Warren Motte
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 959636 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Warren Motte |
| NOMBRES | Warren |
| APELLIDO | Motte |
| FIRMA | MOTTE W |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Colorado System |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 73 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 13 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 73 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1982 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Pierre Bayard How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read 2007
Himmler and the Handmaid by Erik Martiny (review)
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak (review)
Concerning Christine Montalbetti
Christine Montalbetti has published twenty-odd texts at the Éditions P.O.L over the years, beginning with Sa fable achevée, Simon sort dans la bruine, which appeared in 2001. While she has practiced short forms and theater (with several plays produced at the Comédie-Française), her central literary concern has been the novel. Her novels are innovative, engaging, and exceptionally canny constructions. Each of them testifies to a smart, sustained r…
Le Cortège by Gérard Gavarry
Reviewed by: Le Cortège by Gérard Gavarry Warren Motte Gérard Gavarry Le Cortège Paris. P.O.L. 2022. 204 pages. READERS FAMILIAR WITH his work know Gérard Gavarry as a master of French prose style as well as a writer who comes to each project with a fresh perspective, determined to stake out new territory in each of his books. Le Cortège is his most recent novel, and it may be his best yet. The tale he tells here involves the final voyage of a fr…
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère
Reviewed by: Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère Warren Motte Emmanuel Carrère Yoga Trans. John Lambert. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2022. 335 pages. MANY PEOPLE HAVE written about mental crises—one thinks of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Stevenson, Waugh, Plath, and Styron, for instance—but in none of those accounts are the circumstances leading to those crises more closely examined than in Emmanuel Carrère’s new book, Yoga. Published in France in 2020 to co…
Georgia on his Mind
A taste for lands far from Metropolitan France marks Jean Rolin’s writing. He indulges that taste in Savannah (2015), an account of a trip he took to that American city in remembrance of a previous trip in the company of his friend, the photographer Kate Barry. An elegiac tone echoes throughout the book, for between those two trips, Kate Barry died. As Rolin charts his new itinerary, the films that Kate took during their first trip provide Rolin …
Erik MartinyNight of the Long Goodbyes
contemporary India in her wide travels, engaging with great felicity the Sanskrit, Dravidian, and Persianate cultures of India alongside her Gaelic inheritance. In the titular poem, she exhibits the rich diversity she brings to her poetry, putting together words of Asian and European etymology with the greatest confidence to invite the reader to break their linguistic shackles. The Irish wajalukinat is placed alongside the Sanskrit philosophic ma…
Perec en Amérique by Jean-Jacques Thomas
Reviewed by: Perec en Amérique by Jean-Jacques Thomas Warren Motte Thomas, Jean-Jacques. Perec en Amérique. Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2019. 173 pp. In the early pages of this study, Jean-Jacques Thomas confesses that it was not his intention to write a book on Perec. Rather, he was interested in the manner in which "French Theory" had taken root in American academia in the 1960s and 1970s, enabling figures such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault…
Éric MathieuThe Little Fox of Mayerville
simultaneously downplaying, if not outright rejecting, any appeals to preserving the text’s mystical “essence.” Venuti has written an excellent and far-reaching polemic indeed. It is erudite, extremely well-researched, and at times biting —he calls out individual and institutional agents alike—a direct effect of his desiring to move beyond theorizing to stimulate discussion and, hopefully, change. On the practical level, Venuti’s treatise lends s…
Wanderer by Sarah Léon
Sarah Léon Wanderer Trans. John Cullen. New York. Other Press. 2019. 199 pages. This is a first novel, written by a very young author. The French original appeared in 2016 when Sarah Léon was barely twentyone years old. Part of the charm of first novels is that their authors typically try to pack them full to the brim, and Wanderer is no exception. It tells the story of Hermin Peyre, a composer who has chosen to live and work in the rugged landsc…
Les oiseaux morts de l'AmÃ(c)rique by Christian Garcin
