The Invention of Forms
Perec's "Life A User's Manual" and a Virtual Sense of the Real
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4386985 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paul A Harris (0000-0002-1744-2011, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1994 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 56 |
| Publication date | 1994-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | SubStance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3685068 |
| OpenAlex | W2320119272 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (La Vie mode d'emploi) has been hailed since its inception as a unique achievement, primarily because of its incredible formal and the sprawling range of its contents. The daunting set of arbitrary rules and self-imposed constraints that stipulate the text's raw materials catch the writer up in what strikes one as a neurotic net, an intricate artifice that stretches his intelligence to its ludic limits. Seemingly disinterested in re-presenting any single situation or extant state of things, Perec uses a hyperstructural conception to weave a text out of components existing in a universe of (Hartje, Magn6 and Neefs 30). From this standpoint, Life A User's Manual is an emphatically anti-mimetic text. Yet this self-contained literary invention generates a distinctive texture; by a kind of exfoliation, from a text determined by these lists and plans there emerges a visceral feeling for the little things in life. This pre-text or user's manual of life does not represent life; rather, it instantiates the real. Instead of reflecting the world by imitation, Perec manufactures the sense of the real by copying, generating in the process a form of what I will call second-order mimesis, an entirely different register of realism in literature
Aesthetics · Art · Copying · Epistemology · Feeling · Art, Technology, and Culture · Computer Science · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |