Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture
Author: Alexandra Hughes
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2002-03-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134788657

More than 700 alphabetically organized entries by an international team of contributors provide a fascinating survey of French culture post 1945. Entries include: * advertising * Beur cinema * Coco Chanel * decolonization * écriture feminine * football * francophone press * gay activism * Seuil * youth culture Entries range from short factual/biographical pieces to longer overview articles. All are extensively cross-referenced and longer entries are 'facts-fronted' so important information is clear at a glance. It includes a thematic contents list, extensive index and suggestions for further reading. The Encyclopedia will provide hours of enjoyable browsing for all francophiles, and essential cultural context for students of French, Modern History, Comparative European Studies and Cultural Studies.

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies
Author: Kristin Ross
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 1996-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780262680912

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts—automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism—as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel

The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel
Author: Timothy Unwin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 1997-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139825356

This volume offers a unique and valuable insight into the novel in French over the past two centuries. In a series of essays, acknowledged experts discuss a variety of topics including nineteenth-century realism, women and fiction, popular fiction, experiment and innovation, war and the Holocaust, the Francophone novel, and postmodern fiction. They offer a challenging reassessment of major figures, while deliberately reading traditional views of literary history against the grain. Theoretical discussion is combined with close reading of texts and exploration of context, comparison with other genres and other literatures, and reference to novels from earlier periods. This companionable introduction includes a chronology and guide to further reading. From it emerges a strong sense of the vitality and energy of the modern French novel, and of the debates surrounding it.

The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature

The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature
Author: Eva M. Sartori
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 673
Release: 1999-07-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0313033455

The earliest known literary productions by women living in Europe were probably written by French writers. As early as the 12th century, women troubadours in the south of France were writing poems. French women continued writing through the ages, their number increasing as education became more available to women of all classes. And yet, of the great number of works by women writers who preceded the current feminist movement, very few have survived. A few writers such as Marie de France, George Sand, and Simone de Beauvoir became part of the canon. But critics, mostly male, had judged the works of only a few women writers worthy of recognition. As part of the feminist move to reclaim women writers and to rethink literary history, scholars in French literature began to take a new look at women writers who had been popular during their lifetimes but who had not been admitted into the canon. This reference book provides extensive information about French women writers and the world in which they lived. Included are several hundred alphabetically arranged entries for authors; literary genres, such as the novel, poetry, and the short story; literary movements, such as classicism, realism, and surrealism; life-cycle events particular to women, such as menstruation and menopause; events and institutions which affected women differently than men, such as revolutions, wars, and laws on marriage, divorce, and education. The volume spans French literature from the Middle Ages to the present and covers those writers who lived and worked mainly in France. The entries are written by expert contributors and each includes bibliographical information. The entries focus on each writer's awareness of how her gender shaped her outlook and opportunities, on how categorizations, structures, and terms used to describe literary works have been defined for women, and the ways in which women writers have responded to these definitions. The volume begins with a feminist history of French literature and concludes with a selected, general bibliography and a chronology of women writers.

Paris and the Fetish

Paris and the Fetish
Author: Alistair Rolls
Publisher: Rodopi
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2014-01-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9401210268

Freud’s 1927 essay on the acquisition of a screen memory, or fetish, allows the subject to come to terms with the traumatic truth that, for him, dominates the present moment (in Freud’s scenario, the truth of mother’s sexuality) by maintaining, alongside and not in place of it, a parallel story of the past (the myth of the phallic mother). In this book Freud’s theory of the fetish, and in particular this way of allowing two opposed and ostensibly mutually exclusive narratives to co-exist, is used to provide a number of Parisian crime texts with radical new solutions. The fetishistic world-view of Charles Baudelaire’s poetics will be shown to provide the template for all overvalued instances of women passing by; notably, it will be seen how the famous assault on one of Christian Dior’s models as she displayed the New Look for the first time in Montmartre in 1947 depends on a fetish erected in the poem “À une passante”. The same Paris streets allow red herrings to be raised to the status of truth in novels by Fred Vargas, Léo Malet and Frédéric Cathala. In these texts the discovery of a primal scene allows doubt to be cast over authorial solutions and new murderers or victims to be found. In the case of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, the fetishism at work is shown to have harboured a serial killer where no crime was previously considered to have taken place. In these analyses, fetishism is mapped onto prose poetics, intertextuality and deconstruction in order to challenge the way we read text. More importantly, rereading these texts allows us to see fetishism in a new light as a force for positive, creative acts of meaning-making. Alistair Rolls is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of The Flight of the Angels: Intertextuality in Four Novels by Boris Vian (Rodopi, 1999) and, with Deborah Walker, of French and American Noir: Dark Crossings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

On Both Sides of the Tracks

On Both Sides of the Tracks
Author: Morgane Cadieu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2024
Genre: French fiction
ISBN: 0226830365

An analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes. Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu's study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation. Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem.

The Condition of Women in France

The Condition of Women in France
Author: Claire Laubier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 113497003X

Intended for the language student, this is a collection of documentary and statistical materials taken from adverts, newspapers, etc. Each extract relates to the different experiences of French women at work, at home and in politics.

Textual Liberation (Routledge Revivals)

Textual Liberation (Routledge Revivals)
Author: Helena Forsas-Scott
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2014-11-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317578147

Feminist writing has emerged in recent years as a major influence of twentieth-century European literature. Textual Liberation, first published in 1991, provides a timely and wide-ranging survey of twentieth-century feminist writing in Europe, presenting texts from a number of countries and highlighting some of the transnational parallels and contrasts. The contributors emphasize the wider contexts- political, social, economic- in which the texts were produced. They cover feminist literature in Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, Eastern Europe, Russia, France, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, and consider a range of genres, including the novel, poetry, drama, essays, and journalism. Each chapter contains an extensive bibliography with special emphasis on material available in English. A stimulating introduction to the development of European feminist writing, Textual Liberation will be an invaluable resource for students of women’s literature, women’s studies, and feminism.

The Patagonian Hare

The Patagonian Hare
Author: Claude Lanzmann
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2015-06-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0857898752

The unforgettable memoir of 70 years of contemporary and personal history from the great French filmmaker, journalist and intellectual Claude Lanzmann Born to a Jewish family in Paris, 1925, Lanzmann's first encounter with radicalism was as part of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. He and his father were soldiers of the underground until the end of the war, smuggling arms and making raids on the German army. After the liberation of France, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, making money as a student in surprising ways (by dressing as a priest and collecting donations, and stealing philosophy books from bookshops). It was in Paris however, that he met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It was a life-changing meeting. The young man began an affair with the older de Beauvoir that would last for seven years. He became the editor of Sartre's political-literary journal, Les Temps Modernes—a position which he holds to this day—and came to know the most important literary and philosophical figures of postwar France. And all this before he was 30 years old. Written in precise, rich prose of rare beauty, organized—like human recollection itself—in interconnected fragments that eschew conventional chronology, and describing in detail the making of his seminal film Shoah, The Patagonian Hare becomes a work of art, more significant, more ambitious than mere memoir. In it, Lanzmann has created a love song to life balanced by the eye of a true auteur.

Immigration in Post-War France

Immigration in Post-War France
Author: Alec G. Hargreaves
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2022-11-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000777499

Immigration in Post-War France (1987) presents a collection of articles, illustrations and other data, covering everything from politics and education to religion and rock music, that examine the experience of North African immigrants to France. The extensive selection of documents include opinion polls, newspaper articles, academic analyses, cartoons, political posters, maps, tables and photographs. Together, they reflect the views of a wide cross-section of the French and immigrant communities.