Bøger i French and Francophone Studies serien

Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century brings an original perspective on French cinema's 'return to work' in the early twenty-first century, focusing on the transformation of cinematic activism in view of the rapid dissolution of class narratives and solidarities. It is argued that, reckoning with widespread anxieties about job precarity, social uncertainty, loss and invisibility in French society, filmmakers catalysed new modes of intervention, best described as embodied praxes of sociality. Combining rigorous film analyses with concepts borrowed from philosophy, sociology, geography and political theory, this study positions documentary as a privileged point of articulation between aesthetics, politics and ethics. The wide-ranging film corpus features well-established auteurs (Agnes Varda, Raymond Depardon, Denis Gheerbrant) and less canonical filmmakers to celebrate the vitality of contemporary French documentary cinema and its creative contributions to international discussions about work, precarity and social resilience.

This book analyses representations of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-62) in the literary output of French authors of Algerian origin, problematising the extent to which these literary `sites of memory' provide appropriate spaces of consensus for hitherto competing memories of the war.

Gangsters, aviators, hard-boiled detectives, gunslingers, jazz and images of the American metropolis were all an inextricable part of the cultural landscape of interwar France. While the French 1930s have long been understood as profoundly anti-American, this book shows how a young, up-and-coming generation of 1930s French writers and filmmakers approached American culture with admiration as well as criticism. For some, the imaginary America that circulated through Hollywood films, newspaper reports, radio programming and translated fiction represented the society of the future, while for others it embodied a dire threat to French identity. This book brings an innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture, focusing on several of the most famous figures from the 1930s - including Marcel Carne, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Julien Duvivier, Andre Malraux, Jean Renoir and Jean-Paul Sartre - to track the ways in which they sought to reinterpret the political and social dimensions of modernism for mass audiences via an imaginary America.

This book analyses contemporary French films by focussing closely on cinematic representations of immigrants and residents of suburban housing estates known as banlieues. It begins by examining how these groups are conceived of within France's Republican political model before analysing films that focus on four key issues. Firstly, it will assess representations of undocumented migrants known as sans-papiers before then analysing depictions of deportations made possible by the controversial double peine law. Next, it will examine films about relations between young people and the police in suburban France before exploring films that challenge cliches about these areas. The conclusion assesses what these films show about contemporary French political cinema.IntroductionChapter One: Cinema and the RepublicChapter Two: T he Sans-papiers on Screen - Contextualising Immigrant Experiences in FilmChapter Three: Double peine: The Challenges of Mobilising Support for Foreign Criminals via CinemaChapter Four: C hallenging or Perpetuating Cliches? Young People and the Police in France's BanlieuesChapter Five: C hallenging Stereotypes about France's Banlieues by Shifting the Focus?ConclusionNotesFilmography and BibliographyIndex

This book uses six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to argue a reconceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but as works fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses reworkings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to emphasise the way in which such reworkings cast new light on many of their source texts, and how they reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Adapting Nineteenth-Century France charts such revision through a range of genres encompassing the modern media of radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.ContentsIntroduction, Kate GriffithsI Labyrinths of Voices: Emile Zola, Germinal and Radio, Kate GriffithsII Diamond Thieves and Gold Diggers: Balzac, Silent Cinema and the Spoils of Adaptation, Andrew WattsIII Fragmented Fictions: Time, Textual Memory and the (Re)Writing of Madame Bovary, Andrew WattsIV Les Miserables, Theatre and the Anxiety of Excess, Andrew WattsV Chez Maupassant: The (In)Visible Space of Television Adaptation, Kate GriffithsVI Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours: Verne, Todd, Coraci and the Spectropoetics of Adaptation, Kate GriffithsConclusion, Andrew Watts

This innovative study of the Montreal novel in French looks at how imaginary and material landscapes come together to produce a city of neighbourhoods.

This book charts and analyses the emergence of the conventional representation of the French events of 1968 and argues that the dominance of this narrative, despite its limitations, stems from the convenience that such a consensus provides for those that have been pivotal in shaping the collective memory of this critical moment in recent history.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the political arguments about the place of Muslims in contemporary France, and also discusses the ideas put forward by a range of Muslim thinkers. France has become the setting for one of the most important conflicts in the modern world. On the one hand, it possesses a rigidly organized, centralized state, whose bureaucrats and civil servants are animated by a code of secular activism. On the other hand, France is also the home for Europe's largest Muslim minority, variously estimated at numbering between four and six million people. This means that in terms of simple numbers, France can be counted as the world's fifteenth Islamic power. Previous conflicts with religion have left a deep impression on French political culture: from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century conflicts between Catholics and Protestants played to the formation of the collaborationist Vichy government in 1940. In recent decades, Muslims have been stigmatized as an irreconcilable minority unable to adapt to the secular culture of the majority of French citizens. This work draws out the political implications of the current conflict. It is based on events and publications produced in a single five year period, beginning with the shock of the 2002 Presidential elections, in which Le Pen was the second most successful candidate, ranging through the legislation of March 2004 which banned the Islamic headscarf from French state schools, and which sparked off a series of bad-tempered exchanges between left and right-wing French nationalists, anti-racism campaigners, secularists, anti-clericals and a variety of Muslim authors.

Explores the state of French fiction through an examination of the work of five major French writers, Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz and Patrick Modiano. This book deals with some of the writers on British and American university French courses.

An exciting, interdisciplinary collection of essays examining women's relationship to the city, which radically challenges many of the accepted commonplaces surrounding women's roles and positions within an urban space typically characterised as masculine.

This collection of essays maps and analyses the ways in which cultural texts of all kinds are used to respond to, engage with and challenge crises in the contemporary Francophone world.

This is a collaborative study of women's movement across the globe, and how their experience has been represented in writing.

Provides a detailed analysis of intertextual sources from the perspective of the metaphorical re-writings which they undergo in Proust's writing. The author re-evaluates the broader role within the novel of images, which tend to be viewed as isolated rather than as essential parts of a coherent network.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Explores and assesses the twentieth century's fascination with the ghost in relation to notions of identity, authorship and memory, tracing the changing form of the ghost in key twentieth-century French media: film, photography, literature and theory.

Reputation of Louis Aragon (1897-1982) is built upon his activities during the Second World War when his poetry embodied the spirit of the French Resistance. This book goes beyond the figure of the Resistance poet to explore the significance of the subject of war throughout his career.

Through a discussion of border identities, this book presents a balance-sheet of key developments in modern French society and culture in the context of globalization. It seeks to re-define and re-consider the notion of the border in respect of the identification of a variety of visible and invisible 'border' situations.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

France's Colonial Legacies offers a timely intervention in the debates around the French empire and its place in the life of the contemporary nation, drawing on the expertise of researchers working in the fields of politics, media, cultural studies, literature and film, to offer a wide-ranging picture of remembrance in contemporary France.