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This book is the first full-length study of Marguerite Yourcenar's Le Labyrinthe du monde along environmental lines. Written by the first académicienne more than twenty years after Mémoires d'Hadrien, the three-volume work was her most ambitious undertaking. Drawing extensively on the rich reserves of Yourcenar scholarship as well as on environmental humanities, this study entails a broad review of time, place and interconnectedness. While Yourcenar's work often engages in detail with her parents and their forebears, the analysis here includes a focus on notions such as fragility and vulnerability, qualities common to human beings and to the rest of the natural world. Through a quasi-plot structure and a range of concerns carefully orchestrated and examined, Yourcenar proffers her extensive genealogical heritage as a reading of the global and the modern, opening the way to possible grounds for optimism. Yourcenar emerges as an insightful and deeply reflective writer with an important contemporary message, responsive to the urgent environmental concerns of the present day.

This volume explores the political life of rage as it has been experienced and mobilized in the Francosphere since 1968. If mai is remembered as a failure to convert insurrectionary feeling into lasting political change, the vast number of activist groups who have alchemized their anger into resistance over the past fifty years are a testament to the continued, necessary role of rage in political life. This volume traces the various morphologies of anger across French-language literature, thought, cinema and activism. From Black feminisms to punk, flamboyance to suicide, cacophonous sound to riotous song, the contributions probe the aesthetics and politics of rage. This collection also examines the uneven legitimization of political anger – how rage is allowed to be expressed, by whom and in which contexts. Rage is often dismissed as inimical to proper academic inquiry: what unites the contributions in this publication is a commitment to thinking with feeling.

The Dreyfus Affair's Literary Politics offers a new interpretation of writers'political engagements in the crisis that ended the French nineteenth century, following the wrongful treason conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Émile Zola and three writers connected to him – Ferdinand Brunetière, Henry Céard and Saint-Georges de Bouhélier – drew on their affinities and antagonisms concerning Zola's naturalist fiction to shape their political discourse in the Dreyfus Affair. Zola and Bouhélier were Dreyfusard, Brunetière and Céard anti-Dreyfusard, yet in each case they transformed a vision of what literature should be into arguments about French national identity, the proper relationship between literary and political thought, and the tensions between individual rights and raison d'état.Developing a method entitled ‘microhistories of ideas,'Cooke shows that a longitudinal approach to each writer's career yields a set of central unit-ideas that reappear in the new, emotive context of the Affair. Through close readings of material such as pamphlets, newspaper columns and aesthetic essays, the significance of often ephemeral writing to the larger questions of intellectual history – and to the outcome of the Dreyfus Affair itself - becomes clear.

Le mythe de la malédiction littéraire né au xixe siècle est toujours vivant et prolifique. Gianpaolo Furgiuele montre dans cette étude que loin d'adhérer à une conception vraiment sacrale de la littérature, l'artiste maudit témoigne plutôt d'une stratégie de communication jouant sur l'opposition à la société et au succès. Ce phénomène à l'origine littéraire en est venu à influencer et façonner d'autres disciplines, comme la musique ou le cinéma. Il convient de revisiter ces auteurs, trop superficiellement présentés comme des « ratés » ou des « malheureux » par l'histoire et la littérature.Mais l'analyse du mythe et de son instrumentalisation est aussi l'occasion d'évoquer un petit groupe d'hommes nés pour occuper les premiers rangs dans notre histoire littéraire. Les circonstances ou la fortune ne leur ont pas permis de vivre assez longtemps pour conquérir la place qui leur était due. Ces femmes et ces hommes, par une fatalité singulière, sont morts jeunes et sans avoir pu dire leur dernier mot.

Quelle fonction l'éthique occupe-t-elle dans la littérature contemporaine? C'est la question initiale de cet ouvrage, qui repose sur deux principes structurants : le conflit et la pensée. Il s'intéresse à la fois au roman et aux fragments ou autres formes gnomiques, idéales pour l'expression littéraire d'une pensée éthique. L'accès au monde imaginaire qu'est la littérature acquiert une pertinence plus grande à partir des interrogations éthiques qui transforment la matière et la manière romanesque. L'éthique romanesque relève alors moins du jugement que de l'évaluation et de l'exploration. Que ce soit par le roman qui pense ou les topoï romanesques dans la fiction (Milan Kundera), une esthétique de l'inusité ou une philosophie du constat (Michel Houellebecq), les variations romanesques et l'hybridité générique (Camille Laurens), on arrive à mieux saisir l'interaction entre la pensée du roman et la prose du moraliste. L'étude des formes gnomiques joue aussi rôle primordial : les grandes questions sur la place du soi dans le monde reçoivent un traitement sérieux, ironique ou dérisoire (Éric Chevillard), et le travail sur la forme fragmentaire permet de développer une éthique de la lecture (Pascal Quignard). Malgré les différences esthétiques notables de leur œuvre, les cinq auteurs réunis ont en commun d'exposer la complexité des discours de l'éthique et leur pertinence dans la littérature.

Albert Memmi, écrivain et sociologue juif franco-tunisien, a marqué le XXe siècle par ses écrits, tant sociologiques que romanesques. Témoin de nombreuses mutations historiques et socio-politiques de son époque, il y prend part en apportant une active contribution aux polémiques politiques et sociales de son temps. Sur le plan littéraire, son identité multiculturelle a largement influencé son écriture. Et ayant été tourmenté toute sa vie par la question existentielle « Qu'est-ce qu'être Juif? », il fait du déchirement identitaire, de l'identité juive ou du « malheur d'être juif » le moteur premier de son œuvre romanesque qui, par sa complexité, ses topoï et ses formes d'écriture particulières, a su s'imposer dans la sphère littéraire et intellectuelle universelle et devenir une référence incontournable dans les annales de l'écriture de l'identité.

