Transnational French studies Hargreaves, Alec G; Forsdick, Charles; Murphy, David
2010., 20101129, 2011, Volume:
1
eBook
The 2007 manifesto in favour of a “Littérature-monde en français” has generated new debates in both “francophone” and “postcolonial” studies. Praised by some for breaking down the hierarchical ...division between “French” and “Francophone” literatures, the manifesto has been criticized by others for recreating that division through an exoticizing vision that continues to privilege the publishing industry of the former colonial métropole. Does the manifesto signal the advent of a new critical paradigm destined to render obsolescent those of “francophone” and/or “postcolonial” studies? Or is it simply a passing fad, a glitzy but ephemeral publicity stunt generated and promoted by writers and publishing executives vis-à-vis whom scholars and critics should maintain a skeptical distance? Does it offer an all-embracing transnational vista leading beyond the confines of postcolonialism or reintroduce an incipient form of neocolonialism even while proclaiming the end of the centre/periphery divide? In addressing these questions, leading scholars of “French”, “Francophone” and “postcolonial” studies from around the globe help to assess the wider question of the evolving status of French Studies as a transnational field of study amid the challenges of globalization.
In addition to its more well known literary and artistic origins,
the French surrealist movement drew inspiration from currents of
psychological anxiety and rebellion running through a shadowy side
...of mass culture, specifically in fantastic popular fiction and
sensationalistic journalism. The provocative nature of this
insolent mass culture resonated with the intellectual and political
preoccupations of the surrealists, as Robin Walz demonstrates in
this fascinating study. Pulp Surrealism weaves an
interpretative history of the intersection between mass print
culture and surrealism, re-evaluating both our understanding of
mass culture in early twentieth-century Paris and the revolutionary
aims of the surrealist movement. Pulp Surrealism presents
four case studies, each exploring the out-of the-way and
impertinent elements which inspired the surrealists. Walz discusses
Louis Aragon's Le paysan de Paris, one of the great
surrealist novels of Paris. He goes on to consider the popular
series of Fantômes crime novels; the Parisan press coverage of the
arrest, trial, and execution of mass-murderer Landru; and the
surrealist inquiry "Is Suicide a Solution?", which Walz juxtaposes
with reprints of actual suicide faits divers
(sensationalist newspaper blurbs). Although surrealist interest in
sensationalist popular culture eventually waned, this exploration
of mass print culture as one of the cultural milieux from which
surrealism emerged ultimately calls into question assumptions about
the avant-garde origins of modernism itself.
To associate stereotype and them of women in literature is not new. Add to this the relationship East-West as the background of a political-historical context marked by Islamist attacks in Europe and ...the return of religion as an issue is of particular interest. In this contribution, our purpose is to highlight how Submission of Michel Houellebecq as well as its ideological thinking are based on female issue to convey a refractory discourse which is able to provoke a critical meta-discourse in the name of political correctness thinking.
This paper aims to a translation analysis of the French version of the Akathist Hymn to the “Burning Bush” (Rugul Aprins), written between 1945 and 1958, by the poet, who became a monk, Daniil Sandu ...Tudor, imprisoned by the authorities of the communist regime for his religious, mystical beliefs. Initiator of the hesychast movement “The Burning Bush” from the Antim Monastery in Bucharest, he died at the Aiud Prison, in 1962. It is a translation of the first version of this Akathist, spread in France between 1958-1960, through father André Scrima, who otherwise participated in conceiving it, together with father archimandrite Placide Deseille, at that time a Catholic monk in the great Abbey of Bellefontaine. It is mentioned the context in which this translation appeared, with regard to the reasons on which it is based and there are thoroughly analyzed the French versions of the first Kontakion and of the third Ikos. The analysis focuses on the translation principles used by the father translator, the literality observed with discernment and the translation creativity and insists on the expressiveness and the semantic explicitation of numerous translation options. In addition, the analysis envisages the translation strategies of some important theological themes, profoundly spiritual, covered by this Akathist. The main purpose of translating this text in French language is that of using it, through reading, as a means of prayer by the French and Francophone believers, who became Orthodox through conversion. It is surprising the fact that this Akathist, the most profoundly spiritual and mystic from al the Akathist hymns included in the Orthodox hymnography of these two cultures, Romanian and French, was translated in French language since 1960, soon after its creation, being published in an Occidental society, deeply secularized and generally, incompatible with any form of mysticism.
While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, and withdrawal from the social and ...political world, Matthew Potolsky offers an alternative reading of the movement. InThe Decadent Republic of Letters, he treats the decadents as fundamentally international, defined by a radically cosmopolitan ideal of literary sociability rather than an inward turn toward private aesthetics and exotic sensation.The Decadent Republic of Letterslooks at the way Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Algernon Charles Swinburne used the language of classical republican political theory to define beauty as a form of civic virtue. The libertines, an international underground united by subversive erudition, gave decadents a model of countercultural affiliation and a vocabulary for criticizing national canon formation and the increasing state control of education. Decadent figures such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde envisioned communities formed through the circulation of art. Decadents lavishly praised their counterparts from other traditions, translated and imitated their works, and imagined the possibility of new associations forged through shared tastes and texts. Defined by artistic values rather than language, geography, or ethnic identity, these groups anticipated forms of attachment that are now familiar in youth countercultures and on social networking sites. Bold and sophisticated,The Decadent Republic of Lettersunearths a pervasive decadent critique of nineteenth-century notions of political community and reveals the collective effort by the major figures of the movement to find alternatives to liberalism and nationalism.
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