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Winner of the Prix Goncourt A New York Times Notable Book of the Year The setting may be the rainy lower Loire Valley of the 1950s, but it is the WW I battlefields of Artois, Meuse, Lorraine, and Yser that form the emotional backdrop to this poignant testament to the vitality of life that death cannot dim. Fields of Glory begins as a collection of utterly charming reminiscences of the eccentricities of family elders told by an unnamed and indeterminately aged narrator. In pure and graceful prose, Rouaud describes crotchety grandfather Burgaud with his equally difficult car, a cramped and leaky CV2, and maiden great-aunt Marie with her card file of saints—"A prefatory catalogue of terrifying symptoms refers the reader to the saint specializing in the corresponding disorder. The work of a lifetime." It is in the midst of this comedy of daily life that the melancholy subtext of three generations slowly emerges: the stories of the two young men who were casualties of the Fields of Glory and the family that remains to remember them.
The World More or Less completes Jean Rouaud's celebrated autobiographical trilogy about his family and his journey toward becoming a writer - a trilogy that began with Fields of Glory (winner of the Goncourt Prize), followed by Of Illustrious Men. The novel tells the story of a young man caught between adolescent self-pity and adult self-acceptance. For him the world is both hostile and enticing; he is at a crossroads. Awkward, dreamy, lonely, longing, still grieving for the deaths of his father, grandfather, and aunt, he is also very nearsighted. This gives him a sort of double vision: putting on his glasses brings the world into focus, taking them off blurs it. Our view of him, too, is double, one of proximity and distance, for it is formed by the young man's searing self-scrutiny and the writer-to-be's maturer judgment. Sharing this more-or-less world are Theo and Gyf, lover and friend, one whose life is a mystery, the other who wants to capture life's mystery on film.
L'oeuvre de J. Rouaud ne se limite pas aux questions du roman familial et de la mémoire. Ce volume met en valeur d'autres facettes, explore d'autres thématiques, met à jour une intertextualité et les principes d'une poétique, s'intéresse à certaines spécificités de l'écriture, pour mieux approcher la singularité du projet de cet écrivain. Avec un court texte inédit "Tombeau pour Ernst Wiechert" p. 307-311.
Hailed as a masterpiece, Jean Rouaud’s first novel, Fields of Glory, was awarded France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, and sold over a million copies worldwide. Of Illustrious Men establishes as fact what the first novel promised—that Rouaud is a writer of remarkable power, subtlety, and originality. Lovingly set in the same region as Fields of Glory, the novel is about the author’s father, Joseph, and a traveling salesman who died at forty-one and left a family in shock behind him. In the mind of the grieving eleven-year-old son—too young to have really known him—his father was a hero, a warrior, a legend of the Resistance during World War II. But the narr...
The 2007 manifesto in favour of a "Litterature-monde en francais" has generated new debates in both "francophone" and "postcolonial" studies. Praised by some for breaking down the hierarchical division between "French" and "Francophone" literatures, the manifesto has been criticized by othersfor recreating that division through an exoticizing vision that continues to privilege the publishing industry of the former colonial metropole. Does the manifesto signal the advent of a new critical paradigm destined to render obsolescent those of "francophone" and/or "postcolonial" studies? Or isit simply a passing fad, a glitzy but ephemeral publicity stunt generated and promoted by writers and publis...
Was geschieht mit Gedächtnis und mit Erinnerungen, wenn sie zu Schrift werden? Wie lassen sich diese für jeden Menschen so bedeutsamen, ewig aktuellen Größen in literarischen Texten wie Romanen gestalten und darstellen? Welcher Poetik und Ästhetik bedient sich die Imagination, wenn sie Vergangenheit in einem Werk repräsentiert, als erzähltes Erinnern in eine Geschichte und zu einem Selbstbild formt? Erzähltheoretische und poetologische Fragen zum Zusammenhang von Memoria, Geschichte und Identität werden behandelt vor dem Hintergrund philosophischer und geisteswissenschaftlicher Diskurse der Gegenwart. Ein interdisziplinärer Zugriff, der anthropologisch und kulturwissenschaftlich or...
In Beyond Return, Lucas Hollister examines the political orientations of fictions which 'return' to forms that have often been considered sub-literary, regressive, outdated or decadent, and suggests new ways of reading contemporary adventure novels, radical noir novels, postmodernist mysteries, war novels and dystopian fictions.
Provides the listing of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. This is a reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. It contains nearly 8,800 entries.
French Prose in 2000 stems in some important measure from work presented in September 1998 at the International Colloquium on French and Francophone Literature in the 1990’s held at Dalhousie University. A good number of papers given at that time, and since revisited in the light of exchanges, join here certain others specifically written for the purposes of this book. Together they constitute a wide-ranging and modally varied interrogation of the current state of French and francophone prose writing, its multifaceted manners, its richly divergent fascinations, its many theoretical or philosophical groundings. The book thus ceaselessly moves its attention from fictional biography to the roman noir, from the writing of Glissant and Chamoiseau to that of the étonnants voyageurs, from the powerful discourse of women such as Chawaf or Condé, Ernaux or Germain, Sallenave or Kristeva, to that of writers as diverse in their modes as Le Clézio and Quignard, Duras and Renaud Camus. All chapters focus, however, in near-exclusive measure, on the prose production of the last ten or twelve years.
What do we mean by Europe? Thirty-three renowned authors from 33 European countries attempt an answer-in serious, ironic, skeptical, or optimistic tones. Their essays, written for the symposium held at the Literaturhaus Hamburg in 2003, reflect the astonishing diversity of European cultures. Not only are the style and experience of the individual authors remarkable for their distinctiveness, but their perspectives and views also appear to have little in common-at first glance.