A marvellous piece on writing

also, a marvelous piece of writing and for writing. Alas, too late to be manipulated, butchered, and twisted into final exam form. But I’d love to set this sort of thing for a literature course, maybe next term, at least as supplementary reading. It’s definitely going up in the “how to write about writing / how to read about reading” post. (Which will also be appearing in its French form, actually both the commentary and essay ones, but that’s for later.)

Thanks to the lovely Valerie and Carla, who separately and simultaneously happened upon this treasure. My other recent activities of a non-French nature have been set in the MCM classic period–science fiction, furniture, actually some French experimental word-geek fun poetry (OK, earlier too)–call it approximately 1947 (or 1951 and the Treaty of Paris, or 1952) to 1973; with a centre somewhere between Mole’s 1958, the forming of Oulipo, and 1964 (Marimekko’s Unikko print).

This here is from 1965, and c/o Slate.com of 30 November:

Suzanne McConnell, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s students in his “Form of Fiction” course at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, saved this assignment, explaining that Vonnegut “wrote his course assignments in the form of letters, as a way of speaking personally to each member of the class.” The result is part assignment, part letter, part guide to writing and life.

This assignment is reprinted from Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield, out now from Delacorte Press.

FORM OF FICTION TERM PAPER ASSIGNMENT

November 30, 1965

Beloved:

This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on. We may end up miles from here.”

As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all …”

I invite you to read the fifteen tales in Masters of the Modern Short Story (W. Havighurst, editor, 1955, Harcourt, Brace, $14.95 in paperback). Read them for pleasure and satisfaction,beginning each as though, only seven minutes before, you had swallowed two ounces of very good booze. “Except ye be as little children …”

Then reproduce on a single sheet of clean, white paper the table of contents of the book, omitting the page numbers, and substituting for each number a grade from A to F. The grades should be childishly selfish and impudent measures of your own joy or lack of it. I don’t care what grades you give. I do insist that you like some stories better than others.

Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take three stories that please you most and three that please you least, six in all, and pretend that they have been offered for publication. Write a report on each to be submitted to a wise, respected, witty and world-weary superior.

Do not do so as an academic critic, nor as a person drunk on art, nor as a barbarian in the literary market place. Do so as a sensitive person who has a few practical hunches about how stories can succeed or fail. Praise or damn as you please, but do so rather flatly, pragmatically, with cunning attention to annoying or gratifying details. Be yourself. Be unique. Be a good editor. The Universe needs more good editors, God knows.

Since there are eighty of you, and since I do not wish to go blind or kill somebody, about twenty pages from each of you should do neatly. Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Use words I know.

poloniøus

—

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, edited by Dan Wakefield. Delacorte Press.

Annie Ernaux: “Le pamphlet fasciste de Richard Millet déshonore la littérature”

• or, to continue from the previous post, “what’s the point?“: this is the point
• original text (2012-09-11; subscription / non-free) at Le Monde
• extracts below from the blogLa Roue tourne (2012-09-10), by Jean-Emmanuel Ducoin of L’Humanité

“J’ai lu le dernier pamphlet de Richard Millet, Langue fantôme suivi d’Eloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik (P.-G. de Roux, 120 p., 16 €) dans un mélange croissant de colère, de dégoût et d’effroi. Celui de lire sous la plume d’un écrivain, éditeur chez Gallimard, des propos qui exsudent le mépris de l’humanité et font l’apologie de la violence au prétexte d’examiner, sous le seul angle de leur beauté littéraire, les “actes” de celui qui a tué froidement, en 2011, 77 personnes en Norvège. Des propos que je n’avais lus jusqu’ici qu’au passé, chez des écrivains des années 1930. Je ne ferai pas silence sur cet écrit à la raison que réagir renforce la posture de martyr, d’écrivain maudit, qu’il s’est construite. Ou qu’il s’agirait là d’un délire, d’un “pétage de plombs” ne méritant pas une ligne. C’est dédouaner facilement la responsabilité d’un écrivain réputé pour savoir manier la langue à merveille. Richard Millet est tout le contraire d’un fou. Chaque phrase, chaque mot est écrit en toute connaissance de cause et, j’ajouterai, des conséquences possibles.” (…)

