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Transpositions examines a variety of new Euro-Mediterranean literary, cinematic, artistic, and musical works that are inspired in many senses by the movements of contemporary migration. Divided into four parts, the collective volume focuses first on diverse representations of migration in chapters that explore “Mediterranean Crossings.” It then turns to questions of translation, multilingualism, and plurality in chapters united under the heading “Multilingual Aesthetics and Poetics.” In reflections on creative expression in genres ranging from theatrical works to films to the fine arts, the third section titled “Performance Arts” is devoted to migration and exile. The final portion of the publication, “Musical Movements,” focuses on music as a form of composition as well as a the thematic and stylistic influence on depictions of displacement, underscoring its capacity to add multiple layers of meaning to the migratory experience. Transpositions is attentive to the innovative forms of French—to new Francophonies—that are emerging in recent texts wherein authors and artists are compelled to transpose migratory realities into a different linguistic and cultural context. The works that embody transpositions into French may not be fully comprehensible to the reader or the listener since these films, plays, pieces of art, musical compositions, and written publications are so often situated beyond the borders of what is customary. They nonetheless communicate a great deal as they incorporate new, inventive elements that push the limits of formal composition to speak to—and represent—an expanding audience, and this volume revels in these new creations.

Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones offers fertile reflection on the dynamics of linguistic diversity and multifaceted literary translation flows taking place across the Iberian Peninsula. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical perspectives from a comparative standpoint and on a historically diverse body of case studies, the volume’s sixteen chapters explore the key role of translation in shaping interliterary relations and cultural identities within Iberia. Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone metaphor is used as an overarching concept to approach Iberia as a translation(al) space where languages and cultural systems (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish) set up relationships either of conflict, coercion, and resistance or of collaboration, hospitality, and solidarity. In bringing together a variety of essays by multilingual scholars whose conceptual and empirical research places itself at the intersection of translation and literary Iberian studies, the book opens up a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry: Iberian translation studies. This allows for a renewed study of canonical authors such as Joan Maragall, Fernando Pessoa, Camilo José Cela, and Bernardo Atxaga, and calls attention to emerging bilingual contemporary voices. In addition to addressing understudied genres (the entremez and the picaresque novel) and the specific phenomena of self-translation, indirect translation, and collaborative translation, the book provides fresh insights into Iberian cultural agents, mediators, and institutions such as publishing houses and theatre companies. Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones is indispensable reading for those interested in Iberian studies, translation studies, in particular the history of translation in the Iberian Peninsula, and comparative literature.

Life as Creative Constraint is the first book to focus on the extraordinary life- writing of the French experimental writing group, the Oulipo. The Oulipo’s enthusiasm for literary games and formal gymnastics has seen its work caricatured as ‘lifeless’ – impressively virtuoso but more interested in form than content and ultimately disengaged from the world. This book examines a broad corpus of work by Georges Perec, Marcel Bénabou, Jacques Roubaud, and Anne F. Garréta to show that, despite the group’s early devotion to the radical impersonality of mathematics, later generations of Oulipians have brought the group’s fascination with systems, games, and constraints to bear on autobiography. Far from being ‘lifeless’, Oulipian constraints and concepts provide the tools that allow writers to engage critically and creatively with lived experience, and mine the potential of the autobiographical genre. The games played by these writers are not simply pastimes or cunning writing techniques, but modes of survival, self-examination, self-invention, and relating to the world and to others. As the title of Georges Perec’s masterpiece suggests, they are a mode d’emploi for life.

The formulation ‘egalitarian strangeness’ is a direct borrowing from Courts voyages au pays du peuple [Short Voyages to the Land of the People] (1990), a set of essays by the contemporary French thinker Jacques Rancière. Perhaps best known for his theory of radical equality as set out in Le Maître ignorant [The Ignorant Schoolmaster] (1987), Rancière reflects on ways in which a hierarchical social order based on inequality can come to be unsettled. In the democracy of literature, for example, words and sentences, he argues, serve to capture any life and make that available to any reader. The present book explores embedded forms of social and cultural ‘apportionment’ in a range of modern and contemporary French texts (including prose fiction, socially engaged commentary, and autobiography), while also identifying scenes of class disturbance and egalitarian encounter. Part One considers the ‘refrain of class’ audible in works by Claude Simon, Charles Péguy, Thierry Beinstingel, Marie Ndiaye, and Gabriel Gauny. It also examines how these authors’ practices of language connect with that refrain. In Part Two, Hughes analyses forms of domination and dressage with reference to Simone Weil’s mid-1930s factory journal, Paul Nizan’s novel of class alienation Antoine Bloyé from the same decade, and Pierre Michon’s Vies minuscules [Small Lives] (1984) with its focus on obscure rural lives. The reflection on how these narratives draw into contiguity antagonistic identities is extended in Part Three, where individual chapters on Proust and the contemporary authors François Bon and Didier Eribon show enduring forms of cultural distribution being both consolidated and contested.

