Jean Echenoz and Georges Perec: Negotiating Occupied Territory

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emer O’Beirne
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Raymond Queneau ◽  
Occupied Territory ◽  
Personal Loss ◽  
Game Player ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Nouveau Roman ◽  
Jean Echenoz

Abstract Jean Echenoz’s first four novels (1979–89) exhibit the development of a literary apprenticeship across different fictional genres and acknowledge important precursors. Among the latter, the influence on Echenoz’s work of Georges Perec has not received the same attention as that of the nouveau roman, Raymond Queneau, or crime fiction writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette. Yet the presence of Perec the narrative jigsaw-maker is unmistakeable in Echenoz’s first novel, Le Méridien de Greenwich. By the end of Echenoz’s decade-long apprenticeship, however, it is less Perec the game-player than the critic of consumerism and above all the observer of urban life who is privileged in Lac’s allusions to the older writer’s work on the infra-ordinary and on place. A previous short novella L’Occupation des sols not only dramatizes Echenoz’s navigation of an urban and socio-critical territory already occupied by Perec; it also prepares his subsequent commemoration in Lac of both Perec’s ludism and the personal loss informing his work. Taken together, L’Occupation des sols and Lac demonstrate how a grant-aided transposition to suburbia allows Echenoz to embrace his Perecquian inheritance of everyday observation, while articulating the subjection of writers too to commercial forces Perec identified, a theme the younger writer has continued to explore.

Popular Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roslyn Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the history of popular fiction in Australia. The question of place has always been central to Australian fiction, not only as a thematic element but also as a critical or political preoccupation. In part, this is because popular fiction writers, wanting to attract broad audiences, either exploited their Australian content to appeal to international readers or have excised the local to produce a generic and thus more readily accessible setting for outsiders. The chapter considers works by popular fiction writers who adopt a range of positions in relation to their focus on place, but often tackle many different aspects of Australian social and historical change. These novels cover various genres such as crime fiction, historical fiction and romance, science fiction and fantasy, and include Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Damien Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980), and Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute (2001).

Creating with Constraints

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Hasegawa
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Gyorgy Ligeti ◽  
Raymond Queneau ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Musical Creativity ◽  
Process Constraints

Musicians have long framed their creative activity within constraints, whether imposed externally or consciously chosen. As noted by Leonard Meyer, any style can be viewed as an ensemble of constraints, requiring the features of the artwork to conform with accepted norms. Such received stylistic constraints may be complemented by additional, voluntary limitations: for example, using only a limited palette of pitches or sounds, setting rules to govern repetition or transformation, controlling the formal layout and proportions of the work, or limiting the variety of operations involved in its creation. This chapter proposes a fourfold classification of the limits most often encountered in music creation into material (absolute and relative), formal, style/genre, and process constraints. The role of constraints as a spur and guide to musical creativity is explored in the domains of composition, improvisation, performance, and even listening, with examples drawn from contemporary composers including György Ligeti, George Aperghis, and James Tenney. Such musical constraints are comparable to self-imposed limitations in other art forms, from film (the Dogme 95 Manifesto) and visual art (Robert Morris’s Blind Time Drawings) to the writings of authors associated with the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) such as Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau.

Unreliable Narration in Law and Fiction

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-338
Author(s):  
Daniel Del Gobbo
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
High Court ◽  
Law System ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
Objective Interpretation ◽  
Essential Quality ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
The Common ◽  
Agatha Christie ◽  
Unreliable Narration

This article revisits long-standing debates about objective interpretation in the common law system by focusing on a crime novel by Agatha Christie and judicial opinion by the Ontario High Court. Conventions of the crime fiction and judicial opinion genres inform readers’ assumption that the two texts are objectively interpretable. This article challenges this assumption by demonstrating that unreliable narration is often, if not always, a feature of written communication. Judges, like crime fiction writers, are storytellers. While these authors might intend for their stories to be read in certain ways, the potential for interpretive disconnect between unreliable narrators and readers means there can be no essential quality that marks a literary or legal text’s meaning as objective. Taken to heart, this demands that judges try to narrate their decisions more reliably so that readers are able to interpret the texts correctly when it matters most.

