Böcker i Modern French Identities-serien

Queneaüs novels are extremely popular for their wit and linguistic ingenuity but they also pose a serious challenge to the reader¿s reconstruction of the fictional world, which can often go unrecognised. This study takes us back to the fundamental elements of Queneaüs worlds, demonstrating how his idiosyncratic style can affect the reader¿s mental processing of the text (¿world-building¿). It also demonstrates the internal organisation of Queneaüs fictional worlds. Drawing on cognitive discourse models and the philosophical notion of ¿possible worlds¿, the book provides both comparative and general analysis of Queneaüs novels and case studies of Le Vol d¿Icare, Les Fleurs bleues, and Loin de Rueil, exposing the resistance that these worlds present to stable cognitive reconstruction, notably through the subversion of world boundaries (¿world-play¿), and the positing of impossible spaces (¿heterotopiae¿).

This volume, containing selected papers from a conference held by the Department of French in the University of Cambridge in 1999, addresses the exciting and challenging figure of the shifting border in modern French literature and literary theory. Using a variety of critical approaches, the contributors map the fluctuating borders in specific literary texts and explore how these moving boundaries reflect on their practice of literary analysis. Inspired by the ideas of European and American thinkers, including Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Jean-François Lyotard, they consider three major areas of current concern: the construction of identity, the conceptualisation of literary genres and the demarcation of geographical and cultural domains. Applying their insights to a wide-ranging corpus of francophone texts, this volume analyses the work both of canonical figures such as Mallarmé, Proust and Zola and of lesser-known writers such as Aimé Césaire, Assia Djebar and St. John Perse.

"Poetics of the Antilles" explores the poetry and thought of four major Francophone Caribbean writers: Perse, Cesaire, Fanon and Glissant. The book portrays the complex history of the negritude movements in light of Fanon's critique and reveals the original aesthetic ideas and philosophical reflections on which these authors' rich production rests.

The composition of aesthetic beauty and its necessary correlation with the counterparts of ugliness and monstrosity have been the primary concerns of artists and philosophers through the ages. This title offers a fresh range of perspectives on a fundamental transgeneric and transdisciplinary topic.

Investigates the speech of learners at upper-intermediate and advanced stages of acquisition of French to provide a holistic view of the way individuals use the language resources available to them to stake a claim to a new multilingual identity in their target language networks.

Guilt and Shame

What does contemporary French poetry do to the subject? This book examines the means and effects of the subject's transmutation into various processes of (de-)subjectivation by looking at the works of four contemporary writers: Christian Prigent, Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot and Hubert Lucot.

Few full-length studies exist in English on French-speaking authors from Belgium. What, if any, are the particular features of francophone Belgian writing? This book explores questions of cultural and literary identity, and offers an overview of currents in critical debate regarding the place of francophone Belgian writing and its relationship to its larger neighbour, but also engages with broader questions concerning the classification of ¿francophone¿ literature. The study brings together well-known and less well-known modern and contemporary writers (Suzanne Lilar, Neel Doff, Dominique Rolin, Jacqueline Harpman, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Jean Muno, Nicole Malinconi, and Amélie Nothomb) whose works share a number of recurring themes and features, notably a preoccupation with questions of identity and alterity. Overall, the study highlights the diverse ways in which these questions of cultural identity and alterity emerge as a dominant theme throughout the corpus, viewed through a series of literary and cultural frameworks which bring together perspectives both local and global.

Shows a world of violence and tension, a world where people find it hard to be at ease, so that life becomes a process of disease. This book foregrounds Houellebecq's scrutiny of our various attempts to confront and transcend the fundamental reality of the human condition, in particular the horror of death.

The globalisation of culture and the shifting nature of national identities have propelled the stakes of memory and identity to the forefront of current intellectual debates. In recent years, the works of the Algerian francophone author Assia Djebar have reflected a growing preoccupation with the role of memory in forging a sense of individual as well as collective identity. This study traces the interrelated motifs of memory and identity in Djebar¿s novels, arguing the centrality of these themes to her literary project. An interdisciplinary theoretical framework positions Djebar¿s corpus in the wider context of philosophical and psychoanalytical debates on memory and identity. Djebar reveals that much more is at stake in discussions of the interrelationship between memory and identity than concerns of a mere cultural nature. In postcolonial Algeria, repressed memories of Algeriäs colonial past are revealed as instrumental to the genealogy of the current Algerian conflict; in this context, Djebar¿s poetics of memory become a ¿devoir de mémoire¿, an appeal for a revised Algerian historiography in which the individual takes pride of place.

Constitutes collection of essays arises from the 2005 Cambridge French Graduate Conference on the theme of threat.

What effect did the new scientific theories of colour harmony, filtered through his conversations with Delacroix and other artists, have on Baudelaire? Why did he see Daumier as a colourist, but not Ingres? What made him turn his back on French art in 1859 and which artist changed his mind? This book deals with these questions.

Examines the flourishing of intertextuality, as well as the use of traditional forms, such as mythical structures and the 'robinsonade', to undermine authoritative 'metarecits'. This book examines a wide variety of prose genres, from pornography to Bildungsroman to magic realism, as well as poetry.

The end of the British Raj, and the creation of the two states of India and Pakistan in August 1947, is a recognizable narrative within British Anglophone culture and colonial history. In contrast, the persistence of the five French trading posts, or comptoirs, on the Indian subcontinent until 1954 remains largely ignored by both French and British historians of French colonialism and the popular culture of the Hexagone. In examining metropolitan French-language representations of Indian decolonization, this book demonstrates the importance of the British imperial loss in 1947 as a reference point within French cultural production. The critical investigation into the strategies of representation used problematizes existing Anglophone theoretical models, by critics such as Said, Bhabha and Spivak, for the analysis of colonial discourse. It reveals that French-language representations of Indian decolonization cannot be fully appreciated without engaging methodologically with France¿s politically subordinate status in India. The book thus challenges the commonly accepted binary between colonizer and colonized, proposing in its place a triangular model composed of the colonized (India), the ¿subaltern¿ colonizer (France), and the dominant colonizer (Britain). Through a systematic critical evaluation of the range of texts (journalistic, intellectual, political, and literary) produced in metropolitan France by authors such as Romain Rolland, Jean Rous, Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément and Marguerite Duras, the book challenges the current postcolonial orthodoxy that the story of Indian decolonization is solely an Anglophone space.

« Ce n¿est pas la poésie qui doit être libre, c¿est le poète. » A legendary figure within the Surrealist movement, Robert Desnos (1900-1945) has left a unique legacy as a poet of distinction, as a ¿dormeur éveillé¿ revered by his fellow Surrealists, and as a free spirit par excellence. In celebrating Desnos¿s unique creative voice, this book re-evaluates his prominence within and beyond the Surrealist movement, reappraises his status as a poet, and sheds new light on his contribution to the literary and cultural life of his age. The essays in the volume reflect the ongoing vitality and relevance of Desnos¿s poetry and the originality of his contribution to the various other forms of expression in which he excelled: journalism, short stories, script-writing and song-writing. Desnos¿s extensive writings on art and artists, his active involvement in avant-garde film and his close associations with a number of renowned painters are also addressed. This fresh look at Desnos¿s activities and contexts includes an interview with the artist Georges Malkine¿s daughter, Fern Malkine-Falvey, and a study of the memoirs of Desnos¿s wife, Youki. The volume closes with a rare collection of journalistic writings by Desnos which appeared in Le Soir in the late 1920s and have never appeared in print since their original publication.