Contemporary French Poetry and the Image Revolution

Poetry scholar Victoria Bergstrom explores how a group of 1980s French poets rejected metaphor and symbolism to critique media culture, reshaping poetic tradition in an era of image saturation.

In the 1980s, a group of French poets began a movement known as "literalism," following the unofficial dictum: “replace the image with the word ‘image’.” Distancing themselves from metaphor, symbolism, and personal expression, these poets focused instead on the words themselves which they used to stop-up the flow of images rather than serve as a channel for their expression. This anti-transmission poetics emerged—fittingly—at the height of TV’s media dominance and stood as a simultaneous critique of poetic tradition and the broader media environment. Through this conflation of literary and technological rebellion, poetry scholar Victoria Bergstrom argues in a current book project, poetry reveals its unique fitness as a site for thinking about the way text and image interact across the increasingly unintelligible image revolutions of the last 50 years.  

The literalist poets initiated what has been called a “critical turn” in contemporary French poetry, through which poetry asserts its power as a tool of critique by opening itself to the influence of other art forms, disciplines, and technologies—in particular, image technologies. 

Read Victoria Bergstrom's full story on the College of Arts and Sciences News