Michel Butor
Michel Butor in 2002
Michel Butor in 2002
BornMichel Marie François Butor
(1926-09-14)14 September 1926
Mons-en-Barœul, Nord, France
Died24 August 2016(2016-08-24) (aged 89)
Contamine-sur-Arve, France
OccupationWriter
Alma materUniversity of Paris
Genre
  • Novel
  • criticism
Notable worksL'Emploi du temps
La Modification
Mobile

Michel Butor (French: [miʃɛl bytɔʁ]; 14 September 1926 – 24 August 2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator.[1][2]

Life and work

Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille, the third of seven children. His parents were Émile Butor (1891–1960), a railroad inspector and Anna (née Brajeux, 1896–1972). He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947.[3]

In 1950–51, he taught French in Minya, Egypt, followed by teaching assignments in Manchester (1951–53), Thessaloniki (1954–55) and Geneva (1956–57). In 1958, he married Marie-Josèphe (née Mas); they had four daughters.

His first novel, Passage de Milan, was published in 1954, followed by L'Emploi du temps (1956), which won the Prix Fénéon, and by La Modification in 1957, which won the Prix Renaudot. His final novel, Degrés, was published in 1960.

In 1960, he was a visiting professor at Bryn Mawr College and Middlebury College. His travels around the United States at this time resulted in his first experimental book, Mobile, published in 1962 to a controversial reception.[4]

In the following years, he wrote in a variety of forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books.[5] For artist's books he collaborated with artists like Gérard Serée.[6] Literature, painting and travel were subjects particularly dear to Butor. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes 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.

Journalists and critics have associated his novels with the nouveau roman, but Butor himself 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.[7] His best-known novel, La Modification, for instance, is written entirely in the second person.[8] 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."[9][10][11][12]

After meeting in 1977, Butor became a friend of Elinor S. Miller, a French professor at Rollins College at the time.[13] They worked collaboratively on translations, catalogues 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.[14]

In an interview in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, conducted in 2006,[15] the poet John Ashbery described how he wanted to sit next to Michel Butor at a dinner in New York.

In 2013, Butor was awarded the Grand prix de littérature de l'Académie française. He died on 24 August 2016 in southeastern France.[16]

Michel Butor was a foundational member of The Raymond Roussel Society, established in 2016 alongside notable contemporaries including John Ashbery, Miquel Barceló, Joan Bofill-Amargós, Thor Halvorssen, and Hermes Salceda. The society, dedicated to celebrating and studying the works of the innovative and enigmatic writer Raymond Roussel, brought together a group of intellectuals and artists with a shared passion for Roussel's literary legacy. Through this collaboration, Butor's influence and expertise contributed significantly to the society's mission of exploring Roussel's unique literary techniques and promoting a deeper understanding of his innovative contributions to the world of literature.

Selected bibliography

This bibliography is organized according to categories suggested by Jean Duffy's guide to Michel Butor.[17]

Novels

Experimental texts

Essays

Other

Compilations in English

Awards and honours

Further reading

References

  1. ^ L’écrivain Michel Butor, figure du Nouveau Roman, est mort (in French)
  2. ^ French writer Michel Butor dies aged 89: family Archived 2016-09-17 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ His DES thesis (diplôme d'études supérieures [fr], roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) under Gaston Bachelard was titled Les Mathématiques et l'idée de nécessité, "Mathematics and the Idea of Necessity" (see Mary Lydon, Perpetuum Mobile: A Study of the Novels and Aesthetics of Michel Butor, University of Alberta, 1980, p. 156 n. 31).
  4. ^ Daniels, T. Tilden (1 July 2008). "Michel Butor's Mobile: Modernism, Postmodernism, and American Art". Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures. 62 (2): 99–112. doi:10.3200/SYMP.62.2.99-112. ISSN 0039-7709. S2CID 192193498.
  5. ^ Manuel Casimiro, Books on Manuel Casimiro.
  6. ^ Gerard Seree, Notes of biography, Gallery Michelle Champetier, 2020
  7. ^ Une Conversation avec Michel Butor (in French) quotation:

    La littérature, c’est l’expérimentation sur le langage.
  8. ^ Joshua Parker: On writing in second person, Published in Connotations Vol. 21.2–3 (2011/12)
  9. ^ Linda Hutcheon (1985), A theory of parody: the teachings of twentieth-century art forms, p. 41
  10. ^ Allan H. Pasco (1994), Allusion: a literary graft, p. 217
  11. ^ Original quotation:

