Tel Quel Research Articles

From Symbol to Culture: Julia Kristeva’s Fascination with the Chinese Language

Kristeva has a close relationship with China. Not only has she obtained a degree in Chinese and been active in the “China Period” of Tel Quel, but she has also focused on the Chinese language, thought, and culture in both her academic research and her literary work. Kristeva’s early concern with Chinese primarily revolved around linguistics and semiotics. Influenced by the Chinese language, she proposed theories such as “logique poétique” and “le paragramme semiology.” After the 1970s, Kristeva began to introduce psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives into her research, focusing on understanding the Chinese language from the standpoint of Chinese thought, culture, and historical traditions and considering Chinese as a “tonal language.” Since the 1990s and especially in the 21st century, Kristeva further explored the potential for dialogue between Chinese and European cultures within the context of their “encounter.” Thus, Kristeva’s fascination with the Chinese language has become a prominent case of Western practice in the mutual learning between Chinese and Western literary theories.

Des revues et des femmes: la place des femmes dans les revues littéraires de la Belle Époque jusqu’à la fin des années 1950 by Amélie Auzoux, Camille Koskas et Elisabeth Russo

Reviewed by: Des revues et des femmes: la place des femmes dans les revues littéraires de la Belle Époque jusqu’à la fin des années 1950 by Amélie Auzoux, Camille Koskas et Elisabeth Russo Hope Christiansen Auzoux, Amélie, Camille Koskas, et Elisabeth Russo, éd. Des revues et des femmes: la place des femmes dans les revues littéraires de la Belle Époque jusqu’à la fin des années 1950. Champion, 2022. ISBN 978-2-7453-5676-5. Pp. 305. This fine collection analyzes the presence (and absence) of women in a wide range of literary journals published during the first half of the twentieth century. An overview by Jean-Yves Mollier lays the foundation for a chronological treatment of the subject, with sections on the Belle Époque, the period of La Nouvelle Revue française (“citadelle masculine s’il en est” [11]), l’entre-deuxguerres, and the post-World War II era. The material devoted to the Belle Époque is particularly cohesive, thanks to the solid work of Diana Holmes, Martine Reid, and Rachel Mesch on Femina and La vie heureuse, topped off by Wendy Prin-Conti’s intriguing piece on the representation of women poets in Les annales politiques et littéraires. If the journal was at first uniformly condescending toward women’s poetry (juxtaposing lines from women’s and men’s poems in order to highlight the former’s technical inferiority, for instance), it would eventually not only publish poetry by women but publicize and pre-publish excerpts of their forthcoming collections. In the section devoted to the NRF, François Bompaire offers insights on Anna de Noailles, Jean-Kely Paulhan on Élisabeth Porquerol, and Hélène Baty-Delalande on how women fared under Jean Paulhan. Of particular note is Camille Koskas’s discussion of Dominique Aury who, in addition to being the only female member of Gallimard’s comité de lecture for twenty-five years, was instrumental in drawing attention to writers such as Colette, Violette Leduc, and Simone de Beauvoir. The book’s third section looks at women’s involvement in journals specifically through the prisms of politics and cosmopolitanism. Under scrutiny are figures such as Dick May (Mélanie Fabre), Ludmila Savitzky (Amélie Auzoux), Aline Mayrisch (Paola Codazzi), Georgette Camille (Marie Cléren) as well as less well-known publications (La Revue du monde noir [Andy Stafford] and Mesures [Clarisse Barthelémy]). Auzoux paints a vivid picture of a France that felt threatened after World War I by the importation of foreign literature, making Savitsky’s opposition to the francisation of other languages in her translations and her desire to “laisser l’étranger dans toute son étrangeté” (157) all the harder to accept. The four essays in the final section explore the increased visibility of women in literary journals after the second World War. Éric Dussert discusses Marguerite Grepon, champion of the journal intime, while Élisabeth Russo investigates the first fifteen years of Les Temps [End Page 253] modernes, warning readers against simply assuming that Simone de Beauvoir “par une quelconque solidarité ou soif de justice éditoriale, favorise les femmes plus que leurs homologues masculins” (236), when in fact she showed little interest in the idea of une littérature de femme or in promoting women writers. Laurent Gayard showcases Nathalie Henneberg, who gradually gained autonomy as a science fiction writer after participating in l’écriture à quatre mains with her husband, paving the way for other women to make a name for themselves in the genre. Michel Murat’s analysis of Tel Quel (with particular emphasis on Julia Kristeva) brings this important contribution to scholarship on women’s writing and feminism to a close. [End Page 254] Hope Christiansen University of Arkansas Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Поэзия и наука: интранзитивное письмо Дени Роша и Джона Эшбери

