Books in the The French List - (Seagull titles CHUP) series

Rejecting not only the identification of the aesthetic with the work of art, but also the Kantian association of the aesthetic with subjectively universal judgment, the author's analysis of aesthetic relations opens up a space for a theory of art that is free of historicism and capable of engaging with noncanonical and non-Western arts.

Argues that the use of the terms 'war' and 'terror' dehumanize the enemy and permit treatment that would otherwise be impermissible. This title examines the implications and corrupting impact of the attempt to impose 'good' through violence and the attempt to spread democratic values by unethical means.

Features Max, a French journalist looking for his next story, and Lena, an American singer, who were once lovers, but now friends. They travel with Lena's new man, Thibault and with Max's barely masked jealousy. Then they meet the striking Colonel Strether, the epitome of military decorum and bearing.

A collection of poems that echo each other, returning to and elaborating upon key images, thoughts, feelings, and people. Intriguing and enigmatic, it is a mixture of sonnet sequences and prose poems.

Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. His writing contributed greatly to existentialism, and the term "Kafkaesque" is now synonymous with the literature of the surreal, the complex, and the illogical. This book dives deep into Kafka's mind, examining his motives rather than the results.

Tells a story that centers on two young women: Voltairine, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movement of dance, and her soulmate Emile, a young woman recovering from unexpected cardiac arrest. The girls are inseparable, and both their lives have been shattered by the horror of rape.

Takes us to the unchartered frontiers of the forbidden. From initiation ceremonies to crises of hysteria, from suicide attempts to the ecstasies of witches, the author explores in simple but scholarly terms the responses that civilizations have offered to the humanistic need for escape from the body.

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy, semiological essays on mass culture, then unsettled the literary critical establishment with heretical writings on the French classics, before going on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century (Empire of Signs, S/Z, The Pleasure of the Text, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes). In 1976, the one-time structuralist 'outsider' was elected to a chair at France's pre-eminent academic institution, the College de France, choosing to style himself its Professor of Literary Semiology, though this last somewhat hedonistic and more 'subjectivist' phase of his intellectual adventure was cut short by his untimely death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes's published writings have been available to a French audience since the publication in 2002 of the expanded version of his Oeuvres completes [Complete Works], edited by Eric Marty. The present collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews and other occasional journalistic pieces, all drawn from that comprehensive source, attempts to give English-speaking readers access to the most significant previously untranslated material from the various stages of Barthes's career. It is divided (not entirely scientifically) into five themed volumes entitled: Theory, Politics, Literary Criticism, Signs and Images (Art, Cinema, Photography), and Interviews. Barthes's earliest interest is in literature--in theatre and the classic realist novel, but also in the more experimental writers of the 1940s and 50s (literature of the absurd, nouveau roman etc.). The articles translated in this volume run from his mid-1950s writings on popular poetry, the giants of the nineteenth century novel (Hugo, Maupassant, Zola), and the narrative innovations of Robbe-Grillet and his associates through to writings from his later years on Sade, Rousseau and Voltaire, and the longer study 'Masculine, Feminine, Neuter' which is, in the words of his French editor, the 'first outline' of his remarkable critical work S/Z.

When Anna discovers a long letter that her mother, Marie, wrote, Marie has been dead for some time, and Anna is shocked to learn that her mother disappeared with a secret. The letter is addressed to Marie's first great love, a much older teacher who she describes as a great dinosaur.

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Brings together essays written just after World War II. This title features essays that range across the author's reflections on collaboration, resistance and liberation in post-war Europe, his thoughts and observations after his extended trip to the USA in 1945, and an examination of the failings of philosophical materialism.

"'Poâesie et photographie' was originally delivered as the Lezione Sapegno for 2009 at the University of Val d'Aoste, The text of that lecture was subsequently published by Nino Aragno of Turin, Italy. The present version is a greatly amended and developed version of the original lecture, which it supersedes."--Page [vi].

A play that recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Congo Republic and an African nationalist hero.

Writing in 2007, French social philosopher André Gorz was remarkably prophetic, foretelling the international economic meltdown of 2008: "The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry--until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression." This prescient article is collected in Ecologica alongside many of Gorz's final writings and interviews, which together offer practical and often path-breaking set of solutions to our current economic and political problems. In his writings Gorz condemns the speculative global economic system and anatomizes its terminal crisis. Advocating an exit from capitalism through the self-limitation of needs and the networked use of the latest technologies, he outlines a practical, democratically based solution to our current predicament. Compiled by Gorz, Ecologica is intended as a final distillation of his work and thought, a guide to the survival of our planet. It is a work of political, rather than scientific ecology--Gorz aruges that the key to planetary survival is not a surrender to environmental experts and eco-technocrats, but a switch to non-consumerist modes of living that would amount to a type of cultural revolution. Praise for André Gorz"To my mind the greatest of modern French social thinkers."--Herbert Gintis, author of Schooling in Capitalist America"Gorz's work was always within the Utopian tradition--a label he welcomed but which was used pejoratively by his opponents. . . . Many of his derided early warnings about globalization and environmental degradation have become commonplace discourses in political debates today. Ultimately, Gorz's Utopianism was expressed in a very practical sense--we never know how far along the road we are if we have no idea of the destination."--Independent

Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Few can be said to have had as broad an impact on European art in the twentieth century as these two cultural giants. Pablo Picasso, a pioneering visual artist, created a prolific and widely influential body of work. Gertrude Stein, an intellectual tastemaker, hosted the leading salon for artists and writers between the wars in her Paris apartment, welcoming Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound to weekly events at her home to discuss art and literature. It comes as no surprise, then, that Picasso and Stein were fast friends and frequent confidantes. Through Picasso and Stein's casual notes and reflective letters, this volume of correspondence between the two captures Paris both in the golden age of the early twentieth century and in one of its darkest hours, the Nazi occupation through mentions of dinner parties, lovers, work, and the crises of the two world wars. Illustrated with photographs and postcards, as well as drawings and paintings by Picasso, this collection captures an exhilarating period in European culture through the minds of two artistic greats.