This volume examines the Enlightenment-era textualization of the Black African in European thought. Andrew Curran rewrites the history of blackness by replicating the practices of eighteenth-century ...readers. Surveying French and European travelogues, natural histories, works of anatomy, pro- and anti-slavery tracts, philosophical treatises, and literary texts, Curran shows how naturalists and philosophes drew from travel literature to discuss the perceived problem of human blackness within the nascent human sciences, describes how a number of now-forgotten anatomists revolutionized the era’s understanding of black Africans, and charts the shift of the slavery debate from the moral, mercantile, and theological realms toward that of the “black body” itself. In tracing this evolution, he shows how blackness changed from a mere descriptor in earlier periods into a thing to be measured, dissected, handled, and, often, brutalized.
Penetrating and comprehensive, The Anatomy of Blackness shows that, far from being a monolithic idea, eighteenth-century Africanist discourse emerged out of a vigorous, varied dialogue that involved missionaries, slavers, colonists, naturalists, anatomists, philosophers, and Africans themselves.
The Familiar Enemy re‐examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France within the context of the Hundred Years War. During this war, two highly intertwined peoples ...developed complex strategies for expressing their aggressively intimate relationship. The special connection between the English and the French has endured into the modern period as a model for Western nationhood. This book reassesses the concept of ‘nation’ in this period through a wide‐ranging discussion of writing produced in war, truce or exile from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, concluding with reflections on the retrospective views of this time of war created by the trials of Jeanne d'Arc and by Shakespeare's Henry V. It considers works and authors writing in French, ‘Anglo‐Norman’, and in English, in England and on the continent, with attention to the tradition of comic Anglo‐French jargon (a kind of medieval franglais), to Machaut, Deschamps, Froissart, Chaucer, Gower, Charles d'Orléans and many lesser‐known or anonymous works. Chaucer traditionally has been seen as a quintessentially English author. This book argues that he needs to be resituated within the deeply francophone context, not only of England but the wider multilingual cultural geography of medieval Europe. It thus argues that a modern understanding of what ‘English’ might have meant in the fourteenth century cannot be separated from ‘French’, and that this has far‐reaching implications both for our understanding of English and the English, and of French and the French.
A central theme in the history of Old Regime authorship highlights the opportunities offered by a growing book trade to writers seeking to free themselves from patrons and live "by the pen." Accounts ...of this passage from patronage to market have explored in far greater detail the opportunities themselves-the rising sums paid by publishers and the progression of laws protecting literary property-than how and why writers would have seized on them, no doubt because the choice to do so has seemed an obvious or natural one for writers assumed to prefer economic self-sufficiency over elite protection. InThe Literary Market, Geoffrey Turnovsky claims that there was nothing obvious or natural about the choice. Writers had been involved in commercial book publication since the earliest days of the printing press, yet had not necessarily linked these activities with their freedom to think and write. The association of autonomy and professionalism was forged, not given. Analyzing the literary market as a key articulation of the association, Turnovsky explores how in eighteenth-century polemics a rhetoric of commercial authorship came to signify independence for intellectuals. He finds the roots of the connection not in the claims of entrepreneurial writers to rights and income but in a world to which that of the modern author has been contrasted: the aristocratic culture of the seventeenth century. Aristocratic culture, he argues, generated a disparaging view of the professional author as one defined by activities tainting him or her as greedy and arrogant and therefore unworthy of protection and socially isolated.The Literary Marketexamines the story of the "birth of the author" in terms of the revalorization of this negative trope in Enlightenment-era debates about the radically changing role of writers in society.
In its six case studies, The Dynamics of Gender in Early Modern France works out a model for (early modern) gender, which is articulated in the introduction. The book comprises essays on the ...construction of women: three in texts by male and three by female writers, including Racine, Fénelon, Poulain de la Barre, in the first part; La Guette, La Fayette and Sévigné, in the second. These studies thus also take up different genres: satire, tragedy and treatise; memoir, novella and letter-writing. Since gender is a relational construct, each chapter considers as well specific textual and contextual representations of men. In every instance, Stanton looks for signs of conformity to-and deviations from-normative gender scripts. The Dynamics of Gender adds a new dimension to early modern French literary and cultural studies: it incorporates a dynamic (shifting) theory of gender, and it engages both contemporary critical theory and literary historical readings of primary texts and established concepts in the field. This book emphasizes the central importance of historical context and close reading from a feminist perspective, which it also interrogates as a practice. The Afterword examines some of the meanings of reading-as-a-feminist.
