Modern French Identities – serie

Comme l’a noté le philosophe Jacques Derrida, l’enregistrement des voix a été l’un des évènements marquants du siècle passé. Le sociolinguiste William Labov s’est intéressé aux motivations sociales des variations phonologiques, mais non pas à la voix en tant que telle. Les recherches effectuées sur la texture et la qualité de la voix ou la relation entre la voix et l’affect sont beaucoup plus rares. Le sujet est mentionné dans les discussions sur la musique, le doublage, le théâtre et la traduction, sans toutefois être analysé en profondeur. Les articles sur la voix correspondent en outre à un développement relativement récent dans les domaines de la psycholinguistique et de la psychoacoustique, lié à un regain d’intérêt pour les études sur l’émotion de manière générale. Le présent recueil d’articles offre une perspective pluridisciplinaire au carrefour entre la sociolinguistique, la phonologie et les études cinématographiques.

Feminist approaches to questions of women, pleasure and transgression have generally been premised on the assumption that women’s pleasures are typically constrained – if not ignored, marginalized or forbidden – in patriarchal cultures. The naming, foregrounding and pursuit of women’s pleasures can therefore be deemed potentially transgressive and linked to women’s emancipation in other realms. The essays in this volume draw on a range of materials, from travel writing and the novel to film and stand-up comedy, addressing the specificity of French and Francophone approaches to women, pleasure and transgression across a range of historical contexts. The volume is divided into three sections: intellectual and creative pleasures; normative pleasures, that is, pleasures conforming to women’s conventionally expected roles and status as well as to accepted views regarding race, national identity and sexuality; and perverse pleasures, that is, pleasures transgressive in their tendency to reject authority and norms, and often controversial in their «excessive» appetite for violence, sex, alcohol or food. In each case, questions are raised about how we approach such pleasures as feminist researchers, motivated in part by a desire to counter the notion of feminism and feminist research as something «dour» or joyless.

Jules Romains est connu comme un écrivain « de bonne volonté », raisonnable et rationaliste. Il existe, toutefois, un Jules Romains obscur, et méconnu : un Jules Romains créateur de personnages de mauvaise volonté – de criminels, même ; un Jules Romains qui n’hésite pas à parsemer son oeuvre de longs chapitres érotiques – pornographiques, même ; un Jules Romains, enfin, surtout, fasciné par tout ce qui relève du parapsychique et de l’extraordinaire. Mais d’où vient cet attrait pour l’anormal et le paranormal ? C’est en replaçant la production de Romains dans le contexte d’une époque confrontée à la mort de Dieu et meurtrie par deux Guerres mondiales que l’on peut expliquer le glissement qui s’opère, de La Vie unanime (1908) aux oeuvres de l’après-guerre, d’un unanimisme optimiste et humaniste à un fantastique qui, s’il se révèle scientifiquement et politiquement militant, n’en est pas moins désespéré.

« L’écriture à l’ère de l’indétermination considère l’expérience de la littérature comme une manière de traiter les questions les plus complexes du monde contemporain. L’auteur avait déjà souligné l’importance de la critique génétique et des apports théoriques de la psychanalyse lacanienne aux études littéraires dans ses autres livres ; ici, nous sommes conduits à faire un tour de plus par les mains de Flaubert, Proust, Bauchau, Murakami, Poe et Joyce. Formant une spirale qui à chaque révolution se transforme, toujours sensible aux conditions initiales, nous arrivons ainsi à un mode de lecture qui permet de travailler la complexité de la vie dans son aspect littéraire allant jusqu’aux théories du chaos déterministique et du cerveau. Bien que nous soyons tous d’accord sur la complexité du monde difficile et dangereux dans lequel nous vivons, très peu recherchent comme Willemart non pas des critiques négatives et des positions identitaires et autoritaires, mais des modes d’habiter ces mondes traversés par des faisceaux de déterminations et d’indéterminations, des zones de stabilité et d’instabilités, mondes dans lesquels nos formes d’intelligibilité enrichissent et dynamisent l’expérience, faisant en sorte que la littérature devienne l’un des lieux rares où cette complexité peut être vécue intensément. » – Roberto Zular, Professor de théorie Littéraire, Département de Théorie Littéraire, Faculté de Philosophie, Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université de São Paulo (USP)

