Böcker i Modern French Identities-serien

The journal, periodical or revue has a long and largely unexplored history. This volume aims, through a series of focused case studies, to explore the twentieth-century periodical publication in French, offering an overview of some of its most important manifestations and providing a general reflection on this complex textual form.

Pierre Michon is one of France¿s most significant contemporary writers. Since the publication in 1984 of his first book, Vies minuscules, Michon¿s work has never ceased to evade generic classifications. His work ingests books, lives and thought and probes their complex interrelationship and those moments of convergence that transform an ordinary name into that of an ¿Author¿ or of an ¿Artist¿. The contents of Michon¿s work are well documented: they are drawn from canonical novels, chronicles, archives and the biographies of artists¿ lives and are worked into cross-generic forms that revive names and make us rethink the uncertainty of literature. Less has been written of his engagement with avant-garde thought. The legacy of French avant-garde thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the work of Roland Barthes, informs Michon¿s work. Barthes¿s notions of the referent, of intertextuality and of authorship, for example, are transposed, reconfigured and sometimes contested within Michon¿s work. In this way, Barthes¿s name, the afterlife of his thought, remains encrypted within Michon¿s prose. This book situates and reads Michon¿s texts through the complex inscription and transformation of names drawn from the Creuse, literature, art and avant-garde thought. And it is within this matrix that Michon puts in play his own name and its uncertain relation to literature.

The notion of «exposure» underlies much modern thinking about identity, representation, ethics, desire and sexuality. This provocative notion is explored in a collection of essays selected from, and inspired by, the proceedings of a conference held in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge in 2002. The authors engage with exposure as both object and mode of representation in a range of cultural media: literature, critical theory, visual art and film. They analyse a variety of works from the medieval, early-modern, and modern periods, examining not only canonical texts such as Montaigne¿s Essais but also lesser-studied works such as the psychoanalytic theory of Didier Anzieu, the photomontage self-portraits of Claude Cahun, and the novel La Nouvelle Pornographie by Marie Nimier. This volume thus both illustrates and, more importantly, interrogates the richness of the term «exposure», in a way that is stimulating for students and researchers alike.

This book argues that changes in sensory relationships, often claimed to be symptoms of 21st-century technology, are not as recent as they may seem. The author analyses how 'haptic' sensory interactions (simultaneous manifestations of tactile and visual sensation) are portrayed in the work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Serres.

Cet ouvrage propose une etude de la question du genre dans l'oeuvre d'Agota Kristof, ecrivaine suisse francophone d'origine hongroise. La preponderance des narrateurs masculins dans sa prose suggere la superiorite du masculin.

Picturing the end of the world is an enduring cultural practice. This groundbreaking collection of essays offers an overview of the Apocalyptic imagination in French literature and culture from the thirteenth century to the present day, scrutinizing material as diverse as medieval French biblical commentaries and science fiction.

This volume explores the relationship between Francophone women and the material world. Topics include: the female body and objectification; contradictions of the im/materiality of the body; 'the material' and women's engagement with the economy; the relationship of the female body to material objects; cinematic representations of the female body.

Highlights the capacity of Darrieussecq's texts both to confront contemporary social issues, such as national identity and the role of women, and examine the complex relationship between language and reality. It also highlights the significant questions that Darrieussecq's texts raise about the ways in which we perceive and narrate the world.

Explores the work of two major twentieth-century artists by placing them in critical proximity. This book offers an approach to film-philosophy scholarship by embracing the cinematic as an inspiring channel through which to rethink our relationship with film and also with literature and, potentially, with art at large.

France and the Mediterranean

Based on papers delivered at the group's tenth biennial conference in Leeds, which was entitled 'Le parcours', this volume investigates the theme of trajectories in French and Francophone women's lives and writings. It addresses the presence of women in public spaces such as journalism, politics and the street.

Cinematic Queerness

What are the thematic and aesthetic convergences/divergences of such visual productions? Do such works develop problematics and approaches specific to areas such as metropolitan France or French-speaking Canada? This book includes eleven essays to answer these questions.