The poetry of the 20th century has become a real linguistic laboratory. The transition from traditional (national) systems of versification to free verse and, what is especially important, to international free verse, which can be translated faster and with less distortion, made it possible to reduce the time gap in the reception of American authors in France and French authors in the USA. John Ashbury, a prominent representative of the New York School, who lived in France for about 10 years, Denis Roche and Marcelin Pleine — members of the editorial board of the avant-garde magazine Tel Quel, the theorist of intransitive writing R. Barthes were active participants in the transatlantic dialogue of poets in the middle of the 20th century. The texts of John Ashbery and Denis Roche are an international vers libre created according to the principle of intransitive writing. R. Barth, also participating in the French-American dialogue, analyses the peculiarities of writing of the period in question in his paper “To write is an intransitive verb” (1966). A poem is understood as a rhythmic inoculation of lived experience, which has a transformative power for the writer and the reader.

Avant-garde against institutionalization: “China’s university revolution” during Great Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) from the perspective of Tel Quel intellectuals

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of the May 68 Movement throughout France and the Great Cultural Revolution sweeping China, the avant-garde of Tel Quel pinned their hopes of fighting against academic institutionalization in France on ‘‘China’s university revolution.” Tel Quel avant-garde once believed that China’s “open-door university” movement had not only successfully “burned down” the university institution, but also created the vanguard culture of the proletariat. Their imagination of “China’s university revolution" is helpful to the impact on the rigid system of French universities and the creation of French vanguard culture. However, after visiting China, they did not find the expected revolutionary vanguard culture in Chinese universities, but completely bankrupted their own cultural politics. The experience of Tel Quel avant-garde made us reflect on the role of intellectuals, and also encouraged us to discuss how to get rid of the dichotomy between the “universal intellectuals" and the academic institution established in the Enlightenment era. The Foucauldian "specific intellectuals" inspired us that intellectuals should criticize reality based on their professional knowledge and construct reasonable university institution according to the actual situation.

Intertextuality and Tradition

Intertextuality and Tradition

“Out our home” tel quel: An opinion on the Albanian Pavillion in the Venice Biennale 2021

In this year’s Venice Biennale, the Albanian pavilion named “In our home” proposed a notion of neighbourliness that presumably existed “less than 20 years ago,” yet one that has now disappeared as a result of “diving deep in the waters of globalization” and moving “toward an isolated indiference and uncertainty.”1 By ‘peeking sneakily’ at such reality through clips of “In our home” (“Në shtëpinë tonë”) – a rather consummated cinematographic totem of our communist quotidian anthropology, the pavilion invites us “to cross [the walls of our globalist apartment] and rediscover the gift of this bond2 .” Such crossing is ‘scripted’ through a pinwheel axonometric composition, in which four neighboring apartments “share a “[‘secret’] space that can only come to life if the neighbors are willing to make the discovery.”3 Some inconsistencies notwithstanding, like the association of a communist era flm with the wrong periodization of “20 years ago” (which should be like more than 30 years…), or the fact that the number of the ‘neighboring apartments’ in the brief is miscounted as three (when it should be four as an immanent result of the very pinwheel composition of the square), the pavilion explicitly proposes a return and recovery of a ‘lost’ time and its related ‘neighborliness’.

Subjectivity in journalistic discourse: the case study of issue 810 in the Moroccan weekly TEL QUEL

This research is part of the theoretical framework of discourse analysis and was designed within an enunciative approach. It represents a cross-domain of linguistics and information science. It focuses on media communication, particularly the question of enunciative positioning within the journalistic discourse. Indeed, this work proposes to study the subjectivity in the issue entitled: « Boycott, les raisons d’un ras-le-bol », published on May 4th, 2018, by the Moroccan weekly TEL QUEL.

