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Why was Violette Leduc's 1954 novel ThZr_se et Isabelle not published in its entirety until November 2000? Under threat of scandal and obsenity charges, French publisher Gallimard withheld the novel, but Leduc continued to write of her life as a woman writer in wartime Paris, frankly depicting her own and imagined lesbian experiences. Mentored by Simone de Beauvoir and a contemporary of French twentieth-century luminaries Sartre, Camus, Genet, and Cocteau, Leduc is, however, known best as France's great unknown writer. In The Pleasures of the Text, Elizabeth Locey restores Leduc to her rightful place in the canon, bringing to light her singular and important contributions to contemporary lit...
A study of representations of the French Atlantic slave trade in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.
This wide-ranging study looks at how the ageing process has alternately been figured in and excluded from twentieth-century French literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. It espouses a critical interdisciplinarity and calls into question the assumptions underlying much research into ageing in the social sciences, work in which the negative aspects of growing older are almost invariably suppressed. It offers a major reappraisal of Simone de Beauvoir's great but neglected late treatise, La Vieillesse, and presents the first substantial discussion of a lost documentary film about old age in which Beauvoir appears and which she helped to write, PROMENADE AU PAYS DE LA VIEILLESSE. Questioning ...
While rejecting a conception of literature as moral philosophy, or a device for imparting particular morals to the reader through exemplary characters and plots, Maryse Condé has displayed throughout her writing career a strong valorization of literature as ethical critique. This study examines her singular approach to literary commitment as a critical reworking of aesthetic models and modes of interpretation. Focusing on four dominant problematics in Condé’s work—history and globalization in La Belle Créole and Moi, Tituba sorcière...noire de Salem, intertextuality and reception in La migration des cœurs and Célanire cou-coupé, trauma and subjectivity in En attendant le bonheur and Desirada, community and ethics in Traversée de la mangrove and Histoire de la femme cannibale—this analysis proposes to elucidate how, and to what ends, Condé engages, and alters, approaches to reading, staging the problematic, yet pragmatic, need to read well. This hermeneutic imperative foregrounds the need to engage with texts, to cannibalize texts while recognizing their fundamental opacity and inexhaustibility, their resistance to the reader’s interpretive habits.
Alain Elkann has mastered the art of the interview. With a background in novels and journalism, and having published over twenty books translated across ten languages, he infuses his interviews with innovation, allowing them to flow freely and organically. Alain Elkann Interviews will provide an unprecedented window into the minds of some of the most well-known and -respected figures of the last twenty-five years.
This book examines a cross-section of postcolonial Francophone writing from Africa and the Caribbean to highlight and compare their transnational reception.
The essays in Cixous after/depuis 2000, edited by Hall, Chevillot, Hoft-March, and Peñalver Vicea, center on the events from 2000 to 2015 that mark Hélène Cixous’s life and writing: the donation of her archives to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, her return to Algeria, the death of her friend Jacques Derrida, the 40th anniversary of her essay “Le Rire de la Méduse,” and finally, of greatest import in her work of the 21st-century, the last years and death of her mother Eve. The essays explore an important movement in Hélène Cixous’s oeuvre as it shifts its focus not away from questions of the body, language, difference, and sexuality, but to include a broader engagement wi...
Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Note on Translations and Citations -- Introduction: A Writer Reborn . . . and Debated -- PART I: IRÈNE -- 1. The "Jewish Question" -- 2. Némirovsky's Choices, 1920-1939 -- 3. Choices and Choicelessness, 1939-1942 -- PART II: FICTIONS -- 4. Foreigners and Strangers: Némirovsky's Jewish Protagonists -- 5. Portraits of the Artist as a Young Jewish Woman -- PART III: DENISE AND ELISABETH -- 6. Orphans of the Holocaust: Two Lives -- 7. Gifts of Life: A Mother and Her Daughters -- Notes
This annual French XX Bibliography provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. Unique in its scope, thoroughness, and reliability of information, it has become an essential reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. Number 59 in the series contains 12,703 entries. William J. Thompson is Associate Professor of French and Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis.
This is the first full-length study to cover the complete texts of Hervé Guibert (1955–1991), offering a thorough documentation of his literary output. The book is guided by Guibert’s relation to the novel, a major line of enquiry throughout, as well as his experimentation with voices in particular. One of Boulé’s main contentions is that Guibert arrives at the creation of a new literary genre, the roman faux, with the publication of his best-known work To the Friend who did not save my life. The book ends by considering the works Guibert produced after he was diagnosed as HIV positive, within the parameter of the voices of the self.