“Le parti pris de la manière”: “A Preference for Manner”. Elements of a Counter-History

Résumé 0

Opposite “style”, “structure” or “écriture (writing)”, the sum of the categories that have been used to think the literary phenomenon, manner appears as a half-concept or a non-concept. Whereas the term was, in the Classical Age, global, including political philosophy, morality, religion, arts and literature, it is no longer used in the 19th century except as a marker for a variant of style, which tends to erase its specificity. But in truth, manner haunts Balzac’s Théorie de la démarche (A Theory of Walking) just as much as Émile Durkheim’s sociology. Yet more, it represents a counter-concept, whose nature is both artistic and anthropological, and answers to a different epistemological tradition. There is in the 19th century something Baudelaire called a “parti pris de la manière”, “preference for manner”, characterised by the promotion of empiricism and subjectivity as well as the development of a poetics of the defective, perceptible from Hugo to Lautréamont or Corbière.