In the 1980s, a group of French poets began a movement known as "literalism," following the unofficial dictum: “replace the image with the word ‘image’.” Distancing themselves from metaphor, symbolism, and personal expression, these poets focused instead on the words themselves which they used to stop-up the flow of images rather than serve as a channel for their expression. This anti-transmission poetics emerged—fittingly—at the height of TV’s media dominance and stood as a simultaneous critique of poetic tradition and the broader media environment. Through this conflation of literary and technological rebellion, poetry scholar Victoria Bergstrom argues in a current book project, poetry reveals its unique fitness as a site for thinking about the way text and image interact across the increasingly unintelligible image revolutions of the last 50 years.  

The literalist poets initiated what has been called a “critical turn” in contemporary French poetry, through which poetry asserts its power as a tool of critique by opening itself to the influence of other art forms, disciplines, and technologies—in particular, image technologies. 

“My project centers on poets who show themselves to be astute observers of images, image culture, image technologies, who generate fascinating insights about changes within the image environment that reverberate through many aspects of life,” says Bergstrom, assistant professor of French in the department of modern languages and literatures. “I am interested in practices that invite us to see poetry as a place for thinking about what an image is and how mediation operates, what are the technical features of an image object, and what technical features shape the linguistic art object?”

Poetry’s “critical turn” in the 1980s can be understood as a new movement to right-size poetry to the demands of a radically altered media environment. One notable poet in this movement was Pierre Alferi, who often took his work beyond the page. The son of philosopher Jacques Derrida, Alferi created a body of work that included philosophical texts, poetry, novels, but also filmmaking, illustration, and public art installations. 

Another contemporary poet, Anne Portugal, has created poems inspired by the programmed images of video games and the jokes printed inside candy wrappers. Rather than shunning pop culture, Portugal and her contemporaries are curious about how such objects act upon the public, how they work and what we get from them. 

The 1980s stand out as a pivotal moment in media history, as the decade where the unidirectional mass-media of broadcast television hits its peak and the increasing role of interactive media becomes apparent, Bergstrom says. In the world of poetry, the poets of the “critical turn” recognize the image as a contested concept, increasingly complicated by the mystification of black-box technologies.