Comfort examines the works of five Francophone authors who wrote about World War I: Maxence Van der Meersch's Invasion 14, Colette's war reporting, Bakary Diallo's Force-Bonté, Blaise Cendrars's La Main coupée, and Roland Dorgelès's Le Réveil des morts. Engaging in a close reading, she analyzes what makes these literary works unique and what they all have in common. These are the stories of groups who have remained on the margins of the World War I narrative: women and children, French West African colonial troops, wounded veterans, and French Foreign Legionnaires, whose stories have been overshadowed by those of the infantrymen in the trenches who are often the heroes of the conventional French World War I novel. Informed by trauma studies as well as literary history, Comfort's reading of these works enhances our understanding of the way the Great War affected those away from the front lines, and thus contributes to the decentering of the French World War I narrative. This book is of interest to scholars of twentieth-century French literature, culture, and history.

Dans l'univers littéraire de Marcel Pagnol n'est pas une biographie de plus sur un auteur populaire que tout le monde pense bien connaître. Il s'agit plutôt de la « biographie de son œuvre ». Cet ouvrage propose une plongée inédite dans le monde de Marcel Pagnol. Pourquoi les gens en général aiment Pagnol et pourquoi a contrario les intellectuels méprisent son œuvre? C'est la toute première question que pose cet essai. Est-il réellement un auteur à rebours de son époque, « un cas » à part comme les rares universitaires qui s'intéressent à son œuvre aiment à le définir souvent? Qui sont ses inspirateurs et ses maîtres? Comment expliquer ses choix esthétiques? Qui sont ses personnages? Comment sont construites ses œuvres? Est-il un auteur d'œuvres comiques réservées uniquement aux collégiens? Cette étude remet en question bien des aspects qui semblaient faire consensus et jette une lumière nouvelle sur une œuvre que l'on croyait pourtant bien connaître. Il propose une immersion totale dans l'œuvre pagnolienne pour tenter d'en appréhender toute sa complexité et toute son originalité.

La décadence n'est-elle réservée qu'à la fin du XIXe siècle, cette époque hantée par le déclin, la dégénérescence, l'essor de l'artifice et le triomphe de la modernité? De nos jours, le terme pullule, et de fait : la décadence est un virus qui a traversé le temps et frappe les esprits pris d'une langueur, d'une fatigue existentielle et d'un vide ontologique. Notre essai puise dans l'histoire des idées, la critique thématique ainsi que l'étude du discours social pour formuler une hypothèse : la décadence littéraire du XIXe siècle n'a pas disparu de la littérature française mais a muté. Les œuvres de Michel Houellebecq, Philippe Muray et Maurice G. Dantec incarnent selon nous une nouvelle décadence littéraire qui ronge les fondations de notre époque contemporaine, révèle une antimodernité toujours vive et affirme la fin imminente d'un monde.

The French in Macao in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives investigates the role that Macao played as a meeting place of the East and the West during this period of time and its decline as a Portuguese colony in the eyes of the Europeans. The book provides a comprehensive view of representations of Macao as portrayed by the French. These texts in French have been studied less than Chinese or Portuguese texts on Macao. Overall, the book contributes to the study of colonial history, cultural studies, and China in the late Qing dynasty.

In the first decades after the end of French rule, Francophone authors engaged in an exercise of rewriting narratives from the colonial literary canon. In The Author as Cannibal, Felisa Vergara Reynolds presents these textual revisions as figurative acts of cannibalism and examines how these literary cannibalizations critique colonialism and its legacy in each author's homeland. Reynolds focuses on four representative texts: Une tempête (1969) by Aimé Césaire, Le temps de Tamango (1981) by Boubacar Boris Diop, L'amour, la fantasia (1985) by Assia Djebar, and La migration des coeurs (1995) by Maryse Condé. Though written independently in Africa and the Caribbean, these texts all combine critical adaptation with creative destruction in an attempt to eradicate the social, political, cultural, and linguistic remnants of colonization long after independence.The Author as Cannibal situates these works within Francophone studies, showing that the extent of their postcolonial critique is better understood when they are considered collectively. Crucial to the book are two interviews with Maryse Condé, which provide great insight on literary cannibalism. By foregrounding thematic concerns and writing strategies in these texts, Reynolds shows how these rewritings are an underappreciated collective form of protest and resistance for Francophone authors.

Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood. Unselfing explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of productive self-transcendence or a form of alienating self-loss. Michaela Hulstyn explores the shapes and meanings of unselfing through the framework of the global French literary world, encompassing texts by modernist figures in France and Belgium alongside writers from Algeria, Rwanda, and Morocco. Together these diverse texts prompt a re-evaluation of the consequences of the loss or the transcendence of the self. Through a series of close readings, Hulstyn offers a new account of the ethical questions raised by altered states and shows how philosophies of empathy can be tested against and often challenged by literary works. Drawing on cognitive science and phenomenology, Unselfing provides a new methodology for approaching texts that give shape to the fringes of conscious experience.