The relation between the digital and the collective has become an urgent contemporary question. These collected essays explore the implications of this relation, around the theme of #NousSommes. This hashtag marks the point where the «personal» modalities of social media have become embroiled in collective expressions of unity, solidarity and resistance. As this volume demonstrates, the impact of this cannot be isolated to the internet, but affect philosophy, literature, cinema, politics and the public space itself. The contributors approach the issue of #NousSommes from a diverse range of disciplines and methodologies, bringing out both the continuity and discontinuity with other forms of collective expression. Important contemporary philosophers such as Nancy, Derrida and Deleuze are engaged here, as are issues of ecology, community, automation, postcolonial identity and addiction. Featuring eight academic essays and an interview, this volume testifies to the importance of French philosophy and culture in understanding the digital and the collective today.

«From Freud and psychoanalysis to Derrida and philosophy, the question of mourning has been central to a whole strain of modern thought, especially in France. This fascinating and illuminating collection of essays explores the question in a wide range of intellectual and literary settings, from the French Revolution down through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a tour de force.» (Christopher Prendergast FBA, King’s College, Cambridge)«This volume compellingly explores the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, showing how literature can enrich our sense of the complexity of mourning, grief and loss. It provides a significant contribution to scholarship on mourning, understood as a never-ending process of relationality.» (Hanna Meretoja, University of Turku, Finland)How does modern writing in French grapple with the present absence and absent presence of lost loved ones? How might it challenge and critique the relegation of certain deaths to the realm of the unmournable? What might this reveal about the role of the literary in the French and francophone world and shifting conceptions of the nation-state? Essays on texts from the Revolution to the present day explore these questions from a variety of perspectives, bringing out the ways in which mourning contests the boundaries between the personal and the historical, the aesthetic and the ethical, the self and the other, and ultimately reasserting its truly critical resonance.

The French poet Bernard Vargaftig (1934–2012), first known in 1960s literary circles as a writer mentored by Aragon, published regularly and served on the editorial boards of Action poétique and Europe. His poetry foregrounds identity and alterity, eros and notions of self, an immediate present and an onrushing past. This book examines Vargaftig’s evolution and aims. It explores his postwar search for self-acceptance, ontological rootedness and shared forward paths. Using close readings of his poetry and prose, complemented by his comments in interviews, the book particularly considers his emphasis on the sacredness of words. His spiritual yearnings, as well as a need to heal due to lingering trauma from wartime hiding, are shown to underlie his focus on allusive imagery, recurring motifs and compact structures, where silence and sound interweave. Comparative analyses are used to show how his enthusiasm for the female Other attunes us to interpersonal bonds and to the outer world’s creative surge. The study of Vargaftig through the lens of gestures toward the sacred thus highlights poetry as a healing ritual, one that facilitates not only immersion in emotion and sensation, but also a continual process of renewal and self-discovery.

Queer(y)ing Bodily Norms in Francophone Culture questions how a wide selection of restrictive norms come to bear on the body, through a close analysis of a range of texts, media and genres originating from across the francophone world and spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Each essay troubles hegemonic, monolithic perceptions and portrayals of racial, class, gender, sexual and/or national identity, rethinking bodily norms as portrayed in literature, film, theatre and digital media specifically from a queer and querying perspective. The volume thus takes «queer(y)ing» as its guiding methodology, an approach to culture and society which examines, questions and challenges normativity in all of its guises. The term «queer(y)ing» retains the celebratory tone of the term «queer» but avoids appropriating the identity of the LGBTQ+ community, a group which remains marginalized to this day. The publication reveals that evaluating the bodily norms depicted in francophone culture through a queer and querying lens allows us to fragment often oppressive and restrictive norms, and ultimately transform them.

The French literary collective OuLiPo was founded in 1960 with the goal of applying mathematics to literary creation. Comprised of authors, poets, mathematicians, and scientists, this quirky writer’s workshop also created some of the first electronic literature and digital humanities work, contributing to mathematics and computer science in the process. Now beginning its seventh decade of existence, Oulipo has outlived every other literary collective of its time, in no small part due to the diversity of its members and its fascinating marriage of mathematics and literature.OuLiPo and the Mathematics of Literature retraces the historical foundations of this group’s unprecedented literary project, putting its first thirty years of archival meeting minutes into conversation with the scientific and mathematical literature that preceded the founding of the group. Through close readings and genetic criticism, this project demonstrates the impact of the group’s experimental literary production and how it invites a willing reader to participate in abstract, mathematical thought. Additionally, this book makes use of digital humanities techniques to understand Oulipo’s pioneering yet complicated relationship with computer science. This analysis sheds new light on disciplinary questions, suggesting that creative practices can help bridge this artificial divide between the Humanities and STEM fields.

