Being Contemporary: French Literature, Culture and Politics Today

Lia Brozgal is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies (ELTS) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Sara Kippur is Assistant Professor of French at Trinity College, Connecticut.

'As a book exploring how Susan Rubin Suleiman’s thought continues to orient and inspire research in a number of disciplines, Being Contemporary is nothing short of excellent.'Lucas Hollister, French Review

• Introduction: Being Contemporary, Then and NowLia Brozgal and Sara Kippur I. Conceptualizing the Contemporary1. Henry Rousso, “Coping with Contemporariness” 2. Emily Apter, “Rethinking Periodization for the Now Time” 3. Carrie Noland, “(After) Conceptualism: Contemporaneity and Choreography” II. Contemporary Politics and French Thought4. Régine Robin, “Identities in Flux” 5. Lawrence D. Kritzman, “The Paradoxes of Being Contemporary: Derrida and the Political” 6. Jeffrey Mehlman, “Of Sade, Blanchot, and the French Twentieth Century: Thoughts at Columbia” 7. Maurice Samuels, “Alain Badiou and Antisemitism” III. World War II and Vichy: Present Perspectives8. Richard J. Golsan, “What Does ‘Vichy’ Mean Now?”9. Gisèle Sapiro, “Forces of Solidarity and Logics of Exclusion: The Role of Literary Institutions in Times of Crisis”10. Jakob Lothe, “Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust”11. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “‘Moral Witnessing?’” An Israeli Perspective on Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes”12. Irene Kacandes, “From ‘Never Forgetting’ to ‘Post-Remembering’ and ‘Co-Witnessing’: Memory Work for the Twenty-First Century”IV. Writing the Contemporary Self 13. Annette Wieviorka, “‘I’ in the Plural: A New Writing of History” 14. Tom Conley, “Selves at Risk: Reading Susan Suleiman with Marc Augé, La Vie en double”15. Alice Jardine, “Risking Who One Is, At The Risk of Thinking: On Writing an Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva”16. Michael Sheringham, “‘La Connaissance par corps’: Writing and Self-Exposure in Annie Ernaux”V. Novel Rereadings17. Mieke Bal, “Long Live Anachronism” 18. Janet Beizer, “Colette’s Côtelettes, or the Word Made Flesh”19. Christie McDonald, “Choices: Beckett’s Way”20. Alice Kaplan, “Making L'Etranger Contemporary: Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête”VI. Memory: Past and Future21. Emmanuel Bouju, “A Nest in the Air: Phantom Pain and Contemporary Narrative” 22. Deborah Jenson, “Adrien and Marcel Proust: The Memory Patient” 23. Marianne Hirsch, “Vulnerable Times”