A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Louis XIV’s subjects explored new kinds of affective relations with their sovereign, joining with the king in acts of aesthetic judgment, tender feeling, or the “newsiness” of emerging print news culture. Such alternative modes of adhesion countered the hegemonic model of kingship upheld by divine right, reason of state, or corporate fidelities and privileges with subject-driven attachments and practices. Absolutist Attachments discovers absolutism’s alternative political and cultural legacy—not the spectacle of an unbound king but the binding connections of his subjects.
Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Among the more interesting incunabula preserved in the Salle de la Réserve of the Bibliothèque National in Paris are the apparently unique copies of two editions, very similar in content, of a work entitled Les Adevineaux amoureux. In much more comprehensive form Les Adevineaux amoureux is preserved in a manuscript belonging to the Musée Conde at Chantilly. All three texts, in medieval French, appear to date from the 1470s. The present work, Amorous Games, is a critical edition of Les Adevineaux amoureux.
Amorous Games is a miscellany whose principal unifying force is the compiler's aim to provide a manual of conversation and entertainment for polite society. Included are series of questions and answers belonging to the well-established medieval tradition of the "Demandes amoureuses"; a very large number of riddles, mainly folk riddles; and "venditions en amours," little poems that apparently came into bing as part of a social game.
Students of medieval French literature, particularly those with a penchant for some of the minor genres, will find new material in the Amorous Games. Folklorists will discover what is probably the largest collection of riddles bequeathed to us by medieval France and also much that is of value to specialists in the proverb and folk tale.
For this critical edition of Les Adevineaux amoureux Professor Hassell has selected the Chantilly manuscript, because it is the most complete and also because it had not yet been published. The Appendix contains the text of the more complete of the two incunabula and the significant variants appearing in the other fifteenth-century printed edition. The manuscript text has been collated with that of the incunabula, and copious notes and an index to the riddles have been supplied. In his introduction Professor Hassell discusses in detail the major classes and subclasses of the riddle, drawing on the work of Petsch, Taylor, Abrahams, and other scholars of the genre.
Drawing on recent work in medieval literature, history, popular culture, gender studies, and sign theory, Andrew Cowell employs a wide range of traditional and, until now, little known sources to show the unity and importance of a countercultural literary mode.
Andrew Cowell is Assistant Professor, Department of French and Italian, University of Colorado at Boulder.
In Aubade: A Teacher's Notebook Fowlie writes at length of his life as a teacher at Duke University, his friendships with students and colleagues, his appreciation of movies, plays, travels, friends and books he has enjoyed and that have enhanced his life. This is an account of the life of a dedicated teacher who is also a writer-critic. Fowlie assesses his own sense of identity and the manner in which he transmits the values his studies have for him to his students through major literary texts. Aubade delineates Fowlies discovery, via his students, of the forms of a new culture arising alongside the old, which he integrates into his own intellectual life, broadening its horizons.
Written in a distinctive personal and self-reflective mode, this collection offers new unpublished work and brings together for the first time some of Schor’s best-known and most influential essays. These engagements with Anglo-American feminist theory, Freud and psychoanalytic theory, French poststructuralists such as Barthes, Foucault, and Irigaray, and French fiction by or about women—especially of the nineteenth century—also address such issues as bilingual identity, professional controversies, female fetishism, and literature and gender. Schor then concludes with a provocative meditation on the future of feminism.
As they read Bad Objects, Anglo-American theoreticians who have been mainly preoccupied with French feminism will find themselves drawn into French literary and cultural history, while French literary critics and historians will be placed in contact with feminist debate.
In the literature and aesthetic theory of modern times, we have witnessed the revival of the claim that the conventions and artifices of civilization are the source of many ills. Far from establishing harmonious relationships between individuals, they have sometimes legitimized forms of violence and oppression. But while conventions and artifices may be a source of evil, they are also a means by which evils can be reduced or overcome.
One of our greatest living critics, Jean Starobinski pursues this line of reflection by taking us back to the thought of the eighteenth century. Civilization, he argues, has always been entangled with barbarism. As a form of politeness, a refinement of manners, civilization was said to legitimize deceit. But aren’t the conventions of civilized living, however objectionable, a blessing in disguise? It is the task of art, he contends, to make the most of these conventions, to use the very disguises of civilization to counter the barbarism they mask. Tracing this idea through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French literature, Starobinski charts the historical and intellectual limits of criticism itself.
These reflections are nourished by a series of sensitive and perceptive studies: the use of the word "civilization" in the Age of Enlightenment; the classical doctrine of civility and the art of flattery; fable and mythology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the relations between exile, satire, and tyranny in Montesquieu; philosophy and style in the writings of Voltaire; and the search for the remedy of the disease in the thought of Rosseau. A development and refinement of themes that have preoccupied Starobinski throughout his career, Blessings in Disguise is criticism at its best, testing its own limits and extending ours.
The writers and artists of the French avant-garde aspired to reach a global audience that would be wholly transformed by their work. In this study, Effie Rentzou delves deep into their depictions of the interwar world as an international and modern landscape, one marked by a varied cosmopolitanism. The avant-garde’s conceptualization of the world paralleled, rejected, or expanded prevailing notions of the global sphere.
