| This dissertation examines the work of two major French literary figures whose work can be situated as post-surrealist: Henri Michaux and Michel Butor. Given a common predilection for painting with a shared foray into what can be loosely labeled as art criticism, we can ask, for each author studied, how the visual models outside of literature informed their individual questioning of what forms a book and also the limits of genre, leading towards a redefinition of what constitutes poetry. The first chapter examines Michaux's singular investigation with the sign and an effort to reconcile this fascination with his questioning of personal experience and the production of poetry. I explain Michaux's use of the idea of kinetic (cinetique) and cinematic (cinematique) movement in two works: Mouvements and Par la voie des rythmes. These two types of movements coexist in a space that falls short of Michaux's utopia of an original language, resulting in a separation of the two media as equal partners in a search to express his understanding of life. The second chapter looks at the prolific work of Michel Butor; if Michaux's corpus represents a modernist project, Butor's is indicative of what Ihab Hassan has labeled the "postmodern turn." In an analysis of works such as Mobile, Ou, and Boomerang, I show that much of Butor's writings can be seen as an indexical process stemming from an intellectual heritage based upon both modernism and Duchampian aesthetics. My scholarship seeks to go beyond the study of only ekphrastic poetry, literary art criticism, or the collaborative artists' book. While these examples of inter-art dialog are pertinent and my dissertation references all of them, I seek to place these various texts in the context of each author's aesthetic vision and their major works. This approach enables an assessment of the influence of visual models upon the literary productions and innovations of each author, which I argue are products of the intrinsic resistance between two media that testify to our contemporary fascination with images and the increasing heterogeneity of artistic production. |
