From the Foreword:
"To begin this Crosscurrents Series with Michel Butor's intellectual autobiography is itself something of an aesthetic and philosophical coup. . . . If, as Lois Oppenheim suggests in her cogent introduction, most of Butor's prodigious output has been 'a dialogue with his and others' work, ' then this current volume is a dialogue with that dialogue, Butor on Butor on Butor."
Among the most celebrated writers of his generation in France, Michel Butor has produced numerous books of fiction, criticism, and poetry. In this book he evaluates the evolution of his prolific career, offering an intimate look at his own writing and at the idea of writing.
Transformation of Writing, the fourth volume in his series of Improvisations, explores the development of his long and rich career--encompassing more than 500 works ranging from fiction, radio plays, and critical essays to collaborations with composers, photographers, and painters--against the background of post-World War II Western literature. Examining his own work as he would that of any other author, he sheds light on his extraordinary creative itinerary and on the climate, output, and aesthetic perspectives that have dominated the past half-century in France and the rest of Europe.
Butor situates his writing outside the tradition of the nouveau roman and outside postmodernism, placing himself in the tradition of Rabelais, Montaigne, Pound, and Joyce, whose erudition and love of language infused their work with remarkable originality. He explores the relation of fiction to reality, especially in the context of nationalist and colonialist illusion. In addition, he describes the influences on his career of his early study of philosophy and of his extensive travel to Egypt, the United States, Japan, and Australia.
Butor himself worked with the editor and translator of this first English version of Transformation of Writing on questions of translation and annotation. The work retains the spontaneity of the course of lectures from which it derives, delivered on the eve of his retirement from the University of Geneva.
Lois Oppenheim is associate professor of French at Montclair State University in New Jersey. She is the author or editor of more than forty articles and five books, including Directing Beckett, Intentionality and Intersubjectivity: A Phenomenological Study of 'La Modification, ' and Three Decades of the French New Novel. She is the general editor of The Beckett Circle.
Elinor S. Miller is professor emerita of French and Humanities at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. Her scholarly publications deal primarily with the works of Michel Butor (including translations of 6,180,000 litres d'eau par seconde and Frontieres) and with black francophone writers of the Antilles and West Africa.