Browse

This critical study focusing exclusively on Annie Ernaux's writing trajectory provides an analysis of her individual texts. Following a broadly feminist hermeneutic, it engages in a series of close readings of Ernaux's works in a move to highlight the contradictions and nuances in her writing, and to demonstrate the intellectual intricacies of her literary project. By so doing, the study seeks to introduce new readers to Ernaux's works, while engaging on less-familiar terrain those already familiar with her writing.

Anti-Empire explores how different writers across Lusophone spaces engage with imperial and colonial power at its various levels of domination, while imagining alternatives to dominant discourses pertaining to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and class. Guided by a theoretically eclectic approach ranging from Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Studies, Empire is explored as a spectrum of contemporary global power inaugurated by European expansion and propagated in the postcolonial present through economic, cultural, and political forces. Through the texts analysed, Anti-Empire offers in-depth interrogations of contemporary power in terms of racial politics, gender performance, socio-economic divisions, political structures, and the intersections of these facets of domination and hegemony. By way of grappling with Empire’s discursive field and charting new modes of producing meaning in opposition to that of Empire, the texts read from Brazil, the Cape Verde Islands, East Timor, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe open new inquiries for Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies while contributing theoretical debates to the study of Lusophone cultures.

Beyond Return examines how popular literary forms have been politicized or could be productively repoliticized in the literary period that we have called the contemporary (roughly: since 1980). In the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), ‘contemporary’ French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’ Beyond Return proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, this book shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of ‘return,’ and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Beyond Return argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the ‘return to the story’ in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.

The most successful female writer from Francophone Africa, Calixthe Beyala occupies an unusual place in French literary and popular culture. Her novels are bestsellers and she appears regularly on French television, yet a conviction for plagiarism has tarnished her reputation. Thus, she is both an ‘authentic’ African author and a proven literary ‘fake’. This book considers representations of Beyala in the media, critical responses to her writing, and Beyala's efforts to position herself as a champion of women's rights. The book pays equal attention to Beyala's novels, tracing their explorations of the role of migration in the creation of personal identity.

This book celebrates the work of the French Nobel prize-winning novelist Claude Simon. Scholars from France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom reconsider the fifty years of Simon's fiction in the light of his large-scale autobiographical novel ‘Le Jardin des Plantes’ (1997). From a variety of perspectives — postmodernist, psychoanalytic, aesthetic — chapters reflect on the central paradox of Simon's work: his writing and rewriting of an experience of war so disruptive and traumatic that words can never be adequate to communicate it. The layers of artifice in ‘Le Jardin des Plantes’ and the nature of Simon's aesthetic are analyzed in chapters which explore intertextual resonances between Simon and Proust, Flaubert, Borges and Poussin. A complementary view of Simon's ‘Photographies 1937–1970’ shows that it too can be seen as form of indirect autobiography.

"The Colonial Fortune" highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence of colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.

At a time when the world is contemplating the depletion of non-renewable natural resources, the consumer society is increasingly being called into question. This is nowhere more acutely evident than in France, where since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the consumer revolution, extending market forces into every area of social and private life, has been perceived as a challenge to core elements in French culture, such as traditional artisan crafts and small businesses serving local communities. Cultural historians and sociologists have charted the increasing commercialisation of everyday life over the twentieth century, but few have paid systematic attention to the crucial testimony provided by the authors of narrative fiction. This book rectifies this omission by means of close readings of a series of novels, selected for their authentic portrayal of consumer behaviour, and analysed in relation to their social, cultural and historical contexts.

In the wake of the Second World War, ideas of Europe abounded. What did Europe mean as a concept, and what did it mean to be European? Europeanising Spaces in Paris, c. 1947-1962 makes the case that Paris was both a leading and distinctive forum for the expression of these ideas in the post-war period. It examines urban, political and cultural spaces in the French capital in which ideas about Europe were formulated, articulated, exchanged, circulated, and contested during this post-war period, roughly between the escalation of the Cold War and the end of France's war of decolonisation in Algeria. The Parisian café, home and street are each examined in terms of how they were implicated in ideas about Europe. Then, the Paris-based Mouvement socialiste des états unis d'Europe (The Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe) and the far-right wing Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (The Federation of Nationalist Students) are examined as examples of political movements that mobilised around–very different–concepts of Europe. The final section on cultural Europeanising spaces draws attention to the specificities of the Europeanism of exiles from Franco's Spain in Paris; the work of the great scholar of the Arab world, Jacques Berque, in the context of his understanding of the Mediterranean world; and finally, the work of the legendary photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, by looking at the capacities and limitations of the photographic medium for the representation of Europe, and how these corresponded with Cartier-Bresson’s commitments.