    La citation la plus littérale est déjà dans une certaine mesure une parodie. Le simple prélèvement la transforme, le choix dans lequel je l'insère, sa découpure (deux critiques peuvent citer le même passage en fixant ses bords différemment), les allégements que j'opère à l'intérieur, lesquels peuvent substituer une autre grammaire à l'originelle et naturellement, la façon dont je l'aborde, dont elle est prise dans mon commentaire
  12. ^ Michel Butor (1981), Letters from the Antipodes, p. 162 quotation:

    A whole ideology of ownership and transmission is implied by the commercial promotion of books and a certain kind of discourse in newspapers, schools and universities, with its emphasis on greatness, uniqueness, and influence—often via quotation—as a one-way process. This ideology has received a battering for many years now at the hands of authors such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges (Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote) and Butor himself.
  13. ^ Miller, Elinor (1 September 1977). "Approaches to the Cataract: Butor's Niagara". Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature. 2 (1). doi:10.4148/2334-4415.1045. ISSN 2334-4415.
  14. ^ The Fales Library of NYU's guide to Elinor Miller Paper Archived 2009-11-30 at the Wayback Machine
  15. ^ Audio file
  16. ^ Grimes, William (4 September 2016). "Michel Butor, French Novelist Who Shattered Conventions, Dies at 89". The New York Times.
  17. ^ "Introduction". The University of Edinburgh. 3 June 2022. Retrieved 6 March 2024.
  18. ^ Gil Orlovitz (1965). The Award Avant-Garde Reader. Internet Archive.
  19. ^ "Two chapters from Passage de Milan". contentdm.carleton.edu. Retrieved 18 April 2023.
  20. ^ Butor, Michel (1961). Degrees, a novel (in English and French). Internet Archive. New York, Simon and Schuster.
  21. ^ Butor, Michel; Michel Butor Collection (Library of Congress) DLC (1969). Niagara, a novel. Internet Archive. Chicago, H. Regnery Co.
  22. ^ "Il en fait trop ! Place de la radio dans l'œuvre et la vie de Michel Butor". Komodo 21 (in French). 6 October 2021. Retrieved 12 April 2023.
  23. ^ Butor, Michel (1969). Histoire extraordinaire: essay on a dream of Baudelaire's;. Internet Archive. London, Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-61663-8.
  24. ^ Butor, Michel (1981). Letters from the Antipodes. Internet Archive. Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press. ISBN 978-0-8214-0659-5.
  25. ^ THE SUNDAY POEM: MICHEL BUTOR TRANSLATED BY JEFFREY GROSS Gwarlingo, Sept. 15, 2013.
  26. ^ Aldredge, Michelle. "Michel Butor's The Suburbs from Dawn to Daybreak". Gwarlingo. Retrieved 2 August 2022.
  27. ^ Butor, Michel (1969). Inventory; essays. Internet Archive. New York, Simon and Schuster.
  28. ^ "In Memoriam: Michel Butor". frenchculture.org. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
  29. ^ "Académie Mallarmé – Prix Mallarmé, membres du jury, laureats". www.academie-mallarme.fr. Retrieved 4 December 2020.
  30. ^ "Portail SACEM". 1 May 2008. Archived from the original on 1 May 2008. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
  31. ^ Roudaut, Jean (1964). Michel Butor : ou, Le livre futur : proposition. Internet Archive. [Paris] : Gallimard.
  32. ^ Raillard, Georges (1968). Butor. Internet Archive. [Paris.] : Gallimard.
  33. ^ Sturrock, John (1969). The French new novel: Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet. Internet Archive. London, New York [etc.] Oxford U.P. ISBN 978-0-19-212178-3.
  34. ^ Lydon, Mary (1980). Perpetuum mobile : a study of the novels and aesthetics of Michel Butor. Internet Archive. Edmonton [Alta.] : University of Alberta Press. ISBN 978-0-88864-055-0.
  35. ^ "Courrier des Antipodes – Notes on Michel Butor's Letters from the Antipodes". Cordite Poetry Review. 31 January 2017. Retrieved 1 March 2024.

External links

Laureates of the Prix Renaudot
Authority control databases
Categories