Le mot image: Literality and Image-Mediation in 20th- and 21st-Century French Poetry

This dissertation investigates parallel crises of the image in French poetry and in the expanding field of photographic technologies from the 1940s to the present. This latter crisis builds out of the unhinged ubiquity of images in daily life, whose steady advance since lithography inaugurated a new age of image dissemination saw marked accelerations with the advent of television in the postwar years and of digital imaging in the early 1990s. These technological developments and the ways they reshape notions of what an image is (how it originates, where it is located, how it moves) form the backdrop against which a strain of poetic iconoclasm—the aspiration towards a “poésie sans images,” a poetics of the literal—takes shape. The movement known as Literalism, a dominant force in the French poetry scene of the 1980s, forms a kind of literary-historical center to this study, as a moment when reflection on the potential of literality to produce a new kind of poetic vision coincided with a vigorous theoretical reckoning with the particular nature of photographic representation. In an effort to situate this literalist turn, I begin with a study of the work of Francis Ponge, a mid-century poet who I read as a significant anticipatory figure in the story of literality, albeit one whose particular interest in reforming the poetic image leads him to work against rather than with the representational model of analog photography. The recently deceased poet Emmanuel Hocquard, a poet-theorist of 1980s literalism, is the subject of the second chapter, which considers how his conception of literality is informed by his conjugated practices of amateur photography and typesetting. Finally, a study of the work of Hocquard’s protégé Pierre Alferi shows how this younger poet diverges significantly from the literalist precepts of the previous generation with a poetics that is radically accepting of its function as an infrastructure for the (re)mediation of images, one that is not concerned with flattening out the poetic image (as Hocquard does) but with deploying poetic form in a way that allows him to enact (and think critically about) the mobility of televisual and digital images. The issues at stake in these poets’ reimagining of the poetic image can of course be understood in literary-historical terms, as episodes in the ongoing reckoning with the legacy of the surrealist image, or as responses to the perennial “returns” to the comforts of (neo)lyricism that all three of these authors rail against. While this study does take these frameworks into account, my focus is directed instead to the way these poets think the image beyond poetry and, as a result, can be approached seriously as theorists of the image in the broadest sense. By bringing together three authors whose reflection on the technical image is shaped in the photographic, televisual, and digital eras (respectively), I am able not only to underscore the technohistorical situatedness of their particular reconceptualization of the poetic image, but also to make the case for the exceptional potency of poetic thought in the face of image technologies that demand, by virtue of their technical structure, a conceptual awareness of problematics of concreteness and abstraction, interiority and exteriority, transmission and reception, and the operational nature of visualization.

Advisor: Guerlac, Suzanne