How did the avant-garde imagine its interconnected world? And how does this legacy affect our understanding of the global today? The writers and artists of the French avant-garde aspired to reach a global audience that would be wholly transformed by their work. In this study, Effie Rentzou delves deep into their depictions of the interwar world as an international and modern landscape, one marked by a varied cosmopolitanism. The avant-garde's conceptualization of the world paralleled, rejected, or expanded prevailing notions of the global sphere. The historical avant garde—which encompassed movements like futurism, Dada, and surrealism—was self-consciously international, operating across global networks and developed with the whole world as its horizon and its public. In the heady period between the end of the Belle Époque and the tumult of World War II, both individual artists (including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Francis Picabia, Louis Aragon, Leonora Carrington, and Nicolas Calas) and collective endeavors (such as surrealist magazines and exhibitions) grappled with contemporary anxieties about economic growth, imperialism, and colonialism, as well as various universalist, cosmopolitan, and internationalist visions. By probing these works, Concepts of the World offers an alternative narrative of globalization, one that integrates the avant-garde's enthusiasm for, as well as resistance to, the process. Rentzou identifies within the avant-garde a powerful political language that expressed the ambivalence of living and creating in an increasingly globalized world—a language that profoundly shaped the way the world has been conceptualized and is experienced today.

The French literary collective OuLiPo was founded in 1960 with the goal of applying mathematics to literary creation. Comprised of authors, poets, mathematicians, and scientists, this quirky writer's workshop also created some of the first electronic literature and digital humanities work, contributing to mathematics and computer science in the process. Now beginning its seventh decade of existence, Oulipo has outlived every other literary collective of its time, in no small part due to the diversity of its members and its fascinating marriage of mathematics and literature. OuLiPo and the Mathematics of Literature retraces the historical foundations of this group's unprecedented literary project, putting its first thirty years of archival meeting minutes into conversation with the scientific and mathematical literature that preceded the founding of the group. Through close readings and genetic criticism, this project demonstrates the impact of the group's experimental literary production and how it invites a willing reader to participate in abstract, mathematical thought. Additionally, this book makes use of digital humanities techniques to understand Oulipo's pioneering yet complicated relationship with computer science. This analysis sheds new light on disciplinary questions, suggesting that creative practices can help bridge this artificial divide between the Humanities and STEM fields.

Face à une vision totalisante, unitaire et cohérente de la vie et de l'homme héritée de l'âge classique, une autre représentation avait vu le jour depuis le début du XXe siècle et dont les principales caractéristiques sont la discontinuité, l'incohérence et la fragmentation. Dans cette perspective, le présent ouvrage se propose d'étudier la question de l'identité chez des romanciers français et américains - en l'occurrence Albert Camus, André Gide, Paul Auster et Gertrude Stein - et ce dans une approche comparatiste. Il met en exergue le rapport consubstantiel entre l'écriture et la quête initiatique: la fiction narrative discontinue rend compte de l'identité fragmentée et insaisissable des personnages de ces oeuvres. L'incohérence et le désordre deviennent paradoxalement signes de cette modernité qui se veut plurielle, instable et ambivalente.

The Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) is a literary think tank that brings together writers and mathematicians. Since 1960, its worldwide influence has refreshed ways of making and thinking about literature.How to Do Things with Forms assesses the work of the group, explores where it came from, and envisages its future. Redefining the Oulipo's key concept of the constraint in a clear and rigorous way, Chris Andrews weighs the roles of craft and imitation in the group's practice. He highlights the importance of translation for the Oulipo's writers, explaining how their new forms convey meanings and how these famously playful authors are also moved by serious concerns. Offering fresh interpretations of emblematic Oulipian works such as Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual, Andrews also examines lesser-known texts by Jacques Roubaud, Anne F. Garréta, and Michelle Grangaud.How to Do Things with Forms addresses questions of interest to anyone involved in the making of literature, illuminating how writers decide when to stop revising, the risks and benefits of a project mentality in creative writing, and ways of holding a reader's interest for as long as possible.

Le présent recueil offre douze études d'Evert van der Starre sur la littérature française de l'après-guerre. L'approche d'Evert van der Starre pourrait être qualifiée de ce que Jean-Pierre Richard appelle la “microlecture”, - une lecture qui, sans pour autant rejeter toute théorisation littéraire, s'attache à l'analyse minutieuse du texte. Cette lecture “au ras du texte” s'opère selon quelques centres d'intérêt privilégiés : le rôle de l'Histoire et sa “littéralisation”, les aspects ludiquement problématiques de l'écriture et la non moins problématique zone de tension qui, en littérature, existe entre convention et originalité.C'est selon cette triple optique qu'Evert van der Starre consacre les deux premières sections de ce recueil à l'analyse de deux auteurs: Raymond Queneau et Marguerite Yourcenar, “bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble”. Bien étonnés aussi, sans doute, de voir traiter leurs oeuvres avec une perspicacité critique, qui, trop souvent, fait défaut dans les études quéniennes et yourcenariennes à tendance hagiographique. La troisième section offre une série de sondages profonds, qui, à partir de l'analyse précise de tel aspect ou de telle partie de l'oeuvre, vise à jeter sur son ensemble des éclairages nouveaux. Sont ainsi étudiés: le célèbre monologue de Lucky dans En attendant Godot, un poème de René Char, Graal Flibuste de Robert Pinget, La vie sur Epsilon de Claude Ollier. Le chapitre sur Marie Redonnet fait quelque peu exception parce qu'il procède par la méthode inverse: une perspective plus large sur son oeuvre permet d'en détailler de façon fructueuse les différentes parties.

Life as Creative Constraint is the first book to focus on the extraordinary life-writing of the French experimental writing group, the Oulipo. The Oulipo's enthusiasm for literary games and formal gymnastics has seen its work caricatured as'lifeless'- impressively virtuoso but more interested in form than content and ultimately disengaged from the world. This book examines a broad corpus of work by Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Roubaud and Anne F. Garréta to show that, despite the group's early devotion to the radical impersonality of mathematics, later generations of oulipians have brought the group's fascination with systems, games and constraints to bear on autobiography. Far from being'lifeless', oulipian constraints and concepts provide the tools that allow writers to engage critically and creatively with lived experience, and mine the potential of the autobiographical genre. The games played by these writers are not simply pastimes or cunning writing techniques, but modes of survival, self-examination, self-invention, and relating to the world and to others. As the title of Georges Perec's masterpiece suggests, they are a mode d'emploi for life.

