This dissertation proposes a new reading of the work of Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855), placing him alongside Walter Benjamin’s Baudelaire as an insightful critic of modern life. During the 1840s and 1850s, the literary field in France was increasingly shaped by bourgeois values like sincerity, originality, and authenticity, and by the individualism that they underpinned, restricting authorized forms of writing and of subjectivity. I argue that Nerval’s writing constitutes an astute opposition to this transformation of literary subjectivity and the limitations it placed on imaginative experience and practice. Rather than merely reflecting the author’s own psychological crises (as is usually claimed), Nerval’s writings strategically reinvent the literary text as a site of new forms of collective imaginative practice.

By considering Nerval’s work as a journalist, playwright, critic, and travel writer, as well as a poet, I draw out Nerval’s engagements with specific institutions and discourses, from censorship and intellectual property law to the national philosophy curriculum and literary criticism journals. From these local engagements emerges a shrewd critical voice that speaks directly and explicitly to the influence of bourgeois culture on the literary field. I argue that, though he is traditionally read as a figure of Romantic isolation and eccentricity, Nerval should rather be understood in relation to figures like George Sand and Maurice Barrès, writers who advocated a renewal of communal ties (albeit from very different political perspectives). Unlike these contemporaries, however, Nerval approaches community as a formal challenge, as well as a theme. He explodes the framework of the individual writing subject through, for example, a pervasive intertertextuality that constantly relates his texts to other writing and reading experiences. My project thus rejoins the critical tradition that emphasizes the failure to coincide with oneself as the essential feature of Nerval’s writing practice. However, I give this “failure” a productive and strategic value rather than the tragic valence attributed to it by psychoanalytic readings, be they psycho-biographical or post-structuralist. The mobility and porousness of the Nervalian writing subject are a formal innovation that generates a literature of community rather than self-expression.

This dissertation is about how we pay attention to poetry. Paul Valéry’s work in

particular is famous for asking us as readers to attend to a kind of language that isn’t

always resolvable into any one idea, any one meaning. His poems speak, though that

speaking doesn’t always give way to a something-said. In this project, I ask— if poetry

falls shy of what it stands to say, what does it mean to hear it? What is this listening

that falls so beautifully shy of what we stand to hear, and meaningfully so?

Over four chapters, I explore what it looks like to attend to what we cannot

resolve: be it the purely possible, the liminal, or the ever-emergent. Attention, I argue,

takes many shapes: waiting, listening, weariness, even sleep. I show that these forms of

attention constitute the experiential flipside of Valéry’s purely formal poetic language.

Indeed by entering his poetics from the standpoint of embodied experience, we realize

that the unresolvedness of his work is not synonymous with the difficulty of its less-than-

representational language. As a whole, then, this project countervails the

widespread tendency to see Valéry’s work as a mere harbinger of the 20th-century’s

preoccupation with the procedures of language, an approach that so often elides the

specificity of the poet’s relationship to the sensual world of lived experience.

This dissertation investigates parallel crises of the image in French poetry and in the expanding field of photographic technologies from the 1940s to the present. This latter crisis builds out of the unhinged ubiquity of images in daily life, whose steady advance since lithography inaugurated a new age of image dissemination saw marked accelerations with the advent of television in the postwar years and of digital imaging in the early 1990s. These technological developments and the ways they reshape notions of what an image is (how it originates, where it is located, how it moves) form the backdrop against which a strain of poetic iconoclasm—the aspiration towards a “poésie sans images,” a poetics of the literal—takes shape. The movement known as Literalism, a dominant force in the French poetry scene of the 1980s, forms a kind of literary-historical center to this study, as a moment when reflection on the potential of literality to produce a new kind of poetic vision coincided with a vigorous theoretical reckoning with the particular nature of photographic representation. In an effort to situate this literalist turn, I begin with a study of the work of Francis Ponge, a mid-century poet who I read as a significant anticipatory figure in the story of literality, albeit one whose particular interest in reforming the poetic image leads him to work against rather than with the representational model of analog photography. The recently deceased poet Emmanuel Hocquard, a poet-theorist of 1980s literalism, is the subject of the second chapter, which considers how his conception of literality is informed by his conjugated practices of amateur photography and typesetting. Finally, a study of the work of Hocquard’s protégé Pierre Alferi shows how this younger poet diverges significantly from the literalist precepts of the previous generation with a poetics that is radically accepting of its function as an infrastructure for the (re)mediation of images, one that is not concerned with flattening out the poetic image (as Hocquard does) but with deploying poetic form in a way that allows him to enact (and think critically about) the mobility of televisual and digital images. The issues at stake in these poets’ reimagining of the poetic image can of course be understood in literary-historical terms, as episodes in the ongoing reckoning with the legacy of the surrealist image, or as responses to the perennial “returns” to the comforts of (neo)lyricism that all three of these authors rail against. While this study does take these frameworks into account, my focus is directed instead to the way these poets think the image beyond poetry and, as a result, can be approached seriously as theorists of the image in the broadest sense. By bringing together three authors whose reflection on the technical image is shaped in the photographic, televisual, and digital eras (respectively), I am able not only to underscore the technohistorical situatedness of their particular reconceptualization of the poetic image, but also to make the case for the exceptional potency of poetic thought in the face of image technologies that demand, by virtue of their technical structure, a conceptual awareness of problematics of concreteness and abstraction, interiority and exteriority, transmission and reception, and the operational nature of visualization.