The historical avant garde—which encompassed movements like futurism, Dada, and surrealism—was self-consciously international, operating across global networks and developed with the whole world as its horizon and its public. In the heady period between the end of the Belle Époque and the tumult of World War II, both individual artists (including Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Francis Picabia, Louis Aragon, Leonora Carrington, and Nicolas Calas) and collective endeavors (such as surrealist magazines and exhibitions) grappled with contemporary anxieties about economic growth, imperialism, and colonialism, as well as various universalist, cosmopolitan, and internationalist visions. By probing these works, Concepts of the World offers an alternative narrative of globalization, one that integrates the avant-garde’s enthusiasm for, as well as resistance to, the process. Rentzou identifies within the avant-garde a powerful political language that expressed the ambivalence of living and creating in an increasingly globalized world—a language that profoundly shaped the way the world has been conceptualized and is experienced today.
Explores literary theory’s fear of and fascination with the mechanical.
Anxieties about fixing the absolute difference between the human being and the mechanical replica, the automaton, are as old as the first appearance of the machine itself. Exploring these anxieties and the efforts they prompted, this book opens a window on one of the most significant, if subtle, ideological battles waged on behalf of the human against the machine since the Enlightenment—one that continues in the wake of technological and conceptual progress today.
A sustained examination of the automaton as early modern machine and as a curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, Copying Machines offers extended readings of mechanistic images in the eighteenth century through the prism of twentieth-century commentary. In readings of texts by Lafayette, Molière, Laclos, and La Bruyère—and in a chapter on the eighteenth-century inventor of automatons, Jacques Vaucanson—Catherine Liu provides a fascinating account of ways in which the automaton and the preindustrial machine haunt the imagination of ancien régime France and structure key moments of the canonical literature and criticism of the period.
Martinique, French Guyana, Senegal, Morocco, and Haiti serve as the stage for the struggle these writers have faced with French language and culture, a struggle influenced by the legacy of Aimé Césaire. In his stand against the modernist principles of Charles Baudelaire, Walker argues, Césaire has become the preeminent francophone countermodernist. A further examination of the relationships between Césaire and the writers Léon Gontron Damas, Mariama Bâ, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Ken Bugul, and Gérard Étienne forms the core of the book and leads to Walker’s characterization of francophone literature as having “slipped the knot,” or escaped the snares of the familiar binary oppositions of modernism. Instead, he discovers in these writers a shared consciousness rooted in an effort to counter and denounce modernist humanist discourse and pointing toward a new subjectivity formed through the negotiation of an alternative modernity.
Countermodernism and Francophone Literary Culture will engage readers interested in French literature and in postcolonial, Caribbean, African, American, and francophone studies.
In Creole Medievalism, Michelle Warren demonstrates that Bédier's relationship to this multicultural and economically peripheral colony motivates his nationalism in complex ways. Simultaneously proud of his French heritage and nostalgic for the island, Bédier defends French sovereignty based on an ambivalent resistance to his creole culture. Warren shows that in the early twentieth century, influential intellectuals from Réunion helped define the new genre of the "colonial novel," adopting a pro-colonial spirit that shaped both medieval and Francophone studies. Probing the work of a once famous but little understood cultural figure, Creole Medievalism illustrates how postcolonial France and Réunion continue to grapple with histories too varied to meet expectations of national unity.
Dominique Eddé met novelist and playwright Jean Genet in the 1970s. And she never forgot him. “His presence,” she writes, “gave me the sensation of icy fire. Like his words, his gestures were full, calculated, and precise. . . . Genet’s movements mimicked the movement of time, accumulating rather than passing.”
This book is Eddé’s account of that meeting and its ripples through her years of engaging with Genet’s life and work. Rooted in personal reminiscences, it is nonetheless much broader, offering a subtle analysis of Genet’s work and teasing out largely unconsidered themes, like the absence of the father, which becomes a metaphor for Genet’s perpetual attack on the law. Tying Genet to Dostoevsky through their shared fascination with crime, Eddé helps us more clearly understand Genet’s relationship to France and Palestine, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the theater, and even death. A powerful personal account of the influence of one writer on another, The Crime of Jean Genet is also one of the most penetrating explorations yet of Genet’s work and achievement.
Yet is it possible that romance is expressing a truth—and a truth unrecognized by realist genres? The Arthurian literature of the Middle Ages, Karen Sullivan argues, consistently ventriloquizes in its pages the criticisms that were being made of romance at the time, and implicitly defends itself against those criticisms. The Danger of Romance shows that the conviction that ordinary reality is the only reality is itself an assumption, and one that can blind those who hold it to the extraordinary phenomena that exist around them. It demonstrates that that which is rare, ephemeral, and inexplicable is no less real than that which is commonplace, long-lasting, and easily accounted for. If romance continues to appeal to audiences today, whether in its Arthurian prototype or in its more recent incarnations, it is because it confirms the perception—or even the hope—of a beauty and truth in the world that realist genres deny.
Our common definition of literacy is the ability to read and write in one language. But as Margaret Ferguson reveals in Dido's Daughters, this description is inadequate, because it fails to help us understand heated conflicts over literacy during the emergence of print culture. The fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, she shows, were a contentious era of transition from Latin and other clerical modes of literacy toward more vernacular forms of speech and writing.
Fegurson's aim in this long-awaited work is twofold: to show that what counted as more valuable among these competing literacies had much to do with notions of gender, and to demonstrate how debates about female literacy were critical to the emergence of imperial nations. Looking at writers whom she dubs the figurative daughters of the mythological figure Dido—builder of an empire that threatened to rival Rome—Ferguson traces debates about literacy and empire in the works of Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Elizabeth Cary, and Aphra Behn, as well as male writers such as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Wyatt. The result is a study that sheds new light on the crucial roles that gender and women played in the modernization of England and France.
