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- Title
Politiques de l'écriture et régimes du collectif dans les avant-gardes littéraires en mai-juin 1968.
- Authors
GOBILLE, BORIS
- Abstract
This article explores the impact of May-June 68 on the French literary avantgarde. The protests appeared to bolster the revolutionary aspirations of the avant-garde writers, yet proved as much a defeat for them. They had to enter the arena and establish collectives. The politics of avant-garde literature, at least that basing social revolt on a theory-driven language revolution, was countered by the generalized, egalitarian, anonymous, everyday utterance. How did the avant-garde confront this challenge? Three positions are examined. Tel Quel, hostile to the student movement, entered as an already formed group exemplifying the breach between specialized theoreticians and common spontaneists. On the other side, the Comité d'action étudiants-écrivains, established on May 18, 1968 at occupied Sorbonne, aligned with the symbolic matrix of May, advocating merger with the revolutionary movement and breaking with writer privileges to conceive a "writing communism" based on anonymity and impersonality. Lastly, the Union des écrivains, also born during the events, contested the "established literary order" and questioned the relationships between literary writing and the "generalized writing" of May. It also generated a collective union-type action heralding the writer as a "worker" whose "social death" must be prevented and breaking with the literary mythologies that portray the author as an ethereal solitary creator. In challenging the literary singularity, the May-June 68 political community forced the avant-garde to rethink its politics of literature and conceptions of the collective. This article looks at the relationships between literary field and critical event, examining the reshapings that occurred in the immediate post-May period.
- Subjects
WRITING; 20TH century French literature; HISTORICAL linguistics; SOCIAL death; POLITICS &; literature; GOVERNMENT policy
- Publication
Études Françaises, 2018, Vol 54, Issue 1, p13
- ISSN
0014-2085
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.7202/1042864ar