scholarly journals Georges Perec : grandeur et misère d’une signification abymée

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-171
Author(s):  
Maxime Decout
Keyword(s):  
Georges Perec ◽  
Mise En Abyme

« 53 jours », le dernier roman de Perec, demeuré inachevé, propose d’interroger les rapports entre le réel et la fiction à travers une enquête policière sur des manuscrits et des récits mis en abyme. De la sorte, il brouille sans cesse les frontières entre la fiction et le monde, et indique comment le désir absolu de faire signifier le réel comme les récits risque de condamner le lecteur à l’erreur. La signification devient une puissance fascinante et ensorcelante que la mise en abyme renvoie dans le domaine de l’illusion. Le livre est ainsi hanté par l’idée du dévoilement, et fonde la lecture du monde sur des présupposés issus non de lui-même mais de la littérature. S’écrivant tout en désavouant la signification du réel et de la fiction, « 53 jours » affirme donc que la littérature doit avant tout être exigence de lucidité quant à ses pouvoirs et à ses limites. Un autre réalisme s’invente sous la plume de Perec, un « réalisme citationnel », qui combine le monde et les oeuvres : un réalisme qui sait que le réel est aussi une fiction, composée de tous les textes qui peuplent notre mémoire et orientent notre pensée.

From Altered States to Altered Titles: A Close Analysis of the Title Sequence to Ken Russell's Altered States (1981)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 556-571
Author(s):  
Jack Post
Keyword(s):  
Altered States ◽  
Thematic Structure ◽  
Personal Projects ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Narrative Representations ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Film Images ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Aesthetic

Although most title sequences of Ken Russell's films consist of superimpositions of a static text on film images, the elaborate title sequence to Altered States (1981) was specially designed by Richard Greenberg, who had already acquired a reputation for his innovative typography thanks to his work on Superman (1978) and Alien (1979). Greenberg continued these typographic experiments in Altered States. Although both the film and its title sequence were not personal projects for Russell, a close analysis of the title sequence reveals that it functions as a small narrative unit in its own right, facilitating the transition of the spectator from the outside world of the cinema to the inside world of filmic fiction and functioning as a prospective mise-en-abyme and matrix of all the subsequent narrative representations and sequences of the film to come. By focusing on this aspect of the film, the article indicates how the title sequence to Altered States is tightly interwoven with the aesthetic and thematic structure of the film, even though Russell himself may have had less control over its design than other parts of the film.

Staging the World: The Devils as Theatrum Mundi

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-514
Author(s):  
Christophe Van Eecke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Tidal Wave ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
Political Allegory ◽  
The World

When Ken Russell's film The Devils was released in 1971 it generated a tidal wave of adverse criticism. The film tells the story of a libertine priest, Grandier, who was burnt at the stake for witchcraft in the French city of Loudun in the early seventeenth century. Because of its extended scenes of sexual hysteria among cloistered nuns, the film soon acquired a reputation for scandal and outrage. This has obscured the very serious political issues that the film addresses. This article argues that The Devils should be read primarily as a political allegory. It shows that the film is structured as a theatrum mundi, which is the allegorical trope of the world as a stage. Rather than as a conventional recreation of historical events (in the tradition of the costume film), Russell treats the trial against Grandier as a comment on the nature of power and politics in general. This is not only reflected in the overall allegorical structure of the theatrum mundi, but also in the use of the film's highly modernist (and therefore timeless) sets, in Russell's use of the mise-en-abyme (a self-reflexive embedded play) and in the introduction of a number of burlesque sequences, all of which are geared towards achieving the film's allegorical import.

Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

Les derniers 53 jours de Georges Perec. L'impossibilité d'écrire en abyme

Genesis ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-137
Author(s):  
Claudia Amigo pino
Keyword(s):  
Georges Perec

Georges Perec géomètre

Littératures ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-123
Author(s):  
Paul Braffort
Keyword(s):  
Georges Perec

Entretien Georges Perec / Ewa Pawlikowska

Littératures ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georges Perec
Keyword(s):  
Georges Perec

Paludes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Literary Creation ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Status ◽  
Diary Writing ◽  
New Form

Gide’s experimentation with diary-writing continues in Paludes. Like Les Cahiers d’André Walter, it is the diary (journal intime) of a character writing a novel (in this case also entitled ‘Paludes’, creating a structure of mise en abyme). The work’s exploration of diary-writing depends on a dizzying, comical instability in the text’s structure: first, the status of the main narrative (as a diary or some other sort of narrative) is never resolved; secondly, the relation between the main narrative and the narrator’s own literary creation (‘Paludes’) remains unclear. Paludes continues some of the theoretical themes from Les Cahiers d’André Walter, but the narrator of Paludes is more focused on embracing the contingency of diary-writing, as a way to escape the deterministic necessity of existence and achieve some sort of action and freedom in writing. The work calls for a new form of literary œuvre that can accommodate this diaristic contingency.

Creating with Constraints

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Hasegawa
Keyword(s):  
Visual Art ◽  
Creative Activity ◽  
Georges Perec ◽  
Gyorgy Ligeti ◽  
Raymond Queneau ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Musical Creativity ◽  
Process Constraints

Musicians have long framed their creative activity within constraints, whether imposed externally or consciously chosen. As noted by Leonard Meyer, any style can be viewed as an ensemble of constraints, requiring the features of the artwork to conform with accepted norms. Such received stylistic constraints may be complemented by additional, voluntary limitations: for example, using only a limited palette of pitches or sounds, setting rules to govern repetition or transformation, controlling the formal layout and proportions of the work, or limiting the variety of operations involved in its creation. This chapter proposes a fourfold classification of the limits most often encountered in music creation into material (absolute and relative), formal, style/genre, and process constraints. The role of constraints as a spur and guide to musical creativity is explored in the domains of composition, improvisation, performance, and even listening, with examples drawn from contemporary composers including György Ligeti, George Aperghis, and James Tenney. Such musical constraints are comparable to self-imposed limitations in other art forms, from film (the Dogme 95 Manifesto) and visual art (Robert Morris’s Blind Time Drawings) to the writings of authors associated with the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) such as Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau.

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