Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-century French Writing

Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-century French Writing

Author: Sam Ferguson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0198814534

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This volume is the first study of the diary in French writing across the twentieth century, as a genre which includes both fictional and non-fictional works. From the 1880s it became apparent to writers in France that their diariesa supposedly private form of writing would probably come to be published, strongly affecting the way their readers viewed their other published works, and their very persona as an author. More than any other, Andre Gide embraced the literary potential of the diary: the first part of this book follows his experimentation with the diary in the fictional works Les Cahiers d'Andre Walter (1891) and Paludes (1895), in his diary of the composition of his great novel, Le Journal des faux-monnayeurs (1926), and in his monumental Journal 1889-1939 (1939). The second part follows developments in diary-writing after the Second World War, inflected by radical changes in attitudes towards the writing subject. Raymond Queneau's works published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara (1947-1962) used the diary playfully at a time when the writing subject was condemned by the literary avant-garde. Roland Barthes's experiments with the diary (1977-1979) took it to the extremes of its formal possibilities, at the point of a return of the writing subject. Annie Ernaux's published diaries (1993-2011) demonstrate the role of the diary in the modern field of life-writing. Throughout the century, the diary has repeatedly been used to construct an oeuvre and author, but also to call these fundamental literary concepts into question.


Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing

Diaries Real and Fictional in Twentieth-Century French Writing

Author: Sam Ferguson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-03-16

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0192545833

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This volume is the first study of the diary in French writing across the twentieth century, as a genre which includes both fictional and non-fictional works. From the 1880s it became apparent to writers in France that their diaries—a supposedly private form of writing —would probably come to be published, strongly affecting the way their readers viewed their other published works, and their very persona as an author. More than any other, André Gide embraced the literary potential of the diary: the first part of this book follows his experimentation with the diary in the fictional works Les Cahiers d'André Walter (1891) and Paludes (1895), in his diary of the composition of his great novel, Le Journal des faux-monnayeurs (1926), and in his monumental Journal 1889-1939 (1939). The second part follows developments in diary-writing after the Second World War, inflected by radical changes in attitudes towards the writing subject. Raymond Queneau's works published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara (1947-1962) used the diary playfully at a time when the writing subject was condemned by the literary avant-garde. Roland Barthes's experiments with the diary (1977-1979) took it to the extremes of its formal possibilities, at the point of a return of the writing subject. Annie Ernaux's published diaries (1993-2011) demonstrate the role of the diary in the modern field of life-writing. Throughout the century, the diary has repeatedly been used to construct an oeuvre and author, but also to call these fundamental literary concepts into question.


The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

Author: Alison James

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-09-03

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0192603493

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The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature identifies a documentary impulse in French literature that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century and culminates in a proliferation of factual writings in the twenty-first. Focusing on the period bookended by these two moments, it highlights the enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage either with current events or the historical archive. Specifically, it considers a set of ideas and practices centered on the conceptualization and use of documents. In doing so, it contests the widespread narrative that twentieth-century French literature abandons the realist enterprise, and argues that writers instead renegotiate the realist legacy outside, or at the margins of, the fictional space of the novel. Analyzing works by authors including Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano, the book defines a specific documentary mode of literary representation that records, assembles, and investigates material traces of reality. The document is a textual, visual, or material piece of evidence repurposed through its visual insertion, textual transcription, or description within a literary work. It is a fact, but it also becomes a figure, standing for literature's confrontation with the real. The documentary imagination involves a fantasy of direct access to a reality that speaks for itself. At the same time, it gives rise to concrete textual practices that open up new directions for literature, by interrogating the construction and interpretation of facts.


The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

Author: Alison James

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-08-28

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 0198859686

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Studying works by authors including Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano, this volume re-thinks twentieth-century French literature and engages with the question of distinctions between the factual and the fictional.