This is the first full-length study to cover the complete texts of Hervé Guibert (1955–1991), offering a thorough documentation of his literary output. The book is guided by Guibert's relation to the novel, a major line of enquiry throughout, as well as his experimentation with voices in particular. One of the author's main contentions is that Guibert arrives at the creation of a new literary genre, the roman faux, with the publication of his best-known work To the Friend who did not save my life. The book ends by considering the works Guibert produced after he was diagnosed as HIV positive, within the parameter of the voices of the self.

This book draws attention to the existence in France of an AIDS literature from 1985 to 1988 before AIDS writing became either a widely recognized genre or a culturally influential form of writing. It is a predominantly literary critical study, informed by gender studies and psychoanalytic criticism in its readings of individual texts, and interwoven with contextual information.

This book revisits a critical paradigm that has often been overlooked or dismissed by science fiction scholars - namely, that science fiction can be understood in terms of myth. For the purposes of this study, ‘myth’ is defined as an explanatory narrative, and this book builds upon the theory that myth is functionally similar to science: both are concerned with filling in ‘gaps’ in what is known, though the former fills those gaps with cultural logics (or ‘common sense’) while the latter uses testable hypotheses. Science fiction springs from pseudo-science rather than ‘proper’ science, because pseudo-science is more easily converted into narrative; in this book it is argued that different cultures produce distinct pseudo-sciences, and thus, unique science fiction traditions. This framework is used to examine Irish science fiction from the 1850s to the present day, covering material written both in Irish and in English. The author considers science fiction novels and short stories in their historical context, analysing a body of literature that has largely been ignored by Irish literature researchers. This is the first book to focus exclusively on Irish science fiction, and the first to consider Irish-language stories and novels alongside works published in English.

Juan Goytisolo is arguably Spain's foremost contemporary novelist. This book is one of the few major studies in English to examine all of his mature works, from ‘Senas de identidad’ in 1966 to ‘Las semanas del jardin’, published in 1997. It focuses on the interface between the thematic content of the novels and its formal expression, viewing this as the crucial nexus of their meaning. Goytisolo's writing is, in his own words, a ‘commitment of myself … for a transformation of the world.’ This book dissects the nature of the relationship between writer and reader to show how Goytisolo's political commitment is reflected in his work.

Lemography is a unique collection of critical essays on Stanislaw Lem, writer and philosopher hailed on more than one occasion as a literary Einstein. Its aim is to introduce aspects of his work hitherto unknown or neglected by scholarship and evaluate his influence on twentieth-century literature and culture—and beyond. The book’s uniqueness is enhanced by the global makeup of the contributors who hail from Canada, United States, Great Britain, Belorussia, Poland, Croatia, Finland, and Hong Kong. In all cases, these are scholars and translators who for many years have pursued, and in some cases defined, Lem scholarship. Rather than study Lem as a science fiction writer, each essay commands a wider sphere of reference in order to appraise Lem’s literary and philosophical contributions (the ‘philosophy of the future’). Each focuses on a different novel or a set of novels, examining them critically—i.e. with a view to his strengths and weaknesses. Between them, the essays shed light on virtually all phases of Lem’s multidimensional career, from his very first novel Man from Mars right down to the farewell Peace on Earth. In the process, Lemography marks several ‘firsts’ in English: the first overview of Lem’s life and work against the background of political events in postwar Poland; first-time translations from and critical assessments of Lem’s first three novels; a comprehensive analysis of Lem’s best known novel in the context of all of its cinematic adaptations; a sustained critique of Lem as a pioneer of futurology; a critical introduction to Lem’s supercomputer; and a comparative discussion of the last two novels he ever wrote.

