Sophie Calle: Ma’s-tu vue / Did You See Me? (2003)
Filed under book, catalogue | Tags: · art, conceptual art, film, identity, photography, voyeurism

“The work of conceptual artist Sophie Calle embraces photography, storytelling, film, memoir as well as other media. Often controversial, Calle’s projects explore issues of voyeurism, intimacy, and identity as she secretly investigates, reconstructs and documents the lives of strangers–whether she’s inviting them to sleep in her bed, trailing them through a hotel, or following them through the city. Taking on multiple roles–detective, documentarian, behavioural scientist and diarist–Sophie Calle turns the interplay between life and art on its head.
The book presents Calle’s best-known works, including The Blind, No Sex Last Night, The Hotel, The Address Book and A Woman Vanishes, as well as lesser known and earlier projects that have largely escaped the public eye. This compendium of Calle’s photographs, diary excerpts and video stills also includes three critical essays and two interviews with the artist.”
First published in French by Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2003.
English edition
Publisher Prestel, 2003; Second edition, 2008
ISBN 3791330357, 9783791330358
443 pages
via Chloe
Review: Pescador (The Art Book Review, 2012).
Comment (0)Fionnghuala Sweeney, Kate Marsh (eds.): Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, Haiti and the Avant-garde (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, africa, afromodernism, art, art history, avant-garde, black people, blackness, body, colonialism, dance, futurism, jazz, modernism, music, politics, racism, sexuality, surrealism

“This collection of ten essays makes a persuasive case for a black Atlantic literary renaissance and its impact on modernist studies. The chapters stretch and challenge current canonical configurations of modernism in two ways: by considering the centrality of black artists, writers and intellectuals as key actors and core presences in the development of a modernist avant-garde; and by interrogating ‘blackness’ as an aesthetic and political category at critical moments during the twentieth century. This is the first book-length publication to explore the term ‘Afromodernisms’ and the first study to address together the cognate fields of modernism and the black Atlantic.”
Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2013
ISBN 074864640X, 9780748646401
264 pages
Review: Dominic Thomas (French Studies, 2013).
PDF (updated on 2020-6-9)
Comment (0)Maurice Blanchot: The Book to Come (1959‒) [EN, PT]
Filed under book | Tags: · book, literary theory, literature, philosophy, writing

“During the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and substance, left their unmistakable imprint on the work of the most distinguished French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot.
The Book to Come gathers together essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française. Not a random collection of essays, this book is organized into four sections: “the secret of literature”; literature as exigence and as meaning; literature and the novel; and the future of writing and of the book. The authors discussed constitute a veritable repertoire: Rousseau, Proust, Artaud, Brach, Musil, James, Beckett, Bataille, Mallarmé, Joubert, and Claudel, among others.”
Originally published as Le livre à venir, Gallimard, Paris, 1959
English edition
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2002
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804742235
267 pages
Review (Mark Cohen, 2004)
The Book to Come (English, trans. Charlotte Mandell, 2002, 15 MB)
O livro por vir (Portuguese, trans. Leyla Perrone-Moises, 2005, 7 MB)