Occupation Writer Name Michel Butor Libretti Votre Faust Notable works La modification Nominations Prix Goncourt | Genre Novel, criticism Education Lycee Louis-le-Grand Nationality French Role Writer | |
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Books Second Thoughts, Mobile: Study for a Represen, Portrait of the artist as a young a, Passing Time, Passage de Milan Similar People Alain Robbe‑Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Henri Pousseur, Charles Baudelaire |
Entretien avec michel butor
Michel Butor ([miʃɛl bytɔʁ]; 14 September 1926 – 24 August 2016) was a French writer.
Contents
- Entretien avec michel butor
- Michel Butor La Modification Archive INA
- Life and work
- Awards
- Works
- Novels
- Criticism
- Essays
- Other genres
- References
Michel Butor "La Modification" | Archive INA
Life and work

Michel Marie François Butor was born in Mons-en-Barœul, a suburb of Lille. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1947. He has taught in Egypt, Manchester, Thessaloniki, the United States, and Geneva. He has won many literary awards for his work, including the Prix Apollo, the Prix Fénéon; and the Prix Renaudot.
Journalists and critics have associated his novels with the nouveau roman, but Butor himself long resisted that association. The main point of similarity is a very general one, not much beyond that; like exponents of the nouveau roman, he can be described as an experimental writer. His best-known novel, La Modification, for instance, is written entirely in the second person. In his 1967 La critique et l'invention, he famously said that even the most literal quotation is already a kind of parody because of its "trans-contextualization."

For decades, he chose to work in other forms, from essays to poetry to artist's books to unclassifiable works like Mobile. Literature, painting and travel are subjects particularly dear to Butor. Part of the fascination of his writing is the way it combines the rigorous symmetries that led Roland Barthes to praise him as an epitome of structuralism (exemplified, for instance, by the architectural scheme of Passage de Milan or the calendrical structure of L'emploi du temps) with a lyrical sensibility more akin to Baudelaire than to Robbe-Grillet.
In an interview in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, conducted in 2006, the poet John Ashbery describes how he wanted to sit next to Michel Butor at a dinner in New York.
Butor was a close friend and colleague of Elinor Miller, a French professor at Embry Riddle University. Butor and Miller worked collaboratively on translations and lectures. In 2002, Miller published a book on Butor entitled Prisms and Rainbows: Michel Butor's Collaborations with Jacques Monory, Jiri Kolar, and Pierre Alechinsky.
Awards
Works
His works include: