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This collection of twelve essays by scholars from the USA, Canada, the UK and Japan, presents fresh perspectives on familiar Sartrean subjects and novel approaches to neglected ones. Divided into four equal parts – Aesthetics, Philosophy, Politics and Revolt – its chapters reflect both the eclectic scope of Sartre’s project and the dynamic attention it continues to attract. Moreover, this intellectual interest extends beyond the field of “Sartre studies” and across the generations, from established specialists to younger academics regarding Sartre from some surprising new angles: Pop-Art and jazz prove to be revealing prisms, as do dialogues with Dennett, Ilyenkov, Badiou and Genet, among others. In short, this is a book whose original essays make a lively contribution to the continuing critical conversation around the work of Jean-Paul Sartre.
This comparative study examines the prose writings of the best-known cosmopolitan authors of the Third French Republic: the modernists Jean Giraudoux, Valery Larbaud and Paul Morand, and the best-selling popular writer Maurice Dekobra. It investigates what constituted the 'cosmopolitanism' that they publicly proclaimed between the World Wars, a classification which has been widely accepted by commentators ever since. In particular, it considers whether conventional definitions of cosmopolitanism - as an unproblematic attitude of xenophilia coupled with wanderlust, or as an ecumenical humanism - can co-exist with the blind spots and prejudices of its practitioners. This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the writers' identity politics based on their approach to Otherness (gender, race, nationality, political affiliation) as well as to formal innovation. It argues that cosmopolitanism is the organizing principle for their literary and existential attempts at cultivating authentic Selfhood. Through its socio-political embeddedness, this cosmopolitanism reveals the ideological and cultural preoccupations of the day.
Sartre's Second Century reflects the richness of Sartre's vision of the human condition, the diversity of the means he employed in grappling with it, and the lengthy trajectory of his itinerary, in a variety of wider cultural perspectives. The centenary of Sartre's birth in 2005 was the primary occasion for many of the essays included in this volume. Hosted by the UK or North American Sartre Societies, contributors participating in Sartre's centennial celebrations were asked to address the central themes and overall development of his life and thought. As the present collection shows, the attempt to present Sartre in a retrospective light also provides a basis for assessing the relevance of his work for the new century.
This study combines psycho-social and literary perspectives to investigate the interdependency of shame and desire in Annie Ernaux's writing, arguing that shame implies desire and desire vulnerability to shame, and that the interplay between the two generates the energy for personal growth and creative endeavour.
Often marginalised on the sidelines of both philosophy and literature, the works of Albert Camus have, in recent years, undergone a renaissance. While most readers in either discipline claim Camus and his works to be ‘theirs’, the scholars presented in this volume tend to see him and his works in both philosophy and literature. This volume is a collection of critical essays by an international menagerie of Camus experts who, despite their interpretive differences, see Camus through both lenses. For them, he is a novelist/essayist who embodies a philosophy that was never fully developed due to his brief life. The essays here examine Camus’s first published novel, The Stranger, from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives, each drawing on the author’s knowledge to present the first known critical examination in English. As such, this volume will shed new light on previous scholarship.
Inspired by a postgraduate French studies conference (University of Nottingham, 10 September 2008), this volume explores linguistic form and content in relation to a variety of contexts, considering language alongside music, images, theatre, human experience of the world, and another language. Each essay asks what it is to understand language in a given context, and how, in spite of divergent expressive possibilities, a linguistic situation interacts with other contexts, renegotiating boundaries and redefining understanding. The book lies at the intersection of linguistics and hermeneutics, seeking to (a) contextualise philosophical and linguistic discussions of communication across a range ...
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 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...
Papers from a conference held Jan. 2003 at the University of Sheffield.
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.