This is the first critical study in English to focus exclusively on the work of Marie NDiaye, born in central France in 1967, winner of the Prix Femina (2001), the Prix Goncourt (2009), shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2013), and widely considered to be one of the most important French authors of her generation. Andrew Asibong argues that at the heart of NDiaye’s world lurks an indefinable ‘blankness’ which makes it impossible for the reader to decode narrative at the level of psychology or event. NDiaye’s texts explore social stigmata and familial disintegration with a violence unmatched by any of her contemporaries, but in doing so they remain as strangely affectless, split-off and ‘unrecognizable’ as their dissociated protagonists. Considering each of NDiaye’s works in chronological order (including her novels, theatre, short fiction and writing for children), Asibong assesses the aesthetic, emotional and political stakes of NDiaye’s portraits of impenetrable selfhood. His book provides an original and provocative literary-critical, psychoanalytic and psychosocial framework within which to read NDiaye as a simultaneously hybrid and hyper-French cultural figure, fascinating and fantastical practitioner of the postmodern – and reluctantly postcolonial – ‘blank arts’.

In English-speaking countries, Francophone comic strips like Herges' ‘Les Aventures de Tin Tin’ and Goscinny and Uderzo's ‘Les Aventures d'Asterix’ are viewed — and marketed — as children's literature. But in Belgium and France, their respective countries of origin, such strips — known as bandes dessinées — are considered a genuine art form, or, more specifically, ‘the ninth art’. But what accounts for the drastic difference in the way such comics are received? This book explores that difference in the reception and reputation of bandes dessinées. Along with in-depth looks at Tintin and Asterix, the book considers other major comics artists such as Jacque Tardi, Jean Giraud and Moebius, assessing in the process their role in Francophone literary and artistic culture.

Michel Tournier is a writer who explores complex philosophical questions in the guise of concrete, imagistic narratives. This comprehensive study privileges the notion of literary reference, by which the world of text is understood or experienced in metaphorical relation to the world outside of it. Metaphor, in the context of Tournier's fiction, shows how the fantastic merges with the real to provide new perspectives on many diverse aspects of the modern world: the Crusoe myth, Nazism, the value to society of art and religion, and the nature of education. This book elucidates an aesthetic of Tournier's fiction that encompasses the writer's stated ambition to go beyond literature.

This book argues that contemporary Haitian literature historicizes the political and environmental problems brought to the surface by the 2010 earthquake by building on texts of earlier generations, notably at the end of the Duvalier era and its aftermath. Haitian writers have made profound contributions to debates about the converging paths of political crises and natural catastrophes, yet their writings on the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism are often neglected in heated debates about environmental futures. The earthquake only exacerbated this contradiction. Despite the fact that Haitian authors have long treated the connections between political violence, social and economic precariousness, and ecological degradation, in media coverage around the world, the earthquake would have suddenly exposed scandalous conditions on the ground in Haiti. Informed by Haitian studies and models of postcolonial ecocriticism, the book conceives of literature as an “eco-archive,” or a body of texts that depicts ecological change over time and its impact on social and environmental justice. Focusing equally on established and less well-known authors, this study contends that the eco-archive challenges future-oriented, universalizing narratives of the Anthropocene and the global refugee crisis with portrayals of different forms and paths of migration and refuge within Haiti and around the Americas.

This book is a study of aspects of 1890s French literature, with specific reference to the traditions of Symbolism and Decadence. Its main focus is Alfred Jarry, who has proved, perhaps surprisingly, to be one of the more durable fin–de–siècle authors. The originality of this study lies in its use of the enigmatic list of books termed the livres pairs, which appears in Jarry's 1898 novel Gestes et Opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien, his best–known prose work. The greatest interest of the livres pairs lies in a group of works by Jarry's friends and contemporaries, primarily Leon Bloy, Georges Darien, Gustave Kahn, Catulle Mendes, Josephin Madan, Rachilde, and Henri de Regnier. Several of these authors feature as the lords of islands visited by the pataphysician Dr Faustroll in his curious voyage around Paris. In conjunction with Jarry's own works, the contemporary livres pairs serve to illustrate the vibrant and experimental atmosphere in which these authors worked.

Taking nine case studies from the French-speaking world, this book attempts to define the interaction between non-fictional written text (captions, essays, fragments, poems) and photographic image. Considering three categories of intermediality between text and photography, it concludes that the dimensions of their interaction are complex.

The authors studied in this book represent a Francophone archipelago unfamiliar to any mapmaker, but drawn together through their use of narrators who are survivors and, sometimes, inflictors, of unspeakable acts of violence. These authors then repair trauma through the act of writing. The reparative narratives introduced here require that readers be prepared to accept that healing belongs to a whole realm of potential outcomes – and that exposure and denunciation do not exhaust the victim's range of possibilities. The author contends that this context-specific, yet repeating, pattern constitutes a response to our contemporary understanding of both globalized and extremely localized types of traumatic memories.