There are separate languages to be understood in the writings of French and English Romantics, Margery Sabin tells us. Instead of minimizing the importance of national characteristics, as comparatistes frequently do, she demonstrates that national traditions of thought and language have a determining influence throughout the Romantic period. In tracking the differing courses pursued by the best French and English writers of the period, she shows that the idea of the transcendental imagination never took hold among the French-Romantics; that Wordsworth's ideal of the marriage between mind and nature did not inform the vision of the French, who were preoccupied with the isolated human spirit thrown back on its own resources of conscience or faith.
A detailed and far-ranging comparison of Rousseau's Confessions and Wordsworth's Prelude establishes her provocative argument. The idea gains force from the wealth of examples that follow. Sabin examines Wordsworth, Coleridge, and George Eliot as representative of varieties of English Romanticism in the genres of lyric poetry, critical theory, and the novel. Contrasts between these writers and Hugo, Baudelaire, and Flaubert offer new and more precise ways of understanding both Romanticism and later departures from it. Her sensitive readings of Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Addison, Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and others yield further evidence. This fresh critical perspective will generate further thought about major writers and about national differences in literature.
Focusing on the objectification of women by the “male gaze,” Stewart analyzes the varous ways in which this masculine power is simultaneously represented and veiled: the fascination with women playing “male” roles, such as soldiers; the preponderance of voyeuristic images of the naked female body; the transformation of male power into hostile forces of nature that render women helpless. Further, Stewart shows how “indecent” engravings that purported to test the limits of eighteenth-century morality often merely reinforced prevailing images of women.
Addressing critical concerns about the societal enforcement of gender roles in literature along with essential questions about the function of illustration, Engraven Desire provides surprising insight into the culturally conditioned act of reading. Stewart’s work, itself richly illustrated with hundreds of arresting reproductions, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the interplay of art, literature, and society.
"Bloch's Study is a genuinely interdisciplinary one, bringing together elements of history, ethnology, philology, philosophy, economics and literature, with the undoubted ambition of generating a new synthesis which will enable us to read the Middle Ages in a different light.
Stated simply, and in terms which do justice neither to the density nor the subtlety of his argument, Bloch's thesis is this: that medieval society perceived itself in terms of a vertical mode of descent from origins. This model is articulated etymologically in medieval theories of grammar and language, and is consequently reflected in historical and theological writings; it is also latent in the genealogical structure of the aristocratic family as it began to be organized in France in the twelfth century, and is made manifest in such systems of signs as heraldry and the adoption of patronymns. . . .
It is an ingenious and compelling synthesis which no medievalist, even on this side of the Atlantic, can afford to ignore." –Nicholas Mann, Times Literary Supplement
Western site that gives historical reality to the utopias of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment?
Jean-Philippe Mathy offers the first systematic examination of French texts that address the question of America. He shows how prominent French intellectuals have represented America as myth and metaphor, covering the entire ideological spectrum from Maurras to Duhamel, and from Sartre to Aron. The texts themselves range from novels and poems to travel narratives and philosophical essays by Claudel, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Kristeva, and many others.
Mathy deftly situates these discourses on America against the background of French intellectual and political history since 1789. The judgments on American culture that originate in France, he contends, are also statements about France itself. Widespread condemnation of American
materialism and pragmatism cuts across deep ideological and political divides in France, primarily because French intellectuals still operate within a framework of critical and aesthetic models born in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance and elaborated in the age of French classicism.
Mathy engages issues central to interpreting the American experience, such as the current controversies over multiculturalism and Eurocentrism. Although Mathy deals mainly with French authors, he does not limit himself to them. Rather, he uses a comparative, cross-cultural approach that also takes in accounts of America by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Junger, Gramsci, and other Europeans, as well as American self-interpretations from Emerson and Dewey to Cornel West and Christopher Lasch.
Because debates on American modernity have played a crucial intellectual role in France, Extrême-Occident is a major contribution to modern French cultural
history. It will be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the main currents of twentieth-century French thought.
Miller offers a historical introduction to the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored it. He follows the twists and turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas “adventure.” Turning to twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa and the Caribbean—including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan M’Bala—have confronted the aftermath of France’s slave trade, attempting to bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and memory.
Grafting Helen looks at "classicism"—the privileged rhetorical language for describing cultural origins in the West—as a protracted form of cultural embezzlement. No coin in the realm has been more valuable, more circulated, more coveted, or more counterfeited than the one that bears the face of Helen of Troy. Gumpert uncovers Helen as the emblem for the past as something to be stolen, appropriated, imitated, extorted, and coveted once again.
Tracing the figure of Helen from its classical origins through the Middle Ages, the French Renaissance, and the modern era, Gumpert suggests that the relation of current Western culture to the past is not like the act of coveting; it is the act of coveting, he argues, for it relies on the same strategies, the same defenses, the same denials, and the same delusions.
Victor Brombert is an unrivaled interpreter of French literature; and the writers he considers in this latest book are ones with whom he has a long acqualntance. These essays--eleven of them appearing in English for the first time and some totally new--give us an acute analysis of the major figures of the nineteenth century and a splendid lesson in criticism.
