Good to think with Minou Drouet, 1956
Ann Jefferson devotes a brief chapter to Barthes's reflections inside her excellent Genius in France: A concept and its utilizes , a publication that introduces different accounts of this notion from the nineteenth century onwards. His participation, however, sums up a number of the issues raised by the thought. In retrospect, Barthes's arguments could seem somewhat facile, and possibly even marginal considering improvements in the neurosciences. Nonetheless, he'd reveal that genius may be put to several"applications", such as being dealt with as a"quantifiable amount". From the Minou Drouet event, it was"nothing more than the accelerated passage towards maturity" given this, since Barthes put it,"the child accomplishes in the... A couple of the yearly essays which Roland Barthes composed between 1954 and 1957 to get Les Lettres nouvelles, which were eventually collected in Mythologies, touched on the notion of genius. The initial one mocked how Einstein's mind was forced to an object of scientific curiosity, after its elimination within hours of this scientist's death on April 18, 1955 -- a removal which Einstein himself had approved. Another was going to an eight-year-old prodigy, Minou Drouet, who composed poetry that allegedly had outstanding qualities. Doubts arose about the authorship of her writings, after their publication in 1956 by Julliard at a group entitled Arbre, mon ami, which offered tens of thousands of copies: would a mere kid have composed these poems? In recent years 1955--7, a controversy developed from the French media round the subject of genius, youth and poetry. In Barthes's article"Literature based on Minou Drouet" the writer drew attention to the civic nature of the methods used to check the poems' validity, also contended that"analysis, sequestration, graphology, psycho-techniques, and also the inner analysis of papers" were unlikely to solve this"poetic enigma". Absent in the argument was any reflection about the mythical meaning that poetry had obtained for bourgeois culture. Barthes thus"demythologized" the amount of the kid and poetry that was stripped of the tumultuous power, and contended that bourgeois civilization"hidden the ideological character of its value methods by passing them off as organic". In the two essays, Barthes cautioned that the reader against the drawbacks of turning genius in an item of scientific inquiry, although the transformation of the idea of genius is inseparable from the creation of experimental sciences.
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