Philippe Beck’s art of poetry

the poems of Opéradiques

Authors

  • Gorica Orsholits European Graduate School

Keywords:

Philippe Beck, Opéradiques, art of poetry, retelling, boustrophe

Abstract

Contemporary French poet Philippe Beck through his intriguing poetic project Opéradiques (2014; which has yet to be translated into English) demonstrates a new understanding of writing poetry through the deconstructive, reconstructive, boustrophedon process. Beck finds the foundation of his art of poetry in the "ruins" of existing written poems, stories, texts of all genres and forms. When it seems that writing poetry has lost all direction, and almost become irrelevant, Beck's work shows us the "cracks in the wall". Is it that these "cracks in the wall" should be received as a bold attempt to secure a new enthusiasm for the future, to form a stronger poem able to say that which cannot be said? Does Beck's work tell us that poetry must be the answer to the question "what is poetry?" The works of Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Jean-Luc Nancy, provide an opening through which to grasp Beck's poetics.

Author Biography

Gorica Orsholits, European Graduate School

Gorica Orsholits is an independent multidisciplinary researcher, artist, and musician. She studied at the University of Toronto and the European Graduate School from which she received a PhD. Her research interests are in poetry and poetics, literary theory, cultural studies, media, and continental philosophy.

References

Beck, Philippe. Contre Un Boileau: Un Art Poétique. Paris: Fayard, 2015.

Beck, Philippe. Opéradiques. Paris: Flammarion, 2014.

Benjamin,Walter. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In Continental Aesthetics: Romanticism to Postmodernism, edited by Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen, 166–81. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Derrida, Jacques. ‘Violence and Metaphysics’. In Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, 97–192. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Published

2022-07-15

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 2 (2022): Open issue

Section

Academic articles

Copyright (c) 2022 Gorica Orsholits

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