Mevlido's Dreams

Mevlido's Dreams
Author: Antoine Volodine
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2024-06-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1452971463

A postapocalyptic noir that asks if love and political ideals can survive civilizational collapse A meditative, postapocalyptic noir, Mevlido’s Dreams is an urgent communiqué from a far-future reality of irreversible environmental damage and civilizational collapse. Mevlido is a double agent working for the police and living in the last habitable city on the planet, a sprawling abyssal ruin marked by war and ruled by criminals. Suspended in the bardo between his loyalty to the surveillance state and to the anarchists, communists, and other rebels he monitors, Mevlido clings to life and hope—barely—in the city’s vast slums, haunted by the memory of the wife he failed to save during the last war and dreaming of a mysterious mission he is told he must accomplish. At the same time, an enigmatic organization existing elsewhere—the Organs—observes Mevlido’s actions and debates its responsibility to him and to humanity as a whole. Asking what it means to love and care for others at the end of the world, this dense, brilliantly detailed postcollapse reality imagined by Antoine Volodine is one that grows ever more relevant amidst intensifying climate and political catastrophes. A key work in Volodine’s post-exotic fictional universe, Mevlido’s Dreams envisions a world changed beyond recognition and ruled under irrational authoritarianism in which dreams nest within dreams and the boundaries between life and death are fluid and uncertain.

French Fiction Today

French Fiction Today
Author: Warren Motte
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2017-06-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1628972459

French Fiction Today focuses on the French novel in the twenty-first century, examining a series of works that are exemplary of broader currents in the genre. Each of these texts wagers insistently upon our willingness to speculate about literature and its uses, in an age when the value of literature is no longer taken as axiomatic. Each of these texts may be thought of as a critical novel, a form that calls upon us to engage with it in a critical manner, promising that meaning will arise in the articulation of writing and reading. Each of these authors participates in a debate about what the novel is as a cultural form in our present—and about what it may become, in a future that begins right now.

Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels

Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels
Author: Emmanuel Buzay
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2023-03-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031166280

This book sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and, more broadly, contemporary French and Francophone literature. It examines the fictional minds of characters and their conceptions of resistance to the anticipated worlds they inhabit, particularly in novels by Pierre Bordage, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, Amin Maalouf, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Antoine Volodine, and Élisabeth Vonarburg. It also explores how corporal postures serve as a matrix for philosophical quests in novels by Amélie Nothomb, Alain Damasio, and Romain Lucazeau. More specifically, from the fictional readers’ points of view, it provides a critical approach to the mythologies of writing, in the wake of the French philosophical tales by authors including Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire, to question the traditionally expressed formulations of the mythologies of writing, that is, of the metaphors of the book (the book of life, nature, and the world), to rethink the idea of a humanity within its limits.

Autodafe 3/4

Autodafe 3/4
Author: International Parliament of Writers
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1609801717

AUTODAFE is a collection of reports, interviews, correspondence, narratives, and stories from around the world. The review aims to be a place for debate and experimentation, a place where writers, silenced by censorship join voices with world-renowned writers. The contributors are all members of the International Parliament of Writers; the pieces are original to Autodafe. The journal's common themes are the reflection of social and political realities of the world, censorship, the interdict of language, and the effects of globablization among others.

The Cambridge Companion to French Literature

The Cambridge Companion to French Literature
Author: John D. Lyons
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2016
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1107036046

A fresh and comprehensive account of the literature of France, from medieval romances to twenty-first-century experimental poetry and novels.

Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater

Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater
Author: Fran Mason
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2016-12-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442276207

The main aim of the book has been to include writers, movements, forms of writing and textual strategies, critical ideas, and texts that are significant in relation to postmodernist literature. In addition, important scholars, journals, and cultural processes have been included where these are felt to be relevant to an understanding of postmodernist writing. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Postmodernist Literature and Theater contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 cross-referenced entries on postmodernist writers, the important postmodernist aesthetic practices, significant texts produced throughout the history of postmodernist writing, and important movements and ideas that have created a variety of literary approaches within the form. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the postmodernist literature and theater.

Solo Viola

Solo Viola
Author: Antoine Volodine
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 87
Release: 2021-05-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1452965609

A harrowing early novel by one of France’s most unusual contemporary writers At once humorous and horrifying, Solo Viola is one of Antoine Volodine’s first forays into post-exoticism. He takes the reader into a fictional world where a variety of characters collide: three prisoners just released from jail, a band of circus performers, a string quartet, a writer, and a bird. All are trying to survive in an absurd and hostile environment of authoritarian spectacle, at the mercy of a tyrannical buffoon, and seeking the strange counterbalance of hope in a viola player, whose stunning music just might save them all, if only for a moment.

Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction

Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction
Author: Quentin Meillassoux
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 54
Release: 2015-11-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1937561941

In Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, Quentin Meillassoux addresses the problem of chaos and of the constancy of natural laws in the context of literature. With his usual argumentative rigor, he elucidates the distinction between science fiction, a genre in which science remains possible in spite of all the upheavals that may attend the world in which the tale takes place, and fiction outside-science, the literary concept he fashions in this book, a fiction in which science becomes impossible. With its investigations of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, and Popper, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction broadens the inquiry that Meillassoux began in After Finitude, thinking through the concrete possibilities and consequences of a chaotic world in which human beings can no longer resort to science to ground their existence. It is a significant milestone in the work of an emerging philosopher, which will appeal to readers of both philosophy and literature. The text is followed by Isaac Asimov’s essay “The Billiard Ball.”

Eleven Sooty Dreams

Eleven Sooty Dreams
Author: Manuela Draeger
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2021-03-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781948830263

A mystical and deeply moving tale, from the author of one of the world's most ambitious literary projects

Black Village

Black Village
Author: Lutz Bassmann
Publisher:
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2021-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781948830430

A genre-bending story of life after death, from one of France's most celebrated contemporary authors.