A Book About Nothing: The Poetics of the Roman Blanc
The article studies the roman blanc, the empty novel, as the culmination of antirationalism in the 20th-century avant-garde. The authors were familiar with the philosophical trends of their age, which they appropriated antinomistically. Rather than taking for granted the correspondence of language a...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2011
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2011, Volume: 25, Issue: 2, Pages: 185-198 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | The article studies the roman blanc, the empty novel, as the culmination of antirationalism in the 20th-century avant-garde. The authors were familiar with the philosophical trends of their age, which they appropriated antinomistically. Rather than taking for granted the correspondence of language and experience, the avant-gardists sought to highlight the independent functioning of language by turning towards irrationality, obscurity and ineffability. These themes emerged from medieval mysticism (Kabbalah), a source of influence for the avant-gardists. The blank book ‘La loi des purs’ by Isidore Isou charts both the praxis of language and what exceeds representation. The obscurity of the book evokes a poetics with a twofold relation to the inherent negativity of the empty novel. This relation is in the article further developed into two discrepant poetic approaches. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frr006 |