«From Freud and psychoanalysis to Derrida and philosophy, the question of mourning has been central to a whole strain of modern thought, especially in France. This fascinating and illuminating collection of essays explores the question in a wide range of intellectual and literary settings, from the French Revolution down through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a tour de force.» (Christopher Prendergast FBA, King's College, Cambridge) «This volume compellingly explores the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, showing how literature can enrich our sense of the complexity of mourning, grief and loss. It provides a significant contribution to scholarship on mourning, understood as a never-ending process of relationality.» (Hanna Meretoja, University of Turku, Finland) How does modern writing in French grapple with the present absence and absent presence of lost loved ones? How might it challenge and critique the relegation of certain deaths to the realm of the unmournable? What might this reveal about the role of the literary in the French and francophone world and shifting conceptions of the nation-state? Essays on texts from the Revolution to the present day explore these questions from a variety of perspectives, bringing out the ways in which mourning contests the boundaries between the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the ethical, the self and the other, and ultimately reasserting its truly critical resonance.

Cet ouvrage s'intéresse à ce qui fait une oeuvre Mais dans ce vaste domaine, il entre par une porte latérale. On se demande souvent comment, par où commence une oeuvre, ou bien comment et par où elle s'achève. Mais que faire des pauses, intervalles, silences, blancs, interruptions ou des arrêts définitifs ou provisoires? Sont-ils étrangers, comme des arrêts de l'oeuvre, ou intérieurs, des arrêts dans l'oeuvre? Il faut d'abord interroger ceux qui ont pour règle ou pour habitude de s'arrêter vite, ceux qui, dit Georges Perros,'écrivent court'; ceux-là bien souvent interrompent un texte qui se serait volontiers poursuivi sans annoncer de fin. Avec ceux qui, au contraire,'écrivent long', tout se passe comme si les textes étaient souvent sur le point de s'interrompre, et que l'arrêt se trouvait reporté. Sont ainsi présentés des auteurs qui ont écrit, notamment, des notes, des fragments ou des aphorismes, Perros, Cioran, Reverdy, puis trois auteurs d'essais, Malraux, Bataille, Aragon.

Shortlisted for the 2022 R. Gapper book prize The formulation ‘egalitarian strangeness'is a direct borrowing from Courts voyages au pays du peuple [Short Voyages to the Land of the People] (1990), a collection of essays by the contemporary French thinker Jacques Rancière. Perhaps best known for his theory of radical equality as set out in Le Maître ignorant [The Ignorant Schoolmaster] (1987), Rancière reflects on ways in which a hierarchical social order based on inequality can come to be unsettled. In the democracy of literature, for example, he argues that words and sentences serve to capture any life and to make it available to any reader. The present book explores embedded forms of social and cultural ‘apportionment'in a range of modern and contemporary French texts (including prose fiction, socially engaged commentary, and autobiography), while also identifying scenes of class disturbance and egalitarian encounter. Part One considers the ‘refrain of class'audible in works by Claude Simon, Charles Péguy, Marie Ndiaye, Thierry Beinstingel, and Gabriel Gauny and examines how these authors'practices of language connect with that refrain. In Part Two, Hughes analyses forms of domination and dressage with reference to Simone Weil's mid-1930s factory journal, Paul Nizan's novel of class alienation Antoine Bloyé from the same decade, and Pierre Michon's Vies minuscules [Small Lives] (1984) with its focus on obscure rural lives. The reflection on how these narratives draw into contiguity antagonistic identities is extended in Part Three, where individual chapters on Proust and the contemporary authors François Bon and Didier Eribon demonstrate ways in which enduring forms of cultural distribution are both consolidated and contested.

This book examines the works of four contemporary first-generation Chinese migrant writer-artists in France: François CHENG, GAO Xingjian, DAI Sijie, and SHAN Sa. They were all born in China, moved to France in their adulthood to pursue their literary and artistic ambitions, and have enjoyed the highest French and Western institutional recognitions, from the Grand Prix de la Francophonie to the Nobel Prize in Literature. They have established themselves not only as writers, but also as translators, calligraphers, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers mainly in their host country. French has become their dominant—but not only—language of literary creation (except for Gao); yet, linguistic idioms, poetic imagery, and classical thought from Chinese cultural heritage permeate their French texts and visual artworks, reflecting a strong translingual and transmedial sensibility. The book provides not only distinctive literary and artistic examples beyond existing studies of intercultural encounter, French postcolonial, and Chinese diasporic enquiries; more importantly, it formulates a theoretical model that captures the creative dynamics between the French/francophone and Chinese/sinophone spaces of articulation, thereby contributing to contemporary debates about literary and artistic production, interpretation, and circulation in the global development of comparative/world literature, as well as intermediality studies.

