Bücher der Reihe Modern French Identities

This volume explores contemporary French women's writing through the prism of one of the defining moments of modern feminism: the writings of the 1970s that came to be known as "French feminism".

This book provides an unorthodox array of perspectives on materialist thought and representation in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. It constructs a necessarily fragmented timeline of the breaks, tensions and antagonisms in twentieth-century French thought, culture and politics, with particular focus on questions of late capitalism.

#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.

Comment allier inspiration, tradition, culture et invention, d'un cote, et grain de jouissance, Reel, rature et manuscrit, de l'autre. C'est ce que l'auteur met en pratique, utilisant les theories litteraire et psychanalytique a travers les manuscrits de Marcel Proust et d'Henry Bauchau.

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.

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.

Cinematic Queerness

France and the Mediterranean

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.

Explores the work of two major twentieth-century artists by placing them in critical proximity. This book offers an approach to film-philosophy scholarship by embracing the cinematic as an inspiring channel through which to rethink our relationship with film and also with literature and, potentially, with art at large.

This volume explores the relationship between Francophone women and the material world. Topics include: the female body and objectification; contradictions of the im/materiality of the body; 'the material' and women's engagement with the economy; the relationship of the female body to material objects; cinematic representations of the female body.

Picturing the end of the world is an enduring cultural practice. This groundbreaking collection of essays offers an overview of the Apocalyptic imagination in French literature and culture from the thirteenth century to the present day, scrutinizing material as diverse as medieval French biblical commentaries and science fiction.

Cet ouvrage propose une etude de la question du genre dans l'oeuvre d'Agota Kristof, ecrivaine suisse francophone d'origine hongroise. La preponderance des narrateurs masculins dans sa prose suggere la superiorite du masculin.

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.

Pierre Michon is one of France¿s most significant contemporary writers. Since the publication in 1984 of his first book, Vies minuscules, Michon¿s work has never ceased to evade generic classifications. His work ingests books, lives and thought and probes their complex interrelationship and those moments of convergence that transform an ordinary name into that of an ¿Author¿ or of an ¿Artist¿. The contents of Michon¿s work are well documented: they are drawn from canonical novels, chronicles, archives and the biographies of artists¿ lives and are worked into cross-generic forms that revive names and make us rethink the uncertainty of literature. Less has been written of his engagement with avant-garde thought. The legacy of French avant-garde thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the work of Roland Barthes, informs Michon¿s work. Barthes¿s notions of the referent, of intertextuality and of authorship, for example, are transposed, reconfigured and sometimes contested within Michon¿s work. In this way, Barthes¿s name, the afterlife of his thought, remains encrypted within Michon¿s prose. This book situates and reads Michon¿s texts through the complex inscription and transformation of names drawn from the Creuse, literature, art and avant-garde thought. And it is within this matrix that Michon puts in play his own name and its uncertain relation to literature.

« Ce n¿est pas la poésie qui doit être libre, c¿est le poète. » A legendary figure within the Surrealist movement, Robert Desnos (1900-1945) has left a unique legacy as a poet of distinction, as a ¿dormeur éveillé¿ revered by his fellow Surrealists, and as a free spirit par excellence. In celebrating Desnos¿s unique creative voice, this book re-evaluates his prominence within and beyond the Surrealist movement, reappraises his status as a poet, and sheds new light on his contribution to the literary and cultural life of his age. The essays in the volume reflect the ongoing vitality and relevance of Desnos¿s poetry and the originality of his contribution to the various other forms of expression in which he excelled: journalism, short stories, script-writing and song-writing. Desnos¿s extensive writings on art and artists, his active involvement in avant-garde film and his close associations with a number of renowned painters are also addressed. This fresh look at Desnos¿s activities and contexts includes an interview with the artist Georges Malkine¿s daughter, Fern Malkine-Falvey, and a study of the memoirs of Desnos¿s wife, Youki. The volume closes with a rare collection of journalistic writings by Desnos which appeared in Le Soir in the late 1920s and have never appeared in print since their original publication.

