Liberté

Liberté

Liberté, bimonthly journal fd 1959 in Montréal by poet Jean-Guy Pilon and other writers including Jacques Godbout, Fernand Ouellette, Paul-Marie Lapointe and Gilles Hénault. Managed in turn by Pilon, Godbout, Hubert Aquin, again by Pilon, by François Ricard, François Hèbert and since 1993 by Marie-Andrée Lamontagne, it occupies a special place because of the quality and biting tone of its writing, its role as a critical forum for all contemporary cultural ideas, its avid interest in other literatures, the number and importance of its special issues and the international writers' conferences it has organized. Liberté has published such celebrated works as Lapointe's "Arbres", Gaston Miron's "La Vie agonique" (tr "The Agonized Life", 1980), Aquin's "La Fatigue culturelle du Canada français" (tr "The Cultural Fatigue of French Canada," 1979), Ouellette's "La Lutte des langues et la dualité du langage" and the first collection by the future writers of Parti Pris.

Although most major Québec writers have written for Liberté, the journal has always welcomed contributions from foreign authors. Major authors and critics such as René Char, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Aimé Césaire, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortazar, Jean Starobinski and René Girard have all contributed. Since 1980, Liberté has become more polemical, but continues to diversify its involvement in the cultural field with such undertakings as TV specials, studies of literary institutions and studies of feminism.