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Everyday Life
In the last twenty years the concept of the quotidien, or the everyday, has been prominent in contemporary French culture and in British and American cultural studies. This book provides the first comprehensive analytical survey of the whole field of approaches to the everyday. It offers, firstly, a historical perspective, demonstrating the importance of mainstream and dissident Surrealism; the indispensable contribution, over a 20-year period (1960-80), of four major figures: Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, and Georges Perec; and the recent proliferation of works that investigate everyday experience. Secondly, it establishes the framework of philosophical ideas on which d...
French Autobiography
This is the first full-scale study of French autobiography. Whereas earlier critics have engaged primarily in theoretical discussion of the genre, or in analyses of individual works or authors, Michael Sheringham identifies sixteen key autobiographical texts and situates them in the context ofan evolving set of challenges and problems.Informed by a sophisticated awareness of recent theoretical debates, Sheringham conceives autobiography as a distinctively open form of writing, perpetually engaged with different forms of `otherness'. Manifestations of the Other in the autobiographical process - from the reader, who incarnatesother people, to ideology, against which individual truth must be pi...
The Art of the Project
The idea of the 'project' crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when writers and artists are increasingly describing their practices as 'projects', remarkably little critical attention has been paid to the actual idea of the 'project'. This collection of essays responds to an urgent need by suggesting a framework for evaluating the notion of the project in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices, drawn mainly but not exclusively from the French-speaking domain. The overview offered by this volume promises to makes an original and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary literary, artistic and cultural criticism.
Parisian Fields
Perhaps no world city has so many resonances, on so many levels, as Paris. Cafe society, demi-monde, the intellectual life, film-makers and writers... Paris has fragmented socially, sexually, intellectually and linguistically into many fields. Parisian Fields sets out to investigate some of these. The writers investigate how Paris has been both seen and shaped by tourist guides; how its topography has been represented and allegorized by film-makers like Godard, Clair, Vigo and Renoir; how the city has responded to "new" Parisians - for example Afro-American musicians and dancers such as Josephine Baker - and to previously marginalized Parisians - gays and women. Literary analysis, film, social and gender theory, perspectives on urbanism; here are many provocative and innovative views of the open field of Paris, which will appeal to anyone interested in French cultural and literary studies - or just in the City of Light herself. With essays by Roger Clark, Nicholas Hewitt, Jon Kear, Tom Conley, Michael Sheringham, Alex Hughes, Adrian Rifkin, Belinda Jack, Verena Andermatt Conley and Marc Augé.
The Discovery of France
From maps, migration and magic, to linguistic differences and tribal disputes, The Discovery of France tells the whole story of this remarkable - and surprising - country.
Restless Cities
The metropolis is a site of endless making and unmaking. From the attempt to imagine a 'city-symphony' to the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttmann to Terence Davies, Restless Cities traces the idiosyncratic character of the metropolitan city from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first-century megalopolis. With explorations of phenomena including nightwalking, urbicide, property, commuting and recycling, this wide-ranging new book identifies and traces the patterns that have defined everyday life in the modern city and its effect on us as individuals. Bringing together some of the most significant cultural writers of our time, Restless Cities is an illuminating, revelatory journey to the heart of our metropolitan world.
Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry
The songs of the troubadour poets of the south of France were a pervasive influence in the development of the European lyric (and indeed other genres) from the twelfth century to the Renaissance and beyond. Much troubadour poetry is on the topic of love, and is composed from a first-person position. This book is a full-length study of this first-person subject position in its relation to language and society. Using theoretical approaches where appropriate, Sarah Kay discusses to what extent this first person is a 'self' or 'character', and how far it is self-determining. Dr Kay draws on a wide range of troubadour texts, and provides close readings of many of them, as well as translating all medieval quotations into English in order to make the discussion accessible to the non-specialist. Her book will be of interest both to scholars of medieval literature, and to anybody investigating subjectivity in lyric poetry.
The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris
A comprehensive exploration of Paris through the texts and experiences of a vast and vibrant range of authors.
Chasing the Chinese Dream
China is undergoing the biggest and fastest societal and economic change in human history. Driving this dizzying transformation is the idea of the 'Chinese Dream', the promise that in the new China, anyone can make it. Journalist and writer Nick Holdstock has travelled the length of this huge country in order to find out the reality behind this rhetoric - from the factory-owner, to the noodle seller, from the karaoke maids to the hoteliers, and from the deserted, ageing countryside to the young and overcrowded cities.Chasing the Chinese Dream follows a cast of extraordinary characters: we meet the people getting rich; running factories and buying luxury cars and Louis Vuitton bags. But we also meet those left behind, trapped by a system which forces long hours and no prospects upon them. A spell-binding and magical narrative, this book looks to tell the story of modern China through the people who are living it.
Sexuality and the Reading Encounter
Can fictions of desire determine real pleasures? Do texts regulate the performance of our sexual identities? In Sexuality and the Reading Encounter Emma Wilson offers a new account of the intimate relations between reading, identity, and identification. Interweaving theoretical debate with analysis of texts by Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous, her study reveals the formative potential and transferential pleasures of the reading encounter. Drawing on an understanding of identity as performative, alienated and fictitious, this study argues that the fictions we read act as mirrors and decoys displaying seductive images of intelligible sexual identities. The texts chosen for discussion here draw attention to the strategies by which identity is constructed textually. They work thus to frame the reading encounter and to highlight its formative power. In analysis of these texts, this study works to cut across the axes of homosexuality and heterosexuality, offering an alternative focus on the interdependence of identity and fantasy.
