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33 results in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures

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French Cycling
  • A Social and Cultural History
  • Hugh Dauncey
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    21 November 2012
  • French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History aims to provide a balanced and detailed analytical survey of the complex leisure activity, sport, and industry that is cycling in France. Identifying key events, practices, stakeholders and institutions in the history of French cycling, the volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of how cycling has been significant in French society and culture since the late Nineteenth century. Cycling as Leisure is considered through reference to the adoption of the bicycle as an instrument of tourism and emancipation by women in the 1880s, for example, or by study of the development in the 1990s of long-distance tourist cycle routes. Cycling as Sport and its attendant dimensions of amateurism/professionalism, national identity, the body and doping, and other issues is investigated through study of the history of the Tour de France, the track-racing organised at the Vélodrome d'hiver in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s and other emblematic events. Cycling as Industry and economic activity is considered through an assessment of how cycling firms have contributed to technological innovation at various junctures in France's economic development. Cycling and the Media is investigated through analysis of how cyclesport has contributed to developments in the French press (in early decades) but also to new trends in television and radio coverage of sports events. Based on a very wide range of primary and secondary sources, the volume aims to present in clear language an explanation of the varied significance of cycling in France over the last hundred years.

Roland Barthes at the Collège de France
  • Lucy O'Meara
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    07 December 2012
  • Roland Barthes at the Collège de France studies the four lecture courses given by Barthes in Paris between 1977 and 1980. This study, the first full-length account of this material, places Barthes’s teaching within institutional, intellectual and personal contexts. Analysing the texts and recordings of Comment vivre ensemble, Le Neutre and La Préparation du roman I et II in tandem with Barthes’s 1970s output, the book brings together for the first time all the strands of Barthes’s activity as writer, teacher and public intellectual. Theoretically wide-ranging in scope, Lucy O’Meara’s study focuses particularly on Barthes’s pedagogical style, addressing how his wilfully un-magisterial teaching links to the anti-systematic, anti-dogmatic goals of the rest of his work. Barthes’s methodology sought to negotiate the balance between singularity and universality, and central to this endeavour are aesthetic thought and techniques of essayism and fragmentation. Barthes’s strategies are here linked to broad intellectual influences, from the legacies of Montaigne, Kant, Schlegel and Adorno to the contemporary intellectual trends which Barthes sought to evade, and his attraction towards Eastern philosophies such as Zen and Tao. Barthes’s lectures discuss ideal forms of community life, ‘neutral’ modes of discourse and behaviour, and the idea of writing a novel. His consideration of these fantasies involves a profound exploration of the nature of literary creation, social interaction, subjectivity, and the possibility of a universal particular. Roland Barthes at the Collège de France reassesses the critical and ethical priorities of Barthes’s work in the decade before his death, demonstrating the vitally affirmative core of Barthes’s late thought.

Spatial Ecologies
  • Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory
  • Verena Andermatt Conley
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    29 February 2012
  • Spatial Ecologies takes a new look at the “spatial turn” in French cultural and critical theory since 1968. Verena Andermatt Conley examines how Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Augé, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour and Etienne Balibar reconsider the experience of space in the midst of considerable political and economic turmoil. The book considers why French critical theorists turned away from questions of time and looked instead toward questions of space. It asks what writing about space can tell us about life in late capitalism. Conley links this question to the problematic of habitality, taking us back to Heidegger and showing how it informs much of French theory. Building on the author's acclaimed earlier study Ecopolitics, Spatial Ecologies argues, through the voices of the authors taken up the eight chapters, for recognition of the virtue of spatial theory and its pragmatic applications in the global milieu. It will be required reading for scholars of literary and cultural theory, and twentieth- and twenty-first century French culture.

Consumer Chronicles
  • Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature
  • David H. Walker
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    31 March 2011
  • At a time when the world is contemplating the depletion of non-renewable natural resources, the consumer society is increasingly being called into question. This is nowhere more acutely evident than in France, where since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, the consumer revolution, extending market forces into every area of social and private life, has been perceived as a challenge to core elements in French culture, such as traditional artisan crafts and small businesses serving local communities. Cultural historians and sociologists have charted the increasing commercialisation of everyday life over the twentieth century, but few have paid systematic attention to the crucial testimony provided by the authors of narrative fiction. Consumer Chronicles rectifies this omission by means of close readings of a series of novels, selected for their authentic portrayal of consumer behaviour, and analysed in relation to their social, cultural and historical contexts. Walker's study, offering an imaginative interdisciplinary panorama covering the impact of affluence on French shoppers, shopkeepers and society, provides telling new insights into the history and characteristics of the consumer mentality.

