French and Francophone Studies – serie

Through a discussion of border identities, this book presents a balance-sheet of key developments in modern French society and culture in the context of globalization. It seeks to re-define and re-consider the notion of the border in respect of the identification of a variety of visible and invisible 'border' situations.

Reputation of Louis Aragon (1897-1982) is built upon his activities during the Second World War when his poetry embodied the spirit of the French Resistance. This book goes beyond the figure of the Resistance poet to explore the significance of the subject of war throughout his career.

This book responds to the current critical interest in phantoms and haunting. It explores and assesses the twentieth century's fascination with the ghost in relation to notions of identity, authorship and memory, tracing the changing form of the ghost in key twentieth-century French media: film, photography, literature and theory. However, the ghosts of works present cannot be understood fully without considering the ghosts of works past. Each of the twentieth-century works analyzed considers itself haunted by the past, by memory, be it personal or textual. Consequently, this volume also considers this past and these textual memories by exploring specific ghosts in successive ages (Medieval, Renaissance, Early-Modern and the nineteenth century) and genres key to these epochs (poetry, drama and the novel).Thus, this collection offers an insight into the ghost's past, its evolution across time and genre, before turning to focus on how art in twentieth-century France deals with its textual memories and the ghosts of its past. A substantial introduction explains and pulls together the themes and analytical structure of this volume to provide unity and cohesion among the various chapters.

"French Muslims" provides a critical perspective on Muslim politics and experiences in contemporary France, the European country with the largest Muslim population. Drawing from the work of four Muslim thinkers and activists - Chahdortt Djavann, Fadela Amara, Tariq Ramadan, and Houria Bouteldja - this volume examines issues such as the veil, integration, the role of the school, the traditions of the French republic, and the legacy of the French empire. In addition, Gemie analyzes the most important organizations and structures representing French Muslim opinion today, including the French Council of the Muslim Faith and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France.

Explores the state of French fiction through an examination of the work of five major French writers, Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz and Patrick Modiano. This book deals with some of the writers on British and American university French courses.

In examining a number of francophone Montreal novels from 1960 to 2005, this interdisciplinary study considers the ways in which these connect with material landscapes to produce a city of neighbourhoods. In so doing, it reflects on how Montreal has been seen as both home and not home for francophone Quebecers. Morgan offers an overview of the fiction; examines micro and macro geographies of Montreal, and identifies some key literary trends. In so doing, it reflects on the importance of the imaginary in our experiencing and understanding of the urban.

This book uses six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to argue a reconceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but as works fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses reworkings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to emphasise the way in which such reworkings cast new light on many of their source texts, and how they reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Adapting Nineteenth-Century France charts such revision through a range of genres encompassing the modern media of radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.ContentsIntroduction, Kate GriffithsI Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio, Kate GriffithsII Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation, Andrew WattsIII Fragmented Fictions: Time, Textual Memory and the (Re)Writing of Madame Bovary, Andrew WattsIV Les Misérables, Theatre and the Anxiety of Excess, Andrew WattsV Chez Maupassant: The (In)Visible Space of Television Adaptation, Kate GriffithsVI Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours: Verne, Todd, Coraci and the Spectropoetics of Adaptation, Kate GriffithsConclusion, Andrew Watts

In an era of commemoration, France's Colonial Legacies contributes to the debates taking place in France about the place of empire in the contemporary life of the nation, debates that have been underway since the 1990s and that now reach across public life and society with manifestations in the French parliament, media and universities. France's empire and the gradual process of its loss is one of the defining narratives of the contemporary nation, contributing to the construction of its image both on the international stage and at home. While certain intellectuals present the imperial period as an historical irrelevance that ended in the years following the Second World War, the contested legacies of France's colonies continue to influence the development of French society in the view of scholars of the postcolonial. This volume surveys the memorial practices and discourses that are played out in a range of arenas, drawing on the expertise of researchers working in the fields of politics, media, cultural studies, literature and film to offer a wide-ranging picture of remembrance in contemporary France.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.PART ONE: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introduction, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into English, Lynn Penrod3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller, Diana HolmesPART TWO: Society, Culture, Family4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look back, Lucille Cairns5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkis, Susan Ireland6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissage, Andrew Asibong7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, Tardieu, Lori Saint-Martin8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhood, Natalie EdwardsPART THREE: Body, Life, Text9. The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim, Amaleena Damlé10. The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?, Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy11. Embodiment, environment and the re-invention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writing, Helen Vassallo12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporary, Barbara Havercroft13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts, Simon KempPART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Helena Chadderton15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in French, Shirley Jordan16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representations, Deborah B. Gaensbauer17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxes, Owen Heathcote18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb, Anna Kemp19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye

This book uses six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to argue a reconceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but as works fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses reworkings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to emphasise the way in which such reworkings cast new light on many of their source texts, and how they reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Adapting Nineteenth-Century France charts such revision through a range of genres encompassing the modern media of radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.ContentsIntroduction, Kate GriffithsI Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio, Kate GriffithsII Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation, Andrew WattsIII Fragmented Fictions: Time, Textual Memory and the (Re)Writing of Madame Bovary, Andrew WattsIV Les Misérables, Theatre and the Anxiety of Excess, Andrew WattsV Chez Maupassant: The (In)Visible Space of Television Adaptation, Kate GriffithsVI Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours: Verne, Todd, Coraci and the Spectropoetics of Adaptation, Kate GriffithsConclusion, Andrew Watts