L’Approche de la « distance » dans les écrits littéraires de Michel Foucault, ou comment inscrire l’événement dans la structure

Depuis la publication des Dits et écrits, la place de la littérature dans l’oeuvre de Michel Foucault a une position bien assignée dans les recherches académiques, où l’on souligne surtout l’approche nietzschéenne de la lecture qu’a proposé le philosophe. Prenant appui sur des nouvelles publications et sur des manuscrits inédits, notre texte envisage ce thème sous un autre prisme, à partir du structuralisme de l’analyse littéraire et de l’enjeu philosophique de la revue Tel Quel dans son rapport avec le Nouveau Roman. En repérant l’importance du concept de « distance » dans ses écrits sur la littérature, nous discuterons comment plusieurs des notions créées par Foucault se trouvent en dialogue avec cette constellation théorique plus large. Nous y établirons ainsi le rapport entre la structure et l’événement, la paire conceptuelle au centre des débats philosophiques des années 1960, qui nous guidera dans la compréhension des tensions et des adhésions de la méthodologie foucaldienne à l’égard de l’analyse structurale.
 A abordagem da « distância » nos escritos literários de Michel Foucault, ou como inscrever o acontecimento na estrutura
 Desde a publicação dos Ditos e Escritos, o lugar da literatura na obra de Michel Foucault possui uma posição bem definida nas pesquisas acadêmicas, nas quais se ressalta sobretudo a abordagem nietzscheana da leitura proposta pelo filósofo. Recorrendo a novas publicações e aos manuscritos inéditos do Fonds Foucault-BnF, este texto enfocará o tema da literatura sob um outro prisma, à partir do estruturalismo da análise literária e do contexto filosófico da revista Tel Quel em sua relação com o Nouveau Roman. Enfatizando a importância do conceito de “distância” em seus escritos sobre a literatura, discutir-se-á como várias das noções criadas por Foucault se encontram em diálogo com esta constelação teórica mais ampla. A relação entre a estrutura e o acontecimento, enquanto par conceitual que se encontrava no centro dos debates filosóficos nos anos 1960, nos guiará na compreensão das tensões e das adesões da metodologia foucaltiana no que tange à análise estrutural.Palavras-chave: Análise literária. Estruturalismo. Distância. Acontecimento. Tel Quel; BnF Inéditos.

Politica editoriale e cultura del dissenso. Due esempi in casa Einaudi e Feltrinelli tra il 1964 e il 1968

The beginning of the sixties represents for Italian editors the attempt to understand the long wave of cultural dissent that express many European writers almost since the Hungarian revolution. Einaudi and Feltrinelli, following the example of Seuil with the “Tel Quel” collection, creates tho new experimental series: “La ricerca letteraria” and “Materiali”. In my contribution I will try to underline the cultural role of Einaudi and Feltrinelli and their series between ’64 and ’68: Einaudi proposes the translations of nouveau roman authors among others while Feltrinelli leads the discussion about experimentalism and neo-avantgarde. Few years that add to change Italian cultural panorama and prepared the ’68 protests.

«Il cinese ero io, naturalmente». Sanguineti, Tel Quel e il dibattito politico delle neoavanguardie

The essay recalls the debate between Edoardo Sanguineti and the editorial staff of Tel Quel in a meeting that took place in Cerisy La Salle in 1963. The two positions, which were very distant at the time, were to approach in the immediately following years, also on issues politically urgent posed by the student movement of 1968. The adhesion to Marxism-Leninism and the theoretical reflection of Mao Tse-tung's thought will therefore be common.

The Relationship Between Character and Place in The Novel Called 'Father Goriot' of Honore De Balzac

It can be said that social problems which are old as well as history of humanity, and penetrate every span of the ground, and all eras easily present their images in the literature. Starting from the fact that the attitudes and behaviors enable to be a human and that thus the personality too is basically composed of them, it is indispensable that the person needs an environment where he/she can display behaviors arising from his/her mood. Even if the novel has a fictional structure, it narrates tel quel grief and happiness that the life contains in itself. For this, the novel needs characters, time and place. Even so the events are fictional, the novel may only narrate them like this. The place is a complicated structure which contains all concrete and abstract things within itself and, maybe for this reason, is a fact that the human mostly coincides in comparison to “time” and can easily internalize with himself/herself. Therefore, the relationship between character and place manifests itself to us on all occasions. In brief, the concept of “place” cannot be separately discussed by isolating socio-psychological, ideological and economic dimensions of humankind. In this study, it will be researched the relationship between character and place in the famous novel called “Father Goriot” of Honoré de Balzac who is a great author of 19th century, leaves his mark on his age, and is a classic writer as well as his works that already become classic.

