The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture - This collection of essays responds to an urgent need by suggesting a framework for evaluating the notion of the project in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices

 

The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture. Edited by Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham. Berghahn Books, 2005.

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The idea of the ‘project’ crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when writers and artists are increasingly describing their practices as ‘projects’, remarkably little critical attention has been paid to the actual idea of the ‘project’. This collection of essays responds to an urgent need by suggesting a framework for evaluating the notion of the project in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices, drawn mainly but not exclusively from the French-speaking domain. The overview offered by this volume promises to makes an original and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary literary, artistic and cultural criticism.

Contents:

Introduction : Tracking the art of the project : history, theory, practice /
Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham -- Man Ray's endgame and other modernist gambits / Wendy Grossman -- Projected journeys : exploring the limits of travel / Charles Forsdick -- What does reality television threaten? /
Ingrid Wassenaar -- Programming and play : life drive and death drive in the work of Georges Perec, Roman Opalka and Jean-Benoit Puech /
Dominique Rabaté -- Les glaneurs et la glaneuse : salvage and the art of forgetting /
Emma Wilson -- Games with the gaze : Sophie Calle's postmodern phototextuality /
Kate Ince -- On the subject of the project /
Johnnie Gratton -- The art of the Grand projet : Malraux's imaginary museum and its contemporary legacy /
Douglas Smith -- Experimenting with identity : people, place and urban change in contemporary French photography /
Edward Welch -- Programmes and projects in the contemporary literary field /
Dominique Viart -- The project and the everyday : Francois Bon's experiments in attention /
Michael Sheringham -- Michel Foucault : life as a work of art /
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