The Figure in the Writing

An apology for Jean-Louis Schefer would have to exploit, much like Schefer's own language, the double sense of the word as both an excuse and a defense. The excuse, on the one hand, is bilingual: American and French readers alike meet in Schefer's prose a linguistic opacity which is rarely approximated by even the denser aestheticians of either country. On the other hand, the excuse is an explanation: Schefer's essays draw on an incredibly large body of knowledge and a spectacularly varied terminology, extending through multiple historical periods and fields of contemporary scholarship. Semiology and theology, Lacan and Augustine, Uccello and Renais are each, for example, not only significant backgrounds and foregrounds to his writings but frequently they are only slightly (if at all) acknowledged. Schefer's lexicon and style, in short, are a militantly conceived global body: thick with historical resonances and neologisms, elusive to the extent of being an almost unattainable text

French Literature and Poetry · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Psychology