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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.
Militant, historien, journaliste, éditeur, puis à la fin de sa vie, universitaire et figure emblématique de la Nouvelle histoire, Philippe Ariès a été pendant longtemps un marginal en raison de son engagement à l'extrême droite. L'auteur retrace son parcours mais traite aussi les années 1930, de Vichy et de la Révolution nationale, de l'épuration, de la guerre d'Algérie et de l'OAS.
This is the first study systematically to appraise Splendid's, �Elle�, and Le Bagne, the three plays by Jean Genet published after his death, both in the context of the dramatist's dramatic canon and with respect to one another. After showing that their unusual publishing history necessarily sets these works apart from Haute surveillance, Les Bonnes, Le Balcon, Les N�gres, and Les Paravents, it argues that from Splendid'sto Le Bagne, the question of incompletion is 'exteriorized' -- moving from a purely thematic to an increasingly formal context -- and that the status of each posthumously published work differs: Splendid'sis a 'completed' play, thematizing incompletion; �Elle�, with its seemingly incomplete form having thematic currency, is a 'properly unfinished' play; and as the intentionally 'fragmentary', purposefully suspended 'beginning' of a play, Le Bagneis shaped by incompletion.
The role and influence of intellectuals is one of the flashpoints in the recurring debate on the nature and dimensions of French fascism. At the forefront of this debate are a group of emerging writers, collectively known as the Young Right. Though thoroughly schooled in the reactionary nationalism of Charles Maurras' Action francaise, whose orbit they entered in the early 1930s, they were soon seduced by the mobilizing force of neighboring fascist movements and regimes. Led by two precocious literary talents, Robert Brasillach and Thierry Maulnier, the Young Right set themselves to rejuvenating French nationalism and winning a place for France in an emerging new Europe. Their project - an attempt to graft lessons from foreign sources onto a native language of French generational and cultural politics - was one of several efforts to create a distinctive French fascism.
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This passionate and monumental biography reassesses the life and legacy of one of the most significant cultural figures of the twentieth century Unevenly respected, easily hated, almost always suspected of being inferior to his reputation, Jean Cocteau has often been thought of as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. In this landmark biography, Claude Arnaud thoroughly contests this characterization, as he celebrates Cocteau's "fragile genius--a combination almost unlivable in art" but in his case so fertile. Arnaud narrates the life of this legendary French novelist, poet, playwright, director, filmmaker, and designer who, as a young man, pretended to be a sort of a god, but who died as a ...
This book explores the modern cultural history of the queer martyr in France and Belgium. By analyzing how popular writers in French responded to Catholic doctrine and the tradition of St. Sebastian in art, Queering the Martyr shows how religious and secular symbols overlapped to produce not one, but two martyr-types. These are the queer type, typified first by Gustave Flaubert, which is a philosophical foil, and the gay type, popularized by Jean Genet but created by the Belgian Georges Eekhoud, which is a political and pornographic device. Grounded in feminist queer theory and working from a post-psychoanalytical point of view, the argument explores the potential and limits of these two figures, noting especially the persistence of misogyny in religious culture.
This series of bibliographical references is one of the most important tools for research in modern and contemporary French literature. No other bibliography represents the scholarly activities and publications of these fields as completely.
The attempt to apply an aesthetic or literary approach to fascism remains controversial. In The Search for Modern Tragedy, Mary Ann Frese Witt explores the work of a group of European writers and artists who came to fascism by way of aesthetics. In Italy and France, she maintains, an ideological aesthetic of "Mediterranean" fascism developed to a large extent independently of German Nazism. Witt's study of the relationship between fascism and modern tragedy encompasses theoretical writing on tragedy and tragedies by key authors, including Luigi Pirandello, Henry de Montherlant, and Jean Anouilh. She looks at these tragedies in the context of their reception under fascism in Italy and in Vichy France. Fascism, in the minds of many of its supporters, was an aesthetic or spiritual movement, although its aesthetic and political elements were often intertwined. The Search for Modern Tragedy is not concerned primarily with drama written as a means of conveying fascist propaganda. Rather, Witt is concerned with the influence of aesthetic fascism on the theory and practice of modern tragedy.