Jean Paulhan and the idea of ​​literature

Communications from the conference at IMEC, May 18-20, 2011

The crucial place that Jean Paulhan occupies in the history of literature in the 20th century is due as much to his work as an editor as to a constant reflection on literature that he carried out jointly in his critical activity, in his theoretical reflection and in his correspondence with writers. This reflection took the form of an “applied” questioning, constantly repeated, on what literature is and on the means of understanding it, methodical questioning through which, within which an idea of ​​literature took shape which never ceased to seek its own definition. The articles gathered here look at this idea of ​​literature which inspired authors and poets, critics and philosophers, from Breton and Aragon to Blanchot and Merleau-Ponty.

Paulhan's conception of literature resists categorization, and is inseparable from the rhetoric he uses. It is built on a critical reading of the history of criticism since Romanticism and the rupture of Letters with the classical rhetorical regime. It was enriched by continual questioning of the nature of literary language and its pragmatics, and by a reflective practice of reading. To the abstraction of aesthetic and linguistic theories, which according to Paulhan systematically miss part of what they speak of, the unity of words and ideas being by nature elusive, to their inadequacy to literary experience, Paulhan prefers the practice of criticism, an “informed criticism” (Key to poetry, 1944), and, as he confided to Marcel Arland in 1930, that it is urgent to “invent”. Paulhan's idea of ​​literature is thus inseparable from a reflection on criticism, the two coming together in the consolidation and acceptance of a "more literary" literature, to use the tautology which concludes Les Fleurs de Tarbes, inseparable from a clear awareness of the laws of expression and their inescapable "default".

What are these laws of language that allow us to grasp literature in what is specific to it, and the relationship that attaches us to it? What critical benefit can we draw from our experience as readers? How does Paulhan's practice of literature, both poetic and critical, indicate an idea of ​​literature in movement, at work in a rhetoric of reversibility and paradox? Can Paulhan's research claim to be theorized? Does Paulhan's resistance to any form of system leave him a place in the history of literary criticism and theory? These are all questions answered by these communications, resulting from a conference held at the IMEC from May 18 to 20, 2011, as part of the “History of literary ideas” program. from the National Research Agency and the French Literature of the 20th-21st Centuries research center at Paris-Sorbonne University (Paris IV).

Clarisse Barthélémy

• For a thesis defense of Jean Paulhan, Charles Coustille
• From the idea of literature to the desire for law: what is Paulhan moving towards?, Anna-Louise Milne
• The rhetoric of example in Les Fleurs de Tarbes by Jean Paulhan, Inês Bartolo
• Absence, Richard Rand
• Progress in the novel quite slow, Michel Murat
• Jean Paulhan and the Commerce magazine (1924-1932), Ève Rabaté
• Jean Paulhan theoretician: an example of the fragility of humanism in the literature of the first half of the 20th century, Benoît Monginot
• Jean Paulhan and philosophy, Thibaut Sallenave
• Paths and impasses in literature: Armand Petitjean at The NRF of Jean Paulhan, Martyn Cornick
• Enlightened literature: Jules Supervielle and Jean Paulhan, Sophie Fischbach
• Poetry in history: Jean Paulhan against the tide, Clarisse Barthélemy
• Politics and rhetoric in Les Fleurs de Tarbes by Jean Paulhan, J. Michelet