Timothy MathewsLiterature, Art and the Pursuit of Decay in Twentieth-Century France
Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism at University College London. In his writing and translating he explores what relating to art can tell us about relating to people. In addition to Guillaume Apollinaire, he has written widely about twentieth and twenty-first century French Literature, comparative literature, and comparative approaches. He is co-translator with Luce Irigaray of her Everyday Prayers (2004), and with Delphine Grass of Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Struggle (2010). His translations of selected pages from Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux appear in a special issue of CounterText, (2023). His other most recent books are Alberto Giacometti, the Art of Relation (2014), and There and Not Here: Chronicles of Art and Loss (2022). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Academy of Europe, and Officier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Prologue: form and decay
1. Looking and loving: Harlequins in Apollinaire and Picasso
2. Signs and the imaginary: the pleasures of discontent in Roland Barthes
3. Dreams, schemes and wordplay: the surrealism of Robert Desnos
4. Sterility and power: on some paintings by René Magritte
5. The offerings of decay: Jean Fautrier, Les Otages
6. Clothed intimacy: theatre and sex in Marguerite Duras, Les Yeux Bleus Cheveux Noirs
7. 'Des Milliers de Parisiens': conflict, community and collapse in Jean Genet, Les Paravents
Epilogue
List of works consulted
List of illustrations
Index.