Christian Garcin Les oiseaux morts de l’Amérique Arles. Actes Sud. 2018. 221 pages. Christian Garcin’s new novel puts individuals on stage who are rarely given voice in contemporary fiction. Hoyt Stapleton, Matthew McMulligan, and Steven Myers are homeless, and they live in a storm drain in Las Vegas, at some remove from the bright lights and ostentation of the Strip. All three are war veterans: Vietnam in Hoyt’s case, Iraq in the case of the oth…
Leucate Univers
more engaged with the Russian spirit than with the country’s quotidian concerns. The novel almost floats; we are engaged from beginning to end, and one couldn’t find a better companion than Rostov. Rita D. Jacobs New York City Emili Teixidor. Black Bread. Trans. Peter Bush. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2016. 393 pages. There is nothing more profound than the realization of what war does well beyond its official end. Peter Bush has given us a poe…
La Fabrique des pervers
keeps the energy high, moving us through Tezuka’s life at a pace as fast as Tezuka himself. The story was originally serialized, which means that there are several checkin points and some repetition. I found this incredibly helpful, actually. This wasn’t a comic I could read in one sitting, so I appreciated the landmarks along the way. Fred Schodt’s translation was wonderful : fluent, smooth, and with natural language . I can’t imagine anyone els…
Lapidaires verdoyants by Saint-Clément-de-Rivière
yet when with Rupert she doesn’t wish to return to Guiler. Striving to reconcile a split existence, Nin finds herself marking down dissatisfactions with each man’s shortcomings and tempting fate in thrilling ventures, although she cannot help but behold both with understanding, compassion, and love. Trapeze offers Nin’s solution to such a dilemma: embrace ambivalence. Choose everything, choose both, choose between, and choose all. Jessica Gilbey …
The Angel of History
The river’s name becomes allegory. On it flows, blissfully unaware of its role. Borders , blindness, bridges—Jacobsen nestles them all beside “the peaceful Our, which meandered through the dewy meadows with such heavenly calm, if only life on earth were like that.” Borders is a sweeping masterpiece. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Alan Moore. Jerusalem. New York. Liveright. 2016. 1,266 pages. Alan Moore has constructed in Jerusalem a monolithic rende…
Le lieu et le moment
hero he reconstructs the artistic world and images that fixed Paz in the popular imagination, proving that the Nobel laureate was thoroughly “in his century.” This monumental biography has fueled controversy among those who shared or rejected Paz’s convictions. But it is impartial , as befits one of the largest lives ever lived. Paz has not found his Edel, Ellmann, or Stach but rather a combination of them, with some Holroyd-like insights include…
Football
of their ancestors and in having a strong identity of their own. Although contemporary Palestinian poets have been studied to some degree, and books and articles have been published about them, Palestinian performance artists , visual artists, and musicians have not been studied as much. Rahman tries to redress the balance in this small book of 190 pages, and she believes they all represent contemporary Palestinian political conditions and, as im…
Inside Out
Inside Out Warren Motte (bio) Among the many pleasures that fiction puts on offer, the opportunity to lose oneself in mild abstraction is by no means the least, and I imagine that all of us have availed ourselves of that opportunity, whether sparingly or in a more insouciant manner. For my part, I am intrigued by the different shapes that state of abstraction assumes, and by its conditions of possibility. I would propose to parse it closely and m…
Naming and Negotiating
Throughout his career, J.M.G. Le Clézio has wagered upon the theme of cultural plurality, placing it on stage in his fiction in a variety of guises and causing it to perform in different ways. More than anything else, what that performance puts in evidence is the play of culture, that is, the manner in which cultures collide and put each other into question, each one emerging from that collision with reconfigured terms. That is the fundamental ge…
Le Triangle d'hiver by Julia Deck
who will greet me with cries of hate). Meursault will be executed, but Haroun will be condemned to wander. Meursault, contre-enquête was awarded the Prix François Mauriac. It is a fine examination of the relationship between independent Algeria and France and has received much critical praise. Adele King Paris Julia Deck. Le Triangle d’hiver. Paris. Minuit. 2014. isbn 9782707323996 Second novels are often where literary careers are made or, on th…
Cela me regarde
