Poetry in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Denis Roche's Le Mécrit

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I would like to thank Natalie Allen (Ph.D. candidate, University of Iowa) for her meticulous work editing this essay and translating the quotations from French to English. Funding from an Old Gold Fellowship from the University of Iowa allowed me to hire Allen as a research assistant for the summer of 2012. Notes Denis Roche was considered the poet of the Tel Quel, an Avant-Garde literary group that contributed to a literary journal of the same name. See Patrick Ffrench's The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1960–1983) (1995). Benjamin writes in “Little History of Photography” that the photographers of the 1880s “made it their business to simulate the aura which had been banished from the picture with the suppression of darkness through faster lenses” and by “using all the arts of retouching” (517). For more on Roche's comparisons between painting and poetry, see Sarah N. Lawall's “Yves Bonnefoy and Denis Roche: Art and the Art of Poetry” About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and Theory (1974 Lawall , Sarah N. “Yves Bonnefoy and Denis Roche: Art and the Art of Poetry.” About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and Theory . Ed. Mary Ann Caws . Detroit : Wayne State UP , 1974 . Print . [Google Scholar]). Additional informationNotes on contributorsRoxanna CurtoRoxanna Curto (Ph.D., Yale 2008) is Assistant Professor of French and Spanish at the University of Iowa. Her research explores representations of technology and sports in French, Francophone, and Latin American literature.