Brombert shows how a text works--its structure and narrative devices, and the symbolic function of characters, episodes, words--and he highlights the distinctive postures and styles of each writer. He gives us a sense of the hidden inner text as well as the techniques writers have devised to lead their readers to the discovery of what is hidden. With wonderful subtlety he unravels the reader's participatory response, whether it be Hugo reading Shakespeare, Sartre reading Hugo, Stendhal reading Rousseau, T. S. Eliot misreading Baudelaire, or Baudelaire, Balzac, and Flaubert reading their own sensibilities. This book is a sterling example of the finest kind of literary criticism--wise, intelligent, responsive, sympathetic--that reveals central aspects of the creative process and returns the reader joyfully to the texts themselves.
In sixteenth-century France, the level of jokes, irony, and ridicule found in pamphlets and plays became aggressively hostile. In Hostile Humor in Renaissance France, Bruce Hayes investigates this period leading up to the French Wars of Religion, when a deliberately harmful and destructive form of satire appeared.
This study examines both pamphlets and plays to show how this new form of humor emerged that attacked religious practices and people in ways that forever changed the nature of satire and religious debate in France. Hayes explores this phenomenon in the context of the Catholic and Protestant conflict to reveal new insights about the society that both exploited and vilified this kind of satire.
The classical period in France presents a particularly lively battleground for the transition between oral-visual culture, on the one hand, and print culture on the other. The former depended on learning from sources of knowledge directly, in their presence, in a manner analogous to theatrical experience. The latter became characterized by the distance and abstraction of reading. How Do I Know Thee? explores the ways in which literature, philosophy, and psychology approach social cognition, or how we come to know others. Richard E. Goodkin describes a central opposition between what he calls “theatrical cognition” and “narrative cognition,” drawing both on scholarship on literary genre and mode, and also on the work of a number of philosophers and psychologists, in particular Descartes’s theory of cognition, Freudian psychoanalysis, mid‑twentieth‑century behaviorism, and the field of cognitive science. The result is a study that will be of interest not only to students of the classical period but also to those in the corresponding disciplines.
In the United States, such hoaxes are familiar. Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree and JT LeRoy’s Sarah are two infamous examples. Miller’s contribution is to study hoaxes beyond our borders, employing a comparative framework and bringing French and African identity hoaxes into dialogue with some of their better-known American counterparts. In France, multiculturalism is generally eschewed in favor of universalism, and there should thus be no identities (in the American sense) to steal. However, as Miller demonstrates, this too is a ruse: French universalism can only go so far and do so much. There is plenty of otherness to appropriate. This French and Francophone tradition of imposture has never received the study it deserves. Taking a novel approach to this understudied tradition, Impostors examines hoaxes in both countries, finding similar practices of deception and questions of harm.
Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.
Eribon describes the emergence of homosexual literature in Britain and France at the turn of the last century and traces this new gay discourse from Oscar Wilde and the literary circles of late-Victorian Oxford to André Gide and Marcel Proust. He asserts that Foucault should be placed in a long line of authors—including Wilde, Gide, and Proust—who from the nineteenth century onward have tried to create spaces in which to resist subjection and reformulate oneself. Drawing on his unrivaled knowledge of Foucault’s oeuvre, Eribon presents a masterful new interpretation of Foucault. He calls attention to a particular passage from Madness and Civilization that has never been translated into English. Written some fifteen years before The History of Sexuality, this passage seems to contradict Foucault’s famous idea that homosexuality was a late-nineteenth-century construction. Including an argument for the use of Hannah Arendt’s thought in gay rights advocacy, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an impassioned call for critical, active engagement with the question of how gay life is shaped both from without and within.
Abandoned, arrested, and repeatedly incarcerated, Genet, who died in 1986, led a life that could best be described as a tour of the underworld of the twentieth century.
Similarly, Genet's work is recognized by its nearly obsessive and often savage treatment of certain recurring themes. Sex, desire, death, oppression, domination-these ideas, central to Genet's artistic project, can be seen as preoccupations that arose directly from the artist's travels, imprisonments, sexual and emotional relationships, and political engagements and protests. This trenchant volume focuses directly on the moments in Genet's life in which those preoccupations are vividly projected in his novels, theater works, and film projects.
Genet's works have been hugely influential for a vast array of writers, filmmakers, choreographers, and directors, especially at moments of social crisis; thus Genet's life is not only at the root of his own work but also that of many important artists of the twentieth century. With its frank and illuminating introduction by Edmund White, Jean Genet gives readers access to this brilliant and brutal mind.
Provence through the eyes of its writers—those who wrote of it in Provençal or French and also those visitors who were moved by its beauty—that is the inspiration behind A Literary Guide to Provence. In this compact travel guide, Marseilles native Daniel Vitaglione presents a literary panorama of the region of southern France from the Avignon of Mistral to Colette’s St. Tropez.
Including such sites as the birthplace of Nostradamus and the ruins of the Marquis de Sade’s castle, A Literary Guide to Provence presents a thousand years of history entwined with maps and photos that provide readers on tour with a sense of the historical import of this most beautiful of regions even as they experience it firsthand.
Both authors of Provençal ancestry and those who came to love and live in Provence are featured in this comprehensive and enchanting picture of the garden place of France. The Riviera enticed Virginia Woolf. Toulon inspired two novels by Georges Sand. Robert Louis Stevenson resided in Hyères, as did Edith Wharton. Le Lavandou was Willa Cather’s favorite place. F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in St. Raphael and Juan-les-Pins, where he wrote Tender is the Night.
