Henri Michaux Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign

by Rigaud-Drayton, Margaret

• ISBN13: 9780199277988
• ISBN10: 0199277982
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-12-01
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Henri Michaux is widely recognized as a major twentieth-century French poet and painter. Although his fascination with universal languages has attracted the attention of several of his critics, it has up until now been treated as a marginal concern. Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and theUniversal Sign argues that his ideas on what might constitute a universal language are central to an understanding of his works. It suggests that both his ambivalent articulation of his relationship to the languages and literary traditions of his native Belgium and adoptive France, and his effortssimultaneously to exacerbate and subvert the differences between words and images, are rooted in Enlightenment theories of the relationship of the self to nature and its languageRigaud-Drayton's study makes a substantial and original contribution to the study of this complex artist, exploring the intricate relationships between word and image in his poetry and paintings, and his quest for a single, unifying language or sign.

Author Biography

Margaret Rigaud-Drayton is College Lecturer in French at Christ's College Cambridge. She has previously been Lecturer in French at the University of Virginia; Senior Scholar at St Hugh's College, Oxford; and Professeur Eleve Stagiaire, Ecole Normale Superieure de Fontenay-aux-Roses.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	viii
Abbreviation	ix
Introduction	1	(9)
1. Michaux between France and Belgium	10	(24)
2. Self and Other	34	(25)
3. Dreaming of a Universal Language	59	(25)
4. Writing in Another (French) Language	84	(27)
5. Writing and Painting Vision	111	(26)
6. Natural Signs between Writing and Drawing	137	(25)
Conclusion	162	(3)
Bibliography	165	(12)
Index	177