Books in the Modern French Identities series

The journal, periodical or revue has a long and largely unexplored history. This volume aims, through a series of focused case studies, to explore the twentieth-century periodical publication in French, offering an overview of some of its most important manifestations and providing a general reflection on this complex textual form.

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.

Display and Disguise

Gerard Genette's seminal study of the paratext, Seuils, is the starting point for this collection of essays, all of which seek not only to engage with Genette's taxonomy and apply it, but also to interrogate it and to move through and beyond it. This book offers a significant re-engagement with and deployment of paratextual theory and practice.

Comment allier inspiration, tradition, culture et invention, d'un cote, et grain de jouissance, Reel, rature et manuscrit, de l'autre. C'est ce que l'auteur met en pratique, utilisant les theories litteraire et psychanalytique a travers les manuscrits de Marcel Proust et d'Henry Bauchau.

#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".

The notion of «exposure» underlies much modern thinking about identity, representation, ethics, desire and sexuality. This provocative notion is explored in a collection of essays selected from, and inspired by, the proceedings of a conference held in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge in 2002. The authors engage with exposure as both object and mode of representation in a range of cultural media: literature, critical theory, visual art and film. They analyse a variety of works from the medieval, early-modern, and modern periods, examining not only canonical texts such as Montaigne¿s Essais but also lesser-studied works such as the psychoanalytic theory of Didier Anzieu, the photomontage self-portraits of Claude Cahun, and the novel La Nouvelle Pornographie by Marie Nimier. This volume thus both illustrates and, more importantly, interrogates the richness of the term «exposure», in a way that is stimulating for students and researchers alike.

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.

Despite its inherent negative implications as a purveyor of essentialism, the concept of hybridity holds a great deal of critical purchase in the postcolonial world. Hybridity allows identities and cultures to be conceptualized as different and manifold, allowing for the undermining of the binaries of self and other, centre and periphery, colonizer and colonized. In Mauritius, a country where numerous civilizations (African, European, Indian, Chinese) coexist and have constructed a new society, linguistic practices, culture and the body are all intrinsically linked to the concept of identity. The author of this study provides a timely discussion of hybridity in the novels of Ananda Devi, perhaps the most famous name in the Mauritian literary landscape. The book analyses various linguistic practices through the lens of linguistic criticism and theory. It then shifts its attention to psychological dislocations suffered by postcolonial subjects having a hybrid identity, as extolled by theorists such as Glissant and Bhabha, and offers an alternative interpretation of identity. Finally, the physical repercussions of hybridity are discussed in order to gauge its relevance in a society such as Mauritius.

Cet ouvrage propose une etude de la question du genre dans l'oeuvre d'Agota Kristof, ecrivaine suisse francophone d'origine hongroise. La preponderance des narrateurs masculins dans sa prose suggere la superiorite du masculin.

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.