This illustrated guide follows in these writers’ footsteps, and the practical information on hotels and restaurants (phones, web sites, email, etc.) make it the ideal traveling companion for armchair tourists and those who cannot resist seeing Provence for themselves.
"Le Goff is one of the most distinguished of the French medieval historians of his generation . . . he has exercised immense influence."—Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books
"The whole book turns on a fascinating blend of the brutally materialistic and the generously imaginative."—Tom Shippey, London Review of Books
"The richness, imaginativeness and sheer learning of Le Goff's work . . . demand to be experienced."—M. T. Clanchy, Times Literary Supplement
An expanded edition of revered theorist Michael Löwy's Morning Star: Marxism and Surrealism (previously published in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek), this masterwork collects the author's essays on the ways in which surrealism intersected with a variety of revolutionary political approaches, ranging from utopian ideals to Marxism and situationism. Taking its title from André Breton's essay "Arcane 17," which casts the star as the searing firebrand of rebellion, Löwy's provocative work spans many perspectives. These include surrealist artists who were deeply interested in Marxism and anarchism (Breton among them), as well as Marxists who were deeply interested in surrealism (Walter Benjamin in particular).
Probing the dialectics of innovation, diversity, continuity, and unity throughout surrealism's international presence, Morning Star also incorporates analyses of Claude Cahun, Guy Debord, Pierre Naville, José Carlos Mariátegui and others, accompanied by numerous reproductions of surrealist art. An extraordinarily rich collection, Morning Star promises to ignite new dialogues regarding the very nature of dissent.
One of the first books on “Gays in the Military” published following the historic repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in 2011, Napoleonic Friendship examines the history of male intimacy in the French military, from Napoleon to the First World War. Echoing the historical record of gay soldiers in the United States, Napoleonic Friendship is the first book-length study on the origin of queer soldiers in modern France. Based on extensive archival research in France, the book traces the development of affectionate friendships in the French Army from 1789 to 1916. Following the French Revolution, radical military reforms created conditions for new physical and emotional intimacy between soldiers, establishing a model of fraternal affection during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that would persist amid the ravages of the Franco-Prussian War and World War I. Through readings of Napoleonic military memoirs (and other non-fiction archival material) and French military fiction (from Hugo and Balzac to Zola and Proust), Martin examines a broad range of emotional and erotic relationships, from combat buddies to soldier lovers. He argues that the French Revolution’s emphasis on military fraternity evolved into an unprecedented sense of camaraderie in the armies of Napoleon. For many soldiers, the hardships of combat led to intimate friendships. For some, the homosociality of military life inspired mutual affection, lifelong commitment, and homoerotic desire.
Considering novels along with journalism, theatrical performances, correspondences, and face-to-face encounters, Lucey focuses on the interlocking social and formal dimensions of using the first person. He argues for understanding the first person not just as a grammatical category but also as a collectively produced social artifact, demonstrating that Proust’s, Gide’s, and Colette’s use of the first person involved a social process of assuming the authority to speak about certain issues, or on behalf of certain people. Lucey reveals these three writers as both practitioners and theorists of the first person; he traces how, when they figured themselves or other first persons in certain statements regarding same-sex identity, they self-consciously called attention to the creative effort involved in doing so.
Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows.
Written by 164 American and European specialists, the essays are introduced by date and arranged in chronological order, but here ends the book’s resemblance to the usual history of literature. Each date is followed by a headline evoking an event that indicates the chronological point of departure. Usually the event is literary—the publication of an original work, a journal, a translation, the first performance of a play, the death of an author—but some events are literary only in terms of their repercussions and resonances. Essays devoted to a genre exist alongside essays devoted to one book, institutions are presented side by side with literary movements, and large surveys appear next to detailed discussions of specific landmarks.
No article is limited to the “life and works” of a single author. Proust, for example, appears through various lenses: fleetingly, in 1701, apropos of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights; in 1898, in connection with the Dreyfus Affair; in 1905, on the occasion of the law on the separation of church and state; in 1911, in relation to Gide and their different treatments of homosexuality; and at his death in 1922.
Without attempting to cover every author, work, and cultural development since the Serments de Strasbourg in 842, this history succeeds in being both informative and critical about the more than 1,000 years it describes. The contributors offer us a chance to appreciate not only French culture but also the major critical positions in literary studies today. A New History of French Literature will be essential reading for all engaged in the study of French culture and for all who are interested in it. It is an authoritative, lively, and readable volume.
Toward the end of Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator describes the act of creating a work of art as a conversion of sensation into a spiritual equivalent. By means of such allegories of “conversion,” Schlossman shows, the modernist artist disappeared within the work of art and left behind the trace of his sublime vocation, a vocation in which he was transformed, in Schlossman’s words, “into a kind of priest kneeling at the altar of beauty before the masked divinity of representation.”
The author shows how allegory—the representation of the symbolic as something real—was adapted by modernist writers to reflect subjectivity while masking an authorial origin. She reveals how modernist allegory arose, as Walter Benjamin suggests, at the crossroads of history, sociology, economics, urban architecture, and art—providing a kind of map of capitalism—and was produced through the eyes of a melancholic gazing at a “monument of absence.”
Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes, Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?
Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life’s deepest wonderings.
