Michel Leiris (1901-1990), famed anthropologist, essayist, autobiographer, and art critic, has been regarded for the last fifty years as an authoritative reference for any investigation combining literature and the human sciences. Yet because of his aloof and reserved personality, he has remained on the sidelines of many modern movements and few books ahave been written about him. This issue of Yale French Studies pays tribute to Leiris as a great man of letters in twentieth-century European culture.
Marc Blanchard: Editor's Preface: Michel Leiris (1901-1990) in Perspective
Lydia Davis: An Excerpt from Fourbis
Edouard Glissant: The Repli and the Depli
Francis Marmande: Michel Leiris: The Letter to Louise
Jean-Christophe Bailly: A River with no Novel
Jean-Luc Nancy: Les Iris [Irises]
Denis Hollier: Poetry . . . up to Z
Leah Hewitt: Between Movements: Leiris in Literary History
Michele Richman: Leiris's L'Age d'homme: Politics and the Sacred in Everyday Ethnography
Marc Blanchard: "'N stuff . . . " Practices, Equipment, Protocols in Twentieth-Century Ethnography
J.B. Pontalis: Michel Leiris, or Psychoanalysis without End
Emmanuel Levinas: Transcending Words: Concerning Word-Erasing
Maurice Blanchot: Glances from Beyond the Grave