Culture and Identity in Belgian Francophone Writing
Culture and Identity in Belgian Francophone Writing

Author: Susan Bainbrigge

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9783039113828

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Few full-length studies exist in English on French-speaking authors from Belgium. What, if any, are the particular features of francophone Belgian writing? This book explores questions of cultural and literary identity, and offers an overview of currents in critical debate regarding the place of francophone Belgian writing and its relationship to its larger neighbour, but also engages with broader questions concerning the classification of 'francophone' literature. The study brings together well-known and less well-known modern and contemporary writers (Suzanne Lilar, Neel Doff, Dominique Rolin, Jacqueline Harpman, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Jean Muno, Nicole Malinconi, and Amélie Nothomb) whose works share a number of recurring themes and features, notably a preoccupation with questions of identity and alterity. Overall, the study highlights the diverse ways in which these questions of cultural identity and alterity emerge as a dominant theme throughout the corpus, viewed through a series of literary and cultural frameworks which bring together perspectives both local and global.

The Beautiful and the Monstrous
The Beautiful and the Monstrous

Author: Amaleena Damlé

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9783039119004

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Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose formal experiments and revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of literary forms. The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists, comparative studies and interdisciplinary projects.

Mostly French
Mostly French

Author: Alistair Rolls

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9783039119578

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This book, which was inspired by a conference on plural conjugations of Frenchness (La France au pluriel) held in 2007 at the Universities of Technology, Sydney and Newcastle, focuses on the concept of national belonging as it pertains to detective fiction, with particular emphasis on French and Australian detective fictions and the encounter and crossing over between them. The objective is not only to use the concepts of 'French' and 'Australian' detective fiction productively, via the analysis of French and Australian detective-fiction novels, but also to challenge and undermine the very notion of national detective fictions, which are so often assumed to be transparently meaningful. The contributors to this volume focus variously on the following areas: comparative analysis of the genesis of French and Australian detective fiction; translation of Australian (and other) novels into French; translation as a genre; Frenchness as a stereotype, its role in individual novels and its spectre in all detective fiction; and readings of individual French and Australian detective novels. Overall, this book aims to challenge assumptions about French detective fiction, its influence on other national fictions and its explicit and implicit presence in all detective fiction.

New Approaches to Crime in French Literature, Culture and Film
New Approaches to Crime in French Literature, Culture and Film

Author: Louise Hardwick

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9783039118502

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The notion of crime crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. In an era of identity fraud, eco-crime and global terrorism, this collection moves towards a reconsideration of crime in the French and Francophone literary and cultural imagination. How have our conceptions of 'criminal' behaviour developed? How has the French genre of crime fiction, encompassing, but not limited to, the polar, the roman policier and film noir, evolved and reinvented itself? The volume adopts a number of theoretical approaches, which range from sociological and criminological discourse to literary criticism and postcolonial theory (by Chamoiseau, Durkheim, Deleuze, Foucault, Glissant, Krafft-Ebing and Todorov). In a wide-ranging series of innovative and challenging readings, it examines ideas which include the evolving concept of crime in literature from Voltaire and censorship through to scientific constructions of criminality in the nineteenth century and in the postcolonial era, both within and outside metropolitan France. The volume also explores 'textual crimes' in contemporary Martinican women's writing, crime as a genre in André Héléna, Serge Arcouët and Jean Meckert, Sébastien Japrisot and Dominique Manotti, and visual responses to crime by artist Jacques Monory and filmmaker Didier Bivel.

Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq

Author: John McCann

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9783039113736

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Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose formal experiments and revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of literary forms. The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists, comparative studies and interdisciplinary projects.

Albert Camus's "The New Mediterranean Culture"
Albert Camus's

Author: Neil Foxlee

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 9783034302074

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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 méditerranéenne' ('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.

Madness in Twentieth-century French Women's Writing
Madness in Twentieth-century French Women's Writing

Author: Suzanne Dow

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9783039115402

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This book offers a discussion of the trope of madness in twentieth-century French women's writing, focusing on close readings of the following texts: Violette Leduc's L'Asphyxie (1946), Marguerite Duras's Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), Simone de Beauvoir's 'La Femme rompue' (1967), Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire (1975), Jeanne Hyvrard's Les Prunes de Cythère (1975) and Mère la mort (1976). The discussion traces the evolution in the way madness is taken up by women authors from the key period starting just prior to the emergence of second-wave feminism and culminating at the height of the écriture féminine project. This study argues that madness offers itself up to these authors as a powerful means to convey a certain ambivalence towards changing contemporary ideas on the authority of authorship. On the one hand a highly enabling means to figure transgression, the madwoman is equally the repository for a twentieth-century 'anxiety of authorship' on the part of the woman writer.

Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter
Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter

Author: Susan Bainbrigge

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2020-07-27

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1527557316

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This collection of essays explores the ways in which talking therapies have been depicted in twentieth century and contemporary narratives (life-writings, fiction and poetry) in French. This vibrant corpus of francophone literary engagements of therapy has so far been widely unexplored, but it offers rich insights into the connections between literature and psychoanalysis. As the number of autobiographical and fictional depictions of the therapeutic encounter is still on the rise, these creative outputs raise pressing questions: why do narratives of the therapeutic encounter continue to fascinate writers and readers? What do these works tell us about the particular culture and history in which they are written? What do they tell us about therapeutic and other human encounters? The volume highlights the important role that the creative arts have played in offering representations and explorations of our minds, our relationships, and our mental health, or more pressingly, ill-health. The volume’s focus is not only on the patient’s experience as expressed via the creative act and as counterweight to the practitioner’s “case study”, but more specifically on the therapeutic encounter, specifically the relationship between therapist and patient. The contributors here engage with ideas and methodologies within contemporary psychoanalytic thought, including, but not limited to, those of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, André Green, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, and Donald Winnicott, highlighting the dynamic research culture that exists in this field and maintaining a dialogue between the humanities and various therapeutic disciplines. Narratives of the Therapeutic Encounter combines the analysis of psychoanalytic and fictional texts to explore the implications that arise from the space between the participants in therapy, including creative and aesthetic inspirations, therapeutic potentials, and ethical dilemmas.

Threat
Threat

Author: Georgina Evans

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9783039113576

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"This collection of essays arises from the 7th annual Cambridge French Graduate Conference, held July 4-5, 2005, whose theme was 'threat'."

Finding the Plot
Finding the Plot

Author: Loïc Artiago

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-08-11

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1443865443

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“Plot”, writes Peter Brooks, “is so basic to our very experience of reading, and indeed to our articulation of experience in general, that criticism has often passed it over in silence…” (Reading for the Plot, xi). Finding the Plot both explores and helps to redress this critical neglect. The book brings together an international group of scholars to address the nature, effects and specific pleasures of consuming stories. If the central focus is on France and popular literary fiction, the book’s scope – like contemporary fiction itself – observes no national frontiers, and extends across a variety of media. The book addresses both the empirical question of which genres and types of text have been and are most “popular”, and the theoretical questions of how plots work, what pleasures they offer to readers, and why it matters that the plot should not be lost.