Contenu du sommaire : Substances

Unlike William Gaddis's other novels, The Recognitions defines writing in ontological terms as the account of an encounter with substance or being qua being. However, this definition is misleading, as substance turns out to be a fiction produced by purely textual means, like the uncanny apparitions described in ghost stories. Thus, Gaddis only refers to metaphysics in order to challenge its applicability to writing, and the explicit allusions to the question of being eventually suggest that the text belongs in a realm of pure possibility of which being itself is but one actualization among many.

This article reflects on the nature and modalities of Emersonian movement. Emerson the seer understands the necessity to go beyond the forms of old age (rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia) which define his era ; he endeavours to devise a practical philosophy linked to a poetic vision which is attuned to the laws of nature—the locus par excellence of the circulation of fluids. However he oscillates between the fantasy of unlimited substance and the desire to make things matter (in every sense of the term). For the ultimate project is “the upbuilding of a man”: the aim is impressing the reader in order to regenerate him and reestablish the (textual and social) contact with experience.

This article examines the numerous water metaphors at work in Rikki Ducornet's The Fountains of Neptune and suggests that water, being a most mutable substance, is used as an agent of linguistic transformations reminiscent of alchemical transmutations. However, this project, which aims at “substantializing” writing, miscarries as words fail to turn into things. Yet this very failure is what confers its specific and almost magic power on Ducornet's writing.

This article seeks to analyse the nature of Gertrude Stein's poetic language in Tender Buttons. The notion of substance is at the core of Stein's grammar: the poet does not use language to describe the world's substance, but uses language as a substance, turns language into a matter that she models as she writes. All landmarks are lost: the syntax often does not make sense, the mimetic representation is deliberately blurred. The reader can barely recognize his own language, the world he lives in: what the text manifests is that language definitely stands on its own.

In the 1960s-1970s, more and more American artists began to question institutions and authorities. As they sought to make stronger connections between their work and the outside world, context became of paramount importance. Artists who had brought natural elements into the gallery started to go outside to work in situ. Land Art also coincided with the “back to the earth” movements and environmental awareness, when renewed attention was being focused on the earth, the exhaustible resources of nature and the threat technology posed to nature's balance. The aim of this article is to examine the contradictory nature of Land Art through the works known as “earthworks,” that is to say whose medium is earth, but it is also concerned with their monumental and site-specific dimension. The article also focuses on the construction of a relationship between art and environment and its contradictory impacts and meanings at the social, cultural and political levels.