EAN: 9783039105144

THE MODERN ESSAY IN FRENCH KARTONIERT (TB)

As a textual form  the essai predominates in modern and contemporary literature in French.
Emerging from an earlier tradition and distinguished from its English-language counterpart  the
French-language essay ranges from Stéphane Mallarmé to Colette  Victor Segalen to Aimé Césaire
Jean Grenier to Pierre Michon. The essai remains  however  one of the most hazily identified of
textual forms  its definition often depending on the progressive elimination of all other
generic possibilities. Excluded from the archigenres (theatre  poetry  récit)  it can even be
seen as a hold-all category whose role is to absorb the anarchic extremes of writing. It is
perhaps this very lack of pretension to orthodoxy that has drawn so many writers to the essai.
The conventional understanding of the term - as a tentative  unsystematic exploration -
stresses the genre's provisional nature  its refusal of any claims to comprehensiveness. The
essai exploits the devices of anecdote  illustration and humour  it is addressed to a wide and
often general audience  it is also intricately linked to the performance of ideological and
writerly strategies  often reordering the classical art of rhetoric and persuasion. As the
contributions to this volume show  there is a need to outline an ethics and politics  as well
as poetics  of essayism.

Aktuelle Preise zur EAN 9783039105144

Produktinformationen zur 9783039105144