With Palace of Books, he invites us to explore the domain of literature, its sweeping vistas and hidden recesses. Engaging such fundamental questions as why people feel the need to write, or what is involved in putting one’s self on the page, or how a writer knows she’s written her last sentence, Grenier marshals apposite passages from his favorite writers: Chekhov, Baudelaire, Proust, James, Kafka, Mansfield and many others. Those writers mingle companionably with tales from Grenier’s half-century as an editor and friend to countless legendary figures, including Albert Camus, Romain Gary, Milan Kundera, and Brassai,.
Grenier offers here a series of observations and quotations that feel as spontaneous as good conversation, yet carry the lasting insights of a lifetime of reading and thinking. Palace of Books is rich with pleasures and surprises, the perfect accompaniment to old literary favorites, and the perfect introduction to new ones.
In The Pensive Citadel, Victor Brombert looks back on a lifetime of learning within a university world greatly altered since he entered Yale on the GI Bill in the 1940s. Yet for all that has changed, much of Brombert’s long experience as a reader and teacher is richly familiar: the rewards of rereading, the joy of learning from students, and most of all the insight to be found in engaging works of literature. The essays gathered here range from meditations on laughter and jealousy to new appreciations of Brombert’s lifelong companions Shakespeare, Montaigne, Voltaire, and Stendhal.
A veteran of D-day and the Battle of the Bulge who witnessed history’s worst nightmares firsthand, Brombert nevertheless approaches literature with a lightness of spirit, making the case for intellectual mobility and openness to change. The Pensive Citadel is a celebration of a life lived in literary study, and of what can be learned from attending to the works that form one’s cultural heritage.
Politics, Writing, Mutilation was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Five twentieth-century French writers played, and continue to play, a pivotal role in the development of literary-philosophical thinking that has come to be known in the United States as post-structuralism. The work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, and Francis Ponge in the 1930s and 1940s amounts to a prehistory of today's theoretical debates; the writings of Foucault and Derrida in particular would have been unthinkable outside the context provided by these writers. In Politics, Writing, Mutilation,Allan Stoekl emphasizes their role as precursors, but he also makes clear that they created a distinctive body of work that must be read and evaluated on its own terms.
Stoekl's critical readings of their work—selected novels, poems, and autobiographical fragments—reveal them to be battlegrounds not only of disruptive language practices, but of conflicting political drives as well. These irreconcilable tendencies can be defined as progressive political revolution, on the one hand with its emphasis on utility, conservation, and labor; and, on the other hand, a notion of dangerous and sinister production that stresses orgiastic sexuality and delirious expenditure. Caught between these forces is the intellectual of Bataille's time (and indeed of ours), locked in impotence, self-betrayal, and automutilation.
Stoekl develops his critique through dual readings of each writer's central work—the first reading deconstructive, the second a search for the political meaning excluded by a deconstructive approach. Repeating this process on a larger scale, he shows how Derrida and Foucault are indebted to their precursors even while they have betrayed them by stripping their work of political conflict and historical specificity. And he acknowledges that one of the most painful questions faced in prewar and Occupied France—that of the unthinkable guilt and duplicity of the intellectual—may not be as remote from contemporary theoretical concerns as some would have us believe.
Spanning the decades from the post–World War II era to the present day, Amine demonstrates that the postcolonial other is both peripheral to and intimately entangled with all the ideals so famously evoked by the French capital—romance, modernity, equality, and liberty. In their work, postcolonial writers and artists have juxtaposed these ideals with colonial tropes of intimacy (the interracial couple, the harem, the Arab queer) to expose their hidden violence. Amine highlights the intrusion of race in everyday life in a nation where, officially, it does not exist.
Explores French-language writing by women outside France.
This groundbreaking volume highlights the work of contemporary women writing in French whose cultural links, ethnic identities, and historical roots lie outside France. The writings of these women emanate from the cultures of Africa and the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Quebec and other French-speaking regions of Canada.
By writing in French, the writers discussed in Postcolonial Subjects both acknowledge and write against the cultural heritage of France. In doing so, they participate in the subversion of European literary traditions and take part in various forms of cultural and linguistic blending, generating new artistic currents. Each of these essays articulates contemporary debates about the politics and cultural effects of sexism, homophobia, racism, and essentialism, as well as pointing out connections and points of resistance among such diverse strains as feminism, nationalism, and ethnicity. Contributors: Eloise A. Brière, U of Albany; Miriam Cooke, Duke U; Irène Assiba d’Almeida, U of Arizona; Joan Dayan, U of Arizona; John D. Erickson, U of Kentucky; Françoise Lionnet, Northwestern U; Christiane Makward, Pennsylvania State U; Kitzie McKinney, Bentley College; Christopher L. Miller, Yale U; Mary-Kay Miller, Vanderbilt U; Jane Moss, Colby College; Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, Stanford U; Lori Saint-Martin, U du Québec à Montréal; Ronnie Scharfman, Purchase College, SUNY.
Describes the variations in the figure of Dido as she emerges from ancient literary texts.
If we view the Aeneid—the poem of empire, conquest, and male hierarchy-as the West's quintessential canonical text and Latin primer, then the history of Virgil readership should tell us much about the concept of education in the West. In this book, Marilynn Desmond reveals how a constructed and mediated tradition of reading Virgil has conditioned various interpretations among readers responding to medieval cultural and literary texts. In particular, she shows how the story of Dido has been marginalized within canonical readings of the Aeneid. Reaching back to the Middle Ages and vernacular poetic readings of Dido, Desmond recovers an alternative Virgil from historical tradition and provides another paradigm for reading the Aeneid.
