Bücher der Reihe Modern French Identities

Isidore Isou était âgé d¿à peine dix-sept ans quand il s¿est proposé de fonder l¿ultime et le plus radical mouvement européen d¿avant-garde : le lettrisme. Comme d¿autres de ses contemporains, il avait fui sa Roumanie natale et s¿était installé à Paris en 1945, animé par l¿idéal d¿une formule expressive intégrale et toute-puissante, qui dépasserait les frontières nationales, ethniques et linguistiques.Ses efforts se sont concrétisés dans une démarche créative presque obsessive, qui a touché tous les aspects de son existence et l¿a poussé vers l¿exploration simultanée de la littérature, la musique, la peinture, le cinéma, les mathématiques... Mobilisé par la quête d¿une interdisciplinarité génératrice de domaines nouveaux, Isou a tenté de révolutionner le monde artistique et littéraire en orientant l¿acte créateur vers l¿unité minimale de communication : la lettre.Ce livre s¿intéresse à cette quête par Isidore Isou d¿une totalité expressive vitale. En analysant son ¿uvre poétique, nous montrons que la lettre devient pour lui le garant d¿une expressivité inédite et illimitée, aux confins du son et de l¿image.

This volume offers an important examination of the ways in which artistic manipulations of time can lead to a different perception of time as nonsynchronous and anti-chronological. The range of media (philosophical essays, film, plays, novels, autobiographical narratives) and periods (medieval, early modern, contemporary) explored here testify to the enduring significance of so-called «delays» and the need to rethink these as anachronies. The spectral presence of the notion of «Kairos» throughout this volume connects different attempts to subvert linear time, on occasion allowing events and temporalities to coexist and compete or, alternately, asking the mind to stretch itself and experience the uneasiness of time by attempting and failing to encompass diverse spaces and temporalities concomitantly. The resulting essays interrogate, test and contest the limits of the possible and enable a rethinking of what time could represent across disciplines and genres.

Ce livre propose une réflexion autour de l¿influence de la pensée de Frantz Fanon dans les arts et la littérature des Amériques. Il réunit des contributions portant sur des expressions artistiques variées (roman, musique, cinéma, théâtre) et évoque l¿oeuvre d¿artistes de différents horizons culturels et linguistiques (Antigua-et-Barbuda, Argentine, Bolivie, Brésil, Canada, Chili, Cuba, États-Unis, Guadeloupe, Haïti, Porto Rico, République Dominicaine). Les textes montrent non seulement l¿actualité de la pensée de Fanon et sa capacité de résonance dans des territoires extrêmement divers, mais aussi les déplacements, les décalages, les prolongements par lesquels elle se renouvelle sans cesse sur ce continent traversé, encore aujourd¿hui, par les questions (néo)coloniales. Le volume met ainsi en évidence la façon dont Fanon est (re)présenté dans les productions artistiques et littéraires, en même temps qüil rend compte de la manière dont des artistes peuvent être influencés par sa pensée sans le citer, parfois même sans l¿avoir lu, faisant émerger la notion d¿un inconscient fanonien à l¿oeuvre sous des formes esthétiques.

How does modern writing in French grapple with the present absence and absent presence of lost loved ones? This book explores the question from the Revolution to the COVID pandemic, showing how mourning blurs the boundaries between the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the ethical.

Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture questions how a wide selection of restrictive norms come to bear on the body, through a close analysis of a range of texts, media and genres originating from across the francophone world and spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This book explores the origins of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu in an earlier, unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil. Using close readings of early unpublished versions of the work, the author offers a further elucidation of the meaning of this rich and complex novel and its evolution into a modernist work.

In the twentieth century, the boundaries between different literary genres started to be questioned, raising a discussion about the various narrative modes of factual and fictional discourses. Moving on from the limited traditional studies of genre definitions, this book argues that the borders between these two types of discourse depend on complex issues of epistemology, literary traditions and social and political constraints. This study attempts a systematic and specific analysis of how literary works, and in particular documentary ones, where the borders are more difficult to define, can be classified as factual or fictional. The book deals with several areas of discourse, including history, travel tales, autobiography and reportage, and opens up perspectives on the very different ways in which documentary works make use of the inescapable presence of both factual and fictional elements.

Offering new perspectives on the role of broadcasting in the construction of cultural memory, this book analyses selected instances in relation to questions of French identity at the BBC during the Second World War. The influence of policy and ideology on the musical and the poetic is addressed by drawing on theoretical frameworks of the archive, memory, trauma and testimony. Case studies investigate cultural memories constructed through three contrasting soundscapes. The first focuses on the translation of 'Frenchness' to the BBC's domestic audiences; the second examines the use of slogans on the margins of propaganda broadcasts. In the third, the implications of the marriage of poetry and music in the BBC's 1945 premier of Francis Poulenc's cantata setting of resistance poems by the surrealist poet Paul Eluard in Figure humaine are assessed. Concentrating on the role of the archive as both narrative source and theoretical frame, this study offers a new approach to the understanding of soundscapes and demonstrates the processes involved in the creation of sonic cultural memory in the context of global conflict.

