As for the results, they are disappointing, registering as heavily indebted and at times transparent to a range of prior and contemporaneous references: Mark Rothko, Reinhardt again, Jules Olitski, and, above all, James Bishop, a remarkable painter whose work constituted a central reference for the
Tel Quel group and provides the nearest precedent for Devade's pouring method.
"Commitment or the Crisis of Language" picks up where "For A Realist Literature" leaves off, taking aim at an even wider range of targets, including Philippe Sollers's
Tel Quel group and its mentors, Jean Paulhan and Roland Barthes.
At the crossroads of the
Tel Quel group and Nouveau Roman, Ricardou devoted many of his theoretical essays to mise en abyme, self-representation, descriptive technique, and narrative time.
Given the importance of Ducasse's work for the
Tel Quel group in the 70s, it is poetic justice that, today, Ducasse's ideas about poetry appear more in line with what could be described as the poetics of the Oulipo, a movement which, historically, has ties with the literary journal Change that was Tel Quel's preeminent intellectual challenger in the 70s and 80s.
And then there is no accounting for the roles of the Russian formalists, the New Criticism, and the
Tel Quel group and Philippe Sollers in their modifications of the focus on the crucial role of the attitude toward the text in the evolution of hermeneutic theory.
Birch notes affinities with and differences from writers of the nouveau roman, the
Tel Quel group, and Helene Cixous, and in the context of English fiction points out that she is more radically innovative than John Fowles, and shows some similarities to Ann Quin and Alan Burns.
The New Left continued its critique of institutions, targeting the university in particular; for years, the influential
Tel Quel group's tepid response to the luminous notion that the personal is political was to simply conflate Marxism and psychoanalysis.
Intricately connected with surrealism, founder of the influential journal Critique, author of still-unsettling pornographic tales like Histoire de l'oeil, Bataille became in the seventies, when his collected works were published in twelve volumes, a cultlike figure for the
Tel Quel group. Champions include all the bad boys of contemporary theory: Foucault, Sollers, Blanchot, Baudrillard, and Derrida, whose seminal 1967 essay remains one of the best.
He analyzes the cultural and historical elements that helped shape contemporary French fiction since World War II, and clearly defines the esthetic aims of the nouveaux romanciers and of the
Tel Quel group. The book ends with an excellent annotated bibliography, detailed and inclusive, that many scholars will find useful to both their research and their teaching.