Desmond follows the figure of Dido as she emerges from ancient historical and literary texts (from Timaeus and Justin to Virgil and Ovid) and circulates in medieval textual cultures. Her study ranges from the pedagogical discourses of Latin textual traditions (including Servius, Augustine, Bernard Silvestris, and John of Salisbury) to the French and English vernacular cultures inscribed in the Roman d'Eneas, the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César, and the work of Dante, Chaucer, Gavin Douglas, Caxton, and Christine de Pizan. The positions of all these readers point to the cultural specificity and historical contingency of all traditions of reading; thus, this book demonstrates how medieval traditions of reading Dido offer the modern reader a series of countertraditions that support feminist, antihomophobic, and postcolonial interpretive gestures.
The Reinvention of Obscenity casts a fresh light on the mythical link between sexual impropriety and things French. Exploring the complicity between censorship, print culture, and obscenity, DeJean argues that mass market printing and the first modern censorial machinery came into being at the very moment that obscenity was being reinvented—that is, transformed from a minor literary phenomenon into a threat to society. DeJean's principal case in this study is the career of Moliére, who cannily exploited the new link between indecency and female genitalia to found his career as a print author; the enormous scandal which followed his play L'école des femmes made him the first modern writer to have his sex life dissected in the press.
Keenly alert to parallels with the currency of obscenity in contemporary America, The Reinvention of Obscenity will concern not only scholars of French history, but anyone interested in the intertwined histories of sex, publishing, and censorship.
Reproductions of Banality was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
An established fascist state has never existed in France, and after World War II there was a tendency to blame the Nazi Occupation for the presence of fascists within the country. Yet the memory of fascism within their ranks still haunts French intellectuals, and questions about a French version of fascist ideology have returned to the political forefront again and again in the years since the war. In Reproductions of Banality, Alice Yaegar Kaplan investigates the development of fascist ideology as it was manifested in the culture of prewar and Occupied France. Precisely because it existed only in a "gathering" or formative stage, and never achieved the power that brings with it a bureaucratic state apparatus, French fascism never lost its utopian, communal elements, or its consequent aesthetic appeal. Kaplan weighs this fascist aesthetic and its puzzling power of attraction by looking closely at its material remains: the narratives, slogans, newspapers, and film criticism produced by a group of writers who worked in Paris in the 1930s and early 1940s — their "most real moment."
These writers include Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Lucien Rebatat, Robert Brasillach, and Maurice Bardeche, as well as two precursors of French fascism, Georges Sorel and the Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, who made of the airplane an industrial carrier of sexual fantasies and a prime mover in the transit from futurism to fascism. Kaplan's work is grounded in the major Marxist and psychoanalytic theories of fascism and in concepts of banality and mechanical reproduction that draw upon Walter Benjamin. Emphasizing the role played by the new technologies of sight and sound, she is able to suggest the nature of the long-repressed cultural and political climate that produced French fascism, and to show—by implication — that the mass marketing of ideology in democratic states bears a family resemblance to the fascist mode of an earlier time.
Wampole examines both the philosophical implications of this metaphor and its political evolution. From the root as home to the root as genealogical origin to the root as the past itself, rootedness has survived in part through its ability to subsume other compelling metaphors, such as the foundation, the source, and the seed. With a focus on this concept’s history in France and Germany, Wampole traces its influence in diverse areas such as the search for the mystical origins of words, land worship, and nationalist rhetoric, including the disturbing portrayal of the Jews as an unrooted, and thus unrighteous, people. Exploring the works of Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Celan, and many more, Rootedness is a groundbreaking study of a figure of speech that has had wide-reaching—and at times dire—political and social consequences.
In Someone, Michael Lucey considers characters from twentieth-century French literary texts whose sexual forms prove difficult to conceptualize or represent. The characters expressing these “misfit” sexualities gravitate towards same-sex encounters. Yet they differ in subtle but crucial ways from mainstream gay or lesbian identities—whether because of a discordance between gender identity and sexuality, practices specific to a certain place and time, or the fleetingness or non-exclusivity of desire. Investigating works by Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Jean Genet, and others, Lucey probes both the range of same-sex sexual forms in twentieth-century France and the innovative literary language authors have used to explore these evanescent forms.
As a portrait of fragile sexualities that involve awkward and delicate maneuvers and modes of articulation, Someone reveals just how messy the ways in which we experience and perceive sexuality remain, even to ourselves.
Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Subject/Object and Beyond brings together essays by established and emerging scholars to honor the exceptionally rich contributions and career of scholar Colette H. Winn. It also celebrates fifty years of sustained scholarship on early modern women, along with the foundation of Women’s Studies as a recognized academic discipline in North America. The collection comprises seventeen articles that explore multiple perspectives on early modern women, including their writings, translations, reception, and contributions to various fields, including literature, music, politics, religion, and science.
With this important new book, Susan Suleiman lays the foundation for a postmodern feminist poetics and theory of the avant-garde. She shows how the figure of Woman, as fantasy, myth, or metaphor, has functioned in the work of male avant-garde writers and artists of this century. Focusing also on women's avant-garde artistic practices, Suleiman demonstrates how to read difficult modern works in a way that reveals their political as well as their aesthetic impact.