‘An Attempt at Exhausting an Augmented Place in Paris’: Georges Perec, Observer-Writer of Urban Life, as a Mobile Locative Media User

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Licoppe
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Public Place ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Locative Media ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

This chapter describes a thought experiment in which a modern-day Georges Perec, equipped with a smartphone and actively committed to the use of mobile locative media such as Foursquare, would make an Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris today. The chapter argues that the initial project epitomized the way the neutral gaze of the onlooker is constitutive of urban public place and the way in which behavior in urban public places could thereby be described and accountable in generic terms intelligible to readers, themselves framed as strangers (in the sense of strangers in public places). This analysis is used as a baseline to show how a fictive, connected Perec would have to cope with the dual accessibility of places and people, both in the physical world and on screen, and especially the ‘parochialisation’ of place and individualization of digital personae online, in a way which would radically transform the initial literary project. This shows how the city augmented with mobile locative media might not be available to description in the same terms as the 20th century metropolis, and how a square in the augmented city might not be a public place in the same sense.

Ghosts (Jean Echenoz)

Beyond Return ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 132-194
Author(s):  
Lucas Hollister
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Phantom Pain ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Jean Echenoz ◽  
Mystery Novel

In this chapter, I examine how Jean Echenoz transforms and repurposes popular genres—specifically crime fiction and the war novel--in subtly political manners. Through readings of Echenoz’s (anti-)mystery novel A Year (1997) and his short war novel 1914 (2012), I show how Echenoz smuggles biopolitical and spectral problematics into his works, enlarging the conceptual scope of popular story forms and genre fictions. My reading of Echenoz positions him not as a writer that brings us back to the pleasures of story, but rather as a writer who demonstrates how we can alter the generic conventions and narrative strategies of popular violent fiction in order to account for biopolitical exclusion and mediated phantom pain. Echenoz is thus a writer who shows us some ingenious strategies for rethinking the uses of forms and genres.

The gendering power of genres: How female Scandinavian crime fiction writers experience professional authorship

Organization ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Alacovska
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
Codes Of Conduct ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Media Industries ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Analytical Category ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Female Values

This article introduces the notion of genre as an analytical category for the study of gender inequality in creative work. Research on gender and creative labour typically identifies external, systemic and structural causes for gender inequality in media industries. In contrast, I argue that genres, by virtue of their internal, structural and discursive patterning, play a constitutive role in regulating media producers’ gendered professional identities, shaping their struggle for recognition and structuring their economic sustainability. Rather than being merely outcomes of production processes, genres shape gender inequality: They possess gendering power that influences how media producers work, think and feel. Gendering and gendered genre norms that privilege ‘masculine’ over ‘female’ values are so hard-wired in occupational practice and professional codes of conduct that the genre itself becomes a control and boundary ascription mechanism that implicitly governs, sustains and reproduces gendered identity formation, career aspirations and biographical standing. Drawing on in-depth interviews with female producers of Scandinavian crime fiction, globally branded as Nordic Noir, I examine how female writers in Denmark have coped with and experienced the gendering effect of the genre in which they work and to which they are financially beholden. I also tease out the ways in which crime fiction, a masculine genre, causes anxiety of authorship and affects female producers’ identity and boundary work. This focus on the gendering power of genres may potentially help us understand the gender disparities in media industries – disparities that endure despite efforts at policing fair access and equal opportunity.

Independence

2020 ◽  
pp. 165-178
Author(s):  
Michel Hockx
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Experimental Fiction ◽  
Cultural Elite ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Literary Journal ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Nouveau Roman

The Chinese literary field is conventionally divided into two overlapping and mutually sustaining spheres: the ‘official’ and the ‘unofficial’. The former refers to activities sponsored by the state-funded Writers Association and publications by state-owned publishing houses. The latter, sometimes misleadingly designated as ‘underground’, refers to privately funded activities by a self-appointed cultural elite that derives part of its identity from being at odds with the state, and these days also with the market. Since the arrival of the internet, some ‘unofficial’ literary activity has moved online. This chapter describes a fascinating, if extreme, example: the online literary journal Heilan (Black and Blue), run by a group of experimental fiction writers enamoured with the French nouveau roman. It found and explored a unique niche for its uncompromising literary ideas, keeping them alive for much longer than any other ‘unofficial’ group, virtually unnoticed by censors and critics alike.

scholarly journals Machines à écrire, machine à lire

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Magné
Keyword(s):  
Georges Perec ◽  
Cd Rom ◽  
Raymond Queneau

Résumé Cet article décrit la structure et le fonctionnement du CD-ROM Machines à écrire, réalisé par Antoine Denize et Bernard Magné. Mettant en scène (en écran) deux textes combinatoires de Raymond Queneau (« Un conte à votre façon », « Cent mille milliards de poèmes ») et un de Georges Perec (« Deux cent quarante-trois cartes postales ») et permettant l'exploration de la littérature combinatoire des grands rhétoriqueurs à nos jours, Machines à écrire offre à la fois un nouveau mode d'approche des textes et l'occasion de réhabiliter une littérature trop souvent ignorée ou méprisée.

scholarly journals The Oulipo and Modern Thought

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Italo Calvino ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Raymond Queneau ◽  
The Us ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Impact

The impact of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), one of the most important groups of experimental writers of the late twentieth century, is still being felt in contemporary literature, criticism and theory, both in Europe and the US. Founded in 1960 and still active today, this Parisian literary workshop has featured among its members such notable writers as Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Raymond Queneau, all sharing in its light-hearted, slightly boozy bonhomie, the convivial antithesis of the fractious, volatile coteries of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. For the last fifty years the Oulipo has undertaken the same simple goal: to investigate the potential of ‘constraints’ in the production of literature—that is, formal procedures such as anagrams, acrostics, lipograms (texts which exclude a certain letter), and other strange and complex devices. Yet, far from being mere parlour games, these methods have been frequently used as part of a passionate—though sometimes satirical—involvement with the major intellectual currents of the mid-twentieth century. Structuralism, psychoanalysis, Surrealism, analytic philosophy: all come under discussion in the group’s meetings, and all find their way in the group’s exercises in ways that, while often ironic, are also highly informed. Using meeting minutes, correspondence, and other material from the Oulipo archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, The Oulipo and Modern Thought shows how the group have used constrained writing as means of puckish engagement with the debates of their peers, and how, as the broader intellectual landscape altered, so too would the group’s conception of what constrained writing can achieve.

Ouvroir de literature potentielle (Oulipo) [Workshop of potential literature]

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Didier Lapprand
Keyword(s):  
Italo Calvino ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Writing Workshops ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Raymond Queneau ◽  
Radio Programs ◽  
Potential Literature

Oulipo, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle [Workshop of potential literature] is a dynamic and even flamboyant group of writers, poets, and mathematicians who strive to elaborate new constraints, which they employ in order to explore and enhance the potentiality of language. Oulipo was born in 1960 thanks to the union of two complementary minds: that of François Le Lionnais (1901–1984), a mathematician and renowned chess specialist, and that of Raymond Queneau (1903–1976), a famed novelist and poet. The group, now over 30 strong, gives public readings, facilitates writing workshops, and participates in many other public events, including radio programs on France-Culture. One of the key factors of the group’s unequalled longevity is precisely that Oulipo is not an avant-garde assigned to topple previous domineering currents. The most celebrated Oulipians, other than the two founding members, are Georges Perec (1936–1982), Jacques Roubaud (1932--) and Jacques Jouet (1947--). Other icons include Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and Italo Calvino (1923–1985).

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