This collection presents new essays in the complex field of French
literary adaptation. Using a variety of textual and interpretive
approaches, it sheds light on issues of gender, sexuality, class,
...politics and social conventions while acknowledging a range of
contexts, from the commercial to the archival and the aesthetic.
The chapters, written by eminent international scholars, run
chronologically from The Count of Monte Cristo through
Proust and Bonjour, Tristesse to Philippe Djian's
Oh… (adapted for the screen as Elle ).
Collectively, they fill a need for contemporary discussions on the
significance of France's literary representations in the history of
global cinema.
InMedieval Boundaries, Sharon Kinoshita examines the role of cross-cultural contact in twelfth- and early thirteenth-century French literature. Starting from the observation that many of the earliest ...and best-known works of the French literary tradition are set on or beyond the borders of the French-speaking world, she reads theChanson de Roland, thelaisof Marie de France, and a variety of other texts in an expanded geographical frame that includes the Iberian peninsula, the Welsh marches, and the eastern Mediterranean. In Kinoshita's reconceptualization of the geographical and cultural boundaries of the medieval West, such places become significant not only as sites of conflict but also as spaces of intense political, economic, and cultural negotiation. An important contribution to the emerging field of medieval postcolonialism, Kinoshita's work explores the limitations of reading the literature of the French Middle Ages as an inevitable link in the historical construction of modern discourses of Orientalism, colonialism, race, and Christian-Muslim conflict. Rather, drawing on recent historical and art historical scholarship, Kinoshita uncovers a vernacular culture at odds with official discourses of crusade and conquest. Situating each work in its specific context, she brings to light the lived experiences of the knights and nobles for whom this literature was first composed and-in a series of close readings informed by postcolonial and feminist theory-demonstrates that literary representations of cultural encounters often provided the pretext for questioning the most basic categories of medieval identity. Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies
Antonin Artaud’s « Théâtre de la cruauté » consists in the extreme display of the conflictive nature of the world. The Catalan poet Josep Palau i Fabre highlighted the poetic and negative dimensions ...of Artaud’s project and insisted on its failure, addressing its impossible objectivation and its similarity with alchemy. The article aims to identify the central elements of Palau’s interpretation, annihilation and debirth, and to assess their inscription in an experimental poetics proposal inspired by alchemy.
In Novarina’s work, the word establishes a “lyrical gesture” : it calls. Since the appearance of what is called constitutes the drama itself, we can consider the lyricism as communication between the ...subject and the object as the process of creation. This creative gesture is doubly negative. First of all, the writer does not exist anymore in the creation process accomplished with the spectators. Secondly, Novarinian fiction is defined by its negative qualities : informal and timeless, it develops a negative view that opens behind the language.
Klossowski, who had originally started as a religious seeker of truth in his younger years, will – after his « reversal » – feel himself invested with the role of a « heretic » struggling with the ...libidinous search for truth. Even as the creator of a perverted metaphysics, he remains a seeker of the revelation of being, now in the role of the divine « adversary » who, thrown back on himself, tends to imitate a religious mystic. The divine is replaced by the whispers of the demon, which Klossowski experiences as « la complicité d'une force "démonique" » in the creation of his artworks. The Diana myth becomes a parable for the act of artistic creation. Sexuality, understood as the primordial ground of creative force that shapes the signe unique, the phantasm, shifts metaphysics to « phantasmaphysics » (Foucault), in which the mystery of the divine is exposed as a delusion (Wahnbild).
The present paper analyses Carnets du voyage en Égypte by a French painter and writer, Eugène Fromentin (1820-1876), using the concept of autobiogeography. The concept allows to examine how the ...author of a geographical description may be seen throughout this description and how s/he is influenced by the space. The paper argues that the personality of Fromentin emerges from his travel notes even though they are focused mainly on the description of the Egyptian space and the forms “I” or “we” appear there rarely. Three aspects of Fromentin’s personality may be seen through the analyses of his geographical descriptions of Egypt: the Orientalist painter enthusiastic towards the space; the traveler marked by his previous travels to Algeria who in Egyptian spaces sees Algerian ones; and the man who feels old and tired, refuses to discover the Egyptian space and who just wants to come back home.
