FRENCH 317 Commitment and the French Poet

An examination of twentieth and twenty-first century French poetry through the reception of Jean-Paul Sartre’s mid-century Qu’est-ce que la littérature (1948) and through poetry’s elaboration of a pragmatic response to the charge that it is politically uncommitted. Readings ranging from Tzara’s Dadaism, to the surrealism of Breton and Valéry on poetry and anarchy, to Césaire, Senghor and the wartime poetry of Eluard, Char and Ponge, to Jacques Dupin and André du Bouchet in the wake of 1968, to the contemporary writings of Deguy, Fourcade, Cadiot, Hocquard, Réda, Noël and Alféri, who pursue equally subtle challenges to the political and philosophical condemnations of poetry.

Focus on the most significant efforts of twentieth- and twenty-first century French poets to question the limits imposed on poetry by other disciplines, with specific attention to Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical, political and historical condemnation of poetry in Qu’est-ce que la littérature (1948), and to how this condemnation is derivative of earlier cases made against poetry: Romain Rolland’s accusation in the 1930s that surrealist poetry had succumbed to “poetic interiorism,” to the nationally conservative argument that avant-garde poetry is foreign to France and its language, to the French Communist Party’s twentieth-century reduction of poetry to art for art’s sake.

Examination of the post-World War I nihilism of Dadaism, the revolts of André Breton’s surrealism, and Paul Valéry’s Principes d’an-archie pure et appliquée (1936) as an initial and lasting response to the supposed politically uncommitted nature of poetry. The course also considers the philosophical and ideological factors in the distinction between poetry and prose, and the underlying arguments for and against the commitment of literature and poetry. Close readings of René Char, Francis Ponge, Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, which allowed Sartre, inOrphée Noir, to perhaps only imagine the possibility of poetry committed to politics and history.

In the postwar era, the focus is on poets that, in their expression of the social and political dimensions of poetry, remain indebted to and critical of their predecessors: Jacques Dupin’s “L’irréversible” (1968) and “George Jackson” (1973), and André du Bouchet’s “Sous les pavés, la plage” (1968) and Pourquoi si calmes (1996). In the ultra-contemporary period, close readings of Bernard Noël’s L'outrage aux mots (1990), Michel Deguy’s L'énergie du désespoir, the neo-objectivism of Cadiot’s Art poétic’ (1997) and Hocquard’s Ma Haie (2001), Alféri’s reflection on the otherness of poetry as “objet verbal non-identifié” (OVNI), and Fourcade’s En Laisse (2005) as poetry’s intersection with an historical event of the magnitude of Abu Ghraib. Parallel readings of contemporary receptions of Sartre such as Derrida’s “Che cos’è la poesia?” (1994), Badiou’s “L’Age des poètes” and J.L. Nancy’s “Faire, la poésie” (1996), as challenges to philosophical and political diminutions of the poetic and poetry’s pragmatic struggle toward a poetics of commitment and historical action.

Texts:
1. The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (2004)