I met Michel Picard while I was staying at what was euphemistically called "the university of snows", in the early sixties. In treatment like me, he was already an agrégé in letters, while I was undertaking studies in this discipline, and gave practical advice to the small number of students who were willing to listen to him and benefit from his teaching. Then I listened to him, about ten years later, defend a controversial thesis on Roger Vailland at the Sorbonne. Having become a professor myself at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, I had the pleasure of seeing him direct the French section at the University of Reims, where he had founded a research center on "literary reading". I participated all the more willingly in the colloquium he organized in 1984 on the subject, although my purpose was about the premises of reading.

Summary Researchers' interest has gradually shifted from text to reader, as once from author to text. We must abandon our old models, and the big convenient and hollow words with which we draped our ignorances. It is urgent to identify and describe these complex strategies that are hardly illuminated by fashionable communication theories but which underlie learning and recognition of otherness; these dialectics still so poorly known where seduction is like a confused transaction, where everything is at once veiling and unveiling, game and reality. Michel Picard

Literary Reading, Reims Colloquium, June 14-16, 1984, Direction Michel Picard, Proceedings, Paris, Clancier-Guénaud, 1986; 328 p.

Contents:

Michel Picard: Presentation Alain Viala: "The Stake at Play: Literary Reading and Reader Rhetoric" Pierre-Etienne Heymann: "Theatrical Reading – Biographical Act" Franck Schuerewegen: "The Reader and the Hare. How to Read Balzac's The Requisitionnaire" André Karatson: Gide Reader of Mallarmé Philippe Chardin: "Reading Psychoanalysis in Zeno's Conscience" Jean Bessière: "Two Contemporary Figurations of Reading: Sartre, Butor" Alain Montandon: "The Green Perfume – or the Reader's Curiosity" Charles Grivel: "First Readings" Michel Picard: Literature/Reading/Game Anne Clancier: "Psycho-reading of Queneau's Novels" Didier Anzieu: "For a Psychoanalytic Reading of Samuel Beckett's Novels" Guy Scarpetta: "Impure Readings" Roland Galle: "The New Héloïse and the Change in Reading" Béatrice Didier: "The Diary Reader" Pierre Pillu: "Reading the Autobiographical Text" Roman Reisinger: "From the Act of Reading to Pedagogical Action" Maria Alzira Seixo: "Reading Activity: Work and Pedagogy" Jacques Leenhardt: "On Competence in Reading Activity" Henri Behar: "On Some Cultural Prerequisites of Reading (about Jarry)"

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https://classiques-garnier.com/essai-d-analyse-culturelle-des-textes-bibliographie.html? displaymode=full Henri Béhar: Essay on Cultural Analysis of Texts, Classiques Garnier, 2022

Alfred Jarry is, it seems, too well known, therefore misunderstood. Apart from Ubu roi, what do we read of him? Placing the totality of his writings in perspective within the cultures of his time, this essay would like to make him accessible to all. Successively revealing the constants of potachic, Celtic, popular, scholarly culture; the elements of a counter-culture finally, Henri Béhar shows from what sources Jarry borrows to create a work where the most surprising imaginations intertwine with the most traditional themes, constantly perverted. Appearing at the same time as the third and final volume of Jarry's Complete Works in the "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade", this volume will be of the greatest service to the amateur as well as to the student and to all those concerned with the fin de siècle spirit.

Extensions:

• International Meetings of Reims: Literary Reading in... — April 29, 2017 · The three instances proposed by Picard – read, reader, reading – allow us to apprehend the doublings that a reading freed from submission to...
• Play in Reading Theory - Foreword - Editions and... — It is a matter of putting some play into theory, which leads, from the idea of literary play, to questioning a network of associated notions in their linguistic implications
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Michel Picard, Reading as a Game, Essay on Literature, Les éditions de minuit, 1986.