A History of Modern French Literature

A History of Modern French Literature

Author: Christopher Prendergast

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2017-02-21

Total Pages: 737

ISBN-13: 1400885043

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An accessible and authoritative new history of French literature, written by a highly distinguished transatlantic group of scholars This book provides an engaging, accessible, and exciting new history of French literature from the Renaissance through the twentieth century, from Rabelais and Marguerite de Navarre to Samuel Beckett and Assia Djebar. Christopher Prendergast, one of today's most distinguished authorities on French literature, has gathered a transatlantic group of more than thirty leading scholars who provide original essays on carefully selected writers, works, and topics that open a window onto key chapters of French literary history. The book begins in the sixteenth century with the formation of a modern national literary consciousness, and ends in the late twentieth century with the idea of the "national" coming increasingly into question as inherited meanings of "French" and "Frenchness" expand beyond the geographical limits of mainland France. Provides an exciting new account of French literary history from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century Features more than thirty original essays on key writers, works, and topics, written by a distinguished transatlantic group of scholars Includes an introduction and index The contributors include Etienne Beaulieu, Christopher Braider, Peter Brooks, Mary Ann Caws, David Coward, Nicholas Cronk, Edwin M. Duval, Mary Gallagher, Raymond Geuss, Timothy Hampton, Nicholas Harrison, Katherine Ibbett, Michael Lucey, Susan Maslan, Eric Méchoulan, Hassan Melehy, Larry F. Norman, Nicholas Paige, Roger Pearson, Christopher Prendergast, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Timothy J. Reiss, Sarah Rocheville, Pierre Saint-Amand, Clive Scott, Catriona Seth, Judith Sribnai, Joanna Stalnaker, Aleksandar Stević, Kate E. Tunstall, Steven Ungar, and Wes Williams.


The Diary

The Diary

Author: Batsheva Ben-Amos

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 492

ISBN-13: 0253046963

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The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats, including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.


Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy

Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy

Author: Aidan Tynan

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2020-06-18

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1474443370

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Aidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.


The French Fictional Journal

The French Fictional Journal

Author: Valerie Raoul

Publisher:

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13:

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Unlike other forms of fictional first-person narrative such as the memoir or epistolary novel, the French fictional journal or diary-novel has received inadequate critical attention. This is the first full-length analysis devoted to its particular features. Valerie Raoul bases her study on the premise that the interest of the fictional journal lies in its subjugation of one set of conventions, those of the diary, to another set, those of the novel, and the interference of each of those 'codes' in the function of the other. In this context she discusses more than fifty novels or short stories wholly or partly in diary form and written in France between 1800 and the present. In the first part of the book she deals with the fictivity of the diary-novel. Philippe Lejeune's work on the functioning of autobiography serves as a point of comparison to elucidate the distinctive reading pact involved in this aspect of first-person fiction. The second part analyses the internal communication model: on this intradiegetic level the fictional diarist is narrator, actor, and narrate. In the third part, an abstract model is developed to illustrate the functioning of the fictional journal as a bi-textual form of communication, in which the internal communications process is a mise en abyme of the external one between author, character, and reader. The personal narcissism of the 'intimiste' is seen to give way in the fictional 'journal intime' to narcissistic fiction, since diary-novels are always the narration of the production of a 'recit.' This book is an important investigation into the very nature of fiction and the meaning of the activity of writing. It not only fills an important gap in the appreciation of French prose, but also adds to the comprehension of personal narrative in particular and narrative discourse in general.


A French Novel

A French Novel

Author: Frédéric Beigbeder

Publisher: HarperCollins UK

Published: 2013-07-18

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 0007468857

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Arrested for snorting cocaine off a car bonnet, award-winning author and quintessential dilettante Frederic Beigbeder reflects on his troubled childhood, while spending a night in the cells.


Women's Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-century Novel

Women's Diaries as Narrative in the Nineteenth-century Novel

Author: Catherine Delafield

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9780754665175

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Using private diary writing as her model, Catherine Delafield investigates the cultural significance of nineteenth-century women's writing and reading practices. Examining historical and fictional diaries by authors such as Frances Burney, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Brontë, Wilkie Collins and Bram Stoker, Delafield reveals the ideological discrepancy between the private diary and its performance in the role of narrator, offering fresh insights into domesticity, authorship, and the diary as a feminine form and model for narrative.