Bureau “Transatlantic”: French and US Poets on Rendezvous

Abstract

Since the middle of the 19th century, American literature has been perceived by French poets as a kind of Other, at the same time alien and attractive, capable of teaching the experience of liberation, which the French poets themselves lack. Nevertheless, the situation is more familiar when other poets of the world are looking for inspiration in French poetry. French poetry for American modernists of the first quarter of the 20th century was synonymous with everything that expands the horizons of literature. At the same time, the reverse situation, when French poetry is saturated with outside influences, in particular, American ones, is studied much worse. Abigail Lang's book tries to fill this gap, considering the transformations that the new, “post-Surrealist” French poetry is experiencing under the impression of the new American poetry. The book is divided into three chapters: the first one deals with the reception of objectivism since the 1970s to the present, the second one deals with the problem of the “transatlantic” poetic community, which manifests itself in various forms and genres, and, finally, the third one tells about the “speech turn,” which, from the author's point of view, takes place in French poetry of recent decades.