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At the heart of this volume is the assertion that Sartrean existentialism, most prominent in the 1940s, particularly in France, is still relevant as a way of interpreting the world today. Film, by reflecting philosophical concerns in the actions and choices of characters, continues and extends a tradition in which art exemplifies the understanding of existentialist philosophy. In a scholarly yet accessible style, the contributors exploit the rich interplay between Sartre’s philosophy, plays and novels, and a number of contemporary films including No Country for Old Men, Lost in Translation and The Truman Show, with film-makers including the Dardenne brothers, Michael Haneke, and Mike Leigh. This volume will be of interest to students who are coming to Sartre’s work for the first time and to those who would like to read films within an existentialist perspective.
The author examines how social change and philosophical crisis in the 1980s created the conditions for the return of religion to contemporary French intellectual life. It highlights a critical conjuncture in recent French history when religion was revitalized in French secularism as an expression of individual identity.
In an era when reality was aestheticized as collectibles, Octave Mirbeau unleashed his fiction like a destructive machine, setting fire to stale material and discredited ideologies, burning them as fuel and expelling texts as clean emissions. In this first English-language overview of all the novels published under Mirbeau's name, this study argues that Mirbeau is unique among his fin-de-siècle peers. Unlike the Decadents, whose art was a reliquary in which dead inspiration was preserved, Mirbeau disengaged himself from the corpses of past works. Abhorring tradition and complacency, Mirbeau elaborated a kinetics of fiction that made the novel into an agent of violent transformation. Contras...
This collection of essays explores the ways in which talking therapies have been depicted in twentieth century and contemporary narratives (life-writings, fiction and poetry) in French. This vibrant corpus of francophone literary engagements of therapy has so far been widely unexplored, but it offers rich insights into the connections between literature and psychoanalysis. As the number of autobiographical and fictional depictions of the therapeutic encounter is still on the rise, these creative outputs raise pressing questions: why do narratives of the therapeutic encounter continue to fascinate writers and readers? What do these works tell us about the particular culture and history in whi...
Modern Romanian filmmaking has received wide international recognition. From 2001 to 2011, promising young filmmakers have been embraced as important members of European cinema. The country developed a new fervor for filmmaking and a dozen new movies have received international awards and recognition from some of the most important critics worldwide. This development, sometimes called "New Wave cinema," is fully explored in this book. By using a comparative approach and searching for similarities among cinematic styles and trends, the study reveals that the young Romanian directors are part of a larger, European, way of filmmaking. The discussion moves from specific themes, motifs and narratives to the philosophy of a whole generation, such as Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Radu Muntean, Corneliu Porumboiu, Tudor Giurgiu, and others.
Cutting across a swath of recent French-produced cinema, French Blockbusters offers the first book-length consideration of the theoretical implications, historical impact and cultural consequences of a recent grouping of popular films that are rapidly changing what it means to make - or to see - a 'French' film today.
This volume is a tribute to the life and work of Hazel Rowley, internationally acclaimed biographer who died unexpectedly in March 2011. Her passions were many and varied: biography, politics, questions of race and sexuality, the ways in which couples negotiate the dilemmas posed by the need to retain their individuality while building a life as a couple, the deleterious effects of imposing a corporate mentality on universities – all these, and more, were subjects of intense interest to her. This collection combines essays responding to many of those interests with creative writing to honour the complexity and variety of her own magnificent contribution. Hazel Rowley, whose life and work are honoured in this collection, was the author of many articles and essays and four outstanding biographies, Christina Stead: A Biography, Richard Wright: The Life and Times, Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, and Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage.
This book chronicles the struggles of undocumented migrant women in France as they fight to become rights-bearing citizens, revealing how concepts of citizenship and nationality intersect with gender, sexuality, and immigration.
Hexagonal Variations provides an essential overview of key debates about contemporary French society and culture. Concise, challenging and comprehensive, its chapters each address the processes of change and redefinition that characterise France today. Contributors analyse and situate cinematic, literary, online and visual texts, mediatic, political and everyday discourses, in each case pinpointing how diversity, plurality and reinvention inflect cultural and social evolution in France. The chapters in the collection share a key set of thematic concerns and raise topics for debate among scholars and students alike. Central to these are questions about France’s uncertain place and role in Europe and the wider world; the morphing topography of its capital; and the many conundrums posed by the persistence of Republican paradigms in a global environment. If France is no longer the exception, what are the versions and varieties of being French that are lived, thought and imagined in the new millennium?