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ABSTRACTS

Five Essay Pieces. Tracing the Essay in Contemporary Performing Arts

Jasper Delbecke (Ghent University)

In the frame of the ENAG workshop “Hybrid Essayistic Forms and the Neo-Avant Garde”, I discuss the emergence of "the essay" as a form, concept, and method within the field of performing arts during the mid-2010s. Around this period, a generation of theatre and performance artists started to refer to “the essay” as a form, mode or structure to underpin their projects. Given the frame of “Hybrid Essayistic Forms and the Neo-Avant Garde”, my presentation focuses on concrete examples exemplary of this trend.

From critifiction to the essay as experimental form

Brigitte Félix (Université de Paris 8)

The notion of “critifiction” coined by Raymond Federman, which points at the hybridization of the critical and the fictional in postmodern experimental writing, will serve as a starting point to discuss a selection of late 20thc. and 21^st c. North American texts crossing the lines between fiction, metafiction, criticism and memoir under the loose label of “essays”, or even “fiction(s)”, or sometimes without any label at all. What makes some forms of essay writing by American writers resonant with the neo-avant-garde stance? I will attach my presentation to John D’Agata’s essay writing on essays which takes the interesting form of an anthology, The Next American Essay (Graywolf Press, 2003), where each selected essay is introduced by a reflection on essay writing by D’Agata. I will evoke such authors of essays as (in alphabetical order, a provisional list subject to change) Anne Carson, Annie Dillard, Thalia Field, William Gaddis, William H. Gass, Shelley Jackson, Daniel Mendelsohn, Lance Olsen, Rebecca Solnit, Alexander Theroux…

Hybriddles: René Gysen’s Hybrid Essay on Marquis de Sade as Apology and Advocacy

Lander Kesteloot (Ghent University)

During the sixties, the Flemish neo-avant-garde author René Gysen (1927-1969) explored the legacy of D.A.F. Marquis de Sade. He published the essay De slecht befaamde Markies de Sade (1961) and translated Sade’s Juliette (1965), in collaboration with Freddy de Vree, Gust Gils and Claude Krijgelmans. Due to its resistance to generic classification and its propensity for challenging literary conventions (Flamend 1985, 3), Gysen’s literary work can be described as ‘hybrid’. By their nature, hybrid texts transcend boundaries: by blending two or more voices, traditions, genres or styles, they generate new meanings (Budor & Geerts 2004, 12). Specifically regarding his essays, Gysen’s contemporary Pierre H. Dubois (1970, 43) remarks that they are often so imaginative, so poetic, or so autobiographical that they cannot be classified as purely essayistic. In this paper, I examine how De slecht befaamde Markies de Sade (1961) showcases hybridisation across three levels. Firstly, the text oscillates between an impartial, auctorial voice and a subjective, more personal voice. Linguistically, the text shifts between Dutch reflections and French excerpts from the writings of Sade. This results in an amalgamation of voices, as per Mikhael Bakhtin’s concept of ‘polyphony’. Finally, on a generic level, the text blends techniques from various literary forms, including the biography, the essay and the anthology. My hypothesis is that the deployment of hybridisations transcends mere formal experimentation. The hybridisations not only serve to reflect the elusive nature of Sade and (sexual) sadism, but hold functional, ethical ramifications as well. It is for this reason that I adopt the term ‘hybriddles’, building on Liesbeth Korthals Altes’ notion of ‘ethos riddles’ (2014,131), passages that elicit cognitive and ethical questioning in the reader. Through the strategic deployment of such hybriddles, the text prompts readers toward profound ethical introspection and steers them toward an apologetic and advocative stance toward Sade. For instance, Gysen’s biographical account of Sade is presented as a first chapter and creates an apologetic background against which Sade’s philosophy is to be understood.

Works Cited

Budor D. & W. Geerts (2004). Le Texte Hybride. Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Dubois, P.H. (1970). ‘René Gysen als essayist’. In: Komma (reds.), Over René Gysen (pp. 43-54) Nijgh en Van Ditmar.

Flamend, J. (1985). ‘René Gysen’. Kritisch lexicon van de moderne Nederlandstalige literatuur, pp.   1-9.

Korthals Altes, L. (2014). Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. University of Nebraska Press.

“A pair of scissors is not enough”. A literary (and movie related) peculiarity, an essay by Martino Oberto

Irene Cimò (Università degli Studi di Milano /  KU Leuven)

Art conservator with a philosophical background, but also artist, editor and essayist, OM — Martino Oberto’s pseudonym — played a pivotal role in Italian verbo-visual research during the second half of the XX century. Combining his interest for Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus with Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings and James Joyce’s works, he developed his own personal view about language and writing expression. “Ana Eccetera”, the revue he founded in 1958 along with Anna Oberto — his wife — and Gabriele Stocchi, was indeed the perfect way to elaborate and share his artistic, yet linguistic and philosophical research. In 1960, in “Ana Eccetera” 3, OM published A literary (and movie related) peculiarity — Uno specifico letterario (e filmico) —, an interesting, short essay about montage “written in a chaos caused by the mechanic operation of gluing”. The work is indeed the result of an actual work of collage, based on the idea of speech as the artificial product of single, unbound concepts juxtaposed all together. It is absolutely no news for those who know Martino Oberto’s work to deal with this kind of topic, which was often addressed and developed through the different issues of the revue, as well as through his paintings: his aim was indeed to understand the visualization of conceptual thought through written words, in order to abolish any distinction between signifier and signified. Starting from this peculiar method of writing and then proceeding with its weighty content, the contribution intends to analyze Martino Oberto’s work so as to highlight the important impact it had in Italian neo-avant-garde field. In doing so, it will be crucial to emphasize the important role of his artistic models — such as the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the film director Sergej Michajlovič Ėjzenštejn — as well as the philosophical and literary ones.

How to think differently about and with poetry? The poem-essay as critical intervention. 

Vincent Broqua (Université de Paris 8)

From Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson to Charles Bernstein's conception of the modular essay or again Anne Carson's idiosyncratic pieces and Claudia Rankine's Citizen, poets have consistently tried to write criticism differently. They have attempted to intervene in critical writing through and with poetry. But the poem-essay is sometimes difficult to circumscribe. Some of the most recent documentary poetry (such as Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony) or all of Liliane Giraudon's latest poems (Une femme morte n'écrit pas, Polyphonie Penthésilée) are telling examples. 

Prose Poems, Sudden Essays and Other Microforms

Michel Delville (Université de Liège)

Even though terms like 'microessay' are gaining traction, there hasn't been much critical examination of how the prose poem relates to adjacent speculative prose genres. Using several contemporary examples of essayistic prose poetry, this talk explores methods for grasping the direction indicated by recent prose poetry merging critical, philosophical, and lyrical elements. It suggests a form of writing that exists between the aspiration for self-contained poetic expression and the logical requirements and contextual expansiveness of the essay format.

Organization

The workshop is a collaboration of KU Leuven (research group MDRN) and the research network ENAG. It is made possible by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and KU Leuven, MDRN.

ENAG is an FWO-funded research network that further includes CIPA (Université de Liège), OBAwa (Jagiellonian University in Kraków), SEL (Ghent University and Vrije Universiteit Brussels), Transcrit (Université Paris 8), and ViennAvant (Universität Wien)