La Nouvelle Revue Française, qui fut selon François Mauriac la « rose des vents » de la littérature française de l'entre-deux-guerres, jouit en France d'un prestige incomparable. Dans Entre Classicisme et Modernité, Maaike Koffeman remonte aux origines de cette légende par le moyen d'une analyse à la fois historique, littéraire et sociologique des premières années de la NRF. Elle montre que les éléments principaux de sa réussite se mettent en place dès avant la Grande Guerre. Son ascension remarquable ne dépend pas uniquement de la qualité de ses textes, mais aussi des stratégies employées par ses rédacteurs pour lui conquérir une position dominante dans le champ littéraire de la Belle Epoque. Cette étude combine une approche institutionnelle, inspirée des travaux de Pierre Bourdieu, avec une analyse interne, centrée sur les idées et les œuvres littéraires. Ce faisant, elle démontre qu'il y a un rapport étroit entre le programme artistique de la NRF et sa position dans le champ littéraire. Son classicisme moderne lui permet de réunir les meilleurs écrivains de son temps et de fournir une contribution importante au renouvellement du roman français. Maaike Koffeman place les recherches artistiques de la revue dans un contexte international : à travers le concept du modernisme, elle montre comment la NRF aide à préparer la grande transformation du roman européen. Ainsi, elle veut parvenir à une évaluation plus complète et plus objective des efforts de cette revue dont Auguste Anglès a dit qu'elle a « renversé le barème des valeurs littéraires ».The literary review La Nouvelle Revue Française enjoys an enormous prestige in France. In Entre Classicisme et Modernité, Maaike Koffeman explores the origins of this legend of French literary life by means of a historical, literary and sociological analysis of the first years of the review's existence (1908-1914). She shows that the NRF owes its remarkable success not only to its high literary standards, but also to the strategies employed by its editors in order to conquer a dominant position in the French literary world. The review's programme based on a ‘modern classicism'allows it to publish the best authors of its time and to contribute to the regeneration of the French novel. This study places the artistic efforts of the review in an international context, showing that British novelists were a main source of inspiration for the concept of the roman d'aventure, which played an important role in the development of early literary modernism. Maaike Koffeman thereby offers a more complete and more objective evaluation of the achievements of a review that is said to have changed the course of French literature.

Reimagining the Family is the first book-length study of representations of lesbian mothering in French literature. Focusing on female-authored texts published between 1970 and 2013, the book explores how literature reflects, engages with and even anticipates the recent, highly charged debates on the rights of same-sex couples and parents in France. Centred around the notion of «reimagining», the book examines how literature interrogates the normative definition of the family as a heterosexual, biological unit. It discusses a range of themes, including the difficulty of reconciling lesbianism with mothering, the role of the father, the identity of the co-mother and issues of difference and equality. The corpus includes both well-known and previously unstudied authors, and covers a range of genres, from autobiography to popular fiction. Collectively, the texts offer privileged insights into the increasingly relevant experiences of lesbian mothers and illustrate the changing face of the family in twenty-first-century France.

The essays in Shadows in the City of Light explore the significance of Paris in the writing of five influential French writers—Sarah Kofman, Patrick Modiano, George Perec, Henri Raczymow, and Irene Nemirovsky—whose novels and memoirs capture and probe the absences of deported Paris Jews. These writers move their readers through wartime and postwar cityscapes of Paris, walking them through streets and arrondissments where Jews once resided, looking for traces of the disappeared. The city functions as more than a backdrop or setting. Its streets and buildings and monuments remind us of the exhilarating promise of the French Revolution and what it meant for Jews dreaming of equality. But the dynamic space of Paris also reminds us of the Holocaust and its aftermath. The shadowed paths traced by these writers raise complicated questions about ambivalence, absence, memory, secularity, and citizenship. In their writing, the urban landscape itself bears witness to the absent Jews, and what happened to them.For the writers treated in this volume, neither their Frenchness nor their Jewishness is a fixed point. Focusing on Paris's dual role as both a cultural hub and a powerful symbol of hope and conflict in Jewish memory, the contributors address intersections and departures among these writers. Their complexity of thought, artistry, and depth of vision shape a new understanding of the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish and French identity, on literature and literary forms, and on the development of Jewish secular culture in Western Europe.

This book seeks to establish the relevance of Albert Camus'philosophy and literature to contemporary ethics. By examining Camus'innovative methods of approaching moral problems, Whistler demonstrates that Camus'work has much to offer the world of ethics— Camus does philosophy differently, and the insights his methodologies offer could prove invaluable in both ethical theory and practice. Camus sees lived experience and emotion as ineliminable in ethics, and thus he chooses literary methods of communicating moral problems in an attempt to draw positively on these aspects of human morality. Using case studies of Camus'specific literary methods, including dialogue, myth, mime and syntax, Whistler pinpoints the efficacy of each of Camus'attempts to flesh-out moral problems, and thus shows just how much contemporary ethics could benefit from such a diversification in method.

Identités françaises interroge les notions de périphérisation et d'identité nationale à travers une étude de discours sur les banlieues françaises. L'exploration du quotidien, au détriment de l'extraordinaire, invite le lecteur à reconsidérer les représentations des périphéries, et les processus qui créent citoyenneté et marginalité dans la France républicaine. L'accent est porté sur des expériences féminines dans des œuvres produites par des écrivains et artistes issus de ces espaces. Cette attention éclaire les parcours de femmes qui concentrent un ensemble de marginalités socio-économiques ou raciales. L'étude de ces intersections illumine de nombreuses notions d'inclusion et de périphérisation. En plein débats autour d'une identité nationale une et indivisible, l'œuvre de Mame-Fatou Niang illumine des identités plurielles ancrées dans les banlieues françaises. Identités françaises interrogates notions of marginalization and national identity through an analysis of French banlieues. The display of the quotidian, at the expense of the extraordinary, invites the reader to reconsider the most common images of these urban peripheries and the processes that create citizenship and marginality in republican France. The focus is on the female experience, in works produced by writers and artists from these peripheries. Banlieue women sit at the intersection of marginalities of race, gender and class. The study of these intersections illuminates multiple notions of identity, belonging and peripheralization. Amid the contemporary flare-ups and debates around a single and indivisible French national identity, Mame-Fatou Niang's work brings to light plural identities rooted in France's suburban spaces.