This book primarily investigates whether the most important work in the development of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu was Contre Sainte-Beuve, often assigned this role, or the first, unfinished and, in Proust’s lifetime, unpublished novel, Jean Santeuil. Given the length of the final work, this book focuses on the beginning of the first volume, Du Côté de chez Swann, known as «Combray». Proust was writing his work on the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve, when it appeared to evolve into the final novel. However, much of the material found in the early work, Jean Santeuil, can also be found in À la recherche, but usually in a very different form or context. By his abandonment of Jean Santeuil, Proust showed he was still searching for the right material and also, even more challenging, a suitable form in which to present it. The technique adopted for the main body of this work is to follow, by means of close readings, the evolution of a character, a place or an episode, from its earliest appearance in the avant-texte, both published and unpublished, to its final place in «Combray». The extra layer of the avant-texte also leads to further elucidation of the meaning of this rich and complex novel. Finally, the new presentation of the material in «Combray» reveals the novel’s technical evolution to that of a modernist work.

«The collection of well-written essays offers creative and compelling readings of Nimier’s work that can serve to introduce readers to the author’s contributions to the field of autofiction, gender, and memory, to name only a few themes, or prompt new areas of inquiry for established researchers of her work. What is more, the inclusion of creative works not only allows readers to discover Nimier’s newest texts, but also reflects the creative energies of an author whose writing project includes song, theatre, and dance.» (Lisa Connell, H-France Review 22.41, March 2022)«This volume constitutes a landmark in the study of one of France’s foremost contemporary writers. The diversity and originality of its critical approaches and the scholarship and creativity in evidence on every page make it essential reading for anybody interested in Marie Nimier, or in 'self and subject' in contemporary writing.» (Professor Shirley Jordan, Newcastle University)«This diverse collection casts much-needed light on Marie Nimier’s corpus and does full justice to the complexity and richness of Nimier’s writing. It excavates with skill and sensitivity the multiple palimpsestic layers of the narrative self – whether historical, familial, sensorial or linguistic – and illuminates the relational resonances Nimier’s texts provoke, both readerly and literary.» (Professor Siobhán McIlvanney, King’s College London)In the postwar literary culture of France, under the influence of Structuralism and its aftermath, deference to «the text in itself» meant that literary studies eschewed discussing narrators or characters as subjects and deriving social or political commentary from specific texts. In reaction to this trend, which also influenced the writing of novels, a new generation of authors have sought instead to focus on developing innovative ways of conceptualizing subjecthood, identity and agency. Marie Nimier’s writing abundantly exemplifies this «return of the subject» in the rich diversity of the fifteen novels she has published since Sirène in 1985, blending fiction and life-writing. Her narrators/protagonists typically strive to achieve forms of agency which are made possible, yet also threatened, by the ostensible «givens»: heritage, memory, gender, relationships, desire, social environment and, not least, language itself. This volume explores central aspects of self and subject in her oeuvre to date and includes two short stories which Nimier formally publishes here for the first time, one with an English translation.

Can love poetry be the site of a creative partnership? When a poem is written by the male poet for the woman he loves, both addressed to her and taking her as its object, how does – how can – she interact with it?This book represents a foray into the love poetry of Jacques Roubaud, tracing a lifetime of writing from the ardour of first love to the pain of grief and loss. The author brings Roubaud’s poetry into proximity with evolving views on the sexual relation from Freud, Lacan and Irigaray in readings that consider the ties between poet and lover, poet and reader. At the centre of it all is the poet’s engagement with form: the free verse style of the Surrealists that was popular in his youth, the form-orientated writing he turns to as a response to his self-doubt as a writer, and the collapse of metre and rhythm when he mourns the death of his wife. Is form a device for the confinement of the feminine presence in his poems, or does Roubaud construct spaces in his poetry for his lover – his other – to be?

