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Subversive Subjects: Reading Marguerite Yourcenar is the first collection of articles in English to deal with many of this very private author's best-known works. Its contributors make use of a variety of literary theories to probe the complex ambiguities at the heart of Yourcenar's writings. Each contributor ventures beyond traditional readings of Yourcenar's complex texts, pushing against the boundaries of interpretation that the Belgian-born writer carefully established. Many of the essays read like a mystery; hence they follow Yourcenar's call for rigorous explications du texte as they probe her complex ouevre. Judith Holland Sarnecki is Associate Professor of French at Lawrence University. Ingeborg Majer O'Sickey is Associate Professor of German and Women's Studies at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
An interdisciplinary collection of writings on various aspects of change in contemporary French-speaking society, spanning the broad fields of politics and society, arts and culture, the French language, and francophone literatures.
Text into Image: Image into Text is a truly interdisciplinary publication. Whilst all of the contributions focus upon the central problem of the relationship between literature and the visual arts -- one which has lost nothing of its fascination as the debate has expanded in numerous forms from antiquity into the realm of postmodern theory -- they come from contributors working in a large number of different areas. Represented are academics from the worlds of German Studies, French Studies, English Studies, Art History and Film Studies. Given their backgrounds each of the contributors can offer a different perspective upon the core issue of translation between media, but perhaps most valuable is the com-bination of perspectives made possible by the arrangement of the volume into sections dealing with aspects of the image/text debate. In the same way that the volume gains by ranging across traditional disciplinary boundaries so it also gains from dealing with a wide range of historical material from -- to take only one possible route -- Baroque icono-graphy through Romantic imagery to Expressionist agony.
Published on the eve of the philosopher-playwright's centenary, this study offers a wide-ranging re-appraisal of Sartre's complete dramatic opus, from the inaugural 'nativity' play, Bariona (1940), to the swan-song chorus of Armageddon, Les Troyennes (1965). It draws on a close reading of Sartre's writings in philosophy, literature and criticism, and provides an extensive survey of journalistic and academic reception. Each play is situated in relation both to Sartre's intellectual evolution and to the broader historical context. This is the first full-length study in English, for more than thirty years, covering the whole of Sartre's theatre, and it will interest students of twentieth-century European drama, as well as those of modern French literature and ideas.
The papers collected in this volume are selected from the proceedings of the Love and Sexuality conference held at the University of Leeds in 2002. They bring together a cross-section of new directions in the study of love and sexuality currently being explored in French Studies. The central focus of the collection is the representation of love, desire, erotica and sexuality in the couple, in particular in relation to depictions of women. The contributions share a common concern with problematising issues of love and sexuality across various disciplines, focusing on literary texts, cinema, gender studies, theatre studies, history, visual iconography and cultural studies, and ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day.
This study is based on an analysis of videos and transcripts of five films Fric-frac, Circonstances atténuantes, Le Jour se lève, La Règle du jeu and Hôtel du Nord. These films are examples of planned and artificial language. The book looks at the evidential value of these data and assesses the extent to which stereotyped and scripted language can contribute to an understanding of spoken Parisian usage by looking at phonetics, syntax, discourse, lexis and pragmatics. By comparing traditional research carried out by scholars in the nineteenth century and earlier with Parisian data collected and analysed by twentieth-century researchers, the work attempts to identify the salient features that both script-writers and actors in these films considered to be characteristic of social-group differences at that time.
A collection of 18 essays from a 1994 symposium in Dublin, Ireland traces out the paths taken by travellers over three centuries of European cultural history. They investigate what it means to stand between ethnic identities and traditions, analyze the inner dialogue of those who find themselves strangers in their own land, examine dreams and myths of the past and future, address relationships of cultural dominance and resistance, retrace routes of flight and discovery, and measure degrees of discrimination and acceptance. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
As a textual form, the essai predominates in modern and contemporary literature in French. Emerging from an earlier tradition and distinguished from its English-language counterpart, the French-language essay ranges from Stéphane Mallarmé to Colette, Victor Segalen to Aimé Césaire, Jean Grenier to Pierre Michon. The essai remains, however, one of the most hazily identified of textual forms, its definition often depending on the progressive elimination of all other generic possibilities. Excluded from the archigenres (theatre, poetry, récit), it can even be seen as a hold-all category whose role is to absorb the anarchic extremes of writing. It is perhaps this very lack of pretension to ...
In the decade following the success of Waiting for Godot (1952), Samuel Beckett wrote some of his most absorbing work for radio. These plays display the author's appreciation of the essential properties of radio broadcasting. They also highlight a profound musicality which, while evident in his novels, poetry and plays, is particularly noteworthy in this medium. This book is an analysis of the contribution made to radio drama by Beckett. In these plays, he is concerned with themes of human isolation and the frailty of memory and communication. He identified radio as an ideal medium for the presentation of these themes and the development of drama which could transcend the limitations of realism. Beckett used music as an essential component of his radio output for a variety of purposes. In this study, the author argues that, while Beckett's radio plays are suffused with a bleak sense of disintegration of language, music offers a sense of optimism. A variety of musical and performance perspectives is utilised to gain a greater appreciation of these radio plays.
The motifs of island and shipwreck have been present in literature and the arts from ancient times. Whether they occur as plot elements, as part of literary or film imagery, as symbols in paintings, as leitmotifs in songs, or as concepts in philosophical theories, both have always been a source of fascination to authors, artists and scholars. In Shipwreck and Island Motifs in Literature and the Arts, Brigitte Le Juez and Olga Springer have gathered essays that explore shipwreck and island figures in texts as historically, culturally and artistically diverse as Walter Scott’s The Lord of the Isles, Cristina Fernández Cubas’ “The Lighthouse”, reality TV series Treasure Island, pop songs of the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs, or The Otolith Group’s essay-film Hydra Decapita.