Christian Prigent’s Mimological Machine: Le Monde est marrant and La Vie moderne

Abstract

<jats:p>Christian Prigent views his writing as an effort to expose the 'parler faux' of ambient discourses and condemn the impoverishment of language and ideas by the media industry, in particular. Prigent's later texts work on the principle that the acceleration, intensification and gratification that characterize an image-driven society result in the disempowerment of its citizens. Prigent responds with a critical poetics that this study endeavours to describe with reference to two texts: <jats:italic>Le Monde est marrant</jats:italic> (2008) and <jats:italic>La Vie moderne</jats:italic> (2012). These texts devise techniques of vocal imitation (which, adopting Gérard Genette's neologism, we call <jats:italic>mimological</jats:italic>) as a means of addressing those techniques by which the media industry creates credulous and consumption-ready subjects. This critical poetics constitutes a system, it is argued, because it deploys a limited set of combinations as a way of figuring an aberration of an existing system. Prigent's mimetic system demonstrates how poetry offers a means of grasping the harsh realities of the twenty-first century.</jats:p>