Littérature N° 146, juin 2007

Christophe Pradeau. Upon Looking Back to Thibaudet Since the Tate 90s, interest in early 20th century French critical thought has been recurring. This is why, after an edition devoted to Du Bos in 2006, it seems timely to take stock of Thibaudet's contributions to the present literary field in France. Judith Schlanger. The Past With Thibaudet Thibaudet's use of Thucidydes to make sense of the First World War signais a critical position confident of its culture and classicism, a position we may now understand but probably not recapture, but which is a component of returning to Thibaudet, the real point worth reflecting upon. Marielle Macé.
Thibaudet and "A Sense of the Possibilities" For Thibaudet's generation, the contemplation of the past builds possibilities, retroactively, and each new artistic creation thus opens out onto more past possibilities, a sensation whose vitality and pleasure parallels the sense of future possibilities indispensable to action, which is the sense created by the art of his period. Françoise Simonet-Tenant.
Thibaudet and Writing the Self Thibaudet wrote about himself only tangentially, through images he used, or allusions he made, while he was a great reader of intimate writings, perhaps because of a dislike for autobiography: Montaigne and Amin but also correspondences, and diaries of ail sorts. Fabien Vasseur. Thibaudet and "the Extreme Limit of Poetry" Thibaudet's 1911 Poésie de Stéphane Mallarmé, just re-edited, when reread in conjunction with his 1923 essay on Valéry shows him as both a remarkable reader and a prescient executioner of the last remnants of poetry as mattering, introducing to our anti-literary world. Christophe Pradeau.
Conversational Criticism Thibaudet's conversational style seems designed to maintain contact with the world of non-professional readers, in particular of novels, in accordance with his definition, for each century, of its prince not of lecteurs (readers, a neutral term) but of liseurs (who lives for or through books). Albert Thibaudet. Prince of Liseurs, Best of Readers This first re-edition of Thibaudet's 1927 preface to a luxury edition of La Fontaine's Fables, illustrated by Jules Chadel, defines, for each century, an arch-reader or liseur, not so much a professional book-reader as the literary equivalent of a superb wine-critic. Guillaume Bridet.
Roger Caillois in the Collège de Sociologie's Impasses Bataille, Leiris, and Caillois aimed for an activist sociology, the latter becoming an ardent defender of an elitist conception of society's redemption through its producers of ideas - a conception both the war and the evolution of his fellow colleagues were to render completely obsolete. Dimitrios Kargiotis. Quid minor in litteris? Between Theory and History "Major" and "minor" are fundamental epistemological tools for literary and cultural studies.
They have organised the field whether when its reference, as in the past, was truth, or, as for modernity, national history, or, as is emerging now, value (and its problems)