The Quebec Connection

The Quebec Connection
Author: Julie-Françoise Tolliver
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 397
Release: 2020-12-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813944902

From the 1950s to the 1970s, the idea of independence inspired radical changes across the French-speaking world. In The Quebec Connection, Julie-Françoise Tolliver examines the links and parallels that writers from Quebec, the Caribbean, and Africa imagined to unite that world, illuminating the tropes they used to articulate solidarities across the race and class differences that marked their experience. Tolliver argues that the French tongue both enabled and delimited connections between these writers, restricting their potential with the language’s own imperial history. The literary map that emerges demonstrates the plurality of French-language literatures, going beyond the concept of a single, unitary francophone literature to appreciate the profuse range of imaginaries connected by solidary texts that hoped for transformative independence. Importantly, the book expands the "francophone" framework by connecting African and Caribbean literatures to Québécois literature, attending to their interactions while recognizing their particularities. The Quebec Connection’s analysis of transnational francophone solidarities radically alters the field of francophone studies by redressing the racial logic that isolates the northern province from what has come to be called the postcolonial world.

The Francophone World

The Francophone World
Author: Michelle Beauclair
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2003
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN:

The Francophone World: Cultural Issues and Perspectives introduces readers to French-speaking communities across the globe and offers a perspective on the cultures that have developed in the wake of French exploration and colonization. This book explores the French influence in West Africa, the diversity of cultures within the Caribbean, the Francophone communities of North America, and the plight of North African immigrants living in France. Through these interdisciplinary essays and the discussion questions that follow them, readers can examine such wide-ranging topics as the media in Francophone West Africa, the special status of women writers in Senegal, and the mix of cultures in Martinique and French Guiana. This book also highlights the transition into modernity in Burkina Faso, the theater of Aimé Césaire, literature and culture in Québec, and the French presence in the northeastern United States.

Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature

Voices of Exile in Contemporary Canadian Francophone Literature
Author: Elizabeth Dahab
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2010-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 073911879X

Ever since Bessie Smith's powerful voice conspired with the "race records" industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women's singing. In Black Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s, Black Resonance reveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith's blues and Richard Wright's neglected film of Native Son, Mahalia Jackson's gospel music and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers. The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women, Black Resonance offers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century's most beloved and challenging voices.

French Global

French Global
Author: Christie McDonald
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 572
Release: 2010
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0231147414

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.

When The World Spoke French

When The World Spoke French
Author: Marc Fumaroli
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 561
Release: 2011-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1590173759

A New York Review Books Original During the eighteenth century, from the death of Louis XIV until the Revolution, French culture set the standard for all of Europe. In Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, Russia, and Germany, among kings and queens, diplomats, military leaders, writers, aristocrats, and artists, French was the universal language of politics and intellectual life. In When the World Spoke French, Marc Fumaroli presents a gallery of portraits of Europeans and Americans who conversed and corresponded in French, along with excerpts from their letters or other writings. These men and women, despite their differences, were all irresistibly attracted to the ideal of human happiness inspired by the Enlightenment, whose capital was Paris and whose king was Voltaire. Whether they were in Paris or far away, speaking French connected them in spirit with all those who desired to emulate Parisian tastes, style of life, and social pleasures. Their stories are testaments to the appeal of that famous “sweetness of life” nourished by France and its language.

Francophone Literature as World Literature

Francophone Literature as World Literature
Author: Christian Moraru
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2020-07-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501347144

Francophone Literature as World Literature examines French-language works from a range of global traditions and shows how these literary practices draw individuals, communities, and their cultures and idioms into a planetary web of tension and cross-fertilization. The Francophone corpus under scrutiny here comes about in the evolving, markedly relational context provided by these processes and their developments during and after the French empire. The 15 chapters of this collection delve into key aspects, moments, and sites of the literature flourishing throughout the francosphere after World War II and especially since the 1980s, from the French Hexagon to the Caribbean and India, and from Québec to the Maghreb and Romania. Understood and practiced as World Literature, Francophone literature claims--with particular force in the wake of the littérature-monde debate--its place in a more democratic world republic of letters, where writers, critics, publishers, and audiences are no longer beholden to traditional centers of cultural authority.

Francophone Literatures

Francophone Literatures
Author: Belinda Elizabeth Jack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 1996
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0198715064

The canon of French literature has been the subject of much debate and now increasingly francophone literatures are demanding more attention in student French literature courses. The first study in English of francophone literatures, this book introduces the diverse bodies of texts in French from the numerous French-speaking areas around the world, with separate sections covering Africa, French Canada, the Creole Islands, and Europe, and will provide students at both undergraduate and 'A' level with a comprehensive introductory survey of the subject. Francophone literatures emerge from rich bi- and multi-lingual cultures in part as colonial legacies. They also challenge the monopoly of the French literary tradition. This introductory survey celebrates the linguistic difference of such texts and the creative possibilities offered by deviance from an established tradition, demanding new critical approaches. The texts studied here cast a new light upon French literature in terms of their diverse perspectives upon writing, history, politics, and culture, their violent rewritings, subversive versions and parodies sometimes forming an elaborate pastiche of celebrated Frence texts. Guides to further reading, a select bibliography, and an extensive index combine to make the book an extremely readable introductory overview of a hitherto little explored area.

France and Indochina

France and Indochina
Author: Kathryn Robson
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2005-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0739155172

At the intersection of literary, cultural, and postcolonial studies, this volume looks at French perceptions of 'Indochina' as they are conveyed through a variety of media including cinema, literature, art, and historical or anthropological writings. The volume is long awaited, as France's memory of 'Indochina' is understudied compared to its relationship with its former colonies in West and North Africa. The book has contemporary urgency as the makeup of France's immigrant population changes and grows to include Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotioan populations.

Francophone Literature as World Literature

Francophone Literature as World Literature
Author: Christian Moraru
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2020-06-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501347160

Francophone Literature as World Literature examines French-language works from a range of global traditions and shows how these literary practices draw individuals, communities, and their cultures and idioms into a planetary web of tension and cross-fertilization. The Francophone corpus under scrutiny here comes about in the evolving, markedly relational context provided by these processes and their developments during and after the French empire. The 15 chapters of this collection delve into key aspects, moments, and sites of the literature flourishing throughout the francosphere after World War II and especially since the 1980s, from the French Hexagon to the Caribbean and India, and from Québec to the Maghreb and Romania. Understood and practiced as World Literature, Francophone literature claims--with particular force in the wake of the littérature-monde debate--its place in a more democratic world republic of letters, where writers, critics, publishers, and audiences are no longer beholden to traditional centers of cultural authority.

The Algerian New Novel

The Algerian New Novel
Author: Valérie K. Orlando
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2017-05-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813939631

Disputing the claim that Algerian writing during the struggle against French colonial rule dealt almost exclusively with revolutionary themes, The Algerian New Novel shows how Algerian authors writing in French actively contributed to the experimental forms of the period, expressing a new age literarily as well as politically and culturally. Looking at canonical Algerian literature as part of the larger literary production in French during decolonization, Valérie K. Orlando considers how novels by Rachid Boudjedra, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, Nabile Farès, Yamina Mechakra, and Kateb Yacine both influenced and were reflectors of the sociopolitical and cultural transformation that took place during this period in Algeria. Although their themes were rooted in Algeria, the avant-garde writing styles of these authors were influenced by early twentieth-century American modernists, the New Novelists of 1940s–50s France, and African American authors of the 1950s–60s. This complex mix of influences led Algerian writers to develop a unique modern literary aesthetic to express their world, a tradition of experimentation and fragmentation that still characterizes the work of contemporary Algerian francophone writers.