Philippe Vilain ou le parti-pris de la forme

Abstract

Philippe Vilain’s critical work manifests an exciting conceptual creativity through its capacity to grasp the recomposition of key aspects of French literature over the past twenty years by means of terminology and neologisms that he takes great care to define and to
illustrate. This article proposes a reflection on the main elements of this theoretical language as they were forged in La littérature sans idéal (2016) and La Passion d’Orphée (2020) in order to contribute to a definition of Vilain’s theses on contemporary literary production. As with any language system, the one deployed in Philippe Vilain’s essays is the vehicle for a series of underlying values which are endowed with a structuring role, the most determining of which are language’s sacrality and the parti pris de la forme (taking the part of form).