期刊名称：E-rea : Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone
电子版ISSN：1638-1718
出版年度：2013
卷号：10
期号：2
页码：1-7
DOI：10.4000/erea.3060
出版社：Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
摘要：Who was Kay Boyle? Perhaps paradoxically, the aim of this E-rea issue is not to answer this question. Indeed, it is quite impossible to grasp Boyle’s long, prolific career and tumultuous life in a single coherent portrait. As a poet, a prose writer and the author of a large number of essays and articles published in a vast array of periodicals over three-quarters of a century, she attempted all her life to reconcile her belief that the poet’s goal is to provoke literary and social change with the sometimes conflicting imperatives of politics and aesthetics—which led her to make choices that proved detrimental to her career and reputation. The signatory to the “Revolution of the Word” manifesto (transition, June 1929) who proclaimed her firm resolution to “disregard existing grammatical and syntactical laws” and not to communicate with “the plain reader,” does not seem to have a lot in common with the author of the politicized and romanticized novels published in the early forties in order to sensitize the general public to the necessity of a U.S. military intervention in Europe. And some may find it hard to believe that the sixty-seven-year-old activist protesting against the Vietnam War and for the civic rights of black and third-world students at San Francisco State College in 1969 was the same woman who took part in the life of the so-called “lost generation” in Paris—where she befriended such artists as Duchamp, Picabia, Ernst, or Brancusi—and lived on the French Riviera at the time when Sara and Gerald Murphy were busy inventing it.
