The Tel Quel Reader [Paperback]

Patrick French (Editor), Roland-Francois Lack (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415157145 | ISBN-13: 978-0415157148 | Publication Date: March 20, 1998

The work of the French literary review, intellectual grouping and publishing team Tel Quel had a profound impact on the formation of literary and cultural debate in the 1960s and 70s. Its legacy has had enormous influence on the parameters of such debate today. From its beginning in 1960 to its closure in 1982, it published some of the earliest work of Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. It was also associated with some of the key ideas of the French avant-garde, publishing key articles by Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud.
The Tel Quel Reader presents for the first time in English the key essays written by the Tel Quel group. Essays by Julia Kristeva, one of the review's editor's Michel Foucault, and a fascinating interview with Roland Barthes are here made available for the first time in English. It provides a unique insight into the post-structuralist movement and presents some of the pioneering essays on literature and culture, film, semiotics and psychoanalysis.
Assembling key essays from over a twenty-year period, The Tel Quel Reader is an indispensible resource for students of literature, cultural and visual studies, philosophy and French studies.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Excerpted from the French journal Tel Quel (1960-82) and ably translated by two lecturers in French at University College, London, these articles demonstrate French poststructuralist radical literary theory as practiced in France during the 1960s and 1970s by some of its major proponents, e.g., Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers, Marc Devade, Marcelin Pleynet, and Roland Barthes. The articles explore literature and culture, gender, film, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. Critics have detected a progressive movement in the journal itself from literature tel quel, "such as it is," toward the avant-garde and toward a scientific analysis of literature. The translators group the articles under three major headings?Science, Literature, and Art?but several of the articles defy this classification. Marcel Pleynet's article, "Thetic `Madness,' " for example, deals primarily with religion as it relates to art. This reader will prove extremely valuable to structuralist and post-structuralist literature scholars but will have little appeal to broader audiences.?Robert T. Ivey, Univ. of Memphis
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

...stimulating and enjoyable collection.
–Philosophy in Review/Comptes Rendus Philosophiques

The Tel Quel Reader provides an accurate representaion of poststructural theory and its earnes and passionate commitment to the fields of science, art and yes literature..
–David Clippinger

This reader will prove extremely valuable to structuralist and post-structuralist literature scholars....
–Library Journal

This collection includes the most important essays and gives an excellent picture of Tel Quel's work and evolution over time.
–Fredric Jameson, Duke University

The Tel Quel Reader provides a crucial historical link until now unavailable to English readers.
–Kelly Oliver, University of Texas at Austin

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Routledge (March 20, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415157145
• ISBN-13: 978-0415157148
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #561,268 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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This review is from: The Tel Quel Reader (Paperback)

Affective criticism would also be able to critique Paradise because it shares the idea of "indeterminacy" which may be a question that Sollers raises. It is significant that Harry Mathews insists that the reader is the real creator instead of the writer, for the reader lets the book exist once again. Everything that Affective criticism stands for is to make the reader more involved with the text. Wolfgang Iser says "Communication it literature, then, is a process set in motion and regulated, not by a given code, but by a mutually restrictive and magnifying interaction between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment." Some of the problems with an Affective reading are that we bring to much of ourselves, our psychology, to make words mean. Would a book be different if one was tired, happy, or angry? Derrida and Sollers would be against anyone who interjects themselves in the narrative, in the chaos of play, rather than letting a system (text) play out its wishes on the reader. To read a passage like this one by Sollers, one must give up their self-identity for the moment.