You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose formal experiments and revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of literary forms. The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists, comparative studies and interdisciplinary projects.
"Proceeding chronologically, from the beginning of Varda's career in the 1950s to the present, this book focuses on moments where Varda's invocation of different artistic traditions within film opens onto complex commentary on broader aesthetic, theoretical, feminist, and political discussions. I reinterpret some of her best known films, but also focus attention on other less familiar works that merit further consideration. I reassess individual works with the goal of interrogating Varda's visual dialogues to reconstruct the cultural politics of the periods in which they were made. This process of reading new strands of meaning across Varda's oeuvre relies on a richly interdisciplinary appro...
This number of Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui, ‘Swann at 100/Swann à 100 ans’, edited by Adam Watt, has its origins in a conference that took place in Exeter, UK, in December 2013 to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann. The articles, in English and French, approach this first volume of A la recherche du temps perdu from various perspectives: there are reception studies, thematic and stylistic studies, as well as contributions to our knowledge of the cultural and intellectual history of the period and, in particular, that annus mirabilis 1913. ‘Swann at 100’ will be an important resource for all readers of the Recherche. Ce numéro de Marcel Proust Aujo...
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 méditerranéenne' ('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 r...
This wide-ranging volume of essays provides an illuminating set of approaches to the multifaceted contexts of Proust's life and work.
Memory has always been crucial to French literature and culture as a means of mediating the relationship between perception and knowledge of the individual coming to terms with his identity in time. Relatively recently, memory has also emerged as the key force in the creation of a collective consciousness in the wider perspective of French cultural history. This collection of essays, selected from the proceedings of a seminar on 'Memory' given by Dr Emma Wilson at the University of Cambridge, offers a fresh evaluation of memory as both a cultural and an individual phenomenon in modern and contemporary French culture, including literature, cinema and the visual arts. 'Anamnesia', the book's title, develops the Aristotelian concept of anamnesis: recollection as a dynamic and creative process, which includes forgetting as much as remembering, concealment as much as imagination. Memory in this extremely diverse range of essays is therefore far from being presented as a straightforward process of recalling the past, but emerges as the site of research and renegotiation, of contradictions and even aporia.
This study explores Proust’s answers to some of the fundamental challenges of the inevitable human experience of mourning. Thinking mourning and creativity together allows for a fresh approach to the modernist novel at large, but also calls for a reassessment of the particular historical and social challenges faced by mourners at the beginning of the twentieth century. The book enables the reader to acknowledge loss and forgetting as an essential part of memory, and it proposes that this literary topos has seminal implications for an understanding of the ethics, aesthetics, and erotic in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Drawing on the works of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida, Anna Magdalena Elsner develops an original theory of how mourning and creativity are linked by emphasizing that ethical dilemmas are central to an understanding of the novel’s final aesthetic apotheosis. This sheds new light on the enigmatic and versatile nature of mourning but also pays tribute to those fertile tensions and paradoxes that have made Proust’s novel captivating for readers since its publication.
This book, a sensuous evocation of images of the reclining nude, claims a female-identified pleasure in looking. Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin are re-imagining images of female beauty, display, (auto)eroticism, and intimacy. The reclining nude is compelling, for female-identified artists in the ethically adventurous, politically complex feminist issues it engages.
Trained as a cultural historian, Thomas R. Cole is one of the most influential scholars of his generation, with his work moving beyond and impacting many other fields and disciplines. His work includes The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Cole also published No Color Is My Kind: The Life of Eldrewey Stearns and the Integration of Houston, creating along with the book an accompanying film, The Strange Demise of Jim Crow, which was nominated for a regional Emmy and a National Humanities Medal. Cole created a number of other films as well. In all of his work, there is an emphasis on religion, spirituality, and moral meaning. Cole is also a Jewish spiritual director, and this work has become a major focus for him in retirement. This edited volume engages or responds to Cole’s work, which spans cultural history, oral history, aging studies, film, medical humanities, religious studies, and more. As such, this book is not about Cole per se, but the impact of his ideas and subsequent inspirations.
This book brings together, in a novel and exciting combination, three authors who have written movingly about mourning: two medieval Italian poets, Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca, and one early twentieth-century French novelist, Marcel Proust. Each of these authors, through their respective narratives of bereavement, grapples with the challenge of how to write adequately about the deeply personal and painful experience of grief. In Jennifer Rushworth's analysis, discourses of mourning emerge as caught between the twin, conflicting demands of a comforting, readable, shared generality and a silent, solitary respect for the uniqueness of any and every experience of loss. Rushworth explo...