Paul Valery: L'Ecriture en devenir

Study of the development of works and their manuscripts has a long and distinguished pedigree in Western European literary criticism, embracing philological studies, textual scholarship of editions, book history, etc. However, in France during the 1970s and '80s there emerged a new current of criticism: while retaining certain methods from earlier approaches, it was concerned less with the establishment of the final published text and more with the processes of writing it. Several international teams of scholars were assembled within the institute des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes (ITEM), a research centre supported by the Centre National de Ia Recherche Scientifique and attached to the Ecole normale superieure, Paris.
The manuscripts of, for example, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Proust, Joyce, Valery and Sartre were examined to see what could be understood about the creative processes and development of the works.

To achieve this, new methodologies were developed to examine the sources and borrowings that writers drew upon, their readings, the plans and scenarios, the drafts and rewritings, the variants, the erasures, the sections not included in the final version. Critics also began to look at the material aspects, the types of paper and ink or type, the way the pages are organised, the graphic elements.

Some of the manuscripts of Paul Valery has pursued several of these directions, but until now there has been no single authored work offering an analytical overview of the theory and practice of his poetic composition. This will be undertaken through:

a) Study of his writings and theoretical reflections in the Cahiers/Notebooks

b) Study of Valery's poetry manuscripts that are kept in the Bibllotheque national Paris in order to investigate the detailed events and various stages of the writing process

c) Analysis of the interaction between the theory and the practice and the influence of each upon the other.

The aims of the research are:

1. To investigate the theory and practice of Valery's poetic composition through study of his notes and manuscripts and through two case studies of major works, La Jeune Parque and 'La Pythie':

2. To examine the different facets of the creative process- emotional, intellectual, practical and psychological- as revealed in this material;

3.To analyze the role of music as a model operating on several levels simultaneously: by defining the effect upon the listener/reader; by providing practical, compositional tools: above all, by accessing the inner sources of creative energy and song.

The audience for the book consists of Valery scholars and all interested in manuscript studies, both in France and worldwide; Valery's insights into the nature of poetic composition will be of interest to all literary scholars; at the same time, the publication of the 'integral edition' of the Cahiers 1894 1914 has created a new readership of Valery that extends far beyond the corridors of literary criticism. It is because of the potential audience and possibilities for dissemination that the book will be written in French. The combination of the theoretical dimension and the two detailed case studies in a single authored work will make an unprecedented contribution to the field.