“Balayons d’abord la prétendue ironie du titre que, selon l’auteur, les lecteurs, bouchés à l’émeri, n’ont pas perçue. Et pour cause, elle n’y est pas et on en chercherait en vain une once dans la suite du texte. On soupçonne l’adjectif “littéraire” de n’être là que pour la douane – la loi – comme la précaution liminaire, réitérée plus loin par deux fois, dans laquelle Richard Millet déclare ne pas approuver les actes d’Anders Breivik. Et pour se mettre solidement à couvert, il ne craint pas d’user d’un sophisme tellement aveuglant qu’il a ébloui ses défenseurs : 1. La perfection et le Mal ont toujours à voir avec la littérature ; 2. Anders Breivik, par son crime, a porté le Mal à sa perfection ; 3. Donc, je me pencherai sur “la dimension littéraire” de son crime. Inattaquable. Saluez l’artiste qui se flatte d’isoler et d’extraire d’un criminel de masse sa seule “dimension littéraire”. En réalité, il n’en est rien. C’est la littérature qui est ici au service d’Anders Breivik : en tant qu’elle est la pièce essentielle du développement de la thèse de Millet. Elle est enrôlée de force dans une logique d’exclusion et de guerre civile, dont la portée politique, à moins d’être aveugle, est flagrante.” (…)

“La vraie littérature, elle, est morte. Ce qui l’a tuée : “le repeuplement de l’Europe par des populations dont la culture est la plus étrangère à la nôtre”, autrement dit, l’immigration non-européenne. Et, avec quelque précaution, tant le saut imposé à la raison du lecteur est énorme, l’auteur assène : “Le rapport entre la littérature et l’immigration peut sembler sans fondement ; il est en réalité central et donne lieu à un vertige identitaire.” Par un autre coup de force, il fait de l’identité “l’enjeu de la littérature”. Ainsi l’immigré, qui est censé menacer “la pureté” – fantasmatique, elle n’a jamais existé – de la langue française, celui dont la mémoire est ancrée dans une autre culture, un autre héritage que le mien – il vit dans les mêmes espaces, dans le même monde, mais cela Millet ne veut pas le savoir, ou l’accepter – donc ce non-Français de “souche”, de “sang” serait en train de s’infiltrer dans mon imaginaire, mon écriture, de m’imposer sans que je le veuille des schèmes de pensée ? De me coloniser ? (…) Car ce qui est suggéré dans cet Eloge qui suit le tableau de ruines de Langue fantôme – dans une succession qui fait sens – est effrayant. Apparentant Breivik à un “écrivain par défaut”, affirmant “la perfection formelle” de ses crimes et “la perfection de l’écriture au fusil d’assaut qui le mène au-delà du justifiable”, Richard Millet se plaît à faire miroiter la supériorité performative du fusil sur la plume. En l’occurrence, celle de Richard Millet s’est bel et bien mise au service du fusil d’assaut d’Anders Breivik, en attisant la haine à l’égard des populations d’origine étrangère, des musulmans vivant sur notre sol, en dressant des catégories de citoyens contre d’autres dans une trouble attente, voire espérance – du pire.”

“Oui, ce texte répugnant, comme le qualifie à juste titre Jean-Marie Le Clézio, est un acte politique à visée destructrice des valeurs qui fondent la démocratie française. C’est pourquoi, au lieu des questions effarouchées que lui posent les médias, il faut oser demander à Richard Millet : Que voulez-vous ? la fermeture des frontières ? le renvoi de tous ceux qui ne sont pas “français de sang” ? Quel régime à la place de cette démocratie que vous haïssez?”