Gangsters, aviators, hard-boiled detectives, gunslingers, jazz and images of the American metropolis were all an inextricable part of the cultural landscape of interwar France. While the French 1930s have long been understood as profoundly anti-American, this book shows how a young, up-and-coming generation of 1930s French writers and filmmakers approached American culture with admiration as well as criticism. For some, the imaginary America that circulated through Hollywood films, newspaper reports, radio programming and translated fiction represented the society of the future, while for others it embodied a dire threat to French identity. This book brings an innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture, focusing on several of the most famous figures from the 1930s – including Marcel Carné, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Julien Duvivier, André Malraux, Jean Renoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – to track the ways in which they sought to reinterpret the political and social dimensions of modernism for mass audiences via an imaginary America.

Travel writing, migrant writing, exile writing, expatriate writing, and even the fictional travelling protagonists that emerge in literary works from around the globe, have historically tended to depict mobility as a masculine phenomenon. The presence of such genres in women’s writing, however, poses a rich and unique body of work. This volume examines the texts of Francophone women who have experienced or reflected upon the experience of transnational movement. Due to the particularity of their relationship to home, and the consequent impact of this on their experience of displacement, the study of women's mobility opens up new questions in our understanding of the movement from place to place, and in our broader understanding of colonial and postcolonial worlds. Addressing the proximities and overlaps that exist between the experiences of women exiles, migrants, expatriates and travellers, the collected essays in this book seek to challenge the usefulness, relevance or validity of such terms for conceptualising today’s complex patterns of transnational mobility and the gendered identities produced therein.

In the face of the contested legacy of engagement in the Francophone context, this interdisciplinary collection demonstrates that French and Francophone writers, artists, intellectuals and film-makers are using their work to confront unforeseen and unprecedented challenges, campaigns and causes in a politically uncertain post-9/11 world. Composed of eleven essays and a contextualising introduction, this volume is interdisciplinary in its treatment of engagement in a variety of forms, as it reassesses the relationship between different types of cultural production and society as it is played out in the twenty-first century. With a focus on both the development of different cultural forms (Part 1) and on the particular crises that have attracted the attention of cultural practitioners (Part 2), this volume maps and analyses some of the ways in which cultural texts of all kinds are being used to respond to, engage with and challenge crises in the contemporary Francophone world.

This is the first book-length study to analyse and problematize the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’ with regard to the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), and memories of it, in the work of French authors of Algerian origin. The book considers a primary corpus spanning over forty literary texts published between 1981 and 2012, analysing the extent to which texts are able to collect diverse and apparently competing memories, and in the process present the heterogeneous nature of memories of the Algerian War. By setting up the notion of literary texts as ‘sites of memory’, where the potentially explosive but also consensual encounter between former colonizer and colonized subject takes place, the book contributes to ongoing debates surrounding the contested place of narratives of empire in French collective memory, and the ambiguous place of immigrants from the former colonies and their children in dominant definitions of French identity.

Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century brings an original perspective on French cinema's 'return to work' in the early twenty-first century, focusing on the transformation of cinematic activism in view of the rapid dissolution of class narratives and solidarities. It is argued that, reckoning with widespread anxieties about job precarity, social uncertainty, loss and invisibility in French society, filmmakers catalysed new modes of intervention, best described as embodied praxes of sociality. Combining rigorous film analyses with concepts borrowed from philosophy, sociology, geography and political theory, this study positions documentary as a privileged point of articulation between aesthetics, politics and ethics. The wide-ranging film corpus features well-established auteurs (Agnes Varda, Raymond Depardon, Denis Gheerbrant) and less canonical filmmakers to celebrate the vitality of contemporary French documentary cinema and its creative contributions to international discussions about work, precarity and social resilience.

Who has not, in a favored moment, 'stolen the limelight', whether inadvertently or by design? The implications of such an act of display - its illicitness, its verve, its vertiginous reversal of power, its subversiveness - are explored in this book. Narrative crafting and management of such scenarios are studied across canonical novels by Gide, Colette, Mauriac, and Duras, as well as by African Francophone writer Oyono and detective novelist Japrisot. As manipulated within narrative, acts of display position a viewer or reader from whom response (from veneration or desire to repugnance or horror) is solicited; but this study demonstrates that display can also work subversively, destabilising and displacing such a privileged spectator. As strategies of displacement, these scenarios ultimately neutralise and even occult the very subject they so energetically appear to solicit. Powered by gendered tensions, this dynamic of display as displacement works toward purposes of struggle, resistance or repression.

