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The turn of the millennium in France coincided with a number of tangible crises and apocalyptic discourses, and with the growth of the mass media and global market, further generating and manipulating crisis. In this original, wide-ranging but closely analytical study, Cruickshank contextualizes and reads the work of four influential writers of prose fiction —- Angot, Echenoz, Houellebecq, and Redonnet —- teasing out each one's response to this convergence. She suggests that the recurrent fictional and cultural trope of the turning point has both aesthetic and critical potential. Bringing together analyses spanning literature, thought, and culture, she identifies and critiques the ways in which, on the eve of the twenty-first century, different theoretical and fictional approaches confront the manipulation of crisis discourses. Drawing on a 'long twentieth century' of crisis thinking, Cruickshank counters the perception that a postmodern model of perpetual crisis is culturally dominant, and establ
The intrinsic ambivalence of eating and drinking often goes unrecognised. In Leftovers, Cruickshank's new theoretical approach reveals how representations of food, drink and their consumption proliferate with overlooked figurative, psychological, ideological and historical interpretative potential. Case studies of novels by Robbe-Grillet, Ernaux, Darrieussecq and Houellebecq demonstrate the transferrable potential of re-thinking eating and drinking.
The intrinsic ambivalence of eating and drinking often goes unrecognised. In Leftovers, Cruickshank’s new theoretical approach reveals how representations of food, drink and their consumption proliferate with overlooked figurative, psychological, ideological and historical interpretative potential. Case studies of novels by Robbe-Grillet, Ernaux, Darrieussecq and Houellebecq demonstrate the transferrable potential of re-thinking eating and drinking.
Gut, Brain, and Environment in Nineteenth-Century French Literature and Medicine offers a new way of conceptualizing food in literature: not as social or cultural symbol but as an agent within a network of relationships between body and mind and between humans and environment. By analysing gastrointestinal health in medical, literary, and philosophical texts, this volume rethinks the intersections between literature and health in the nineteenth century and triggers new debates about France’s relationship with food. Of relevance to scholars of literature and to historians and sociologists of science, food, and medicine, it will provide ideal reading for students of French Literature and Culture, History, Cultural Studies, and History of Science and Medicine, Literature and Science, Food Studies, and the Medical Humanities. Readers will be introduced to new ways of approaching digestion in this period and will gain appreciation of the powerful resources offered by nineteenth-century French writing in understanding the nature of connections between gut, mind, and environment and the impact of these connections on our status as human beings.
What connects garbage dumps in New York, bomb sites in Baghdad, and skyscrapers in São Paulo? How is contemporary visual culture – extending from art and architecture to film and digital media – responding to new forms of violence associated with global and globalizing cities? Addressing such questions, this book is the first interdisciplinary volume to examine the complex relationship between globalization, violence, and the visual culture of cities. Violence – in both material and cultural forms – has been a prominent and endemic feature of urban life in the global metropolitan era. Focusing on visual culture and offering a strong humanities perspective that is currently lacking i...
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Widely acknowledged as an important, if highly controversial, figure in contemporary literature, French novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq has elicited diverse critical responses. In this book Carole Sweeney examines his novels as a response to the advance of neoliberalism into all areas of affective human life. This historicizing study argues that le monde houellebecquien is an 'atomised society' of banal quotidian alienation populated by quietly resentful men who are the botched subjects of late-capitalism. Addressing Houellebecq's handling of the 'failure' of the radical thought of '68, Sweeney looks at the ways in which his fiction treats feminism, the decline of religion and the family, as well as the obsolescence of French 'theory' and the Sartrean notion of 'engaged' literature. Reading the world with the disappointed idealism of a contemporary moralist, Houellebecq's novels, Sweeney argues, fluctuate between despair for the world as it is and a limp utopian hope for a post-humanity.
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This book re-assesses director Jean Renoir’s work between his departure from France in 1940 and his death in 1979, and contributes to the debate over how the medium of film registers the impact of trauma. The 1930s ended in catastrophe for both for Renoir and for France: La Règle du jeu was a critical and commercial disaster on its release in July 1939 and in 1940 France was occupied by Germany. Even so, Renoir continued to innovate and experiment with his post-war work, yet the thirteen films he made between 1941 and 1969, constituting nearly half of his work in sound cinema, have been sorely neglected in the study of his work. With detailed readings of the these films and four novels produced by Renoir in his last four decades, Davis explores the direct and indirect ways in which film, and Renoir’s films in particular, depict the aftermath of violence.