Posture polémique de Richard Millet

• Main Author: Philippe Piedevache
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Association Portugaise d'Etudes Françaises 2011-06-01
• Series: Carnets
• Subjects: Richard Millet; Politically correct; Literary field
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/carnets/6424

For quite long, Richard Millet had a fairly narrow readership, but at the turn ot the century, he became one of the prominent literary figures of the politically correct. In this essay, I aim at tracing the artist's career and emphasizing the correlation between the evolution of his position in the literary field -as defined by Bourdieu- and the increasing freedom of his changing speech. As he can be seen from his first texts, Richard Millet has always had misgivings about postmodernism and the political and cultural orientations in France. My point here is to analyse to what extent the fighting spirit and incisiveness of his written work have grown in a parallel step with his influence in the literary world. The question of the acknowledgement strategies, which led a writer with one of the most critical eye of his time to take part in a rôle play uniting intellectual and mediatized positions.