Böcker i The French List-serien

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When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother, Marie, wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who she describes as a great dinosaur.

A title, in which, the author meditates on a collection of illustrations of sexual imagery, that presents a reflection on the sexual image that psychoanalysis calls "the primal scene" - a concept introduced by Freud as the first sexual scene witnessed by a child; a scene that is unexplained, unforgettable, and ultimately haunting.

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy, semiological essays on mass culture, then unsettled the literary critical establishment with heretical writings on the French classics, before going on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century (Empire of Signs, S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). In 1976, the one-time structuralist 'outsider' was elected to a chair at France's pre-eminent academic institution, the College de France, choosing to style himself its Professor of Literary Semiology, though this last somewhat hedonistic and more 'subjectivist' phase of his intellectual adventure was cut short by his untimely death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since the publication in 2002 of the expanded version of his Oeuvres completes [Complete Works], edited by Eric Marty. The present collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews and other occasional journalistic pieces, all drawn from that comprehensive source, attempts to give English-speaking readers access to the most significant previously untranslated material from the various stages of Barthes's career. It is divided (not entirely scientifically) into five themed volumes entitled: Theory, Politics, Literary Criticism, Signs and Images (Art, Cinema, Photography), and Interviews. Barthes's earliest interest is in literature--in theatre and the classic realist novel, but also in the more experimental writers of the 1940s and 50s (literature of the absurd, nouveau roman etc.). The articles translated in this volume run from his mid-1950s writings on popular poetry, the giants of the nineteenth century novel (Hugo, Maupassant, Zola), and the narrative innovations of Robbe-Grillet and his associates through to writings from his later years on Sade, Rousseau and Voltaire, and the longer study 'Masculine, Feminine, Neuter' which is, in the words of his French editor, the 'first outline' of his remarkable critical work S/Z.

Takes us to the unchartered frontiers of the forbidden. From initiation ceremonies to crises of hysteria, from suicide attempts to the ecstasies of witches, the author explores in simple but scholarly terms the responses that civilizations have offered to the humanistic need for escape from the body.

Tells a story that centers on two young women: Voltairine, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movement of dance, and her soulmate Emile, a young woman recovering from unexpected cardiac arrest. The girls are inseparable, and both their lives have been shattered by the horror of rape.

Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His writing contributed greatly to existentialism, and the term "Kafkaesque" is now synonymous with the literature of the surreal, the complex, and the illogical. This book dives deep into Kafka's mind, examining his motives rather than the results.

The fascinus, or phallus, was at the heart of classical Roman art and life. No god was more represented in ancient Rome than the phallic deity Priapus, and the fescennine verses, one of the earliest forms of Roman poetry, accompanied the celebrations of Priapus, the harvest, and fertility. This title looks closely at this delicate interplay.

Argues that the use of the terms 'war' and 'terror' dehumanize the enemy and permit treatment that would otherwise be impermissible. This title examines the implications and corrupting impact of the attempt to impose 'good' through violence and the attempt to spread democratic values by unethical means.

After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka family find themselves embroiled in the struggle for Polish independence. This is a history of Eastern Europe told in miniature through the tumultuous saga of one family as they try to reclaim their estate.

Rejecting not only the identification of the aesthetic with the work of art, but also the Kantian association of the aesthetic with subjectively universal judgment, the author's analysis of aesthetic relations opens up a space for a theory of art that is free of historicism and capable of engaging with noncanonical and non-Western arts.

In Paris, Montreal, Seville, Berlin, and towns large and small, the author has dreamt - and she has remembered her dreams. In this small volume, she shares her dreams of the years 2008-10, a time of global upheaval that happened to coincide with upheavals in her own life.

Recounts the author's own experiences with totalitarianism in his native Bulgaria, offering a historical look at communism. This title reveals the essence of totalitarian ideology, the characteristics of daily life under communism, and the irony of democratic messianism.

French cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio is best known for his writings on media, technology, and architecture. This title gathers conversations in which Virilio and architectural writer Marianne Brausch look at a 20th century characterized by enormous technological acceleration and by technocultural accidents of barbarism and horror.

By charting the history of the philosophy of conflict in Western discourse, the author offers a critique of contemporary notions of war and terror.