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Table des matières

Barsky, Robert F. :

  * Introduction: Marc Angenot and the Scandal of History

Abstract: This article assesses the life and work of Marc Angenot by tracing the
series of "red threads" that run through the huge corpus of his work. Along the
way, Barsky provides an overview of Angenot's theories, which bear upon
philology, history, literary theory, linguistics, semiotics, and literature. He
also assesses the ways in which Angenot's uniquely European classical training
has (and should have) intersected with a North American intellectual culture,
while offering a roadmap for understanding the theoretical and methodological
implications of an approach that is nearly as daunting as the "social
discourse" and the "grand narratives" it attempts to describe.

Barsky, Robert F.
Angenot, Marc. :

  * "You Cannot Transform the History of Ideas Into a Comic Strip": An
Interview with Marc Angenot

Abstract: This interview between Robert Barsky and Marc Angenot engages the
central themes of Angenot's work while providing a sense of the ties that bind
the diverse corpus of work together. This wide-ranging discussion shows the
breadth of the materials under examination and, moreover, the array of tools he
brings along with him for the task; along the way, he describes his efforts to
unearth both the consistencies that are at the base of any discourse hegemony
and the absurdities, contradictions, and scandals that flow through its
dialogical veins.

Angenot, Marc :

  * Social Discourse Analysis: Outlines of a Research Project

Abstract: In this foundational text for the large scale project that produced
several major works, including 1889: Un état de discours social, Marc Angenot
describes the project of amassing and assessing every French text written, and
every utterance uttered in 1889, as a way of establishing a range of topics,
opinions, argumentative strategies, current usages, in short, the "social
discourse" of a single year. As ambitious as it is monumental, this article
offers a program for understanding an era in our history, while providing a
series of guidelines for studying any utterance and any text, which demands
nothing less than the need for it to be considered against the backdrop of
discourses within which it was made, and which made it possible.

Angenot, Marc.
Barsky, Robert F., tr. :

  * What Can Literature Do? From Literary Sociocriticism to a Critique of
Social Discourse

Abstract: Implicitly refuting Sartre's famous What is Literature?, as well as
all versions of literary analyses that look to discover the uniquely original
and extra-contextual elements of the literary text (and the genius of their
authors), Angenot offers a fresh new assessment of the role literature plays in
a given social discourse compendium. Along the way, he portrays the literary
text as that which speaks after all other discourses have had their say, not to
offer a more profound or original perspective, but to simply re-cast what is
already "thinkable" and "sayable" within the prevailing social discourse. If
literature does fulfill a particular role, says Angenot, it is by conveying to
the reader a carnivalesque sense that when it comes to knowledge claims made in
other domains, "it ain't necessarily so."

Jameson, Fredric:

  * Marc Angenot, Literary History, and the Study of Culture In the Nineteenth
Century

Abstract: Fredric Jameson considers Angenot's work within a broader effort to
elaborate a theory, or discern a model, applicable to the study of literary
history as a "form" or "genre," and along the way assesses the (literary) work
of the nineteenth century in light of 1889, a 1200 page "cube" he deems "a
classic if anything ever was." Invoking approaches and works by Adorno,
Bakhtin, Balzac, Benjamin, Flaubert, Foucault, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and
Zola, among others, and a range of ways in which Angenot's "story of the year"
approach impacts their respective views, Jameson's assessment, like Angenot's,
provocatively takes on the task of determining "how to forestall the grim
closure of the synchronic and the definitive imprisonment in the past."

Pierssens, Michel.
Barsky, Robert F., tr. :

  * A State of Social Discourse

Abstract: Besides being a unique compendium of fin-de-siècle French culture and
civilization, Marc Angenot's 1889 raises important issues regarding the
rationale and methodology of historical reconstruction. The choice of a single
year rather than a larger period, the choice of an exhaustive study of
discursive possibilities, the refusal of traditional hierarchies between
genres, styles, and printed sources: these are ways to create an entirely new
perspective on the nineteenth century as well as new tools for research, so
many significant advances that also have some limitations.

Leps, Marie-Christine:

  * Critical Productions of Discourse: Angenot, Bakhtin, Foucault

Abstract: This paper correlates Marc Angenot's theory of social discourse to the
transgredient notions of the dialogical in Mikhail Bakhtin, and of
governmentality in Michel Foucault. Together these three concepts allow a close
investigation of the material/textual production of hegemonic truths, as well as
an exploration of the means of transforming such truths and elaborating new
forms of subjectivity and agency. Angenot, Bakhtin, and Foucault deploy the
concept of discourse differently, yet their texts variously attribute a crucial
role to fiction in the cultural production of knowledge and power relations.
Together, their historical analyses set forth an eminently pertinent set of
theoretical and methodological tools for contemporary cultural studies.

Suvin, Darko, 1930- :

  * Besinnung and What May the Century Amount To: On or About or Because of
Marc Angenot as Goad and Stimulus

Abstract: This is an article in two parts. Part 1, "Besinnung: Remembrance,
Recollection, Reasoning Again," approaches, starting from Augustine's
Confessions, Marc Angenot's "social discourse theory" and his article "Pour en
finir avec les études littéraires." In the spirit of Nietzsche's maxim "You
should be closest to a friend with your heart when you resist him," the great
strengths of Angenot's approaches are pointed out, as well as limits of and
reservations about a Foucauldian discourse theory that cannot accommodate
fiction. Part 2, "What May the Century Amount to," is a set of independent
theses in a sustained dialogue with Angenot's work.

The Yale Journal of Criticism publishes works of interest to readers in the
humanities, irrespective of field or period, including scholarly articles,
original art, review essays, polemical interventions, and conference and
symposium papers. The journal engages in current methodological debates in
literature, history, philosophy, popular culture, and the visual arts. Work
from the YJC has appeared in Best American Essays.

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press

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