Les grandes surfaces suivi de La logique du seuil ou la problématique de l’altérité dans Autoportraits de Marie Uguay et Nombreux seront nos ennemis de Geneviève Desrosiers
This memoir focuses on two poetry collections from Quebec: Marie Uguay’s “Autoportraits” and Geneviève Desrosiers’ “Nombreux seront nos ennemis”. These can be characterised as “intimist” as they bring to the forefront the poetical narrator’s close observations of his daily life. My two-part project includes a research on Uguay’s and Desrosiers’ view of “intimism” as well as a poetry collection inspired by their work. My research concentrates on the threshold’s logic and on the narrator’s troubled relationship with the various representations of alterity. In the two studied poetry collections, the “I” indeed occupies a reclusive position from which it does not have to face alterity.  The poems that form the second part of this project testify to the resourcefulness in which the narrator spreads out in order to avoid his humdrum existence. The monotony of daily life is seen as a trap or a form of imprisonment. Consequently, only a thin frontier separates dreams from reality in these poems. The contrast between the “I”’s actual positions and his fancied destinations plays a major role in the text’s aesthetic. Several wishes are laid upon the table, amongst them a new departure. The poems therefore express the narrator’s longing but attempt to avoid the dangers of a classic “intimism” which are an exaggerated sensitivity or narcissism.
Creative writing Poetry Study of Quebec's Literature Women's writing Intimacy poetry Day-to-day writing