Books in the European Connections series

«This volume locates itself neatly in the growing collection of publications on intermediality by relating such practices to Roland Barthes. Barthesian motifs and writerly concerns are found within a variety of intermedial practices, as the analysis moves, historically and globally, across visual, aural and literary cultures. Such an approach is both appropriate and innovative within Barthes Studies and in cultural theory more generally.»(Andy Stafford, Professor of French and Critical Theory, University of Leeds)The essays in this collection reconsider Roland Barthes as a crucial figure in intermedia studies, arguing that the concepts and forms of analysis he pioneered are of continuing importance for students and scholars working in the field. These essays utilize an interdisciplinary methodology, drawing on Barthes's own intermedial critical practice, to examine the multiple relationships between art, literature, music and performance and across different languages. The collection places Barthes's writing in critical dialogue with other theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Dick Higgins and Emmanuel Levinas, investigating the work of figures as varied as André Breton, Giordano Bruno, Alain Cavalier, Alfred Hitchcock, Marcel Schwob, W. G. Sebald, Steven Spielberg, Yoko Tawada and Lev Tolstoy. The collection demonstrates that Barthes's intermedial critical and theoretical practice provides a means of challenging fixed critical narratives and exploring crucial intermedial issues, including how narrative crosses media, the close relationship between image and text throughout history, and how twentieth-century consumer capitalist culture transformed the relationship between image and text.

«This fascinating study of gesture makes an original contribution to film studies through the persuasive insights it offers into the significance of gesture in its different manifestations in post-New Wave cinema. Meticulous analysis of an eclectic choice of examples and compelling meditations on wider questions of social conditioning, human memory and gender make this book essential reading.»(Dr Albertine Fox, Senior Lecturer in French Film, University of Bristol)Since the invention of cinema in the late nineteenth century, gesture has been a central preoccupation and source of innovation for early film pioneers and avant-garde filmmakers. A non-verbal form of expression and communication characterised by movement, gesture is a key theoretical concept in film analysis that raises crucial questions about the medium specificity of cinema. This book uses an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach to read gesture in terms of its interplay with film technology and its relations with the visual and performing arts.The author examines the aesthetics of gesture in a selection of films made during a complex historical and cultural period marked by the disintegration of the French New Wave, the uprisings of May 1968 and the decline of postwar economic prosperity. The book offers an in-depth study of the works of major and often under-explored French and Francophone filmmakers, artists, writers and intellectuals, including Chantal Akerman, Fernand Deligny, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Klossowski, Anne-Marie Miéville, Georges Perec, Bernard Queysanne, Jacques Rivette, Renaud Victor and Pierre Zucca. While revitalising the expression of gesture in modern sound cinema, their films developed radical ways of representing and revealing the impact of sociocultural conditioning on the body.

« Outre les rapprochements novateurs entre les films de Minnelli et Demy, ce livre démontre admirablement qüil est non seulement possible mais important de fonder les approches esthétiques traditionnelles sur une analyse rigoureuse ancrée dans les gender studies. »(Phil Powrie, professeur émérite d¿études cinématographiques, University of Surrey, Royaume Uni)Au-delà de leurs univers oniriques souvent qualifiés d¿enchantés, les films musicaux et les mélodrames de Vincente Minnelli et de Jacques Demy témoignent des mutations socio-culturelles d¿après-guerre.Ces productions du cinéaste de la Nouvelle Vague et du grand représentant de l¿âge d¿or hollywoodien sont emblématiques d¿un style camp apprécié à la fois des publics populaires, des tenant·e·s du cinéma d¿auteur·trice et des sous-cultures queer.A partir d¿une analyse des masculinités articulée aux dimensions de sexualité, de classe et de race, le livre examine les représentations de genre entre la France et les États-Unis, à l¿heure où la Guerre froide, la société de consommation, la décolonisation, mais aussi les mouvements féministes globalisés transforment profondément les identités individuelles et collectives.L¿autrice explore comment les films de ces deux cinéastes, reconnus internationalement mais jamais rapprochés, façonnent des modèles de masculinités alternatives fondées sur des valeurs empathiques et inclusives.

