French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Le Vac, Manifeste pour une poétique de la modernité. Vers Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Breton, Tzara
Poetry and Poetics
Manifesto for a Poetics of Modernity: Toward Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Breton, Tzara
Arnaud Le Vac
Editions du Cygne, 2021
*
ISBN: 978-2-84924-644-3
14 x 21 cm
136 pages
15.00 €
*
DESCRIPTION:
A Manifesto for a Poetics of Modernity conceived to think poetics and modernity together: inseparable from the invention of a way of living and speaking in and through language. A living language that reinvents, in the present of utterance, the historicity of our lives and our history. That which constitutes our modernity as modernity: transforming our relationship to language and to the world, to the subject and to society. A manifesto that listens to how language creates the world and how the world creates language, while questioning—both collectively and singularly—what language does to the poem and what the poem does to language. What we call literature when we speak of poetry, and what we call poetry when we speak of literature. This is also the present and future of linguistics and literature, whenever neither discipline forgets what the poem accomplishes with language. A poetics of modernity which, as modernity itself, is likewise a politics of modernity.
Arnaud Le Vac places his study within the rich tradition of French literary reflection, tracing a lineage that runs from Victor Hugo through the major figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry. By examining authors such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé and Guillaume Apollinaire, alongside the avant-garde disruptions of Surrealism and Dada with André Breton and Tristan Tzara, the volume investigates how poetic writing continually redefines our relationship to the world and to society. This trajectory highlights the profound entanglement between aesthetic innovation and the changing conditions of modern human experience.
The book addresses fundamental questions regarding the power of utterance and the reciprocal shaping of language and reality. By considering how the poem acts upon language and how language constructs the world, it offers valuable insights for readers interested in poetics, literary history and the philosophy of language. Scholars, students and enthusiasts of French literature will find it a stimulating contribution to understanding the ongoing dialogue between modern art forms and the sociopolitical dimensions of the present era.