This study focuses on fictional representations of albinism in the work of the French writers Didier Destremau and Patrick Grainville, and the Francophone Guinean writer Williams Sassine. The focus on selected novels allows for an in-depth study of each narrative and sheds new critical light on these under-studied writers, permitting a comparative discussion of the novels in relation to other writing about albinism. A series of common themes can be found in these novels, which, although present in different combinations and intensities, echo the preoccupations of all fictional writing about albinism. They include a recognition of the problematic relationship between inner and outer reality (in both bodily terms and in relation to notions of inclusion and exclusion), the challenging of accepted categories and designations, and the consequent problematisation of the relationship between Self and Other. Bound up with these issues, of course, are questions of identity and power.

This book was shortlisted for the R.H. Gapper prize 2011. On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre, in Algiers. Entitled 'La nouvelle culture mediterraneenne' ('The New Mediterranean Culture'), Camus's lecture has been interpreted in radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression of his so-called 'Mediterranean humanism' or as an early indication of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality. These various interpretations are based on reading the text of 'The New Mediterranean Culture' in a single context, whether that of Camus's life and work as a whole, of French discourses on the Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that country). By contrast, this study argues that Camus's lecture - and in principle any historical text - needs to be seen in a multiplicity of contexts, discursive and otherwise, if readers are to understand properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camus's lecture as a case study, the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical justification of this 'multi-contextualist' approach.

#NousSommes represents a moment when social media became embroiled in collective expressions of unity, solidarity and resistance. This book explores the role of the digital in the collective today, drawing on the work of important French philosophers like Nancy, Derrida and Deleuze and addressing issues such as ecology, automation and addiction.

L'ecriture a l'ere de l'indetermination considere l'experience de la litterature comme une maniere de traiter les questions les plus complexes du monde contemporain. L'auteur souligne l'importance de la critique genetique et de la psychanalyse lacanienne pour les etudes litteraires de Flaubert, Proust, Bauchau, Murakami, Poe et Joyce.

Jules Romains est connu comme un ecrivain rationaliste, mais il est fascine par tout ce qui releve du parapsychique et de l'extraordinaire. C'est en replacant sa production dans le contexte d'une epoque meurtrie par deux Guerres mondiales qu'on peut expliquer le fait qu'il glisse d'un unanimisme optimiste a un fantastique desespere.

The pursuit of women's pleasures, often expected to be constrained under patriarchy, is potentially transgressive and linked to women's emancipation in other realms. This book explores a wide range of examples of women and pleasure in French and francophone culture, from novels to stand-up comedy.

Les recherches effectuees sur la texture et la qualite de la voix ou la relation entre la voix et l'affect sont beaucoup plus rares. Le present recueil d'articles offre une perspective pluridisciplinaire au carrefour entre la sociolinguistique, la phonologie et les etudes cinematographiques.

La parodie (souvent indissociable du terme « pastiche ») est une notion passe-partout qui recouvre des pratiques fort diverses et a donné lieu à de multiples définitions à travers les âges, d¿Aristote aux théories modernes dérivées de l¿intertextualité en passant par Bakhtine et Genette. Dans la seconde moitié du XIX siècle, la parodie connaît un véritable âge d¿or même si elle reste souvent considérée comme parasitique. C¿est la fin de siècle qui va peu à peu lui donner ses lettres de noblesse en lui permettant de venir coïncider avec les pratiques de la modernité. Aux XX et XXI siècles, parodie et pastiche se font toujours plus glissants et semblent renvoyer à l¿essence même de l¿art (post)moderne. Cet ouvrage propose de fournir un état présent des théories de la parodie et du pastiche, et d¿étudier quelques-unes des multiples pratiques parodiques qui ponctuent la littérature et la culture françaises. Une approche interdisciplinaire est ainsi privilégiée : en abattant les cloisons qui consignent trop souvent les études de la parodie / du pastiche au seul domaine littéraire, les notions seront déclinées, non seulement sur le mode littéraire et théâtral, mais encore dans leurs rapports avec l¿image fixe, la presse et le théâtre de marionnettes.

The concept of the parasite - 'one who eats at the table of another' - was mobilized by Michel Serres in 1980 to figure disruptions and breakdowns in society and communication. The chapters of this volume explore the concept in French literature, film, art and philosophy, demonstrating the new and continued relevance of the figure of the parasite.

This volume explores and challenges the extensive possible meanings and semantic connotations of the stain, including dirt, blood, dye, clue, symptom, shadow, smudge, memory, crack, trace and blindspot. The roles, functions, workings and unworkings of stains are interrogated across a range of disciplinary areas in French and Francophone literature and culture. The collection provides a theoretical framework for the significance of the stain in interpretation across a wide range of disciplines as well as offering close readings of films, photographs, paintings and literary texts in which the figure of the stain appears. In this respect, the following key notions are addressed and reconfigured: presence and absence, obscurity, visibility and legibility, form(lessness) and (non)representation, the (non)human and the animal, language and materiality, experience and knowledge, suffering and healing, remembering and forgetting. In parallel, the collection offers innovative readings of the work of key thinkers, examining how Barthes, Proust, Bataille, Camus and others engage with the topic of stains. This volume presents the stain as a powerful critical tool which complicates and contaminates historical, ethical, aesthetic and methodological boundaries. The essays celebrate the productive potential of the stain as an oblique means of accessing and uncovering significant and unexpected continuities and discontinuities.

This book examines the poetry of Bernard Vargaftig (1934-2012) with a focus on his emphasis on the sacredness of words. His spiritual yearnings, as well as a need to heal due to lingering trauma from wartime hiding, are shown to underlie his poetry, which reflect a continual process of renewal and self-discovery.