Suleiman directly addresses the subversive intent of avant-garde movements from Surrealism to postmodernism. Through her detailed readings of provocatively transgressive works by André Breton, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and others, Suleiman demonstrates the central role of the female body in the male erotic imagination and illuminates the extent to which masculinist assumptions have influenced modern art and theory. By examining the work of contemporary women avantgarde artists and theorists--including Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Leonora Carrington, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman--Suleiman shows the political power of feminist critiques of patriarchal ideology, and especially emphasizes the power of feminist humor and parody.
Central to Suleiman's revisionary theory of the avant-garde is the figure of the playful, laughing mother. True to the radically irreverent spirit of the historical avant-gardes and their postmodernist successors, Suleiman's laughing mother embodies the need for a link between symbolic innovation and political and social change.
“Tropicalization” is the central metaphor of this analysis, a term that incorporates both the construction of various dynamic tropes by which the colonized are viewed and the site of the study, primarily the tropics. Tropicopolitans, then, are those people who bear and resist the representations of colonialist discourse. In readings that expose new relationships between literary representation and colonialism in the eighteenth century, Aravamudan considers such texts as Behn’s Oroonoko, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Captain Singleton, Addison’s Cato, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and The Drapier’s Letters. He extends his argument to include analyses of Johnson’s Rasselas, Beckford’s Vathek, Montagu’s travel letters, Equiano’s autobiography, Burke’s political and aesthetic writings, and Abbé de Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. Offering a radical approach to literary history, this study provides new mechanisms for understanding the development of anticolonial agency.
Introducing eighteenth-century studies to a postcolonial hermeneutics, Tropicopolitans will interest scholars engaged in postcolonial studies, eighteenth-century literature, and literary theory.
Exploring the figure of the heretic in Catholic writings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as well as the heretic's characterological counterpart in troubadour lyrics, Arthurian romance, and comic tales, Truth and the Heretic seeks to understand why French literature of the period celebrated the very characters who were so persecuted in society at large. Karen Sullivan proposes that such literature allowed medieval culture a means by which to express truths about heretics and the epistemological anxieties they aroused.
The first book-length study of the figure of the heretic in medieval French literature, Truth and the Heretic explores the relation between orthodoxy and deviance, authority and innovation, and will fascinate historians of ideas and literature as well as scholars of religion, critical theory, and philosophy.
A variety of educational experiments failed to tame these feral children by the standards of the day. After telling their stories, Douthwaite turns to literature that reflects on similar experiments to perfect human subjects. Her examples range from utopian schemes for progressive childrearing to philosophical tales of animated statues, from revolutionary theories of regenerated men to Gothic tales of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers such as Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite shows how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker side of eighteenth-century thought, she demonstrates how advances in science gave rise to troubling ethical concerns, as parents, scientists, and politicians tried to perfect mankind with disastrous results.
Ozouf uses the woman's portrait, traditionally a male genre, to portray ten French women of letters whose lives span the period from the eve of the French Revolution to the resurgence of the feminist movement in the late twentieth century. She studies the letters and memoirs of Mme du Deffand, Mme de Charrière, Mme Roland, Mme de Staël, Mme de Rémusat, George Sand, Hubertine Auclert, Colette, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir. Rejecting the male constructions of femininity typical of this genre, Ozouf restores these women's voices in order to study their own often-conflicted attitudes toward education, marriage, motherhood, sex, and work, as well as the dilemma of writing in a literary world that did not support women's work.
Ozouf claims that a uniquely French feminism informed these women's lives, one that stems from the great egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution and is more tolerant of difference than its American counterparts. She argues that as a result, modern French culture has not isolated women from men in the same ways as American and British cultures have done.
Though the practice of self-translation long predates modernity, it has found new forms of expression in the global literary market of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The international renown of self-translating authors Samuel Beckett, Joseph Brodsky, and Vladimir Nabokov has offered motivation to a new generation of writers who actively translate themselves.
Intervening in recent debates in world literature and translation studies, Writing It Twice establishes the prominence and vitality of self-translation in contemporary French literature. Because of its intrinsic connection to multiple literary communities, self-translation prompts a reexamination of the aesthetics and politics of reading across national lines. Kippur argues that self-translated works should be understood as the paradigmatic example of world literature and, as such, crucial for interpreting the dynamics of literary circulation into and out of French.
After the failed revolution of 1848, the sense of disillusion that swept through France deeply affected the literature of the time. Chambers argues that literary melancholy and disorientation constituted a symptom of historical conditions rather than, as many other critics contend, a willful resistance to them.
Enriched by careful readings of works by Flaubert, Nerval, Baudelaire, Gautier, and Hugo, this book is a subtle meditation on the powers of writing and reading and a suggestive contribution to current debates over the historical status of literary texts. Originally published in French, the book has been revised and expanded to include a new chapter on Gérard de Nerval's "Sylvie."
In analyses of well-known authors such as Corneille, Molière, Racine, and Madame de Lafayette, Peters demonstrates that the apparent absence of physical space in seventeenth-century literary depiction indicates a subtle engagement with, rather than a rejection of, evolving principles of cosmological understanding. Space is not absent in these works so much as transformed in keeping with contemporaneous developments in early modern natural philosophy. The Written World will appeal to philosophers of literature and literary theorists as well as scholars of early modern Europe and historians of science and geography
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