Contenu du sommaire : L'invention de l'ordinaire.

Hailed as the emblematic «postmodern » novel by American academics, White Noise has received a largely uniform critical treatment that rarely ventures beyond the limits of cultural satire. This article aims at showing that such a reading gets bogged down in the banality that DeLillo uses for ironical purposes. I suggest that this novel is not a handbook on American supermarkets or Baudrillard' s simulacra, but a literary text, and that the only noise worth listening to is DeLillo 's writing itself.

This essay suggests that the notion of commonplace could be a key to the interpretation of E. E. Cummings' poetic writing. Everyday incidents as well as traditional loci communi are disfigured, distorted and dismembered on the page of the poem : they constitute the matter of poetic experience. E. E. Cummings ' poetics tends to turn the commonplace into a poetic event.

If the novel is indeed a house, as Hawthorne and James suggest, then Carpenter's Gothic is about what happens when no one does any housework there, least of all Madame Socrate with her useless vacuum cleaner : Gaddis 's text no longer seeks to reflect a transcendent Truth, and the metaphysical pattern invented by Plato thus loses its relevance. This is the logical outcome of the process by which Western culture has tended to eliminate the sacred aura that once surrounded writing and art, as Walter Benjamin explains. However, Gaddis 's refusal to subscribe to a theology of writing can also be understood as a response to the Puritan distinction between religion and art, and thus as a paradoxical endorsement of Puritan theology : words and the Word inevitably overlap, despite all attempts at severing the connection between them.

This paper stems from a question : how is the very idea of banality to be interconnected to autobiographical Afro-American writing ? In Fatheralong, Wideman describes his quest for what he terms a "common ground", a locus from which to start rebuilding a daily life. By tracing the various stages of this quest, by drawing upon several meanings of the word "banal", and by focusing on inner mechanisms of Wideman's writing, this essay intends to show that, ultimately, it is the text itself that the author posits as common ground.

Great poets are not necessarily ignored in their own time as the reputation and destiny of J. Gordon Coogler 's work amply demonstrate. An eminent representative of the Twilight Period, the "Sweet Bard of the Congaree " bobbed up to national fame largely thanks to H.L. Mencken 's brief mention in "The Sahara of the Bozart". He may well, by now, have regained the invisibility of true spirits in national literature, but his regional aura is bound to shine on.