Among the many pleasures that fiction puts on offer, the opportunity to lose oneself in mild abstraction is by no means the least, and I imagine that all of us have availed ourselves of that opportunity, whether sparingly or in a more insouciant manner. For my part, I am intrigued by the different shapes that state of abstraction assumes, and by its conditions of possibility. I would propose to parse it closely and methodically here, were it not for the fact (...) that its dimensions are so mutable, as mutable as individual readerly experience can be. Instead, I shall focus on a few textual passages that seem to me to incorporate clear invitations to the kind of abstracted state that interests me, hoping thereby better... (shrink)

In the early pages of this study, Jean-Jacques Thomas confesses that it was not his intention to write a book on Perec. Rather, he was interested in the manner in which "French Theory" had taken root in American academia in the 1960s and 1970s, enabling figures such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others to export their thought with such resounding success. During the same period, a variety of creative writers, (...) many of them associated with the nouveau roman, became widely known, respected, and indeed influential in American intellectual circles. Gradually, Thomas began to wonder why Georges Perec failed to achieve the... (shrink)