La poétique de l¿étrangeté est l¿expression d¿un retour au corps par lequel le roman contemporain interroge sa propre capacité à penser le monde social. Dans les ¿uvres de Suzette Mayr, de Marie NDiaye et de Yoko Tawada, étudiées dans cet ouvrage, le corps apparaît comme un objet étrange, dont l¿évidence naturelle ne va plus de soi. Il est caractérisé par sa malléabilité, voire par ses métamorphoses; en même temps, il porte les marques des catégories de la domination. La poétique de l¿étrangeté peut être interprétée comme une traduction littéraire du tournant théorique «matérialiste queer», qui s¿efforce d¿analyser ensemble la dynamique du pouvoir, fondée sur la production des subjectivités, et le caractère structurel de la domination, qui repose sur des bases socio-économiques. Le corps est à la fois dénaturalisé et ressaisi comme le signe d¿une histoire intersectionnelle. Il n¿est pas tant l¿expression d¿une vérité de l¿identité que la construction narrative d¿un point de vue situé. C¿est à partir d¿un corps fictif que s¿écrit une certaine perception du monde, que se redéfinissent les formes romanesques, et que se crée un usage étrange de la langue. Le dialogue entre la théorie et la fiction, qui prend source dans leur étrangeté réciproque, invite alors à imaginer la nature dénaturalisée du corps, tout comme la reconfiguration littéraire du monde social.

This book explores the historical and artistic value of three bande dessinee (BD), French-language comics, that depict the lives of Existentialist thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. The work is the first to analyse biographical BD through the lens of Existentialism, offering a new theory of reading biographical comics.

Why do we read? What exactly thrills us in the text? Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, this collection explores the notion of readerly enjoyment, between form and content, emotion and reason, and escapism and knowledge seeking, to understand how literary and ideological pleasures intersect.

This book is an interdisciplinary analysis of an art form that is crucial to the understanding of Italian contemporary society: political music from the 1960s to today. Using cultural studies, digital humanities and literary analysis, this book analyses a corpus of political music to offer insights into the sociolinguistic aspects of Italian.

This interdisciplinary study, situated at the cross-section of music, literature and gender, examines the woman singer and her song as a literary motif in French and German prose fiction from the 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century. Through selected case studies, this diachronic history of motifs offers a fresh perspective on canonical singer archetypes, such as Goethe's child singer Mignon and Madame de Stael's ground-breaking artist Corinne. The volume also examines lesser known narratives by authors including Caroline Auguste Fischer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Hector Berlioz and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, some of which have not been considered critically in this regard before. This allows for a re-evaluation of the significance of the singer motif in musical narratives from the Romantic era to the July Monarchy. The sometimes polemic, often ambivalent, yet always nuanced and multi-layered reflection on the woman singer in literature bears testimony to the complexity of the nineteenth-century musical-literary discourse and its fluid negotiation of gender relations and female performance, fitting well with that ineffable, enigmatic essence of the woman singer herself who, as a literary motif and a cultural icon, continues to resonate and fascinate well beyond the nineteenth century.

Roland Barthes and Pier Paolo Pasolini were two of the most eclectic cultural personalities of the past century, as elusive as they were influential. Despite the glaring differences between them, they also shared a number of preoccupations, obsessions and creative approaches. Certain themes recur insistently in the works of both men: the pervasiveness of power and the violence inherent in the modernising process; the possibility of freedom and subjective autonomy; and the role of creative practices in a society configured as a desert of alienation. Despite this common ground, no systematic attempt at reading the two authors together has been made before now. This book explores this uncharted territory by comparing these two intellectual figures, focusing in particular on the similarities and productive tensions that emerge in their late works. Psychoanalysis plays a key role in the articulation of this comparison.

Gerard de Nerval's French translations of Goethe's Faust are key works in Franco-German cultural relations. This book presents a nuanced view of works that continue to be the principal conveyors in France of arguably the foremost work of German literature.

This study observes the composition and distribution of books in the diversity of its aesthetic possibilities: the several materials and formats are considered, together with all the different participants to the publishing process (writers, artists, bookbinders, publishers).

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw an explosion in Europe of interest in foreign languages and literatures. This book explores how early generations of women writers formed connections with each other across national boundaries.

The notion of citizenship is part of national collective memory and a memory of individuals belonging to a specific historical and cultural context. This book seeks to investigate the importance of women's relationship with citizenship and nationality from a diachronic perspective analysing different forms of writing in various European contexts.

Divorce is a conspicuous character trait of modernity, commonly portrayed in texts and on screen, with its moral and social rationalisation firmly rooted in Enlightenment and Romantic thought. The aim of this volume is to bring into focus this contemporary cultural fascination by assembling the variety of academic responses it has started to create. Bringing together the reflections of scholars from the UK and North America who have worked in this domain, this study offers for the first time a genuinely wide-ranging account of the depiction of divorce across the northern hemisphere in a number of media (fiction, journalism, film and television). It reaches historically from the intellectual and legal aftermath of the Enlightenment right up to the present day. As such, the collection shows both the roots of this apparently contemporary phenomenon in nineteenth-century literary practice and the very particular ways in which divorce characterises the different narrative media of modernity.