The French twentieth-century photographer Robert Doisneau has become synonymous with his image of Le baiser de l’hôtel de ville (1950), which shows a mise en scène of a couple embracing amidst the street’s hustle and bustle. Continue reading
Latest Entries
Barbie, Inc.
Everybody knows the situation: a delayed flight, and nothing more to read. Airport literature is then the answer to all our anxieties. In this case, it was entitled Swing Time (2016, Penguin edition in 2017) and its author is Zadie Smith. Continue reading
Mimesis as anti-Figura
James I. Porter’s “Disfigurations: Erich Auerbach’s Theory of Figura” (Critical Inquiry, vol. 44-1, 2017, pp., 80-113) is one of the best essays I’ve read in recent months. Continue reading
Anything but a tourist guide
Tourism is big business and “literary” travel guides are often marketed as culturally correct tools to upgrade the experience of the journey, be it abroad or at home. The new book by Eric Hazan (a publisher and political activist born in 1935 whose crisp and provocative ways of writing and thinking can be given as an example to many of those who are much younger than him) is not a book of this kind. Continue reading
What Do We Want to Know? Alberto Manguel’s ‘Curiosity’
What Is Curiosity? How Do We Question? What Are We Doing Here? What Do We Want to Know? The award-winning Canadian writer Alberto Manguel explores these, and thirteen other equally poignant questions in his book Curiosity, published by Yale University Press (2015). Continue reading
J.R. Carpenter’s ‘The Gathering Cloud’
In the field of electronic literature, the name of J.R. Carpenter, a Canadian-born multimedia artist, writer, researcher, and performer, is since many years a major reference. Continue reading
Many voices are one voice
Internet culture has made copy and paste, sampling, “uncreative” or “unoriginal” writing, as Kenneth Goldsmith or Marjorie Perloff like to say – in short all kind of modern day versions of imitation – fashionable once again. Continue reading