Absent the Archive is the first cultural history in English that is devoted to literary and visual representations of the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protesters. Covered up by the state and hidden from history, the events of October 17 have nonetheless never been fully erased. Indeed, as early as 1962, stories about the massacre began to find their way their way into novels, poetry, songs, film, visual art, and performance. This book is about these stories, the way they have been told, and their function as both documentary and aesthetic objects. Identified here for the first time as a corpus—an anarchive—the works in question produce knowledge about October 17 by narrativizing and contextualizing the massacre, registering its existence, its scale, and its erasure, while also providing access to the subjective experiences of violence and trauma. Absent the Archive is invested in exploring how literature and culture represent history by complicating it, whether by functioning as first responders and persistent witnesses; reverberating against reality but also speculating on what might have been; activating networks of signs and meaning; or by showing us things that otherwise cannot be seen, while at the same time provoking important questions about the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of representation.

Francophone Literature as World Literature examines French-language works from a range of global traditions and shows how these literary practices draw individuals, communities, and their cultures and idioms into a planetary web of tension and cross-fertilization. The Francophone corpus under scrutiny here comes about in the evolving, markedly relational context provided by these processes and their developments during and after the French empire. The 15 chapters of this collection delve into key aspects, moments, and sites of the literature flourishing throughout the francosphere after World War II and especially since the 1980s, from the French Hexagon to the Caribbean and India, and from Québec to the Maghreb and Romania. Understood and practiced as World Literature, Francophone literature claims--with particular force in the wake of the littérature-monde debate--its place in a more democratic world republic of letters, where writers, critics, publishers, and audiences are no longer beholden to traditional centers of cultural authority.

Among the Jewish writers who emigrated from Eastern Europe to France in the 1910s and 1920s, a number chose to switch from writing in their languages of origin to writing primarily in French, a language that represented both a literary center and the promises of French universalism. But under the Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944, these Jewish émigré writers—among them Irène Némirovsky, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, Jean Malaquais, and Elsa Triolet—continued to write in their adopted language, even as the Vichy regime and Nazi occupiers denied their French identity through xenophobic and antisemitic laws. In this book, Julia Elsky argues that these writers reexamined both their Jewishness and their place as authors in France through the language in which they wrote. The group of authors Elsky considers depicted key moments in the war from their perspective as Jewish émigrés, including the June 1940 civilian flight from Paris, life in the occupied and southern zones, the roundups and internment camps, and the Resistance in France and in London. Writing in French, they expressed multiple cultural, religious, and linguistic identities, challenging the boundaries between center and periphery, between French and foreign, even when their sense of belonging was being violently denied.

Malgré leur apparente disparité, Apollinaire, Prévert, Tournier et Beckett partagent leur prédilection pour l'ambiguïté en général et leur goût pour le jeu de mots en particulier. La fonctionnalité littéraire qu'ils confèrent aux doubles sens et au jeu de mots ne se limite pas à la plaisanterie ou au divertissement cérébral. Bien au contraire, elle est souvent à l'origine d'évocations sérieuses et d'implications tragiques. Qui plus est, l'ambiguïté intentionnelle et le jeu de mots peuvent être à la base de la genèse et de la structuration de leurs œuvres. Despite their apparent disparity, Apollinaire, Prévert, Tournier and Beckett share a predilection for ambiguity in general and for puns in particular. The literary function they confer to double meanings and puns is not limited to humour or entertainment. On the contrary, it often generates serious reflections and tragic plots. Moreover, intentional ambiguity and puns can be the basis for the genesis and structuring of their works.

Dans Témoignage et littérature d'après Auschwitz, Fransiska Louwagie offre des études critiques provenant de deux centres de gravité de la littérature de la Shoah et des camps nazis : les œuvres des témoins-survivants et celles des générations suivantes. Le livre explore les œuvres d'écrivains majeurs et parfois moins connus, comme celles de Robert Antelme, André Schwarz-Bart, Piotr Rawicz, Jorge Semprun et Imre Kertész, d'une part, et celles de Georges Perec, Raymond Federman, Gérard Wajcman, Henri Raczymow et Michel Kichka, de l'autre. En consacrant à chaque auteur une étude critique approfondie, Fransiska Louwagie fait pleinement droit à l'individualité des œuvres, tout en dégageant des perspectives transversales sur les questions éthiques et esthétiques qui sous-tendent le témoignage et la littérature d'après Auschwitz. In Témoignage et littérature d'après Auschwitz, Fransiska Louwagie brings together two key areas of Holocaust literature, offering a rich analysis of both testimony and second generation writing. The book explores the works of major and sometimes lesser-known writers such as Robert Antelme, André Schwarz-Bart, Piotr Rawicz, Jorge Semprun, Imre Kertész, Georges Perec, Raymond Federman, Gérard Wajcman, Henri Raczymow and Michel Kichka. By devoting an in-depth critical study to each of these writers, the book draws out the individual specificity of their works, while also developing broader insights into the ethical and aesthetic questions that underlie acts of witnessing and writing ‘after Auschwitz'.