This dissertation is situated within a field of cultural studies that seeks to develop a broader understanding of the political stakes of twentieth- and twenty-first century debates over who can travel. This line of inquiry responds to the persistent tendency in travel writing over the course of the century to exclude certain subjects in movement from the role of the traveler. The question, "What is travel?" is often treated in both literary texts and criticism as a philosophical or abstract question, stripped of its historical and political implications. I ask, what is the relationship between this effort to restrict the identity of the traveler and France's imperialist history? How and why are non-European subjects denied the status of traveler, and how does the debate over the traveler / tourist binary, which has received more critical attention, relate to the reification of colonial and postcolonial subjects in the role of the "sedentary native"? Taking these questions as a point of departure, this dissertation explores how the theoretical opposition between the dynamic traveler and the passive travelee is constructed, undermined, and directly challenged in texts belonging to a wide variety of genres, from the historical novel to the Oulipian literary exercise to autofiction.

The first part of the dissertation considers representations of travel at the "apogee" of the French Empire in the early 1930s. In Chapter One, I analyze how the 1931 Colonial Exposition, in framing a visit to the fair as a voyage around the world, both reifies the identity of the European visitor to the fair (indigenous to the metropole) as a traveler and reinforces the notion that the colonial subjects imported to perform the role of the "natives" at the fair (many of whom had traveled thousands of miles to reach Paris) could never occupy the role of the traveler. Chapter Two moves across genres to André Malraux's adventure novel La voie royale (1930). I show how this modernist text--while continuing to exclude colonial subjects from the role of the traveler--nevertheless challenges the association of Europeans with dynamism and progress so central to the rhetoric of the mission civilisatrice.

The second part of the dissertation analyzes texts from the last quarter of the century that reconfigure ideas of travel. In Chapter Three, I demonstrate how Maryse Condé's two-volume historical novel Ségou (1984-85) challenges the myth of African ahistoricity that emerges from both colonial historiographies and certain Negritude discourses through its narration of histories of travel in West Africa and throughout the Diaspora. In contrast to the representation of West African cultural spaces at the Exposition through an essentialized, monolithic architecture, the figure of the city in Ségou is a site of cultural exchange and hybridity.

Chapter Four turns to two works published during the mid-1970s: a watershed moment for the history of tourism and immigration in the twentieth century. I juxtapose Georges Perec's Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien (1975)--an account of several days spent sitting in the Place Saint-Sulpice--with Rachid Boudjedra's Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée (1975), which narrates an unnamed emigrant's struggle to navigate the subterranean labyrinth of the Paris metro. I explore how Perec's encounters with tourists circulating through the Place Saint-Sulpice can shed light on the ways in which native Parisians respond to the presence of Boudjedra's protagonist in the metropolitan capital. In both texts, interactions between Parisians and travelers to Paris are shaped by the natives' anxiety over the perceived globalization of mobility in the 1970s.

In Chapter Five, I examine a pair of texts representing urban itineraries in the French capital at the turn of the century: Bessora's 53 cm (1999) and Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1999). By reimagining Paris as a site of travel, the location of multiple histories and cultures, the texts read in this last chapter fundamentally undermine the oppositions between "here" and "elsewhere," home and abroad, traveler and native, and more broadly speaking, between travel and dwelling, which have defined colonial and neocolonial ideas of travel throughout the twentieth century. Finally, in the Afterword, I suggest how an approach to travel literature structured around close attention to historical context can inform contemporary debates over the disciplinary boundaries of French / Francophone Studies.