Jacques Serena‘s Fever

Authors

  • Warren Motte

Abstract

L'Acrobate (2004) de Jacques Serena s'offre comme une fine étude psychologique, une méditation sur les usages et les abus de l'imagination, et comme une réflexion impitoyable sur l'acte d'écrire. Nous proposant un portrait nuancé d'un artiste très particulier, Serena joue sur la construction de l'identité sexuelle, sur la maladie et la contagion, sur les séductions de la fiction, sur la précarité de l'interprétation, tout en organisant sa pensée autour de la notion-clef de la fièvre.

Jacques Serena's L'Acrobate (2004) recommends itself as an intriguing study in psychology, as a meditation on the uses (and abuses) of imagination, and by virtue of the uncompromising gaze that it casts upon the process of writing. Painting a nuanced portrait of a very peculiar artist, Serena plays upon topoi such as gender construction, illness and contagion, the seductions of fiction, and the precarity of interpretation, all of which cluster squarely and inevitably around the notion of fever.

Author Biography

Warren Motte

Warren Motte is College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado Boulder. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with particular focus upon experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. His most recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), Mirror Gazing (2014), and French Fiction Today (2017).

Published

2019-03-22

Issue

Section

Articles