“Groskop skillfully juggles memoir, biography, philosophy, and literary criticism to create a delightful tour through some of French literature's greats.” —Madeline Miller, New York Times–bestselling authorLike many people the world over, Viv Groskop wishes she was a little more French. A writer, comedian, and journalist, Groskop studied the language obsessively starting at age 11, and spent every vacation in France, desperate to escape her Englishness and to have some French chic rub off on her. In Au Revoir, Tristesse, Groskop mixes literary history and memoir to explore how the classics of French literature can infuse our lives with joie de vivre and teach us how to say goodbye to sadness. From the frothy hedonism of Colette and the wit of Cyrano de Bergerac to the intoxicating universe of Marguerite Duras and the heady passions of Les Liaisons dangereuses, this is a love letter to great French writers. With chapters on Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Albert Camus, and of course Françoise Sagan, this is a delectable read for book lovers everywhere.“Ms. Groskop is a skilled raconteuse who brings people—and the page—to life. She writes with a self-deprecating appreciation of the Frenchman or -woman manqué(e) that lurks in us all. You don't have to be a savant to enjoy this book... Au Revoir, Tristesse will make a witty, seductive companion.” —The Wall Street Journal“Groskop's combination of her own memories, what the novels meant to her at different stages in her life, her description of the authors, along with her description of the novels, will have readers eagerly turning the book's pages.” —Forbes

Réalités pseudonymes explore la question de la réalité à travers le prisme du nom propre et de ses mécanismes référentiels dans la littérature et les arts au tournant du 21ème siècle. Julie Gaillard convoque les œuvres de penseurs, auteurs et artistes qui ont en commun de remettre en question l'évidence référentielle du nom propre pour interroger la fabrique du réel et montrer comment il peut être transformé, suspendu ou encore détourné : Jean-François Lyotard, Samuel Beckett, Édouard Levé, ainsi que les artistes Renaud Cojo et Invader. Situé au carrefour de plusieurs disciplines, l'ouvrage interroge la trame de la réalité à l'heure où les sociétés glissent de modalités analogiques à des modalités numériques de sa médiation. Réalités pseudonymes explores the question of reality through the lens of the proper name and its referential mechanisms in French literature and arts at the turn of the 21st century. Julie Gaillard analyzes the works of thinkers, authors, and artists who all question the referential transparency of the proper name to question the fabric of reality and show how it can be transformed, suspended or even faked: Jean-François Lyotard, Samuel Beckett, Édouard Levé, as well as the artists Renaud Cojo and Invader. Situated at the crossroads of several disciplines, the book questions the fabric of reality at a time when societies are shifting from analogue to digital modalities of its mediation.

Over recent decades concerns at the increased scarcity and precarity of salaried employment have dominated political struggles, theoretical debates and cultural representations in France. This study argues that such concerns are evidence of a profound shift in contemporary French economy, culture and society. Engaging with work in political economy and sociology, the book sketches a new interpretative framework, the better to understand the nature and implications of these profound changes. It examines the challenges such changes have posed to fundamental French republican values, arguing they have opened up a rift between older notions of French republican citizenship and the precarious forms of subjectivity characteristic of post-Fordist labour. The book traces the symptoms of this rift in a range of cinematic and literary representations of the contemporary workplace, as these depict the dilemmas faced, the trajectories followed, and the geographical regions inhabited by French workers of different ages, sexes, social classes, and ethnicities.

In Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.

Through a close reading of seven literary memoirs of the Nazi Occupation of France, Refiguring Les Années Noires: Literary Representations of the Nazi Occupation shows how the memory of the period has been shaped by political and social factors. An interdisciplinary study incorporating trauma theory, history, and folklore studies, this book examines representations of the Occupation by a diverse group of writers ranging from a female Resistance fighter to one of the first French Roma novelists. The methodological diversity of the volume brings to the fore each author's unique perspective and demonstrates that their works are at once historically and artistically significant. Above all, this book gives voice to groups whose experiences in occupied France have largely been forgotten.

Imagine trying to tell someone something about yourself and your desires for which there are no words. What if the mere attempt at expression was bound to misfire, to efface the truth of that ineluctable something? In Someone, Michael Lucey considers characters from twentieth-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent. The characters expressing these “misfit” sexualities gravitate towards same-sex encounters. Yet they differ in subtle but crucial ways from mainstream gay or lesbian identities—whether because of a discordance between gender identity and sexuality, practices specific to a certain place and time, or the fleetingness or non-exclusivity of desire. Investigating works by Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Jean Genet, and others, Lucey probes both the range of same-sex sexual forms in twentieth-century France and the innovative literary language authors have used to explore these evanescent forms. As a portrait of fragile sexualities that involve awkward and delicate maneuvers and modes of articulation, Someone reveals just how messy the ways in which we experience and perceive sexuality remain, even to ourselves.

Être contemporain c'est, au premier chef, être de son temps (ou en avance sur lui) et produire une œuvre qui puisse être reçue parmi celles qui constituent le cœur vivant de la période la plus actuelle. Cet ouvrage se penche sur la question du contemporain, aussi bien du point de vue du discours critique qui le définit que des pratiques littéraires qui s'y rattachent, en prenant pour objet le discours narratif tel qu'il s'est déployé au Québec et en France depuis le tournant des années 1980. Les auteurs rendent d'abord compte des thèmes et des mécanismes de valorisation qui marquent la critique littéraire, puis présentent des œuvres qui exemplifient certaines concrétisations esthétiques et poétiques d'un nouvel art narratif. En se situant au confluent des réflexions françaises et québécoises, ils font dialoguer ces deux corpus et tentent de répondre aux questions suivantes : la notion de contemporain désigne-t-elle un même phénomène en France et au Québec? Recoupe-t-elle la même réalité là-bas et ici? Ces acceptions « nationales » se contaminent-elles, s'influencent-elles? Entre vision panoramique et attention aux particularités des œuvres, cet ouvrage soulève des points de contact et de divergence entre les deux littératures.

Cet ouvrage, coordonné par Sophie Jollin-Bertocchi et Serge Linarès, interroge pour la première fois la pratique fréquente du changement de style chez les écrivains français depuis la fin du XIXe siècle. Restituant le phénomène à son historicité, il ne vise pas à contester la notion de « style d'auteur », mais à en relativiser le caractère essentialiste, croisant la démarche stylisticienne avec d'autres approches (sociologie, poétique…). Il dessine le contexte historique et éditorial, évoque ensuite des parcours de polygraphes, appréhende la problématique sous l'angle générique (poésie, roman), met en évidence les enjeux biographiques, questionne enfin les possibilités d'une permanence derrière la disparité des manières d'écrire. À l'époque moderne, avoir du style ne se limite pas à en avoir un seul. This collection coordinated by Sophie Jollin-Bertocchi and Serge Linarès addresses the common practice of the change of style among French authors since the end of the nineteenth century. The intention is not to challenge the notion of an author's style but the relativization of its essentialist nature, from different approaches (sociology, poetics…) and through a variety of examples. This study outlines the historical and editorial context, brings up some surveys from the point of view of genre (poetry, novel), and underlines the biographical issues. This book also raises the question of some possibilities of a standard behind the array of different styles. In the contemporary period, evidencing Style does not imply being limited to one style only.

Largely forgotten over the years, the seminal work of French poet, novelist and camp survivor Jean Cayrol has experienced a revival in the French-speaking world since his death in 2005. His concept of a concentrationary art—the need for an urgent and constant aesthetic resistance to the continuing effects of the concentrationary universe—proved to be a major influence for Hannah Arendt and other writers and theorists across a number of disciplines. Concentrationary Art presents the first translation into English of Jean Cayrol's key essays on the subject, as well as the first book-length study of how we might situate and elaborate his concept of a Lazarean aesthetic in cultural theory, literature, cinema, music and contemporary art.

Il s'agit du cinquième titre de la collection Archipel de l'Association des professeurs des littératures acadienne et québécoise de l'Atlantique. Précédées de deux textes inédits des écrivaines Marguerite Andersen et Lise Tremblay, qui évoquent la place du don et du sacrifice dans leurs carrières respectives, ces études portent sur les littératures française, acadienne, québécoise, autochtone et africaine, de même que sur la création littéraire, le cinéma, le théâtre et l'art performance.

L'histoire de Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) est marquée par son drame d'orphelin et sa double culture. Elle est gravée de secrets et de remords inexpiables qui ont déformé la réalité objective pour se déployer dans l'écriture. Sont donc mises en présence l'action multiforme du sentiment de faute et les forces absolutoires libérées par l'être pour survivre à la hantise du mal. Quelles voies Supervielle a-t-il empruntées pour transcender et le bien et le mal?

This volume takes the pulse of French post-coloniality by studying representations of trans-Mediterranean immigration to France in recent literature, television and film. The writers and filmmakers examined have found new ways to conceptualize the French heritage of immigration from North Africa and to portray the state of multiculturalism within – and in spite of – a continuing Republican framework. Their work deflates stereotypes, promotes respect for cultural and ethnic minorities and gives a new dignity to subjects supposedly located on the margins of the Republic. Establishing a productive dialogue with Marianne Hirsch's ground-breaking concept of postmemory, this volume provides a much-needed vocabulary for rethinking the intergenerational legacy of trans-Mediterranean immigrants.

L'auteur propose ici une synthèse équilibrée, aussi attentive aux écrivains de la « Belle Époque » qu'à la production la plus contemporaine. Sans les illusions déformantes d'une interprétation « moderniste » ou « traditionaliste », l'histoire de la littérature des XXe et XXIe siècles qu'il dessine n'est pas plus celle d'un progrès que celle d'une décadence.Cet ouvrage suit les mutations de la littérature dans l'histoire. Le panorama qu'il dresse des ouvrages les plus récents en fait un outil unique pour l'étudiant confronté aux problématiques littéraires de notre temps.

Le'Trésor régulier des rythmes'témoigne de la pulsation de l'écriture à laquelle un jeune garçon a cédé dans un milieu dépourvu de livres. Il dégage d'abord une fresque, pittoresque et altière, de son enfance passée au Sahara. Il en prolonge le foyer à l'autre point de l'ellipse : Paris — solitude de l'écrivain face à la maladie, à son destin, aux crises qui les transcendent et les réparent — c'est la seconde moitié de l'ouvrage. Cette autobiographie est un récit. Elle clôt un quintette mémoriel ouvert avec'Psoas'et'Où tes traces...'(parus), poursuivi avec'Aux Allemand's et'Au Pays de Blanche'(à paraître).

Après avoir abordé les modalités des relations entre Violence et Vérité dans les littératures francophones, ce volume s'attache à des formes littéraires de Résistance. Celles-ci entendent souvent dépasser les réponses purement violentes et manifester ainsi leur refus de l'assujettissement, par des Sagesses – répliques souvent plus subtiles à la barbarie et à la domination. Elles circonviennent beaucoup mieux l'adversaire, comme le « sujet supposé savoir » dont parlent les psychanalystes. Ce parcours se fait au travers de textes francophones venus de latitudes très diverses　: du Vietnam au Liban, du Maghreb à l'Afrique centrale, de la Suisse et de la Belgique aux Amériques. Ce faisant, c'est à un florilège d'esthétiques diverses que se voit convié le lecteur. Ce livre touche en effet aussi bien au symbolisme qu'à la postmodernité, en passant par les grandes voix du Maghreb ou des Antilles dans le contexte du dernier demi-siècle. Le propos ne s'organise pas pour autant en fonction des aires géographiques. Il montre que les soi-disant opacités francophones, leurs poét(h)iques, leurs hybridations ou leurs chemins de traverse constituent toujours des réponses à des situations historiques. Elles sont, qui plus est, très révélatrices de la dynamique du système franco-francophone. Trente-cinq études, pour ce faire, et qui font saisir de près le fait que ces œuvres sont loin d'être périphériques.