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How have poets writing in French reacted and adapted to cinema? This book answers with original analyses of over a century of remediation experiments among poets ranging from Mallarmé to Alferi, Hillel-Erlanger to Isou, and Cocteau to Damas and Gleize. ‘Cinepoetry’ names a disseminated but insistent practice of writing poetry under the inspiring warp of films, movie culture, the scenario form and cinema as actual or imaginary apparatus. Poets were struck by the essential feature of cinema--automorphosis—making it the first artificial form capable of reshaping itself like fluids and organic bodies. Far from marginal, cinepoetry forces us to reassess central tenets of modernism and the avant-garde, such as the inception of Surrealism and Lettrism, or the relation of Symbolism to visual technologies. Arguing that the mutation of the Romantic imagination into the ‘imaginary’ was hastened by cinepoetic thought, the book provides a new genealogy for poetry in the age of new media based on what is often lacking in remediation studies: close analyses of a large and diverse corpus of works, and the identification of a specific set of cross-medium operations. This book reconfigures key binaries within the interdisciplinary landscape of today's humanities: the canon and the margins, literature and cinema, text and image, close reading and post-technological hermeneutics, old vs. new media, prose poems vs. visual poems, text-based poetry vs. digital poetry. It also engages with the place of cinema in the thought of Jean Epstein, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault among others.

Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory to other memories of violence, especially those of colonialism. These works produced a “memory-in-complicity” that implicates different regimes of violence throughout history as well as different subject positions, such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator. Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity investigates the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than discourses of trauma, shame, and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work? As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.

This book brings theories of affect to the study of poetics. Informed by the thinking of Silvan Tomkins, Melanie Klein, and Wilfred Bion, it offers new interpretations of the poetics of four major American artists: Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and Andy Warhol. By exploring their transferential poetics, that is, the close, reflexive attention each of these artists pays to the transfer of feeling between text and reader, the author unfolds the affect dynamics fundamental to experiences of composition, expression, group phenomena, thinking and learning, and self-care. The book’s historical route from Poe to Warhol culminates in television, a technology and cultural form that makes affect distinctly available to perception. The peculiar theatricality of these four artists can best be understood as a reciprocal framing relation between the bodily means of communicating affect (by face and voice) and technologies of graphic reproduction. In its various returns to television, as technology, as institution, as writing, as theater, this book offers a loose, integrated approach to criticism across mediums of composition and performance.