Michel Butor
Encyclopedia
Michel Butor is a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 writer.

Life and work

Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul
Mons-en-Barœul
Mons-en-Barœul is a commune in the Nord department in northern France.It is a suburb of the city of Lille, and is adjacent to it on the northeast. The name Mons-en-Barœul means mount in the Barœul, the city is actually built on a slight hill; the Barœul was a former territory . Before the sixteenth...

. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...

, Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...

, Salonika, the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, and Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...

. He has won many literary awards for his work, including the Prix Apollo, the Prix Fénéon and the Prix Renaudot
Prix Renaudot
The Prix Théophraste-Renaudot or Prix Renaudot is a French literary award which was created in 1926 by ten art critics awaiting the results of the deliberation of the jury of the Prix Goncourt....

.

Journalists and critics associated his novels with the nouveau roman
Nouveau roman
The nouveau roman is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the title in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new...

, but Butor himself has long resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a very general one, not much beyond that; like exponents of the nouveau roman, he can be described as an experimental writer. His best-known novel, La Modification
La Modification
Second Thoughts is a novel by Michel Butor. It is the author's most famous work.-Plot summary:The plot is quite straightforward: a middle-aged man takes the train in Paris to visit his lover, Cécile - whom he has not informed of his arrival - in Rome. They have met in secret once a month for the...

, for instance, is written entirely in the second person. In his 1967 La critique et l'invention, he famously said that even the most literal quotation is already a kind of parody because of its "trans-contextualization."

For decades now, he has chosen to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books to unclassifiable works like Mobile. Literature, painting and travel are subjects particularly dear to Butor. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...

 to praise him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet.

In an interview in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, conducted in 2006, the poet John Ashbery
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

 describes how he wanted to sit next to Michel Butor at a dinner in New York.

Butor was a close friend and colleague of Elinor Miller, a French professor at Embry Riddle University. Butor and Miller worked collaboratively on translations and lectures. In 2002, Miller published a book on Butor entitled Prisms and Rainbows: Michel Butor's Collaborations with Jacques Monory, Jiri Kolar, and Pierre Alechinsky.

Novels

  • Passage de Milan (1954)
  • L'emploi du temps (1956) (translated into English as Passing Time)
  • La modification (1957) (translated into English as Second Thoughts)
  • Degrés (1960)

Criticism

  • Histoire extraordinaire : essai sur un rêve de Baudelaire
    Charles Baudelaire
    Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...

    (1961)
  • Les mots dans la peinture (1969)
  • Improvisations sur Flaubert
    Gustave Flaubert
    Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...

    (1984)
  • Improvisations sur Michel Butor : l'écriture en transformation (1993)
  • L'utilité poétique (1995)
  • Quant au livre : triptyque en l'honneur de Gauguin
    Paul Gauguin
    Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

    (2000)

Other genres

  • Mobile : étude pour une représentation des États-Unis (1952) (translated into English as Mobile: Study for a Representation of the United States)
  • Le génie de lieu (1958)
  • Portrait de l'artiste en jeune singe (1967) [cf. Joyce
    James Joyce
    James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

    's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
    A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialised in the magazine The Egoist from 1914 to 1915, and published first in book format in 1916 by B. W. Huebsch, New York. The first English edition was published by the Egoist Press in February 1917...

    ]
  • Niagara (1969)
  • Matière de rêves (1975–1985)
  • Retour du boomerang (1988)
  • L'embarquement de la reine de Saba (1989)
  • Transit A, Transit B (1992)

Resources

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