L'oeuvre ouverte. Michel Jeanneret ou la perpétuelle mobilité des formes

As a tribute to Michel Jeanneret, who died on 3 March 2019, three of his friends, Dominique Brancher, Frank Lestringant and Frédéric Tinguely, recall here the three periods of his output as a literary critic, which span the period between the Renaissance and the Romantics, deliberately rendering permeable the borders which separate centuries and disciplines. In turn, are considered the Renaissance with its shifting boundaries, the different characteristics of the Grand Siècle, and then folly in its different forms, from Erasmus to Nerval. For Michel Jeanneret, criticism was not an exercise confined to a study or relegated within the four walls of a classroom, but was an activity open to life, one which radiates outwards, questioning the present and laying foundations for the future. It was not an activity confined to a particular century, but was always overflowing - and in all directions - out of the constraining compartmentalisation of our specialist fields. For him, the Renaissance was only a point of departure, a mobile base out of which opened broad avenues sweeping through, and almost rending apart, the Classical age, while charting fruitful and at times disturbing paths forward through to our modern day. In the tight fabric of our literary history, Michel Jeanneret has opened up a fertile space, a wide clearing which we here attempt to explore.