Books in the Modern French Identities series

This book was shortlisted for the R.H. Gapper prize 2011. On 8 February 1937 the 23-year-old Albert Camus gave an inaugural lecture for a new Maison de la culture, or community arts centre, in Algiers. Entitled 'La nouvelle culture mediterraneenne' ('The New Mediterranean Culture'), Camus's lecture has been interpreted in radically different ways: while some critics have dismissed it as an incoherent piece of juvenilia, others see it as key to understanding his future development as a thinker, whether as the first expression of his so-called 'Mediterranean humanism' or as an early indication of what is seen as his essentially colonial mentality. These various interpretations are based on reading the text of 'The New Mediterranean Culture' in a single context, whether that of Camus's life and work as a whole, of French discourses on the Mediterranean or of colonial Algeria (and French discourses on that country). By contrast, this study argues that Camus's lecture - and in principle any historical text - needs to be seen in a multiplicity of contexts, discursive and otherwise, if readers are to understand properly what its author was doing in writing it. Using Camus's lecture as a case study, the book provides a detailed theoretical and practical justification of this 'multi-contextualist' approach.

Picturing the end of the world is an enduring cultural practice. This groundbreaking collection of essays offers an overview of the Apocalyptic imagination in French literature and culture from the thirteenth century to the present day, scrutinizing material as diverse as medieval French biblical commentaries and science fiction.

This volume explores the relationship between Francophone women and the material world. Topics include: the female body and objectification; contradictions of the im/materiality of the body; 'the material' and women's engagement with the economy; the relationship of the female body to material objects; cinematic representations of the female body.

Highlights the capacity of Darrieussecq's texts both to confront contemporary social issues, such as national identity and the role of women, and examine the complex relationship between language and reality. It also highlights the significant questions that Darrieussecq's texts raise about the ways in which we perceive and narrate the world.

Explores the work of two major twentieth-century artists by placing them in critical proximity. This book offers an approach to film-philosophy scholarship by embracing the cinematic as an inspiring channel through which to rethink our relationship with film and also with literature and, potentially, with art at large.

Offering new perspectives on the role of broadcasting in the construction of cultural memory, this book analyses selected instances in relation to questions of French identity at the BBC during the Second World War. The influence of policy and ideology on the musical and the poetic is addressed by drawing on theoretical frameworks of the archive, memory, trauma and testimony. Case studies investigate cultural memories constructed through three contrasting soundscapes. The first focuses on the translation of 'Frenchness' to the BBC's domestic audiences; the second examines the use of slogans on the margins of propaganda broadcasts. In the third, the implications of the marriage of poetry and music in the BBC's 1945 premier of Francis Poulenc's cantata setting of resistance poems by the surrealist poet Paul Eluard in Figure humaine are assessed. Concentrating on the role of the archive as both narrative source and theoretical frame, this study offers a new approach to the understanding of soundscapes and demonstrates the processes involved in the creation of sonic cultural memory in the context of global conflict.

France and the Mediterranean

Cinematic Queerness

Since the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to J. M. G. Le Clezio in 2008, there has been a wave of new interest in his A uvre. This book traces the evolution of the writer's postcolonial thought from his early works to his groundbreaking autobiographical novel Revolutions, arguably his most subversive text to date. The author shows how Le Clezio's critique of colonialism is rooted in an early denunciation of capitalism and philosophical dualism, and sheds new light on the crucial roles played by Jean-Paul Sartre, Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon in his development. The author's close reading of Revolutions reveals a complex system of interconnections between the colonial conflicts from the 1700s to the 1900s, with recurrent patterns of violence, cultural repression and racism. The issue of neocolonialism is addressed and the persistence of the colonial mindset in contemporary Europe and Westernized countries is shown to echo the findings of Paul Gilroy, Max Silverman and Etienne Balibar. The book concludes with an examination of the utopian elements underpinning Revolutions, establishing close affinities with the work of Edouard Glissant and developing the notion of permanent revolution. Themes explored include those of storytelling, cultural memory, cultural identity, language, intertextuality and interculturality.

The pursuit of women's pleasures, often expected to be constrained under patriarchy, is potentially transgressive and linked to women's emancipation in other realms. This book explores a wide range of examples of women and pleasure in French and francophone culture, from novels to stand-up comedy.

This book is the first critical survey of the work of Eric Jourdan. Jourdan first came to public attention as a schoolboy in 1955, when he published Les Mauvais anges, a sulphorous novel of adolescent male-to-male love, which was banned by the censors in 1956 and again in 1974. It did not officially appear until 1984. Despite the ban, and despite ongoing censorship, Jourdan continues to write novels, short stories and plays. His many books include the 'trilogy' Charite, Revolte and Sang, and other equally uninhibited texts such as Le Garcon de joie, Aux gemonies and Le Jeune soldat. More recent publications include short stories, historical novels (Sans lois ni dieux, Lieutenant Darmancour) and the more autobiographical text Trois cA urs. This study charts Jourdan's writing career from Les Mauvais anges to the present day, situating his work in the context of writers from Peyrefitte and Montherlant to Guibert, Dustan and Guyotat. The analysis concentrates on three main themes: boyhood and masculinity; sex and (homo)sexuality; and violence and death. Throughout, a number of questions are paramount. What is the connection between masculinity and violence? How does Jourdan reconcile joie de vivre with pain and punishment? Do his young male protagonists progress from bad boys to new men? In what ways can his texts be seen as homoerotic, homosexual, gay or queer? What, ultimately, is the connection between sex, sexuality and writing in Jourdan? The book includes detailed bibliographies of Jourdan's works and, for the first time since its original, controversial publication in Arcadie, his short story 'Le Troisieme but'.

Investigates the speech of learners at upper-intermediate and advanced stages of acquisition of French to provide a holistic view of the way individuals use the language resources available to them to stake a claim to a new multilingual identity in their target language networks.

Shows a world of violence and tension, a world where people find it hard to be at ease, so that life becomes a process of disease. This book foregrounds Houellebecq's scrutiny of our various attempts to confront and transcend the fundamental reality of the human condition, in particular the horror of death.

This book argues that changes in sensory relationships, often claimed to be symptoms of 21st-century technology, are not as recent as they may seem. The author analyses how 'haptic' sensory interactions (simultaneous manifestations of tactile and visual sensation) are portrayed in the work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Michel Serres.

#NousSommes represents a moment when social media became embroiled in collective expressions of unity, solidarity and resistance. This book explores the role of the digital in the collective today, drawing on the work of important French philosophers like Nancy, Derrida and Deleuze and addressing issues such as ecology, automation and addiction.

This book provides an unorthodox array of perspectives on materialist thought and representation in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. It constructs a necessarily fragmented timeline of the breaks, tensions and antagonisms in twentieth-century French thought, culture and politics, with particular focus on questions of late capitalism.

This volume explores contemporary French women's writing through the prism of one of the defining moments of modern feminism: the writings of the 1970s that came to be known as "French feminism".