Focusing on representations of women’s experiences in contemporary France, ‘Taking Up Space’ examines how women inhabit a variety of work spaces. It also speaks to the importance of cultural productions in calling out labour issues affecting women, as well as in offering a platform that allows us to imagine a future where inclusive and equitable work spaces are the norm. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological use of objects, the book explores women’s experiences through different metaphors of the door related to labour. The contributors demonstrate how doors are not only closed or open, but also serve as a threshold. Taken together, the chapters convey how women’s work experiences can range from states of oppression to survival and celebration, and demonstrates how through deliberate stances and actions, various work spaces can become sites of liberation and revolution.

The women represented in this volume as both authors and protagonists exert power by resisting the social paradigms that govern how they ‘should’ behave – by thwarting expectations of typical ‘feminine’ conduct (whether in relation to female corporeality and sexuality) or by their (non)adherence to the institutions of marriage and motherhood. However, they also claim power by espousing more conventionally ‘feminine’ roles, recuperating and revaluing those that entail caring and nurturing. They emphasise, in ways consistent with the growing body of feminist work on care relations, the positive, life-affirming potential that such roles embody. This volume focuses on women who, through smaller and larger acts of empowerment, seek to exert influence over their life choices. Its diverse contributions acknowledge the contextual, historical and intersectional specificities governing every woman’s power to choose her own present and future, and the important role played by even incremental changes in contributing to a greater sense of personal independence and self-knowledge, without which there can be no meaningful political change.

Provides a detailed analysis of intertextual sources from the perspective of the metaphorical re-writings which they undergo in Proust's writing. The author re-evaluates the broader role within the novel of images, which tend to be viewed as isolated rather than as essential parts of a coherent network.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the political arguments about the place of Muslims in contemporary France, and also discusses the ideas put forward by a range of Muslim thinkers. France has become the setting for one of the most important conflicts in the modern world. On the one hand, it possesses a rigidly organized, centralized state, whose bureaucrats and civil servants are animated by a code of secular activism. On the other hand, France is also the home for Europe's largest Muslim minority, variously estimated at numbering between four and six million people. This means that in terms of simple numbers, France can be counted as the world's fifteenth Islamic power. Previous conflicts with religion have left a deep impression on French political culture: from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century conflicts between Catholics and Protestants played to the formation of the collaborationist Vichy government in 1940. In recent decades, Muslims have been stigmatized as an irreconcilable minority unable to adapt to the secular culture of the majority of French citizens. This work draws out the political implications of the current conflict. It is based on events and publications produced in a single five year period, beginning with the shock of the 2002 Presidential elections, in which Le Pen was the second most successful candidate, ranging through the legislation of March 2004 which banned the Islamic headscarf from French state schools, and which sparked off a series of bad-tempered exchanges between left and right-wing French nationalists, anti-racism campaigners, secularists, anti-clericals and a variety of Muslim authors.

Memories of May 68 charts the emergence of the conventional representation of the French events of 1968 and argues that the dominance of this narrative, despite its limitations, stems from the convenience that such a consensus provides for those that have been pivotal in shaping the collective memory of this critical moment in French history.

Memories of May 68 charts the emergence of the conventional representation of the French events of 1968 and argues that the dominance of this narrative, despite its limitations, stems from the convenience that such a consensus provides for those that have been pivotal in shaping the collective memory of this critical moment in French history.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.PART ONE: Women’s Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Trends and Issues1. Women’s writing in twenty-first-century France: introduction, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye2. What ‘passes’?: French women writers and translation into English, Lynn Penrod3. What women read: contemporary women’s writing and the bestseller, Diana HolmesPART TWO: Society, Culture, Family4. Vichy, Jews, enfants cachés: French women writers look back, Lucille Cairns5. Wives and daughters in literary works representing the harkis, Susan Ireland6. (Not) seeing things: Marie NDiaye, (negative) hallucination and ‘blank’ métissage, Andrew Asibong7. Rediscovering the absent father, a question of recognition: Despentes, Tardieu, Lori Saint-Martin8. Babykillers: Véronique Olmi and Laurence Tardieu on motherhood, Natalie EdwardsPART THREE: Body, Life, Text9. The becoming of anorexia and text in Amélie Nothomb’s Robert des noms propres and Delphine de Vigan’s Jours sans faim, Amaleena Damlé10. The human-animal in Ananda Devi’s texts: towards an ethics of hybridity?, Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy11. Embodiment, environment and the re-invention of self in Nina Bouraoui’s life-writing, Helen Vassallo12. Irreverent revelations: women’s confessional practices of the extreme contemporary, Barbara Havercroft13. Contamination anxiety in Annie Ernaux’s twenty-first-century texts, Simon KempPART FOUR: Experiments, Interfaces, Aesthetics14. Experience and experiment in the work of Marie Darrieussecq, Helena Chadderton15. Interfaces: verbal/visual experiment in new women’s writing in French, Shirley Jordan16. ‘Autofiction + x = ?’: Chloé Delaume’s experimental self-representations, Deborah B. Gaensbauer17. Beyond Antoinette Fouque (Il y a deux sexes) and beyond Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)? Anne Garréta’s sphinxes, Owen Heathcote18. Amélie the aesthete: art and politics in the world of Amélie Nothomb, Anna Kemp19. Conclusion, Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye