Writing Art

Emma Wagstaff is Lecturer in French at the University of Birmingham. She studied modern languages at the University of Cambridge and held a research fellowship at St John’s College. She has been a visiting student at the École Normale Supérieure and previously taught French literature at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Contents: Introduction to Giacometti reception, to the history of poésie critique and to critical debates in word and image studies - Analysis of texts by André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre to examine the ways in which they make the viewer's response to Giacometti's work the subject - Comparison between the prose poems of René Char and the poetic prose of Francis Ponge, considering their responses to Giacometti's art as performative - Discussion of the extent to which writings on Giacometti by Jean Genet, Jacques Dupin and Yves Bonnefoy might be deemed 'haptic' - Presentation of texts by Michel Leiris and André du Bouchet as enacting the disruptive effects of their stimulus on their form, in the light of Lyotard's discussion of the figure in distinction to discours.