SOURCE: Gould, Karen. “Nicole Brossard: Beyond Modernity or Writing in the Third Dimension.” In Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing in Quebec, pp. 52-107. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Gould evaluates Brossard's poetry volumes Suite logique and Le Centre blanc, and particularly her novel Un livre, as key texts in the formulation of a new, experimental literary modernity in Quebec.

To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

Political liberation of sexuality: this is a double transgression, of politics by the sexual, and conversely. But this is nothing at all: let us now imagine reintroducing into the politico-sexual field thus discovered, recognized, traversed, and liberated … a touch of sentimentality: would that not be the ultimate transgression? For, after all, that would be love: which would return: but in another place.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland...