Bücher der Reihe Modern French Identities

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¿).

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.

"Poetics of the Antilles" explores the poetry and thought of four major Francophone Caribbean writers: Perse, Cesaire, Fanon and Glissant. The book portrays the complex history of the negritude movements in light of Fanon's critique and reveals the original aesthetic ideas and philosophical reflections on which these authors' rich production rests.

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.

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.

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 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.

« 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.

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.

The notion of «exposure» underlies much modern thinking about identity, representation, ethics, desire and sexuality. This provocative notion is explored in a collection of essays selected from, and inspired by, the proceedings of a conference held in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge in 2002. The authors engage with exposure as both object and mode of representation in a range of cultural media: literature, critical theory, visual art and film. They analyse a variety of works from the medieval, early-modern, and modern periods, examining not only canonical texts such as Montaigne¿s Essais but also lesser-studied works such as the psychoanalytic theory of Didier Anzieu, the photomontage self-portraits of Claude Cahun, and the novel La Nouvelle Pornographie by Marie Nimier. This volume thus both illustrates and, more importantly, interrogates the richness of the term «exposure», in a way that is stimulating for students and researchers alike.

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.

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.

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.

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.

France and the Mediterranean

Cinematic Queerness

Cette etude est consacree aux pratiques imitatives qui continuent de caracteriser un grand nombre d'/uvres litteraires et de films issus de l'immigration dans la France postcoloniale. Les artistes dont l'/uvre est analysee dans ce livre ont des liens avec le Vietnam, le Cameroun, l'Algerie, le Liban et la Tunisie.

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.