Michel Leiris’ Anthropology and the Ontology of Finitude: Reading the Ethnographic Writings Through the Lens of Miroir de la Tauromachie

MLN ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 129 (4) ◽  
pp. 1009-1034
Author(s):  
Kevin Inston
Keyword(s):  
Michel Leiris

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Evans
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Marcel Proust ◽  
Gustave Flaubert ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
The Many

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.

Michel Leiris, la voix de l'autobiographie

Pleine Marge ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 31 (0) ◽  
pp. 27-38
Author(s):  
Simon HAREL
Keyword(s):  
Michel Leiris

Cultures in Contact

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Watson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Working At Home ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
Novel Of Manners ◽  
At Home

In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in France of “ethnographic surrealism,” his anthropological writings in the period after World War II show a surprising fidelity to disciplinary protocols. The chapter argues that Leiris’s ethnography of the Francophone Caribbean, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, tries to subvert those protocols, turning from a social science survey into something like a novel of manners by the end. Ultimately, however, this literary turn falls prey to tropes of imperial romance that Leiris ostensibly seeks to undercut.

scholarly journals Obsessed with Politics : Positions and interventions in Narratives of Travels in Black Africa by André Gide, Albert Londres and Michel Leiris

Viatica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank ESTELMANN
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Andre Gide ◽  
Black Africa ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Institutional Aspects ◽  
André Gide

The three authors and travelers studied in this paper (Albert Londres, André Gide, Michel Leiris) speak out against colonialism. They are critical of its effects in the context of late European colonial rule in black Africa during the late 1920s and early 1930s. For various reasons however, ranging from institutional aspects to personal sensibilities, it was undesirable to interfere in political debates. Hence, the reluctance to subscribe to the role of early intellectuals and public watchmen. They justified their outspokenness with their personal experience as travelers and the urgency of the matter they discussed. It can be shown that the literary forms that resulted from this situation (grand reportage, literary travel log, ethnographic journal) modernized the genre of travel writing in a critical moment of its evolution.

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