Autoridade e alteridade na China de Roland Barthes

Em 1974 Roland Barthes, François Wahl, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva e Marcelin Pleynet passam um mês na China de Mao Tsé-Tung. O “grupo de Tel Quel”, como era visto, visita o país sob a tutela da Agência Luxingshe, que também providencia dois guias e tradutores para acompanhar os visitantes. Tendo por fio condutor os Cadernos da viagem à China([1974] 2009) e o artigo “E então, China?” (1974) de Barthes, procurarei identificar, descrever e interpretar a presença do estrangeiro chinês aos olhos do escritor francês, por meio de suas formulações espacial e linguística, bem como das descrições dos chineses. Dessa leitura, num grau mais abstrato, serão objeto de reflexão situações de exercício de autoridade e de busca pela alteridade, marcando a atualidade dos gestos barthesianos de repulsa à primeira e de busca pela segunda. Os pontos de vista de Barthes serão contrapostos aos de seus colegas de viagem, que também reportaram suas impressões uma vez de volta à França. Como a China é apreendida pela trama textual das narrativas de viagem e pelo discurso dos membros do grupo? Quais aspectos convergem e quais divergem nesses múltiplos olhares sobre o mesmo objeto, o Estrangeiro, particularmente, chinês, num momento de autoritarismo político e ideológico?

Hagiographie profane et contemporanéité dans Vies minuscules de Pierre Michon

According to Giorgio Agamben, being contemporary suggests an oblique relation to time, where the author must be both modern and anachronistic. This understanding of contemporaneity implies that a critical distance must be achieved by the individual vis-à-vis his or her own time in order to have a better overview of it. In Vies minuscules, Pierre Michon seems to adopt a reactionary position by going back to a traditional form of storytelling, by using extremely flowery language and by creating a literature devoid of any explicit experimental devices, thereby differentiating himself from the Oulipo and Tel Quel schools, which dominated the literary world in France at the time. However, this article aims to show that Michon’s novel is still very contemporary, in the sense that Agamben gives to this word: by focusing his writing on insignificant or reprehensible characters, by putting his journey as a writer at the center of his story, and by deciding to write in an archaic language, he travesties the medieval genre of the vita and therefore achieves a truly contemporary style. Between hagiography and autofiction, Vies minuscules offers an original conception of modern writing that is, as the author puts it, “always new, always from yesterday.”

Wolff, Jorge. Telquelismos latino-americanos: a teoria crítica francesa no entre-lugar dos trópicos

O livro Telquelismos latino-americanos: a teoria crítica francesa no entre-lugar dos trópicos, de Jorge Wolff, professor da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, parte de um questionamento relevante: em que medida as tendências vanguardistas da crítica francesa nos anos 1960 e 1970 – representadas, notadamente, pelo grupo Tel Quel e sua revista homônima – tiveram uma influência na intelectualidade do cone sul?

Maoist Aesthetics in Western Left-wing Thought

In their article “Maoist Aesthetics in Western Left-wing Thought,” Jun Zeng and Siying Duan discuss a terrain of knowledge called “Maoist aesthetics,” which is the creative misreading of Mao’s “On Contradiction,” the theory and practice of “Cultural Revolution” and other revolutionary literature and arts of Mao’s time by Western Left intellectuals. Scholars and academic communities inspired by Maoism include Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis Pierre Althusser, the Chinese period of Tel Quel, Fredric Jameson, Arif Dirlik, and Contemporary Radical Left intellectuals such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek. Comparative study of the mutual influence of (Western) Maoist Aesthetics and (Chinese) Mao’s thinking on literature, as well as the research of (Western) Maoism’s return to China, can contribute to the rediscovery of the multi-dimensional voices and complexity of the theoretical thinking around Mao Zedong, and thus reveal unique but neglected voices.

