Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Amandine André’s experimental prose poem “Figures Miniatures” presents a minimalistic textual world: there are an unnamed protagonist, books, flies, rotting matter, a bed, a room, thresholds to and from the room, and an unnamed other. Through these elements alone, but mostly through the language which renders them apparent, a space of great anxiety and philosophical reach is conjured, a space in which language is simultaneously a prison from which the narrator cannot escape yet which is still the only testament to the narrator’s existence. My study examines the way in which André elaborates a complex and exigent interrogation of language’s limits and of an identity that struggles for agency through and despite a persistent and increasingly abject subjugation. I show how “Figures Miniatures” is an exemplary text for relating experimental aesthetics to contemporary concerns of subaltern theory, language, identity, social theory in such a way that the boundaries between theoretical genres need not be isolated, and can form an expressive and incisive dynamics that invites us to think across delimited categories.