French Literature Reviews - 2026

Andrea Schellino, Stèle provisoire de Victor Segalen, ou l’écriture du Désir-Imaginant
Francophone and Oral Literatures

Among the "Oriented Stelae"—that section of Segalen’s collection designed to contextualize the "Amorous Praises"—no poem articulates the erotic bond between the writing and reading of poetry more clearly than "Stèle provisoire". Inscribed upon a dual surface of stone and flesh, the text reveals the fragile and ephemeral essence of the act of writing. The impossibility of fully accessing the poem becomes the very condition of its comprehension: the reader is led to seek out desire within an imposed deprivation.

By articulating genetic criticism and stylistics, this study outlines a sensual theory of Segalen’s poetry from within the text's intimate close-quarters engagement.

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A Ph.D. graduate of the University of Paris-Sorbonne, associate professor of French literature at Roma III University, and head of the ITEM Baudelaire Research Group, Andrea Schellino is the author of La Pensée de la décadence de Baudelaire à Nietzsche (Classiques Garnier, 2019). He is the editor of the new edition of Baudelaire's Œuvres complètes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

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You can read an article about this work on Actualitte.com :

"The author offers a reading of Victor Segalen's "Stèle provisoire" in light of the 1912 and 1914 editions of Stèles and the broader work of their author. Belonging to the "Oriented Stelae", this poem assumes a central function within the collection: representing the act of writing and reading, it extends towards a form of "desiring idealism" (Christian Doumet), which finds expression in other poems by Segalen. Serving as a mirror to the precarious foundation of poetry, this stela is a "cloud," according to the Chinese epigraph heading the text's border: "Chou Ling".

The analysis of the poem is structured in relation to the Chinese linguistic model—a "religion of the sign"—and the concrete inscription of sinograms within the text of the poem, which establish an absolute identification of the character with its meaning: "They do not express; they signify; they are." At the same time, the author provides a detailed examination of Segalen's creative workshop through a genetic approach: the manuscript dossier preserved in the Segalen collection at the BnF contains five handwritten versions and four corrected typescript versions of "Stèle provisoire"."

Victor Segalen occupies a unique place in modern French literature, bridging Symbolism, exoticism, and a profound engagement with Chinese aesthetics and philosophy. His collection Stèles rethinks poetic form through the lens of epigraphic writing and Eastern linguistic models, treating the written sign not merely as a vehicle for expression but as a concrete, self-sufficient entity. Schellino places this work within the broader context of early twentieth-century poetic experimentation, tracing how the encounter with foreign traditions reshaped the boundaries of French verse and inspired a distinct aesthetic of distance and desire.

This close-quarters stylistic and genetic analysis will appeal to scholars and advanced students of modern French poetry, comparative literature, and manuscript studies. By examining the evolution of the text across multiple handwritten and typed drafts preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the study illuminates the creative workshop behind one of Segalen's most resonant poems. It offers valuable tools for researchers investigating the intersections of genetic criticism, sinography, and the philosophy of poetic creation in the modern era.