“J’écris depuis plus de quarante ans. Pas davantage aujourd’hui qu’hier je ne me sens menacée dans ma vie quotidienne, en grande banlieue parisienne, par l’existence des autres qui n’ont pas ma couleur de peau, ni dans l’usage de ma langue par ceux qui ne sont pas “français de sang”, parlent avec un accent, lisent le Coran, mais qui vont dans les écoles où, tout comme moi autrefois, ils apprennent à lire et écrire le français. Et, par-dessus tout, jamais je n’accepterai qu’on lie mon travail d’écrivain à une identité raciale et nationale me définissant contre d’autres et je lutterai contre ceux qui voudraient imposer ce partage de l’humanité. Une jeune romancière, qui n’est pas d’origine européenne, m’a écrit ces jours-ci à propos du livre de Millet et de la tiédeur des réactions du milieu littéraire : “Comme je me sens, moi et mes enfants, visée par ces attaques contre le multiculturalisme et le métissage, je me dis que si ces idées devaient prendre corps et réalité, nous serions bien seuls.” Il est encore temps d’agir afin que n’advienne jamais cette réalité, et pour commencer, d’appeler un chat un chat et l’Eloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik un pamphlet fasciste qui déshonore la littérature.”

ANNIE ERNAUX

(dans Le Monde, 11 septembre 2012)

Plusieurs signataires disent également partager pleinement l’avis d’Annie Ernaux.
Voici leurs nom: Olivier Adam, Philippe Adam, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Marianne Alphant, Gwenaëlle Aubry, Patrick Bard, Cathie Barreau, Bruce Bégout, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Arno Bertina, Luc Blanvillain, Evelyne Bloch-Dano, François Bon, Elisabeth Brami, Geneviève Brisac, Michel Canesi, Laurent Cauwet, Marie-Claude Char, Jean-Patrice Courtois, Sylvain Courtoux, Céline Curiol, Emmanuel Darley, Sylvia Tabet Davidenkoff, Kéthévane Davrichewy, Jean Baptiste Del Amo, Chloé Delaume, Agnes Desarthe, Maryline Desbiolles, Louise Desbrusses, Marie Desplechin, Bernard Desportes, Suzanne Doppelt, Bruno Doucey, Lionel Duroy, Eugène Ebodé, Antoine Emaz, Mathias Enard, Didier Eribon, Arlette Farge, Lydia Flem, Vincent Fleury, Philippe Forest, Dan Franck, Anne-Marie Garat, Christian Garcin, Gilbert Gatoré, Michèle Gazier, Jean-Baptiste Gendarme, Liliane Giraudon, Jean-Louis Giovannoni, Valentine Goby, Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Serge Joncour, Maylis de Kerangal, Pascale Kramer, Nathalie Kuperman, Hervé Hamon, Stéphanie Hochet, Nancy Huston, Charlotte Lacoste, Lola Lafon, Jérôme Lambert, Mathieu Larnaudie, Camille Laurens, Bertrand Leclair, JMG Le Clézio, Noémi Lefebvre, Alban Lefranc, Pierre Lepape, Michèle Lesbre, Yun Sun Limet, Laure Limongi, Alain Mabanckou, Gérard Macé, Eric Marty, Jérôme Meizoz, Céline Minard, Gérard Mordillat, Laure Murat, Bernard Noël, Amélie Nothomb, Gaëlle Obiégly, Pascal Ory, Martin Page, Yves Pagès, Jean-Noël Pancrazi, Eric Pessan, Mazarine Pingeot, Christine Planté, Jérôme Prieur, Christian Prigent, Dominique Quélen, Michel Quint, Jamil Rahmani, François Rastier, Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, Jean Rouaud, Denis Roche, Oliver Rohe, Isabelle Roussel Gillet, Lydie Salvayre, Boualem Sansal, Julien Santoni, Colombe Schneck, Michel Séonnet, Alain Sevestre, Florence Seyvos, Martine Storti, Muriel Szac, Abdellah Taïa, Camille de Toledo, Tito Topin, Cécile Vargaftig, Franck Venaille, Delphine de Vigan, Jean-Jacques Viton, Carole Zalberg, Valérie Zenatti, écrivains.

what’s the point?

