Corridas en textes et en images : pour une esthétique de la blessure chez Michel Leiris et Ernest Hemingway
During the inter-war period, Michel Leiris and Ernest Hemingway were part of circles composed of painters, photographers and drawers invested in various collaborative projects. Michel Leiris and Ernest Hemingway represent both sides of the cult of bullfighting, to which a whole generation of artists and intellectuals have joined since the early 1920’s. In their works, the imagination of bullfighting is translated through a profusion of images, in praesentia or in absentia. Although criticism has sometimes focused on the influence of painting or on the bullfighting theme in the works of Leiris and Hemingway, a silence surrounds the entanglement yet essential between images, texts and bullfights.   When reading their literary work, a certain number of questions arises: in what way is the view indispensable to the advent of bullfighting? How are the text/picture arrangements thought? To what extent is bullfighting conceived as an art, or rather as a place where all the different arts enter into dialogue? In the course of this work, the chosen direction lies at the crossroads between the thematic criticism as conceived by Michel Collot and the intermedial approach (more precisely his study of the text/image relationship). I will report on the different types of images that punctuate the works of the corpus, essential relays of an aesthetic of the wound. In the novel L'Âge d'homme and the collection Miroir de la tauromachie by Michel Leiris, as well as in the novel Mort dans l'après-midi and the short story « L'Invincible » by Ernest Hemingway, I will discuss the singular aesthetic that binds to the bullfighting theme, expressed by the arrangement of visible wounds.
Ernest Hemingway Michel Leiris Tauromachie Inter-war pediod Bullfighting Intermediality Text/image relationship Injury Twentieth century literature