Art and Torture in Farabeuf: Elizondo's Rereadings of Barthes, Bataille, and Baudelaire

ABSTRACTThe article discusses Salvador Elizondo's novel Farabeuf, o la crónica de un instante (1965), and the comparison it draws between torture and art—specifically, the shared function of both torture and art (particularly photography) as prolongations of the finite instant. The novel is grounded conceptually in the work of three French theorists: Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, and Charles Baudelaire. The first two—Elizondo's contemporaries and contributors to Tel Quel magazine—become especially important as concerns the question of photography. The novel is centered on a real photograph of torture (borrowed by Elizondo from Bataille's Les Larmes d’Éros), which may be understood as an enactment of Barthes's ideas on the body in Camera Lucida. Finally, Baudelaire—a contemporary of the novel's storyline, in which he briefly appears—informs a discussion of eroticized violence as a refusal of the natural, a recurring theme in his aesthetic writing, and one that Elizondo explores throughout Farabeuf.

Roland Barthes e a muralha chinesa

Em 1974, Roland Barthes e uma comitiva de intelectuais ligados à revista francesa Tel Quel visitam a China de Mao Tsé-Tung. Durante as três semanas que passa no país, Barthes anota tudo o que vê e escuta, bem como o que pensa e sente. Essas notas vêm a público em 2009, com a publicação francesa dos Cadernos da viagem à China, e mostram um escritor entediado, aprisionado pelo discurso político que esteriliza a escrita literária. Ao contrário de seus companheiros de viagem, que se posicionam a favor ou contra o regime maoísta em livros e artigos publicados quando do retorno à França, Barthes escreve um texto curto e absolutamente neutro: “E então, a China?”, uma reflexão sobre as cores pálidas que viu e o chá fraco que experimentou, desvencilhando-se do que para ele era a verdadeira armadilha, a polaridade que fixa em uma posição cristalizada a favor ou contra, forçando um engajamento político em nome de uma doxa. O presente artigo contará a história dessa viagem e analisará os textos barthesianos que dela se originaram, interrogando-se sobre a relação entre Barthes e o estrangeiro. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n43a745.

Variaciones sobre el “telquelismo” de la revista Los libros

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1984-784X.2016v16n26p3El presente artículo examina características específicas de la revista argentina Los Libros (1969-1976) a partir de sus vínculos con producciones contemporáneas del campo intelectual francés. En particular, se detiene en la importancia del grupo Tel Quel dentro de la concepción y la orientación crítica y política de la publicación argentina. Con este fin, se analizan, por un lado, la convivencia de dos orientaciones contrapuestas en el comienzo de Los Libros, y por otro, se revisan sus posiciones teóricas y políticas.

Art, Society/Text: A Few Remarks on the Current Relations of the Class Struggle in the Fields of Literary Production and Literary Ideologies

Abstract “Umetnost, družba/tekst” was an editorial published in the Slovenian journal Problemi-Razprave (Problems-Debates) in 1975. The journal was the central outlet of the so-called Slovenian Lacanian school and as such the most important place for the reception of French anti-humanist philosophy in the former Yugoslavia. The concept of the journal was based on interpreting French post-structuralism in the spirit of the Tel Quel magazine, anti-humanist Marxism in the spirit of Louis Althusser, theoretical psychoanalysis in the spirit of Jacques Lacan and his followers, as well as on a special blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian ideology critique, which characterised the French journal Cahiers pour l'Analyse. One might also find theoretical and conceptual similarities between Problemi and other French post-structuralist periodicals, such as Peinture, cahiers théoriques and Cahiers du cinéma. The editorial presented here is thus a unique example of introducing structuralism, post-structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis into debates about society, culture, ideology, and art in Yugoslavia in that time.

On Yugoslav Poststructuralism: Introduction to “Art, Society/Text”

Abstract “Umetnost, družba/tekst” was an editorial published in the Slovenian journal Problemi-Razprave (Problems-Debates) in 1975. The journal was the central outlet of the so-called Slovenian Lacanian school and as such the most important place for the reception of French anti-humanist philosophy in the former Yugoslavia. The concept of the journal was based on interpreting French post-structuralism in the spirit of the Tel Quel magazine, anti-humanist Marxism in the spirit of Louis Althusser, theoretical psychoanalysis in the spirit of Jacques Lacan and his followers, as well as on a special blend of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Althusserian ideology critique, which characterised the French journal Cahiers pour l'Analyse. One might also find theoretical and conceptual similarities between Problemi and other French post-structuralist periodicals, such as Peinture, cahiers théoriques and Cahiers du cinéma. The editorial presented here is thus a unique example of introducing structuralism, post-structuralism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis into debates about society, culture, ideology, and art in Yugoslavia in that time.