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In the 1990s the French literary arena was enlivened by the emergence of a new generation of women writers. This book selects six of its most distinctive voices and addresses important questions about the very new in French women's writing. What are young women choosing to write about? What do they tell us about changing perceptions of feminine identities? What does it mean to write (and to read) as women at the start of the new millennium? An introductory chapter explores key issues such as the woman writer in the public imagination and continuity and change within French women's writing since the 1970s. It also highlights thematic threads which recur across the work of the authors studied:...
This study of Francis Ponge's essays on contemporary artists (L'Atelier contemporain) attempts to broaden the popular view of the author as a poet of objects. It explores Ponge's perception of art criticism as an inherently problematic genre and exposes the inhibitions surrounding the production of the essays. The study demonstrates how Ponge's essays on artists parallel developments in his other works. They are seen as instrumental in his movement towards open texts and a stress on the creative process itself, as well as opportunities to reaffirm his philosophical and aesthetic stance.
At stake throughout the fictional writings of Marie NDiaye (1967-) is the issue of the stranger's welcome. NDiaye's fascination with a spectrum of outsider figures and with the multiple, often subtle practices which create and sustain social groups as bounded entities, gives rise to detailed and disquieting portrayals not of hospitality but of the mechanisms and rituals of repulsion.Engaging with critical theory on hospitality across the disciplines, Shirley Jordan's closely argued analysis of NDiaye's novels, theatre and short stories probes the tropes of inhospitality around which the writer's work coalesces, exploring the ethical significance of a corpus in which communities, environments and spaces are persistently tainted by unwelcoming. NDiaye is seen to elaborate a fantastic anthropology: one which, through sustained attentiveness to non-observance of the rules of hospitality, provides a focus for debate about belonging in a postcolonial world.
EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.
What is 'the literary fantastic' and how does it manifest itself in the texts of French and francophone women writers publishing at the close of the twentieth and start of the twenty-first century? What do we mean today when we talk of 'the real' and 'realism'? These are just some of the questions addressed by the papers in this volume which derive from a conference entitled 'The Fantastic in Contemporary Women's Writing in French' held in London in September 2007. This book sets out to refocus through a non-realist lens on the works of high-profile authors (Darrieussecq, Nothomb, Germain, Cixous and NDiaye) and some of their less highly publicised contemporaries. It analyses and mobilises a wide range of both gendered and non-gendered practices and theories of 'the contemporary fantastic' whilst critically interrogating both of the latter terms and their inter-relation.
In The Aesthetic Clinic, Fernanda Negrete brings together contemporary women writers and artists well known for their formal experimentation—Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector—to argue that the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire. To elaborate this ethics, Negrete looks to notions of sublimation and feminine sexuality developed by Freud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, and their reinvention with and after Jacques Lacan, including in the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But she also highlights how psychoanalytic theory draw...
First critical study of prize-winning French author Marie NDiaye.
This is not a "once upon a time" book. Life has been a fight. Each self-contained chapter is packed with revealing episodes of an extraordinary life. It is a sharing of her marriage, career, and children, and how love and sabotage lived as partners. In this book, I reflect on the life long friendships that sustained me through the years, and the world travel that has been integral in the enjoyment and enrichment of eight of Shirley's dearest friends. Portions of this book read like a travel log from the Carribean islands to the Great Barrier Reefs of Australia and the capitals of Europe. From the Great Wall of China to the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem, Shirley has shared meaningful memories wit...
What are families like in contemporary France? And what begins to emerge when we consider them from the point of view of recent theoretical perspectives: (faulty) cohesion, (fake) coherence, (carefully planned or subversive) deconstruction, loss (of love, confidence or credibility), or, even (utter) chaos and (alarming) confusion? Which media revamp old stereotypes, generate alternative reinterpretations, and imply more ambiguous answers? ...]Uneasy contradictions and ambiguities emerge in this bilingual collection of approaches and genre studies. The family plot seems to thicken as family ties appear to loosen. Has the family' been lost from sight, or is it being reinvented in our collective imaginary? This book proposes a new series of perspectives and questions on an old and familiar' topic, exploring the state and status of the family in contemporary literature, culture, critical and psychoanalytic theory and sociology.