Modern Essay in French : Movement, Instability, Performance

As a textual form, the essai predominates in modern and contemporary literature in French. Emerging from an earlier tradition and distinguished from its English-language counterpart, the French-language essay ranges from Stéphane Mallarmé to Colette, Victor Segalen to Aimé Césaire, Jean Grenier to Pierre Michon. The essai remains, however, one of the most hazily identified of textual forms, its definition often depending on the progressive elimination of all other generic possibilities. Excluded from the archigenres (theatre, poetry, récit), it can even be seen as a hold-all category whose role is to absorb the anarchic extremes of writing.
It is perhaps this very lack of pretension to orthodoxy that has drawn so many writers to the essai. The conventional understanding of the term – as a tentative, unsystematic exploration – stresses the genre’s provisional nature, its refusal of any claims to comprehensiveness. The essai exploits the devices of anecdote, illustration and humour; it is addressed to a wide and often general audience; it is also intricately linked to the performance of ideological and writerly strategies, often reordering the classical art of rhetoric and persuasion. As the contributions to this volume show, there is a need to outline an ethics and politics, as well as poetics, of essayism.

The Editors: Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He obtained his BA (Hons) in French at Oxford in 1992 and his Ph.D. in French at Lancaster in 1995. He is author of Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity (2000), editor of Les Usages du genre (2002), and is currently working on twentieth-century travel literature in French.
Andrew Stafford obtained his BA in French Studies (1988), an M.A. in Critial Theory (1990) and Ph.D. (1995) at the University of Nottingham, and is the author of Roland Barthes, Phenomenon and Myth. An Intellectual Biography (1998). Currently working on essayism in Barthes’s S/Z, he has published three articles on this in France (in ‘Genesis’, ‘Revue des sciences humaines’ and in an edited volume ‘Roland Barthes, au lieu du roman’); he is also co-editing Barthes’s seminar notes on Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ from 1968-1969, for publication in Seuil’s ‘Traces écrites’ series in 2007; and a selection of Barthes’s writings on fashion that he has edited and translated into English is to be published in 2006. He is a member of the editorial board of Francophone Postcolonial Studies and Senior Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Leeds.