The Culture of War explores the unexpected flourishing of literature both high and low during the Siege of Paris at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871. When Prussian forces completely blockaded Paris, isolating the city from the outside world, Parisians turned to literature to resist the enemy, to fill the idle hours under siege, and to articulate their place in history. This cultural boom was a conscious effort on the part of literary institutions like newspapers, publishers, and theaters to ensure the viability of their industries during a period of political uncertainty. To do so, many publishers, editors, and directors sought legitimacy through populism, promoting literature written by anonymous and unknown authors or that spoke to populist ideas. A study of national tragedy on a local scale, The Culture of War goes beyond traditional narratives of communal or individual psychology, and studies institutional responses to financial and political instability, viewing literature as a product of economic and political forces.

The chapters in this book respond to important questions about the formal properties of French literary texts and the agency of form. A central feature of twentieth- and twenty-first century French and Francophone writing has been the exploration of how cultural forms (literary, philosophical and visual) create distinctive semiotic environments and at the same time engage with external realities. The aim of this volume is to explore how the formal properties of a range of texts inflect our reading of them and, through that exploration, to renew the engagement with form that has been a key feature of French cultural production and of analysis in French studies.

This book pursues the specific case of Italian travel narratives in the Far East, through a focus on the experience of Japan in works by writers who visited the Land of the Rising Sun beginning in the Meiji period (1868-1912) and during the concomitant opening of Japan’s relations with the West. Drawing from the fields of Postcolonial and Transnational Studies, analysis of these texts explores one central question: what does it mean to imagine Japanese culture as contributing to Italian culture? Each author shares in common an attempt to disrupt ideas about dichotomies and unbalanced power relationships between East and West. Proposing the notion of ‘relational Orientalism,’ this book suggests that Italian travelogues to Japan, in many cases, pursued the goal of building imaginary transnational communities, predicated on commonalities and integration, by claiming what they perceived as ‘Oriental’ as their own. In contrast with a long history of Western representations of Japan as inferior and irrational, Searching for Japan identifies a positive overarching attitude toward the Far East country in modern Italian culture. Expanding the horizon of Italian transnational networks, normally situated within the Southern European region, this book reinstates the existence of an alternative Euro-Asian axis, operating across Italian history.

Eating and drinking are essential to survival. Yet for human animals, they are ambivalent, proliferating with ideological, historical and psychological leftovers. This study reveals and mobilizes the provisional meanings, repressed experiences and unacknowledged tensions bound up with representations of food, drink and their consumption. It creates a flexible critical framework by bringing together an unexploited convergence of post-war French thinkers who use – or whose thought is legible through – figures of eating and drinking, including Barthes, Bataille, Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Certeau, Cixous, Derrida, Fischler, Giard, Kristeva, Lacan, Lefebvre, Lévi-Strauss, Mayol and Sartre. New combinations emerge for elucidating the intersecting effects of: incorporation; constructs of class, gender and racial difference; bad faith; distinction; secondary ideological signifying systems; provisional meanings bound up with linguistic traces; economies of excess; everyday ‘making-do’; the ethics of consuming the other; the return of the repressed; lack; abjection; notions of ‘eating on the sly’, ‘mother’s milk’, the ‘omnivore’s paradox’ and ‘gastro-anomie’. Possibilities for re-thinking with eating and drinking are further exemplified in cases studies of novels in which – often beyond authorial intentions – food and drink are structurally important and interpretatively plural: Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes/The Erasers (1953); Ernaux’s Les Armoires vides/Cleaned Out (1974); Darrieussecq’s Truismes/Pig Tales (1996); and Houellebecq’sLa Carte et le territoire/The Map and the Territory (2010). New understandings of post-war French cultural production are revealed. But above all, the analyses demonstrate the potential – across genres, periods and places – for literary, comparative, cultural, film, gender and food studies of re-thinking with eating and drinking.

This volume examines how, why and with what success smaller European literatures – written in less well-known languages from less familiar traditions – endeavour through translation to reach international readers. It argues that prevailing nation- and world-centred theoretical approaches have failed to provide an adequate understanding of the international circulation of these literatures, and instead advocates and models a comparative, interdisciplinary approach that consistently tests theory against concrete experience and practice, and combines literary, historiographical and translation methodologies to produce a far more precise analysis of the strategies, motivations, obstacles and patterns that emerge as these literatures strive to be heard. Through case studies drawn from over thirteen national contexts from Scandinavia and the Low Countries to the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe, the volume analyses how the international perceptions of these literatures are disadvantaged and distorted in theory, reception and industry practice, evaluates successes and failures as these literatures, through state and third-sector intervention and individual innovation, attempt to overcome their marginalization, and charts how the mould of our perception of these literatures might be broken.

By confronting the singularity of the relationship between two exemplary writers of the last century, this book challenges and reinvigorates our notions of what art and criticism – literary or otherwise – can do. While it takes Roland Barthes’s encounters with Marcel Proust’s monumental masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu as its specific focus, the implications of its argument are far-reaching. Indeed, the book argues that Barthes’s writing on Proust’s work between the early 1950s and 1980 (including a substantial set of unpublished notes for a seminar delivered at the University of Rabat in 1969–1970) proposes not only a critical culture of Proust that is productively inconsistent, but also, more generally, a fresh understanding of criticism as a creative activity that embraces insecurity and variation as it refuses to remain fixed upon reassuringly stable themes, meanings and interpretations.