Image at left: some points, with something (also sort of pointy) at their end, and a definite purpose-point to this pointy activity.*

At some point along the way in a course about literature, some eternal questions will be raised. Or, flat-footed ugly pedestrian practical truths. How to tackle them will of course vary. I like to combine nipping things in the bud—turn potential negatives positive, all that frowns are smiles upside-down hokum—with being honest and, I hope, treating students like the intelligent responsible adults they are. I don’t mind having Big Unanswerables hang over a course. But rather than have them as shady specters haunting the whole class and perhaps looming larger, darker, and more malevolent with each class; I’d rather have them overarching, and turn that into an actual arch, an arc narratif, a supporting structure that helps to hold a course together and give it some shape over its whole span from beginning to end. Not so much choosing fight over flight in reaction to such things, but turning a tackle into an embrace. Classic nightmare-manipulation strategy; now, it’s OK, I haven’t gone doolally in the summer sun: we’re not going to go into F—d-word charlatanry; but this is literature we’re talking about, and as a new friend reminded me a couple of days ago, one of its strongest oldest forms is the visio.

Take, for an example of The Big Questions, “Introduction to Early French Literature and to Textual Analysis” (FREN 220). Start the first week by asking what each of these terms means. That’s already an introduction to the course. And to the dissertation littéraire: start by defining your terms and demonstrating that you understand the question you’re setting out or “essaying” to answer; an hypothèse that will lead to your thèse and antithèse and so on. It’s also a start to the analyse / commentaire de texte, and its requirement that you select, from all possible analysable points/material, your question/topic/thème.

Each of these “qu’est-ce que la…” questions includes further questions (introduction / literature / French literature / early literature / early French literature / analysis / text / textual analysis). The two sub-clauses (introduction to… literature / introduction to… analysis). Build up to the whole phrase. Ponder the lack of verb? Does this imply an elided verb of action / investigation / other?

Leave all this stuff as open questions, repeat from time to time, and laisser mijoter on a gentle heat while stirring occasionally. Continue for 13 weeks. Keep an eye on it along the way. See what happens at the end. End result not guaranteed and will vary every time—given natural variation in all factors—but it’s surely better than turning your back on the whole thing and risking under-cooking, tasteless raw lumpiness, and/or equally tasteless overdone patches where your materia has been allowed to stick to itself, not mix properly, and consumed itself into a burned powdery crisp.

I did the manifesto on why literature, reading, writing, story-telling, and poetry matters last year quite a lot: partly as at that stage I didn’t know what I’d be doing after April 2012, and there was—given the current economy—a distinct possibility that these would be the last courses and the last people I ever taught. That feels like a very heavy load. Sometimes that felt a bit teary. I resisted the urge to watch Dead Poets Society again, read Baudelaire, be melancholy and splenetic (insofar as females of the species can do such things: the other side of our incapacity for virtue?), and behave according to the worst stereotypes of French literary introspection. “Malingering,” my grandad would have called that (and probably mother too, in less charitable moments; fortunately, she’s kinder than to do that!).

Teary: melancholy, malingering, or melodrama; but the good thing was that it reinforced the heavy burden that teaching is, that this is something that matters. I think it was great that that last semester last year might have been my last; I like to think that I’ve usually taught well in the past, and I know I’ve always cared: about the courses, the transmission of knowledge, about the students themselves as people, and about helping and nurturing and catalysing growth. (Please don’t all barf at once. This is serious stuff.) But that last term: to quote the great Vinny Jones, “it’s been emotional.” In the period between applying for and getting my present job, and now—going into Week 3—I’ve learned two things.

One: when back teaching again this semester, I felt that same sense of “this matters.” Of fulfillment at the end of a class and a day. I like it and it makes me happy. Even if things ballsed up along the way, as they inevitably do, and then wiggled back on course or somewhere nearby. I mean, anyone who thinks they can teach in a fun interactive creative way, that respects and engages with their students, and who thinks they can do that with a neat tidy precise Lesson Plan à la Pedagogy & Teaching Methodology 101? Is having a laugh, hallucinating, delusional, or living in some other possible world. Yes, that even goes for the classic “I am going to talk for 45 to 50 minutes” lecture. For which there is, by the bye, a time and a place. Not every day, obviously. But it’s got a role to play in your multimedia multiple-approach textured “enriched” learning.

Two: rethinking the academic formula and identity. Teaching is important, and some research is too. Hopefully all teaching, though sometimes one does wonder: depending on who’s doing it, why, what they’re teaching, how, why the students are there, and if it’s not a self-perpetuating ego-massaging exercise and excuse for continuing existence. Both for some students (that’s often easily seen, in perpetual students of the wrong sort) and, I’m afraid, for some faculty. This may be news to people outside academia, and probably isn’t for most people working at universities and elsewhere in higher/third-level education. It’s a sad and sorry truth, and doesn’t help anyone. Least of all, as I was saying to a chum over email earlier today, us poor old marginalised medievalists: somewhere between exclusive and exotic, and in danger of extinction. For reasons of evolutionary adaptation; coping with climate-change; and senescence, decrepitude, and decay. But there is ground for hope: the human element. Teaching by humans who are humanists (in all senses). Who are alive and have a healthy survival instinct, and who are living rational beings and can use reason not merely to survive, but to flourish. Not necessarily to grow: enough of the Viagra-paradigm in everything from economics, politics, and history to more mundane everyday life… but to be an integral stable part of something that continues in a robust vivacious way.

Rethinking that connection between teaching and research: for me, but also on the larger-scale. I’ve taught for a fair while, and wanted for just as long to bring that activity and research together in some way, but that’s partly as these are two things that I like (off and on) and I know are important—they matter to me, and they matter full stop—and, like all things/people/ideas you like, it’s nice to try to introduce them to each other and you hope they’ll be friends. There’s a hundred ways of integrating teaching and research: twins, a Platonic androgyne, a love-hate relationship, two faces of one thing, separate but complementary, an active/passive duo.

One I hadn’t thought of much until last year was that they’re both learning, and they’re both a looped conjoined reading-and-writing (I’d call it circular, except it’s more spiral… maybe “nebular,” if that doesn’t sound too nebulous?)

The kind of teaching I do asks students to learn. And me to learn with them and from them; to see how they’re learning and bring that into teaching; and all that involves my reading them (and writing on their written work, comments being of course commentary and “textual analysis” in their own right). The learning that the students are (hopefully) doing is similar to mine. In beginners’ language classes; in the class that sits on the wonderful thresh-hold between language and literature—hello FREN 122—where students are first starting to write about their reading of others’ writing; and in FREN 220, a combined introduction to (a) literature and (b) textual analysis, where students work on the commentary and the essay.

The kind of research I do, when you break it down, is this:

• reading stuff
• thinking about it
• rereading it
• rethinking it, and rethinking the thinking-part
• re-rereading
• re-rethinking
• and so on

Accompanied by:

• writing about the reading and the thinking, sometimes separately, sometimes together
• rewriting: about the writing, the rereading, the rethinking
• re-rewriting: similarly
• and so on

And:

• reading and thinking leading to other further reading: looking unknown new things up, remembering parallels or echoes, checking old half-remembered vague recollections
• reading random things and that reading leading to other reading
• with accompanying networks being built threading, weaving, and webbing all those readings (and the thinkings and the writings) together

Sometimes “random” is “a word triggers something, sticks out, niggles and nags.” Association, analogy. Intuition, instinct. Distraction, digression. Seeing something out the corner of the eye/mind’s eye, and that thing catching the attention. This phenomenon has got something to do with being short-sighted. If you’ve worn glasses all your thinking life, you live in two realities—with/without glasses—and with an edge between corrected “normal” vision and bat-blind “natural” vision.You are much more aware of the difference between the two and of that edge. That is true of long-sighted people too, of course. But for the short-sighted, what you see outside framed normality is blurry and at a different focal distance. It’s mysterious. And because it’s blurry anything that is discernible out of the blur catches your eye. I’m in the -8 to -10 range, so we’re talking blurrissimo… I spend some of my time spec-less, and spent quite a lot of time that way when I was a small child; providing me with natural powers of magnification on close-up details, but also with more practice in deductive guesswork, the construction of meaning from haze, deploying past experience and acquired knowledge then forming hypotheses then testing them, and pattern-recognition.

It’s no coincidence that the Gibson novel of that name is one of my favourites in his opus. All this is of course “reading” in the Barthes sense. See also: “le monde flou,” and Marc Escola, « Présentation : le vœu de myopie », dans Fabula LHT (Littérature, histoire, théorie), 01 septembre 2007, URL : http://www.fabula.org/lht/3/Presentation.html The latter is a good overview piece on les microlectures: sharing something of the long tradition of exegesis and commentary, 20th c. English close reading and practical criticism, and the classic French explication/analyse de texte. Back to teaching: every week in FREN 220 will involve exercises that combine microlecture with micro-écriture, and half the course’s work, of a commentative nature, is of course microlecture.

Often the random turns out not to be utterly arbitrary, but following some cunning rapid mysterious inner mechanism that later on can be rethought and reformulated/~written as: was a good idea and makes sense. Only later. And when reconstructing, adding in hypothetical a.k.a. imaginary and maybe even fictitious pathways. There’s something in common here with that spectre vs. arch approach to Big Questions, in that apparent uncontrolled randomness is one of these things that can be dark and scary and bad, or a positive asset and boon, depending on attitude and response.

What complicates with microlecture complicates this pseudo-random reading:

• reading on several levels and in several layers simultaneously
  • + keeping all these levels, layers, threads in view and under control
  • + maintaining sense in sight: delving into detail without getting lost in it; digging while clinging to and following rhizomal networks … and surfacing for air occasionally…
  • … that is, not forgetting to breathe: remembering what you’re doing and why you’re there
• + doing all this in the contrary motions of decryption and deduction

Best practice and prior or parallel training for this, and best accompanying background music: The Best Of Bach or anything else that’s contrapunctal, polyphonic, and richly textured.

Best reading-material (whether books, TV shows, or movies) for intermissions: anything featuring detection (e.g. crime fiction) and/or the hypothetical (e.gg. science fiction and other speculative fictions). Twin Peaks is highly recommended.

All of which is lovely and happy and leaves me gamboling like a spring lamb in flowery meadows, and leads to the following links, which were actually what I meant to talk about when I started writing this post. This post, which has turned out to be mostly preliminary prologue; or, an introduction to literature and to literary analysis. Consider these links, assembled, as an introduction to Early French literature and to textual analysis:

• (sorry, UBC FHIS French folks only) part of this year’s French Research Seminar is on microlecture, with accompanying bloggy commentating activity. We’re very hip in my department, and intelligently so.
  The guiding precepts for which are the Escola piece linked above.
  • Classic case of random-linkage-method in operation: I found it when searching “barthes + myope/myopie” as I (still) vaguely remember that he was short-sighted, and am convinced that short-sightedness makes for better critics. That Escola piece turns up and is linked to several times in the first several pages of Google search results. I then went to the Research Seminar’s blog/site for the first time, to check what their microlecture materialsand who their Cited Authorities were and guess what? Escola again.
  • From which: links can come into being, and they can also wax and wane. This one strengthened and became more important. As with any network-map and its component points (when a point becomes a nexus) and threads (when a minor vessel becomes an artery for heavy information-flow).
• The 41st UBC Medieval Workshop’s DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS is today: its theme is “Interpretive Conflations: Exegesis and the Arts in the Middle Ages” and the call for papers is here.
• l’affaire Millet: Richard Millet has resigned from Gallimard’s editorial board, because of the reception of his “Eloge littéraire d’Anders Breivik”; reception which included a marvellous piece from Annie Ernaux, coming up in the next post (as this one is already over 2000 words long). For more, see:
  • Le Monde, articles from 28 August to 14 September
  • Annie Ernaux’s impassioned piece: “Le pamphlet de Richard Millet déshonore la littérature” (11 September)
• l’affaire Camus: another scandal, around the planned Camus exhibition. It’s been building up for a while now. See the latest: Michel Onfray’s “la nef des fous” in Le Monde (YO MEDIEVAL REFERENCE! MEDIEVALISM RULES OK!!) and the commentaries thereon.
  As ever with blogging: if you’re interested in commentary and commenting, you’re in clover. The literary point of interest here is—back to this post’s title—”what’s the point of having an exhibition about a writer?”
• and—Le Monde again—republication a couple of days ago of a wonderful interview with Yves Bonnefoy from 2010. One of my favourite poets, translators, and writers about poetry (and all manner of other things, and the poetry in life, and living poetically). If you haven’t at least read his translations of Shakespeare, you haven’t lived.
  I think it might be something about getting old(er), that the passing of time changes, and you’re sometimes not too sure if someone’s living or dead. I am often surprised at how old someone I like is (usually it’s older rather than younger), and all too often find someone I think of as very much alive is dead. So it’s really nice to see someone you thought was dead is still alive.
  In apology: here are his most recent works (that is, since the date I thought he’d died):
  • Deux scènes et notes conjointes (2009)
  • Notre besoin de Rimbaud, Seuil (2009)
  • Raturer outre (2010)
  • La Communauté des critiques, Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, (2010)
  • Pensées d’étoffe ou d’argile, Coll. Carnets, L’Herne (2010)
  • Genève, 1993, Coll. Carnets, L’Herne (2010)
  • La Beauté dès le premier jour, Bordeaux, William Blake & Co (2010)
  • L’Inachevable, Entretiens sur la poésie, 1990-2010, Albin Michel (2010)
  • Le Lieu d’herbes, Galilée (2010)
  • Le Siècle où la parole a été victime, Mercure de France, (2010)
  • L’Heure présente (2011)
  • Sous le signe de Baudelaire, Gallimard, (2011)

I was also amused to see another earlier one: La Quête du Graal, avec Albert Béguin, Le Club du livre, 1958 ; rééd. Seuil, 1982. Interest piqued (or, the eye caught) from a medievalist point of view and because The Mole had been working on 1958, a year that has thus been haunting us for the last couple of years.**  It’s uncanny how often you bump into 1958 in daily life, without even looking for it.

Aside from the teaching-research-learning nexus—perhaps a Karl Uitti creative triangle—maybe these sorts of commentative literary activities and reflexions on literariness are in the air? I’d rather thing of this as something normal and natural and essentially human, rather than a fashion. Style, rather than fashion. Chic, not mode.

On which subject of fine French style:

• The Collège de France have revamped their site and it is now officially amazing. It’s brought the term universitas into the 21st century, the digital text revolution (on which: back to 1958, earlier txtual revolutions, and introduction to text/ual analysis) and its move to free public access to knowledge, and at the same time brought us back to WHAT A UNIVERSITY IS and WHAT THAT WORD MEANS.
  Marketing and branding departments, take note. UBC Brand, that means you.
• See for a completely non-haphazard example of why the Collège de France is great, why its site is great, and why Medievalism and Medievalists are great: Michel Zink (Chaire, Littératures de la France médiévale)
• Collège de France inaugural lectures (OpenEdition; leçons inaugurales)
• Collège de France podcasts
• word of the week: la baladodiffusion

To conclude: here is one answer to “what’s the point (of FREN 220, French literature, literature, and/or learning)?”

* Image at top, further interpretation thereof / commentary thereon: Possibly accompanied by some pointing; unknown whether intentional, accidental, nonchalant hand-waving, or with mysterious underlying forces at work.
Optional extra, for imaginative readers: iron hand in velvet glove, beyond the confines of the frame.

** Christopher Mole, “Nineteen Fifty-Eight: Information Technology and the Reconceptualisation of Creativity,” Cambridge Quarterly 40.4 (2011): 301-27.