scholarly journals Creative Writing Crosses the Atlantic: An Attempt at Creating a Minor French Literature

Author(s):  
Gert-Jan Meyntjens

AbstractThis chapter analyzes literary advice culture from a transnational-comparative perspective. It sheds light on the reception of the American poetics of creative writing in contemporary France by examining the specific case of Outils du roman: Avec Malt Olbren sur les pistes et exercices du creative writing à l’américaine (2016, Tools of the Novel. Exploring American Creative Writing with Malt Olbren) by the experimental prose-writer François Bon. This text represents a broader dynamic in which French authors of literary advice resort to a repertoire of American writing techniques in an attempt to revive French literature. To conceptualize this process of transfer, I use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature.” This notion conveys how literary advice in France must constantly position itself vis-à-vis its American counterpart, but also how it appropriates and transforms this same body of ideas and techniques. More generally, this chapter makes a case for an increased consideration of supranational transfers in the domain of literary advice when studying processes of local literary change.

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Baugh

In Bergsonism, Deleuze refers to Bergson's concept of an ‘open society’, which would be a ‘society of creators’ who gain access to the ‘open creative totality’ through acting and creating. Deleuze and Guattari's political philosophy is oriented toward the goal of such an open society. This would be a democracy, but not in the sense of the rule of the actually existing people, but the rule of ‘the people to come,’ for in the actually existing situation, such a people is ‘lacking’. When the people becomes a society of creators, the result is a society open to the future, creativity and the new. Their openness and creative freedom is the polar opposite of the conformism and ‘herd mentality’ condemned by Deleuze and Nietzsche, a mentality which is the basis of all narrow nationalisms (of ethnicity, race, religion and creed). It is the freedom of creating and commanding, not the Kantian freedom to obey Reason and the State. This paper uses Bergson's The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: For a Minor Literature, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy? to sketch Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the open society and of a democracy that remains ‘to come’.


Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Daisy Sainsbury

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of minor literature, deterritorialization and agrammaticality, this article explores the possibility of a ‘minor poetry’, considering various interpretations of the term, and interrogating the value of the distinction between minor poetry and minor literature. The article considers Bakhtin's work, which offers several parallels to Deleuze and Guattari's in its consideration of the language system and the place of literature within it, but which also addresses questions of genre. It pursues Christian Prigent's hypothesis, in contrast to Bakhtin's account of poetic discourse, that Deleuze and Guattari's notion of deterritorialization might offer a definition of poetic language. Considering the work of two French-language poets, Ghérasim Luca and Olivier Cadiot, the article argues that the term ‘minor poetry’ gains an additional relevance for experimental twentieth-century poetry which grapples with its own generic identity, deterritorializing established conceptions of poetry, and making ‘minor’ the major poetic discourses on which it is contingent.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-195
Author(s):  
Oliver Friggieri

The Semitic character of Malta’s language and the Latinity of its culture have both contributed towards the complex formation of a unique country marked by dualities of language and identity. This article seeks to outline the development of Maltese as a medium through which Malta could best express itself and construct its own literature, as Maltese intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to create an alternative to the older Italian and more recent British dominance. The establishment of Maltese as the national language and of a thriving Maltese literature reflects a move away from the use of Maltese Italian as a minor literature to the creation of an “ultraminor” Maltese for an independent country.


2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (6) ◽  
pp. 1773-1779 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lubna Freihat ◽  
Victor Muleya ◽  
David T. Manallack ◽  
Janet I. Wheeler ◽  
Helen R. Irving

Over 30 receptor-like kinases contain a guanylate cyclase (GC) catalytic centre embedded within the C-terminal region of their kinase domain in the model plant Arabidopsis. A number of the kinase GCs contain both functional kinase and GC activity in vitro and the natural ligands of these receptors stimulate increases in cGMP within isolated protoplasts. The GC activity could be described as a minor or moonlighting activity. We have also identified mammalian proteins that contain the novel GC centre embedded within kinase domains. One example is the interleukin 1 receptor-associated kinase 3 (IRAK3). We compare the GC functionality of the mammalian protein IRAK3 with the cytoplasmic domain of the plant prototype molecule, the phytosulfokine receptor 1 (PSKR1). We have developed homology models of these molecules and have undertaken in vitro experiments to compare their functionality and structural features. Recombinant IRAK3 produces cGMP at levels comparable to those produced by PSKR1, suggesting that IRAK3 contains GC activity. Our findings raise the possibility that kinase-GCs may switch between downstream kinase-mediated or cGMP-mediated signalling cascades to elicit desired outputs to particular stimuli. The challenge now lies in understanding the interaction between the GC and kinase domains and how these molecules utilize their dual functionality within cells.


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 306-316
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Mazzei ◽  
Matthew C. Graham ◽  
Laura E. Smithers

In this article, we map conditions and enactments for a new plane of inquiry, what Mazzei named a minor inquiry. Informed by our collective thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of a minor literature and its attendant characteristics, deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective assemblage of enunciation, we present the conditions for inquiry on this new plane, provide enactments from our individual projects, and conclude with incitements for escaping the dogma of prescribed method.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (121) ◽  
pp. 101-114
Author(s):  
Michael Høxbro Andersen

The concept of happiness becomes of great political importance in France during the Great Revolution. But 19th century French literature will question the possibility of producing a truly modern happiness through society. Withdrawing from post-revolutionary society then becomes a topos of the novel. As I argue in my paper, this is the case in the novels of Stendhal in particular. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s modern concept of otium, Stendhal articulates an opposition between an attitude that is strategic and histrionic, and a withdrawal into contemplation, with only the latter procuring any happiness: a happiness of sensation.


Phronimon ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Konik

This article problematises assertions concerning the existence of a minor tradition of French wildlife documentary begun in the 1920s by Jean Painlevé and more recently contributed to through Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s Microcosmos: The People of the Grass (1996). What is advanced, instead, is the importance of regarding these directors’ respective films as constituting two different minor traditions. In this regard, the impasses to which the often-surrealist features of Painlevé’s films were a response, are discussed in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature and Deleuze’s idea of modern political cinema, or minor cinema. Thereafter, focus shifts on to discussion of the different context out of which Microcosmos emerged, along with the relevance of its unique cinematography for current environmental concerns—particularly because of its capacity to precipitate what Deleuze refers to as a spiritual automaton that stands to catalyse a more ecologically-orientated people to come.


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