The end of the British Raj, and the creation of the two states of India and Pakistan in August 1947, is a recognizable narrative within British Anglophone culture and colonial history. In contrast, the persistence of the five French trading posts, or comptoirs, on the Indian subcontinent until 1954 remains largely ignored by both French and British historians of French colonialism and the popular culture of the Hexagone. In examining metropolitan French-language representations of Indian decolonization, this book demonstrates the importance of the British imperial loss in 1947 as a reference point within French cultural production. The critical investigation into the strategies of representation used problematizes existing Anglophone theoretical models, by critics such as Said, Bhabha and Spivak, for the analysis of colonial discourse. It reveals that French-language representations of Indian decolonization cannot be fully appreciated without engaging methodologically with France¿s politically subordinate status in India. The book thus challenges the commonly accepted binary between colonizer and colonized, proposing in its place a triangular model composed of the colonized (India), the ¿subaltern¿ colonizer (France), and the dominant colonizer (Britain). Through a systematic critical evaluation of the range of texts (journalistic, intellectual, political, and literary) produced in metropolitan France by authors such as Romain Rolland, Jean Rous, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément and Marguerite Duras, the book challenges the current postcolonial orthodoxy that the story of Indian decolonization is solely an Anglophone space.

Examines the flourishing of intertextuality, as well as the use of traditional forms, such as mythical structures and the 'robinsonade', to undermine authoritative 'metarecits'. This book examines a wide variety of prose genres, from pornography to Bildungsroman to magic realism, as well as poetry.

The globalisation of culture and the shifting nature of national identities have propelled the stakes of memory and identity to the forefront of current intellectual debates. In recent years, the works of the Algerian francophone author Assia Djebar have reflected a growing preoccupation with the role of memory in forging a sense of individual as well as collective identity. This study traces the interrelated motifs of memory and identity in Djebar¿s novels, arguing the centrality of these themes to her literary project. An interdisciplinary theoretical framework positions Djebar¿s corpus in the wider context of philosophical and psychoanalytical debates on memory and identity. Djebar reveals that much more is at stake in discussions of the interrelationship between memory and identity than concerns of a mere cultural nature. In postcolonial Algeria, repressed memories of Algeriäs colonial past are revealed as instrumental to the genealogy of the current Algerian conflict; in this context, Djebar¿s poetics of memory become a ¿devoir de mémoire¿, an appeal for a revised Algerian historiography in which the individual takes pride of place.

Few full-length studies exist in English on French-speaking authors from Belgium. What, if any, are the particular features of francophone Belgian writing? This book explores questions of cultural and literary identity, and offers an overview of currents in critical debate regarding the place of francophone Belgian writing and its relationship to its larger neighbour, but also engages with broader questions concerning the classification of ¿francophone¿ literature. The study brings together well-known and less well-known modern and contemporary writers (Suzanne Lilar, Neel Doff, Dominique Rolin, Jacqueline Harpman, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Jean Muno, Nicole Malinconi, and Amélie Nothomb) whose works share a number of recurring themes and features, notably a preoccupation with questions of identity and alterity. Overall, the study highlights the diverse ways in which these questions of cultural identity and alterity emerge as a dominant theme throughout the corpus, viewed through a series of literary and cultural frameworks which bring together perspectives both local and global.

This volume, containing selected papers from a conference held by the Department of French in the University of Cambridge in 1999, addresses the exciting and challenging figure of the shifting border in modern French literature and literary theory. Using a variety of critical approaches, the contributors map the fluctuating borders in specific literary texts and explore how these moving boundaries reflect on their practice of literary analysis. Inspired by the ideas of European and American thinkers, including Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Jean-François Lyotard, they consider three major areas of current concern: the construction of identity, the conceptualisation of literary genres and the demarcation of geographical and cultural domains. Applying their insights to a wide-ranging corpus of francophone texts, this volume analyses the work both of canonical figures such as Mallarmé, Proust and Zola and of lesser-known writers such as Aimé Césaire, Assia Djebar and St. John Perse.

Queneaüs novels are extremely popular for their wit and linguistic ingenuity but they also pose a serious challenge to the reader¿s reconstruction of the fictional world, which can often go unrecognised. This study takes us back to the fundamental elements of Queneaüs worlds, demonstrating how his idiosyncratic style can affect the reader¿s mental processing of the text (¿world-building¿). It also demonstrates the internal organisation of Queneaüs fictional worlds. Drawing on cognitive discourse models and the philosophical notion of ¿possible worlds¿, the book provides both comparative and general analysis of Queneaüs novels and case studies of Le Vol d¿Icare, Les Fleurs bleues, and Loin de Rueil, exposing the resistance that these worlds present to stable cognitive reconstruction, notably through the subversion of world boundaries (¿world-play¿), and the positing of impossible spaces (¿heterotopiae¿).