Parisian <i>poiesis: architecture and the aesthetics of contemporary French poetry</i>

These changes have inspired the creation of various works in French nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry on Paris, from Baudelaire to Aragon, Fallet, and Jouet. Despite this, there is no academic study of contemporary French poetry’s critical examination of the city’s urban renewal.

This thesis seeks to address this gap by exploring the relationship between urban and poetic form in contemporary Paris in understudied texts by Jacques Réda, Jacques Roubaud, and Michel Houellebecq. It examines how the city's writers engage with Paris and its urban renewal and how this, in turn, informs their work. The study observes the effects that this specific spatial experience has on the poet through close readings of poetic form in each text, the application of urban and spatial theory, and an examination of the built environment through concepts such as memory, mobility, frailty, and struggle.