Anodyne
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
 
" [A] form of writing for which there is no exact English term: fait divers. This is a French expression, in common use for centuries, for a certain kind of newspaper piece: a compressed report of an unusual happening. What fait divers means literally is 'incidents,' or 'various things.' The nearest English equivalent is 'news briefs' or, more recently, 'news of the weird.' The fait divers has a long and important history in French literature. Sensationalistic though it is, it has influenced the writing of Flaubert, Gide, Camus, Le Clézio and Barthes. In Francophone literature, it crossed the line from low to high culture. But though a version of it was present in American newspapers, it never quite caught on in the English language as a literary form."

(via Raymond Boisjoly, and broadly applicable to most of the repurposed images found here)
- posted by cjb @ 9:25 AM


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