Sunday, May 11, 2025, 19.00 to 20.00pm UK time (Please check your own time zone).

You are warmly invited to join us for a talk with Pierre Taminiaux to celebrate the launch of Lignes de vie (Lifelines), his latest poetry volume, published by L’Harmattan.

Register for the event here.

Purchase the book here.

Lignes de vie is inspired by the 20th Century avant-garde, from Dada to Surrealism and beyond, both in literature and the visual arts. It includes poems on Surrealist artists Man Ray, Victor Brauner and Joseph Cornell, among others. The writing that the work explores is not strictly automatic, but it nonetheless emphasizes a spontaneous form of verbal and literary expression that is characterized by a strong sense of randomness within the poetic language.

Pierre Taminiaux is a Professor of 20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Literature at Georgetown University. He has also taught at the University of Strasbourg and at the University of Paris-1-Sorbonne.

He has published numerous scholarly books, most recently Esthétiques radicales : actualité des avant-gardes (Hermann, 2021) and Politique de la contradiction : art moderne et surréalisme (Hermann, 2022). Beside Surrealism, his critical essays on the 20th Century avant-garde focus on Situationism as well as on Cobra.

He is also the author of several poetry volumes, most recently Miroirs du jeu (L’Harmattan, 2023) which is inspired by the work of both Dada and Surrealist poets, from Tzara to Nougé.