T el Q uel

Abstract

Tel Quel , a French journal founded in 1960 and disbanded in 1982, played a major role in the promotion of writers and ideas associated first with structuralism and poststructuralism. The director, Philippe Sollers, was himself an accomplished postmodern writer, and his wife and fellow editorial board member, Julia Kristeva, was a major literary theorist and critic. Tel Quel was not strictly an academic journal, although academics served on its various editorial boards and its readership fell largely within the academic intelligentsia. Sollers never held an academic post, and he understood the project of the journal as a sustained challenge to the prevailing academic consensus in such fields as literary study, art history, philosophy, political science, and psychoanalysis. Tel Quel became two journals over time. Beginning in 1982, Tel Quel became L'Infini , a journal with similar ambitions to those of Tel Quel that remains in publication to this day. During its heyday in the 1960s and ‘70s, Tel Quel helped spawn several other journals in the humanities and social sciences, such as Change and Cahiers pour l'Analyse . The book series at Seuil, Collection Tel Quel (inaugurated in 1962), published some of the most important monographs of the period such as Théorie d'ensemble (1968), which first introduced Russian formalism and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to France, as well as germinal books by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva that were highly influential in Anglo‐American literary and cultural theory.