This book outlines certain durable properties of multi-layered practice of artistic and intellectual invention by confronting it with the complex theoretical and spatial metaphor of utopia. It encourages understandings of the poetic and the utopian in the twentieth-century French literary context.

Introduction: Towards a Utopian Space of Poetic Work Part I: Lieu commun Poetic Foundation and the Limit of Community 1. The Common Object of Poetic Work 2. Pragmatics of the Common Object 3. Between Order and Origin: Victor Segalen 4. Silent Community and Revolutionary Speech: Rene Daumal 5. Poetic Foundation in the Opening of Language: Yves Bonnefoy Part II: Haut Lieu (Dis)placing the Scene of Poetic Experience 6. Experience and the Scene of Experience 7. Poetic Placements 8. Segalen outside the Forbidden City 9. Daumal on the Slopes of Mont Analogue 10. Bonnefoy in the Arriere-pays Part III: Non-lieu Formative and Transformational Attributes of Poetic Textuality 11. Emergence of the Poetic Text as Non-lieu 12. Ambivalence of a Spatial Logic in the Non-lieu 13. Segalen: Metamorphoses of the Non-lieu 14. Daumal: The Lieu of the Non and the Imaginary of a Poetic Affirmation 15. Bonnefoy: The Poetic Non-lieu and the Practice of Hope 16. Conclusion: Within Disenchantment