This volume offers an important examination of the ways in which artistic manipulations of time can lead to a different perception of time as nonsynchronous and anti-chronological. The range of media (philosophical essays, film, plays, novels, autobiographical narratives) and periods (medieval, early modern, contemporary) explored here testify to the enduring significance of so-called «delays» and the need to rethink these as anachronies. The spectral presence of the notion of «Kairos» throughout this volume connects different attempts to subvert linear time, on occasion allowing events and temporalities to coexist and compete or, alternately, asking the mind to stretch itself and experience the uneasiness of time by attempting and failing to encompass diverse spaces and temporalities concomitantly. The resulting essays interrogate, test and contest the limits of the possible and enable a rethinking of what time could represent across disciplines and genres.

This volume explores the political life of rage as it has been experienced and mobilized in the Francosphere since 1968. If mai is remembered as a failure to convert insurrectionary feeling into lasting political change, the vast number of activist groups who have alchemized their anger into resistance over the past fifty years are a testament to the continued, necessary role of rage in political life.This volume traces the various morphologies of anger across French-language literature, thought, cinema and activism. From Black feminisms to punk, flamboyance to suicide, cacophonous sound to riotous song, the contributions probe the aesthetics and politics of rage. This collection also examines the uneven legitimization of political anger – how rage is allowed to be expressed, by whom and in which contexts. Rage is often dismissed as inimical to proper academic inquiry: what unites the contributions in this publication is a commitment to thinking with feeling.

This book is the first full-length study of Marguerite Yourcenar's Le Labyrinthe du monde along environmental lines. Written by the first académicienne more than twenty years after Mémoires d’Hadrien, the three-volume work was her most ambitious undertaking. Drawing extensively on the rich reserves of Yourcenar scholarship as well as on environmental humanities, this study entails a broad review of time, place and interconnectedness.While Yourcenar’s work often engages in detail with her parents and their forebears, the analysis here includes a focus on notions such as fragility and vulnerability, qualities common to human beings and to the rest of the natural world. Through a quasi-plot structure and a range of concerns carefully orchestrated and examined, Yourcenar proffers her extensive genealogical heritage as a reading of the global and the modern, opening the way to possible grounds for optimism. Yourcenar emerges as an insightful and deeply reflective writer with an important contemporary message, responsive to the urgent environmental concerns of the present day.

This book presents a close reading of four texts by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, guided by Gilles Deleuze’s concept of metamorphosis, «becoming-animal». In his critique of anthropocentrism and Western reason, Le Clézio dismantles the opposition between mind and matter, language and life, developing Henri Bergson’s notion of the living, «le vivant». A philosophical and ecological role is accorded poetic, sensorial expression, which is the means of communication between the multiple forms of life. For instance, the protagonist may become a bird: in their flight they form intercultural relations calling to mind the texts of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau. Importantly, Le Clézio never divorces the poetic from the socio-political. The text Bitna, sous le ciel de Séoul, for example, unfolds against the background of the war between North and South Korea. Through the figure of the war-traumatised homeless Algerian, Béchir, The Story of Dodo emerges as one of the most powerful critics of nationalism and capitalism ever written.

‘A true Caribbeanist, James Arnold has long been a vital critical presence. These essays bear testimony to a remarkable career and to the hallmarks of Arnold’s scholarship: its extraordinary erudition; and the subtle but determined anticolonialism that motivates the work, even as it questions the broader thrusts of Postcolonial Theory.’ – Professor Martin Munro, Eminent Scholar and Winthrop-King Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Florida State University‘Reading the French Caribbean is a thoroughgoing analysis of the history of French Caribbean literature, containing lucid, well-researched analyses of key works. The book summarises the findings of Arnold’s long and successful career examining the history and culture of the French Caribbean, including extensive scholarship on the wide-ranging works of Aimé Césaire. The book provides an excellent resource for students who want to discover this long and rich culture.’ – Professor Jane Hiddleston, Professor of Literatures in French, University of OxfordIn this essay collection, Albert James Arnold reads French Caribbean literature in its historical context, focusing on the competing claims of ethnic groups from the time of slavery to the recent past. The plural society model predominates, with a particular interest in gender difference and societal issues. Terms such as ‘negritude’, ‘créolite’ and the ‘neocolonial’ are explored and challenged, while the influence of such theorists as Edouard Glissant and Frantz Fanon are shown to continue to reverberate into the present. This collection offers insightful readings of the literature of the French Caribbean to a new generation of scholars.