In this article I shall trace the psychological and communicational circuit constituted by mirror scenes in contemporary literature, or more specifically scenes in which the subject confronts his or her own image in the mirror. I shall consider three types of mirror scenes: first, those scenes in which the subject sees and recognizes himself without any difficulty; second, those in which such recognition is arrived at with some difficulty; and fi…
I, me
My purpose in this article is modest: I wish merely to examine why many of us in academe are reluctant to say “I” when we write. We go to considerable lengths to avoid that “I”—even when we mean “I” and nothing else. Why do we resort to such awkward constructions as “The present study will argue that... ,” or “We shall attempt to demonstrate that... ,” or “One perceives in Sartre's hell a stylized version of lived reality... ,” rather than saying…
Le Fils de Judith by Marie Cosnay
Patrick Boltshauser Rapids Peter Arnds, tr. Dalkey Archive Press A young man moves to a new city and quickly becomes disoriented in an unfamiliar environment. When his relationship with Anja, an older woman, unpredictably veers on a secretive path, he loses all stability. A third-person narrative intensified by bursts of poetry, Rapids portrays a necessary odyssey in search of self. Kjell Askildsen Selected Stories Seán Kinsella, tr. Dalkey Archi…
L'Ambition by Iegor Gran
Ron Butlin The Magicians of Edinburgh Polygon This collection of poems from Edinburgh’s poet laureate gives a fresh face to an old city. The Magicians of Edinburgh is a moving presentation of the Scottish capital city, exploring many of its most characteristic attractions: the Parthenon on Carlton Hill, the Walter Scott Monument, and (of course) whiskey. This new collection is particularly timely as Scotland considers the future of its national i…
The Work of Mourning
Entretiens et conférences
Jacques Jouet and the Literature of Exhaustion
In the last two decades, Jacques Jouet has patiently constructed one of the most astonishing bodies of work in contemporary French literature. During that time, he has published some 40 volumes in a variety of literary genres. By turn a poet, a novelist, a playwright, a short story writer, an essayist, a lexicographer, and a member of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo), Jouet never seems to rewrite himself--and such a consideration a…
Romanciers Minimalistes 1979–2003
Constraint on the Move
Constraint is often conceived of as a restrictive process, one that severely limits the field of possibilities available to a writer. While it is undoubtedly true that the use of systematic artifice and writing rules in a literary text does narrow an author's choices (one cannot use author, for instance, in a text that is limited to monosyllabic words), it may also provide for fresh and largely unsuspected choices and for new sorts of mobility as…
La Bibliotheque Oulipienne
Le vol. 6 est publie par le Castor Astral, il reunit les fascicules 74 a 85 (1995-1997) de la Bibliotheque oulipienne, avec des textes de Herve Le Tellier, Michelle Grangaud, Jacques Jouet, Jacques Bens, Jacques Roubaud et Francois Le Lionnais
The Poetics of Experiment
De la problematologie? Philosophie, science et langage
Oulipo
Oulipo
Auctor Ludens
Questioning Edmond Jabes
Playing It by the Book
AMONG THE MANY EMBATTLED CONSTRUCTS IN OUR CULTURE, the book has been particularly beset in recent years. Assailed from all sides by other forms of expression-television, film, electronic media, and so forth, the book competes more and more unequally in the cultural marketplace. A stroll through any bookstore will confirm that the traditional notion of the book as a vehicle for literature has been challenged from within as well, for even in good …
The Rhetoric of the Impossible
The Rhetoric of the Impossible Warren Motte (bio) Is it possible, it thinks, that one has not yet seen, known and said anything real or important? —Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge It's damn near impossible to write about Marcel Bénabou's books. They present a limpid, armored surface where the kind of handholds one normally looks for in a text are rare and extraordinarily precarious. Every utterance in them is so deeply bound up in ir…
Francis Ponge
The working hypothesis of Sydney Lévy's Ponge is that poetry may help us come to know the world of phenomena, and that it may in some cases articulate that knowledge in a manner that might be called "scientific." This is a notion that will confound many readers of contemporary poetry--though it would surely have seemed utterly apt to Lucretius. Lévy is interested in the ways in which Ponge attempts to reduce the distance between experience and it…
Les absences du Capitaine Cook
Introduction
Once again, with this special section on Jacques Jouet, SubStance returns to a format it practiced in its early years, introducing the work of a writer whom it feels deserving of broader recognition among readers of contemporary literature. As Sydney Lévy put it in a recent issue, there are only two rules to be observed here: first, that the author work with the journal in order to shape the dossier; second, that the author figure among the contr…
Jacques Jouet and the Literature of Exhaustion
In the last two decades, Jacques Jouet has patiently constructed one of the most astonishing bodies of work in contemporary French literature. During that time, he has published some 40 volumes in a variety of literary genres. By turn a poet, a novelist, a playwright, a short story writer, an essayist, a lexicographer, and a member of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo), Jouet never seems to rewrite himself--and such a consideration a…
Perfect Books
Having accepted SubStance's kind invitation to contribute to its hundredth issue, I found myself more and more troubled by the questions I had been asked to address, "What are the questions that fascinate you?" and "What do you want to know?" Not that they are unreasonable ones; quite to the contrary in fact. I realized nonetheless that, while there are a great many questions that fascinate me, the ones that fascinate me the most are the ones I f…
Editors' Preface
The Work of Mourning
Entretiens et conférences
Voices in Her Head
Voices in Her Head Warren Motte (bio) Reading Lydie Salvayre is principally a matter of listening. A clamor of voices resounds in her writings—voices of rage, of loathing, of indignation, of sorrow, of fear, of desperation. They shout, they whisper, they castigate, they wheedle, they condemn. Some voices are maddeningly prolix, others are painfully laconic; some offer carefully reasoned insight, others speak to say nothing; some emanate from the …
Reflections on Mirrors
Reflections on Mirrors Warren Motte (bio) [A lecture delivered in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Johns Hopkins University, September 23, 2004.] When Johns Hopkins extended its kind invitation to me yet again, I thought long and hard about what I might say today. I thought that I might speak about the question of mourning in the work of Georges Perec; but when the issue of Yale French Studies containing that piece of mine app…
Jeux mortels
Le formalisme ludique de la Disparition , de Perec, roman de trois cents pages composé sans la lettre E , cache un jeu mortel. Car le livre encrypte un discours d'urgence, dont les termes principaux sont la privation, le manque et la mort. Au terme d'une telle lecture, le littéraire en vient à figurer iconiquement le littéral : ce que transcrit le roman, finalement, c'est l'itinéraire écrit d'une survie
Gérard Gavarry's Hops
Gérard Gavarry's Hops Warren Motte University of Colorado Once in a great while a novel comes along that pleases and astonishes not only by virtue of the story it tells, but also by virtue of its form, and the new possibilities that it suggests for the genre itself. Gérard Gavarry's Hop là! un deux trois (2001) is just such a book, one of the richest and most innovative novels to appear in France in recent years. Set in the suburbs of Paris, it p…
Introduction
The French Novel Now Warren Motte University of Colorado As many of us know to our chagrin, speculating about the "now" can be very perilous indeed, for that "now" is the most protean of terms, at once both dynamic and static, mutating into something quite different even as we struggle to come to terms with it, yet continually demanding that we account for it once and for all. In the essays included here, we have attempted to describe certain for…
Quelques questions pour Christine Montalbetti
Christine Montalbetti est universitaire et romanciere. Son premier roman, Sa fable achevee, Simon sort dans la bruine, a paru aux Editions P.O.L. en 2001, suivi par L'Origine de l'homme en 2002. Ex
Paris-Brest by Tanguy Viel
Hfl ^Thovs7 the soldie^^B^ HMrepairs ^1 ^Hjfl the gramophone l; ^^MH tenyears he attempts to reachher by ^^^^H letter andphone. ^^|^H Nationalist Serbia teaches ^^B?H Aleksandarthat"mySerbian blood was contaminated by my Bosniak ^^B^H mother/' while TV news portrays ^^B^H those who defendedVisegrad as the aggressors. The family thus ^^^^H emigrates to Essen, where Aleksan ^^^^H dar masters his environment but ^^^^H observes, "Ifanyone says I'm a …
Courir by Jean Echenoz
novel is one of interwoven secrets and searching: for identities, miss ing loved ones, self-esteem, and the solution to mysteries. Kathleen McNerney West Virgnia University Fatou Diome. Inassouvies, nos vies. Paris. Flammarion. 2008. 271 pages. 19. isbn978-2-0812-1353-1 The latest novel by the author of Le Venire de l'Atlantique (2003; see WLT, September 2004, 83) and Ketala (2006) is set in Strasbourg, where Fatou Diome has been living since she…
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