French Postmodern Masculinities
  • From Neuromatrices to Seropositivity
  • Lawrence R. Schehr
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 January 2012
    Print publication:
    12 December 2009
  • As traditional notions of masculinity have been put into question, there have been representational reactions to and articulations of changing masculinities in post-modern culture. Certain contemporary French cultural productions are illustrative of these changing masculinities and this book offers the first comprehensive examination of these manifestations. Acclaimed critic Lawrence Schehr uses analysis of AIDS narratives, mainstream films, popular novels, more mainstream novels, a graphic novel, and rightist polemics to explore the changing meaning of masculinity in French society. French Postmodern Masculinities will appeal to a broad range of researchers and postgraduate students working in French cultural studies, cinema, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature.

Postcolonial Eyes
  • Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature
  • Aedin Li Loingsigh
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 January 2012
    Print publication:
    01 June 2009
  • Over the past two decades interest in travel has developed significantly. Critical engagement with imperialism, postcolonialism, diasporas, ethnography and cultural anthropology has led to increasingly sophisticated readings of the travel writing genre and a growing acknowledgement of its complex history. Postcolonial Eyes is the first study of its kind to identify a specifically Sub-Saharan African lineage within the broader tradition of travel writing. As well as exploring the reasons for Africans’ exclusion from the genre, the book examines the important relationship between ethnicity and travel and identifies the concerns and preoccupations that define African writers’ approaches to travel.

Assia Djebar
  • Out of Algeria
  • Jane Hiddleston
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 December 2011
    Print publication:
    01 March 2011
  • For more than fifty years, Assia Djebar, Silver Chair of French at New York University and winner of the Neustadt Prize for Contribution to World Literature, has used the tools of poetry, fiction, drama and film to vividly portray the world of Muslim women in all its complexity. In the process, she has become one of the most important figures in North African literature. In Assia Djebar, Jane Hiddleston traces Djebar’s development as a writer against the backdrop of North Africa’s tumultuous history. Whereas Djebar’s early writings were largely an attempt to delineate clearly the experience of being a woman, an intellectual, and an Algerian embedded in that often violent history, she has in her more recent work evinced a growing sense that the influence of French culture on Algerian letters may make such a project impossible. The first book-length study of this significant writer, Assia Djebar will be of tremendous interest to anyone studying post-colonial literature, women’s studies or Francophone culture.

Haiti Unbound
  • A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon
  • Kaiama L. Glover
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 December 2011
    Print publication:
    08 December 2010
  • Historically and contemporarily, politically and literarily, Haiti has long been relegated to the margins of the so-called 'New World.' Marked by exceptionalism, the voices of some of its most important writers have consequently been muted by the geopolitical realities of the nation's fraught history. In Haiti Unbound, Kaiama L. Glover offers a close look at the works of three such writers: the Haitian Spiralists Frankétienne, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and René Philoctète. While Spiralism has been acknowledged by scholars and regional writer-intellectuals alike as a crucial contribution to the French-speaking Caribbean literary tradition, the Spiralist ethic-aesthetic not yet been given the sustained attention of a full-length study. Glover's book represents the first effort in any language to consider the works of the three Spiralist authors both individually and collectively, and so fills an astonishingly empty place in the assessment of postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics. Touching on the role and destiny of Haiti in the Americas, Haiti Unbound engages with long-standing issues of imperialism and resistance culture in the transatlantic world. Glover's timely project emphatically articulates Haiti's regional and global centrality, combining vital 'big picture' reflections on the field of postcolonial studies with elegant close-reading-based analyses of the philosophical perspective and creative practice of a distinctively Haitian literary phenomenon. Most importantly perhaps, the book advocates for the inclusion of three largely unrecognized voices in the disturbingly fixed roster of writer-intellectuals that have thus far interested theorists of postcolonial (Francophone) literature. Providing insightful and sophisticated blueprints for the reading and teaching of the Spiralists' prose fiction, Haiti Unbound will serve as a point of reference for the works of these authors and for the singular socio-political space out of and within which they write.

Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature
  • Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat
  • Martin Munro
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    05 December 2011
    Print publication:
    01 March 2007
  • Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature reinterprets and analyses post-1946 Haitian writing as a literature of exile. It moves between texts that have emerged out of different places and different times, and outlines generational shifts and changes in Haitian exiled writing. The breadth and scope of this book will attract scholars and students with interests in fields such as Caribbean studies, postcolonial studies, francophone studies, migration studies, and African–American studies.

The Noir Atlantic
  • Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel
  • Pim Higginson
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    26 October 2011
    Print publication:
    30 June 2011
  • Noir Atlantic follows the influence of African American author Chester Himes on Francophone African crime fiction. In 1953, Chester Himes emigrated to Paris where he struggled to publish, just as he had in the United States, until the 'Harlem Domestic Series' transformed the author into a cult figure for a generation of Parisian readers who appreciated the blend of absurdist humor and violence. For African authors, these novels also modeled an escape from a high literary paradigm inherited from the colonial experience. Himes’s ambiguous role as a famous 'French' writer paradoxically also made him an effective means of escaping the centripetal pull of the Métropole. Starting with Abasse Ndione’s 1982 La Vie en spirale depictions of Senegal’s marijuana smoking subculture and ending with Mongo Beti’s 2001 Branles-bas en noir et blanc that displaced Himes’ Harlem to Yaoundé, Cameroon, these works turned their backs on France and its ideological and anthropological criteria of literary success and embraced a new aesthetic. In the process, the Francophone African authors of noir became less motivated by Fanonian cultural nationalism and more with entertaining the reader while making a living. Noir Atlantic demonstrates why and how we should consider this move to a 'frivolous literary' as a profoundly significant moment in Francophone African literary history that lead the way to more recent developments such as Littérature Monde.

Thresholds of Meaning
  • Passage, Ritual and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative
  • Jean Duffy
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    26 October 2011
    Print publication:
    31 May 2011
  • Thresholds of Meaning examines contemporary French narrative and explores two related issues: the centrality within recent French fiction and autofiction of the themes of passage, ritual and liminality; the thematic continuity which links this work with its literary ancestors of the 1960s and 1970s. Through the close analysis of novels and récits by Pierre Bergounioux, François Bon, Marie Darrieussecq, Hélène Lenoir, Laurent Mauvignier and Jean Rouaud, Duffy demonstrates the ways in which contemporary narrative, while capitalising on the formal lessons of the nouveau roman and drawing upon a shared repertoire of motifs and themes, engages with the complex processes by which meaning is produced in the referential world and, in particular, with the rituals and codes that social man brings into play in order to negotiate the various stages of the human life-cycle. By the application of theoretical concepts and models derived from anthropology and from visual studies, the study situates itself at the intersection of the developing field of literature and anthropology studies and research into word and image.

The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction
  • Celia Britton
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    26 October 2011
    Print publication:
    30 September 2010
  • This book analyses the theme of community in seven French Caribbean novels in relation to the work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. The islands’ complex history means that community is a central and problematic issue in their literature, and underlies a range of other questions such as political agency, individual and collective subjectivity, attitudes towards the past and the future, and even literary form itself. Britton examines Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, Edouard Glissant’s Le Quatrième Siècle, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Vincent Placoly’s L’eau-de-mort guildive, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Daniel Maximin’s L’Ile et une nuit and Maryse Condé’s Desirada.

Patrick Chamoiseau
  • Recovering Memory
  • Maeve McCusker
  • Published by:
    Liverpool University Press
    Published online:
    26 October 2011
    Print publication:
    01 March 2011
  • Now available in paperback, this acclaimed book skilfully examines the work of the award-winning writer Patrick Chamoiseau. Considered by many as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene in over 40 years, Chamoiseau made his name with his book Texaco (published in 1992 and winner of the highest literary prize in France, the Prix Goncourt). His books have gone on to sell millions and his work has been translated by a number of academic presses. McCusker sets the author in context, providing a valuable contribution to ‘memory studies’ by looking at literary representation of memory in Martinique, a society founded on slavery but now politically assimilated to the metropolitan centre, France.

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