Since the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to J. M. G. Le Clézio in 2008, there has been a wave of new interest in his œuvre. This book traces the evolution of the writer’s postcolonial thought from his early works to his groundbreaking autobiographical novel Révolutions, arguably his most subversive text to date. The author shows how Le Clézio’s critique of colonialism is rooted in an early denunciation of capitalism and philosophical dualism, and sheds new light on the crucial roles played by Jean-Paul Sartre, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon in his development.The author’s close reading of Révolutions reveals a complex system of interconnections between the colonial conflicts from the 1700s to the 1900s, with recurrent patterns of violence, cultural repression and racism. The issue of neocolonialism is addressed and the persistence of the colonial mindset in contemporary Europe and Westernized countries is shown to echo the findings of Paul Gilroy, Max Silverman and Étienne Balibar. The book concludes with an examination of the utopian elements underpinning Révolutions, establishing close affinities with the work of Édouard Glissant and developing the notion of permanent revolution. Themes explored include those of storytelling, cultural memory, cultural identity, language, intertextuality and interculturality.

The last three decades have witnessed the proliferation of gay/lesbian-themed films both on our screens and at international film festivals. This trend – termed ‘hypervisibility’ by Julianne Pidduck – has gone far beyond the boundaries of countries with a multicultural tradition and now reaches many territories, including the French-speaking world. What is the narrative and thematic originality of such films in French-speaking contexts? Do such feature films develop problematics and approaches specific to areas such as metropolitan France or Francophone Canada?The sixteen essays included in this collection (six in English and ten in French) aim to answer to such questions by offering in-depth and challenging discussions of film productions from France and Quebec, ranging from Patrice Chéreau’s L’Homme blessé/The Wounded Man (1983) via Josiane Balasko’s Gazon maudit (1995) to Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005). Works by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, Sébastien Lifshitz, Gaël Morel, François Ozon and Léa Pool are also examined.

This book was shortlisted for the R.H. Gapper prize 2011.On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre, in Algiers. Entitled ‘La nouvelle culture méditerranéenne’ (‘The New Mediterranean Culture’), Camus’s lecture has been interpreted in radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression of his so-called ‘Mediterranean humanism’ or as an early indication of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality.These various interpretations are based on reading the text of ‘The New Mediterranean Culture’ in a single context, whether that of Camus’s life and work as a whole, of French discourses on the Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that country). By contrast, this study argues that Camus’s lecture – and in principle any historical text – needs to be seen in a multiplicity of contexts, discursive and otherwise, if readers are to understand properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camus’s lecture as a case study, the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical justification of this ‘multi-contextualist’ approach.

Originating in the conference held at the University of Cambridge in 2009, this collection of essays includes a range of innovative papers from across the diverse field of French and Francophone studies. From medieval texts to the dramatization of the novel, from postcolonial writing to the politics of film and the bande dessinée, the articles in this collection draw on recent developments in the theories of adaptation, translation, and cultural and textual transition. In keeping with these developments, they move the notion of adaptation away from questions of authenticity and fidelity, thinking instead about the movement across texts and time, and the way such movement generates new meanings. Offering insightful approaches to its subjects of study, the book is an engaging contribution to this growing area of research.

This multidisciplinary edited volume examines wide-ranging exchanges between France and its Mediterranean neighbours and their impact. It questions the changing notion of a Mediterranean space and its representation, centrality and relevance in terms of France’s international relations under Sarkozy’s presidency, from the launch of the Union for the Mediterranean and its complex articulations with the European Union’s own agenda in the region, to the tortuous relations with Libya, made even more complicated by the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’. Beyond the realm of state relations and formal policy networks, the volume examines the crucial role played by diasporas, the interplay between postcolonial and transnational representations in the fields of cultural diplomacy, cinema and architecture, and considers how these can produce merged or hybrid identities. Later in the collection, the politics of ethnicity in post-war France, the interplay between negative perceptions of Islam and the changing memory of the Algerian War, and the evolution of Franco-Algerian relations since 1962 are used to question the weight of the colonial past when analysing the relations between France and North Africa.