Home Literary Studies 7. L’Objet Après L’Objet: Contemporary French Poetry
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7. L’Objet Après L’Objet: Contemporary French Poetry

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Objects Observed
This chapter is in the book Objects Observed
A fascination with objects continues in French poetry today. Unlike their twentieth-century predecessors, French poets now generally use the object as a pretext for the creation of quirky and unconventional post- modern textualities. Jean-Marie Gleize has coined the expression “la poésie après la poésie” (“poetry after poetry no longer exists”) to de-scribe the work of contemporary innovative poets who move beyond the confines of traditional lyricism. I propose the term “l’objet après l’objet” to designate the unexpected and challenging ways in which these new poets have reinvented the role of the object as a basis for poetics.Jacques Roubaud’s (Signe d’Appartenance) (1967)Jacques Roubaud’s is one of the most intriguing poèmes­objets to have appeared in recent decades in French literature. Roubaud (b. 1932) is a member of the Oulipo group, which was founded in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. The group’s main goal is to “[p]roposer aux écrivains de nouvelles ‘struc-tures’ de nature mathématique ou bien encore inventer de nouveaux procédés artificiels ou mécaniques, contribuant à l’activité littéraire”1(“propose to writers new ‘structures’ of a mathematical nature or else again to invent new artificial or mechanical devices contributing to lit-erary activity”). In his biography of writer Georges Perec, another ma-jor figure who belongs to the Oulipo, David Bellos explains the group’s raison d’être as follows: “Oulipo was not a sect, or a chapel, or a cam-paign for an ‘ism’; indeed it was not really a writers’ group at all. It was a research team that aimed to fashion new tools for writing and to re-furbish old and forgotten ones. Its operational model was Bourbaki, the 7L’Objet après L’Objet: Contemporary French Poetry
© 2018 University of Toronto Press, Toronto

A fascination with objects continues in French poetry today. Unlike their twentieth-century predecessors, French poets now generally use the object as a pretext for the creation of quirky and unconventional post- modern textualities. Jean-Marie Gleize has coined the expression “la poésie après la poésie” (“poetry after poetry no longer exists”) to de-scribe the work of contemporary innovative poets who move beyond the confines of traditional lyricism. I propose the term “l’objet après l’objet” to designate the unexpected and challenging ways in which these new poets have reinvented the role of the object as a basis for poetics.Jacques Roubaud’s (Signe d’Appartenance) (1967)Jacques Roubaud’s is one of the most intriguing poèmes­objets to have appeared in recent decades in French literature. Roubaud (b. 1932) is a member of the Oulipo group, which was founded in 1960 by poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. The group’s main goal is to “[p]roposer aux écrivains de nouvelles ‘struc-tures’ de nature mathématique ou bien encore inventer de nouveaux procédés artificiels ou mécaniques, contribuant à l’activité littéraire”1(“propose to writers new ‘structures’ of a mathematical nature or else again to invent new artificial or mechanical devices contributing to lit-erary activity”). In his biography of writer Georges Perec, another ma-jor figure who belongs to the Oulipo, David Bellos explains the group’s raison d’être as follows: “Oulipo was not a sect, or a chapel, or a cam-paign for an ‘ism’; indeed it was not really a writers’ group at all. It was a research team that aimed to fashion new tools for writing and to re-furbish old and forgotten ones. Its operational model was Bourbaki, the 7L’Objet après L’Objet: Contemporary French Poetry
© 2018 University of Toronto Press, Toronto
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