets whose work is the focus of this study: Armen Lubin (1903-74), Ghérasim Luca (1913-94), Edmond Jabès (1912-91) and Michelle Grangaud (1941-). Ranging across borders within and beyond the Francosphere – from Algeria to Armenia, to Egypt, to Romania – this book shows how a poetic practice inflected by exile, statelessness or non-belonging has the potential to disrupt long-held assumptions of the relation between subjects, the language they use and the place from which they speak.

In Earth and Mind : Dreaming, Writing, Being Michael Bishop examines very recent work by nine major French and Francophone writers : Bonnefoy, Risset, Stétié, Khoury-Ghata, Ben Jelloun, Velter, Bancquart, Pinson and Dupin, dealing with the mind’s complex modes of relating to its experience of presence to the world.

A selection of modern French poems with critical commentary, glossary of literary terms, biographies and bibliography.

This book finds its origin partly in the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990's at Dalhousie University, September 1998. number of the papers, since reworked, take their place here alongside other studies subsequently invited. They form a broad and varyingly focused set of cogent and pertinent appraisals of very recent French, and francophone, poetic practice and its shifting, becoming conceptual underpinnings.