Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Love and Sexuality
The papers collected in this volume are selected from the proceedings of the Love and Sexuality conference held at the University of Leeds in 2002. They bring together a cross-section of new directions in the study of love and sexuality currently being explored in French Studies. The central focus of the collection is the representation of love, desire, erotica and sexuality in the couple, in particular in relation to depictions of women. The contributions share a common concern with problematising issues of love and sexuality across various disciplines, focusing on literary texts, cinema, gender studies, theatre studies, history, visual iconography and cultural studies, and ranging from the sixteenth century to the present day.
Francophone Writing in Transition
In this volume, Francophone Algerian writing is studied as the hesitant articulation of strategies of alternative representation and, however modest, of deviance as a form of resistance.
Anamnesia
Memory has always been crucial to French literature and culture as a means of mediating the relationship between perception and knowledge of the individual coming to terms with his identity in time. Relatively recently, memory has also emerged as the key force in the creation of a collective consciousness in the wider perspective of French cultural history. This collection of essays, selected from the proceedings of a seminar on 'Memory' given by Dr Emma Wilson at the University of Cambridge, offers a fresh evaluation of memory as both a cultural and an individual phenomenon in modern and contemporary French culture, including literature, cinema and the visual arts. 'Anamnesia', the book's title, develops the Aristotelian concept of anamnesis: recollection as a dynamic and creative process, which includes forgetting as much as remembering, concealment as much as imagination. Memory in this extremely diverse range of essays is therefore far from being presented as a straightforward process of recalling the past, but emerges as the site of research and renegotiation, of contradictions and even aporia.
The Early Sartre and Marxism
This work highlights key areas of common ground between the ethical, aesthetic and political content of works from Sartre's early period and classic Marxist philosophy. Taking account of both the specifity of early Sartrean thought and the hetero- geneity of Marxist theories, it affirms their lasting importance to the radical left critique.
Writing Shame and Desire
This study combines psycho-social and literary perspectives to investigate the interdependency of shame and desire in Annie Ernaux's writing, arguing that shame implies desire and desire vulnerability to shame, and that the interplay between the two generates the energy for personal growth and creative endeavour.
Transmissions
As a concept, transmission is crucial to our understanding of how ideas circulate within and across cultures. It opens up a series of questions that link to key debates concerning the exchange of knowledge. Bringing together research from a broad range of areas in French studies, this volume investigates the workings of transmission in relation to canonical and contemporary figures alike, including Proust, Barthes, Derrida, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claire Denis. The essays collected here offer a lively response to the themes of transmission, considering literature and philosophy from the medieval period onwards, as well as modern cinema and critical theory. The first section traces concepts of malign transmission that have informed medieval, early modern and finally contemporary representations of contagion. The second section addresses the impact of trauma, along with its imperative to testify to, or transmit, painful experiences such as rape and the Holocaust. The final section considers transmission in terms of a signal that carries a message, as well as the media that transport or encode that signal.
(Un)Believing in Modern Society
This landmark study in the sociology of religion sheds new light on the question of what has happened to religion and spirituality since the 1960s in modern societies. Exposing several analytical weaknesses of today's sociology of religion, (Un)Believing in Modern Society presents a new theory of religious-secular competition and a new typology of ways of being religious/secular. The authors draw on a specific European society (Switzerland) as their test case, using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to show how the theory can be applied. Identifying four ways of being religious/secular in a modern society: 'institutional', 'alternative', 'distanced' and 'secular' they show how and why these forms have emerged as a result of religious-secular competition and describe in what ways all four forms are adapted to the current, individualized society.
The Cultural Defense of Nations
Addressing one of the greatest challenges facing liberalism today, this book asks if is it legally and morally defensible for a liberal state to restrict immigration in order to preserve the cultural rights of majority groups. Orgad proposes a liberal approach to this dilemma and explores its dimensions, justifications, and limitations.
Culture and Identity in Belgian Francophone Writing
Few full-length studies exist in English on French-speaking authors from Belgium. What, if any, are the particular features of francophone Belgian writing? This book explores questions of cultural and literary identity, and offers an overview of currents in critical debate regarding the place of francophone Belgian writing and its relationship to its larger neighbour, but also engages with broader questions concerning the classification of 'francophone' literature. The study brings together well-known and less well-known modern and contemporary writers (Suzanne Lilar, Neel Doff, Dominique Rolin, Jacqueline Harpman, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Jean Muno, Nicole Malinconi, and Amélie Nothomb) whose works share a number of recurring themes and features, notably a preoccupation with questions of identity and alterity. Overall, the study highlights the diverse ways in which these questions of cultural identity and alterity emerge as a dominant theme throughout the corpus, viewed through a series of literary and cultural frameworks which bring together perspectives both local and global.
Authentic Fictions
This comparative study examines the prose writings of the best-known cosmopolitan authors of the Third French Republic: the modernists Jean Giraudoux, Valery Larbaud and Paul Morand, and the best-selling popular writer Maurice Dekobra. It investigates what constituted the 'cosmopolitanism' that they publicly proclaimed between the World Wars, a classification which has been widely accepted by commentators ever since. In particular, it considers whether conventional definitions of cosmopolitanism - as an unproblematic attitude of xenophilia coupled with wanderlust, or as an ecumenical humanism - can co-exist with the blind spots and prejudices of its practitioners. This book offers a comprehensive reinterpretation of the writers' identity politics based on their approach to Otherness (gender, race, nationality, political affiliation) as well as to formal innovation. It argues that cosmopolitanism is the organizing principle for their literary and existential attempts at cultivating authentic Selfhood. Through its socio-political embeddedness, this cosmopolitanism reveals the ideological and cultural preoccupations of the day.
