The relationship between the made and the found is one of the most fertile tensions in modern French literature. This collection of critical and creative writing explores how the interplay between the given and the imagined, the real and the virtual, the world as we find it and the world as we make it, functions as a generative matrix for literary experimentation. Each contributor considers the question of attention and explores how attending to something – a text, a place, a moment, a detail – has the capacity to transform both perceiver and perceived.

Drawing together analyses of diverse literary practices - the everyday, new autobiographical forms, contemporary poetics, textual and visual experiments, anthropology, urbanism, flanerie and archival work – this volume invites us to make new connections between many well-established themes. Critical thinking by renowned scholars appears alongside poetry and prose by leading writers from France and Britain, forging new relationships between scholarly and creative practices and challenging us to cross the border between the two.

This volume is in memory of Professor Michael Sheringham, whose ground-breaking works on autobiography, the everyday, and the archive redefined the field of French Studies. A remarkably perceptive cultural and literary critic, he published and spoke all over the world, and was particularly renowned for his friendships and collaborations with a wide range of critics and writers.