On Leiris

Michel Leiris (1901-1990), famed anthropologist, essayist, autobiographer, and art critic, has been regarded for the last fifty years as an authoritative reference for any investigation combining literature and the human sciences. Yet because of his aloof and reserved personality, he has remained on the sidelines of many modern movements and few books ahave been written about him. This issue of Yale French Studies pays tribute to Leiris as a great man of letters in twentieth-century European culture.

Marc Blanchard: Editor's Preface: Michel Leiris (1901-1990) in Perspective

Lydia Davis: An Excerpt from Fourbis

Edouard Glissant: The Repli and the Depli

Francis Marmande: Michel Leiris: The Letter to Louise

Jean-Christophe Bailly: A River with no Novel

Jean-Luc Nancy: Les Iris [Irises]

Denis Hollier: Poetry . . . up to Z

Leah Hewitt: Between Movements: Leiris in Literary History

Michele Richman: Leiris's L'Age d'homme: Politics and the Sacred in Everyday Ethnography

Marc Blanchard: "'N stuff . . . " Practices, Equipment, Protocols in Twentieth-Century Ethnography

J.B. Pontalis: Michel Leiris, or Psychoanalysis without End

Emmanuel Levinas: Transcending Words: Concerning Word-Erasing

Maurice Blanchot: Glances from Beyond the Grave