The relationship between the made and the found is one of the most important themes in modern French literature. This collection of critical and creative writing explores how the interplay between the given and the imagined, the real and the virtual, the world as we find it and the world as we make it, functions as a generative matrix for literary experimentation. Each contributor considers the question of attention, and explores how attending to something - a text, a place, a moment, a detail - creates and transforms both perceiver and perceived. Drawing together analyses of diverse literary movements - Surrealism, new autobiographical forms, le nouveau roman, the everyday, contemporary poetics, anthropology, urbanism and flanerie - this volume invites us to make new connections between many well-established themes. Critical thinking by renowned scholars appears alongside poetry and prose by leading writers from France and Britain, forging new relationships between scholarly and creative practices, and challenging us to cross the border between the two.

This volume explores how poets use different kinds of formal experimentation to change the way we think, and to allow us to try out new ways of perceiving existence and positioning ourselves within the world. Yves Bonnefoy and Jean-Luc Nancy: Ontological Performance examines the affinities that exist between Bonnefoy's poetry and Nancy's philosophy. It analyses how Bonnefoy experiments with the poem's act of address, its material disposition, and sonorous performance. It scrutinises how he foregrounds the bodily and material forces that are at play within language in order to makes us feel the diverse worldly forces that are active within us and to make us perceive our own human existence in more interconnected ways. Exploring how Bonnefoy and Nancy share the desire to resist detached ways of perceiving existence, this book analyses how they present interaction as the generative dynamic that drives all existence and use the text's resonant play to make us aware of how all bodies-human, material, or poetic-emerge from a complex interplay of worldly forces.

'The Royal Court has been at the centre of British cultural life for the past 50 years, an engine room for new writing and constantly transforming the theatrical culture' - Stephen Daldry. For half a century the Royal Court has been at the cutting edge of British theatre. Established by George Devine as a 'writers' theatre', the Court has consistently provided a platform for the most vital dramatic talents of the day. Illustrated throughout with photographs from the plays, and reproduces documents and rehearsal notes from the original productions, "Inside Out" considers the most notable productions from the tenure of each successive artistic director since the Court opened, and includes interviews with actors, writers, designers, technicians, and directors themselves.It lays bare the truth about controversies over productions like Look Back in Anger, Saved, Perdition, and Shopping and F**king, the closely fought battles over funding, and remarkable internal struggles between huge and competitive personalities at the heart of the Court. "Inside Out" combines a probing history with a unique collection of original and revealing anecdotes from everyone involved in the story of this most influential and important of cultural institutions.