Bøger i Modern French Identities serien

Can love poetry be the site of a creative partnership? When a poem is written by the male poet for the woman he loves, both addressed to her and taking her as its object, how does ¿ how can ¿ she interact with it?This book represents a foray into the love poetry of Jacques Roubaud, tracing a lifetime of writing from the ardour of first love to the pain of grief and loss. The author brings Roubaud¿s poetry into proximity with evolving views on the sexual relation from Freud, Lacan and Irigaray in readings that consider the ties between poet and lover, poet and reader. At the centre of it all is the poet¿s engagement with form: the free verse style of the Surrealists that was popular in his youth, the form-orientated writing he turns to as a response to his self-doubt as a writer, and the collapse of metre and rhythm when he mourns the death of his wife. Is form a device for the confinement of the feminine presence in his poems, or does Roubaud construct spaces in his poetry for his lover ¿ his other ¿ to be?

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.

Marie Nimier's writing exemplifies a contemporary 'return of the subject' in the rich diversity of the fifteen novels she has published since Sirene in 1985, blending fiction and life-writing. This collection of essays explores central aspects of self and subject across her oeuvre and includes an original short story by Nimier.

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.

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.

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.

This monograph is the first book to examine places and spaces in French war fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These places and spaces are presented as literary isotopias, or fictional worlds and analysed in a selective corpus of thirty-three novelists and forty-two examples of war fiction. The book identifies and classifies the various types of isotopia that appear in fiction in the form of scenes, images or literary microcosms. The author establishes four isotopic modes - possession, dispossession or loss, alienation, and repossession - by which means the isotopias are expressed. The spaces considered include territorial demands, gains, possessions, losses and national spaces, as well as internal mental spaces. The corpus of novels selected for this project covers a wide variety of examples of fictional worlds: the spiritual, the marginal, the regional, the ideological, the psychological, the erotic, the ecological and the political. The methods of analysis identify these worlds, demonstrate both how they function in relation to the characters in the novels and how they affect the reader, and provide further illumination on the intentions, achievements and ideologies of the characters and of the novelists concerned. One of the findings of the study is that the greater the stress of war and conflict the more authors and characters tend to seek refuge in their imaginary (isotopic) worlds.

Despite its inherent negative implications as a purveyor of essentialism, the concept of hybridity holds a great deal of critical purchase in the postcolonial world. Hybridity allows identities and cultures to be conceptualized as different and manifold, allowing for the undermining of the binaries of self and other, centre and periphery, colonizer and colonized. In Mauritius, a country where numerous civilizations (African, European, Indian, Chinese) coexist and have constructed a new society, linguistic practices, culture and the body are all intrinsically linked to the concept of identity. The author of this study provides a timely discussion of hybridity in the novels of Ananda Devi, perhaps the most famous name in the Mauritian literary landscape. The book analyses various linguistic practices through the lens of linguistic criticism and theory. It then shifts its attention to psychological dislocations suffered by postcolonial subjects having a hybrid identity, as extolled by theorists such as Glissant and Bhabha, and offers an alternative interpretation of identity. Finally, the physical repercussions of hybridity are discussed in order to gauge its relevance in a society such as Mauritius.

This book is the first critical survey of the work of Eric Jourdan. Jourdan first came to public attention as a schoolboy in 1955, when he published Les Mauvais anges, a sulphorous novel of adolescent male-to-male love, which was banned by the censors in 1956 and again in 1974. It did not officially appear until 1984. Despite the ban, and despite ongoing censorship, Jourdan continues to write novels, short stories and plays. His many books include the 'trilogy' Charite, Revolte and Sang, and other equally uninhibited texts such as Le Garcon de joie, Aux gemonies and Le Jeune soldat. More recent publications include short stories, historical novels (Sans lois ni dieux, Lieutenant Darmancour) and the more autobiographical text Trois cA urs. This study charts Jourdan's writing career from Les Mauvais anges to the present day, situating his work in the context of writers from Peyrefitte and Montherlant to Guibert, Dustan and Guyotat. The analysis concentrates on three main themes: boyhood and masculinity; sex and (homo)sexuality; and violence and death. Throughout, a number of questions are paramount. What is the connection between masculinity and violence? How does Jourdan reconcile joie de vivre with pain and punishment? Do his young male protagonists progress from bad boys to new men? In what ways can his texts be seen as homoerotic, homosexual, gay or queer? What, ultimately, is the connection between sex, sexuality and writing in Jourdan? The book includes detailed bibliographies of Jourdan's works and, for the first time since its original, controversial publication in Arcadie, his short story 'Le Troisieme but'.

Since the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to J. M. G. Le Clezio in 2008, there has been a wave of new interest in his A uvre. This book traces the evolution of the writer's postcolonial thought from his early works to his groundbreaking autobiographical novel Revolutions, arguably his most subversive text to date. The author shows how Le Clezio's critique of colonialism is rooted in an early denunciation of capitalism and philosophical dualism, and sheds new light on the crucial roles played by Jean-Paul Sartre, Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon in his development. The author's close reading of Revolutions reveals a complex system of interconnections between the colonial conflicts from the 1700s to the 1900s, with recurrent patterns of violence, cultural repression and racism. The issue of neocolonialism is addressed and the persistence of the colonial mindset in contemporary Europe and Westernized countries is shown to echo the findings of Paul Gilroy, Max Silverman and Etienne Balibar. The book concludes with an examination of the utopian elements underpinning Revolutions, establishing close affinities with the work of Edouard Glissant and developing the notion of permanent revolution. Themes explored include those of storytelling, cultural memory, cultural identity, language, intertextuality and interculturality.

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.

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 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.

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".