Une Littérature qui se fait

Littérature qui se fait, Une

Une Littérature qui se fait, (1962), Gilles Marcotte's innovative study of the evolution of literature in French, is an anthology of his early essays about major writers. Analysing the problems confronting authors who have outgrown the old values of church, family and the land without fully articulating new values, Marcotte identifies the experience of vertigo as a constant in urban fiction. The 19th-century poet was isolated from European cultural centres; the modern poet is a double or inner exile, searching for a language with which to inhabit the landscape.

Marcotte suggests that Québec writers, successfully voicing the poetics of solitude, express alienation, despair and silence (Hébert, Blais, Jasmin), or escape into the worlds of death, dream and the past (Nelligan, Saint-Denys Garneau, Lozeau). With the appearance from 1949 onward of Roland Giguère's writings, the Québec poets' apocalyptic vision began to confront the physical realities of life. Larry Shouldice's anthology Contemporary Quebec Criticism (1979) offers a translation of the chapter "The Poetry of Exile."