Download or read book French Writers and the Politics of Complicity written by Richard J. Golsan and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2006-02 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the political commitments of three French writers who collaborated with the Vichy Regime and Nazi Germany during World War II, and on those of three leading French intellectuals of the 1990s whose misplaced political idealism led them to support xenophobic, authoritarian regimes and dangerous historical revisionisms, Richard J. Golsan reexamines the notion of political commitment or engagement in two difficult periods in modern French history. Discussing the fiction, essays, and journalism of Henry de Montherlant, Jean Giono, and Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Golsan explores the complexity of artistic and intellectual collaboration during the German Occupation. He demonstrates that, in this context, complicity with political evil often derived from "nonpolitical" motives including sexual orientation, antimodern aesthetics, and dangerously skewed religious beliefs. Turning to the post–cold war era of the 1990s, Golsan examines the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut's support for Croatian independence, the "mediologist" Régis Debray's pro-Serb stance during the bombing of Kosovo, and the historian Stéphane Courtois's revisionist comparison of Nazi and Communist crimes during the 1997 debate surrounding the publication of The Black Book of Communism. In these three cases, laudable motives—and misguided historical comparisons with Vichy, Nazism, and the Occupation period that marked the political and intellectual discourses of France in the 1990s—resulted, paradoxically, in antidemocratic engagements profoundly at odds with the original motivations behind these intellectuals' commitments. In each of these case studies, political complicity derives from a combination of passions and ideals—whether positive or negative, emotional or intellectual—as well as a desire to make the present conform to a particular and generally skewed vision of the past. The full implications of these involvements are neither fully grasped nor understood by their authors, either through lack of objectivity, rationality, or imagination or through willful ignorance. The results are always unfortunate and often disastrous. Considered together, these six intellectuals serve as sobering reminders that political commitments are never as simple or straightforward as they seem and that admirable motives for political involvement can have dangerous and destructive consequences in historical practice.
Download or read book Memory and Complicity written by Debarati Sanyal and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of violence, namely that of colonialism. These works produced what Debarati Sanyal calls a “memory-in-complicity” attuned to the gray zones that implicate different regimes of violence across history as well as those of different subject positions such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator. Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity develops an inquiry into the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than affect based discourses of trauma, shame and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work? As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.
Download or read book France and the Spanish Civil War written by Mr Martin Hurcombe and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging study of French intellectuals who represented the Spanish Civil War as it was happening and in its immediate aftermath, Martin Hurcombe explores the ways in which these individuals addressed national anxieties and shaped the French political landscape. Bringing together reportage, essays, and fiction by French supporters of Franco's Nationalists and of the Spanish Republic, Hurcombe shows the multifaceted ways in which that conflict impacted upon French political culture. He argues that French cultural representations of the war often articulated a utopian image of the Nationalists or of the Spanish Republic that served as models behind which the radical right or the radical left in France might mobilise. His book will be of interest not only to scholars of French literature and culture but also to those interested in how events unfolding in Spain found an echo in the political landscapes of other countries.
Download or read book Being Contemporary written by Lia Nicole Brozgal and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of 23 riveting essays on aspects of contemporary French culture by the superstars of the field.
Download or read book Ego histories of France and the Second World War written by Manuel Bragança and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-21 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the intellectual autobiographies of fourteen leading scholars in the fields of history, literature, film and cultural studies who have dedicated a considerable part of their career to researching the history and memories of France during the Second World War. Basedin five different countries, Margaret Atack, Marc Dambre, Laurent Douzou, Hilary Footitt, Robert Gildea, Richard J. Golsan, Bertram M. Gordon, Christopher Lloyd, Colin Nettelbeck, Denis Peschanski, Renée Poznanski, Henry Rousso, Peter Tame, and Susan Rubin Suleiman have playeda crucial role in shaping and reshaping what has become a thought-provoking field of research. This volume, which also includes an interview with historian Robert O. Paxton, clarifies the rationales and driving forces behind their work and thus behind our current understanding of one of the darkest and most vividly remembered pages of history in contemporary France.
Download or read book Complicity in Fin de si cle Literature written by Helen Craske and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-12 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complicity in Fin-de-siècle Literature examines late-nineteenth century French understandings of literature as a morally collusive medium, which implicates readers, writers, and critics in risqué or illicit ideas and behaviour. It considers definitions of complicity from the period's evolving legal statutes, critical debates about literary 'bad influence', and modern theories of reader response, in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how cultural production of the period forged relationships of implication and collusion. While focusing on fin-de-siècle French culture, the book's theoretical discussions provide a new terminology and conceptual framework through which to analyse literary influence and reception, applicable to different historical periods and national settings. Interdisciplinary in nature, the study draws on methods associated with close reading, literary history, law and literature studies, cultural studies, and sociology of literature. Each of the book's chapters highlights how particular literary themes or techniques encouraged readers' identification with transgression and facilitated alternative forms of solidarity. The analysis draws on a range of case studies from different media forms, including: Naturalist, Decadent, and psychological novels, biographically revealing fiction ('romans à clefs'), little magazines ('petites revues'), and saucy magazines ('revues légères'). Texts written by well-known literary figures--such as Émile Zola, Octave Mirbeau, and Rachilde--appear alongside previously overlooked periodical and archival sources. The book's varied corpus reveals the widespread appeal of risqué topics and illicit solidarity across the literary spectrum.
Download or read book The Trial That Never Ends written by Richard J. Golsan and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fiftieth anniversary of the Adolf Eichmann trial may have come and gone but in many countries around the world there is a renewed focus on the trial, Eichmann himself, and the nature of his crimes. This increased attention also stimulates scrutiny of Hannah Arendt’s influential and controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The contributors gathered together by Richard J. Golsan and Sarah M. Misemer in The Trial That Never Ends assess the contested legacy of Hannah Arendt’s famous book and the issues she raised: the "banality of evil", the possibility of justice in the aftermath of monstrous crimes, the right of Israel to kidnap and judge Eichmann, and the agency and role of victims. The contributors also interrogate Arendt’s own ambivalent attitudes towards race and critically interpret the nature of the crimes Eichmann committed in light of newly discovered Nazi documents. The Trial That Never Ends responds to new scholarship by Deborah Lipstadt, Bettina Stangneth, and Shoshana Felman and offers rich new ground for historical, legal, philosophical, and psychological speculation.
Download or read book Matisse s Poets written by Kathryn Brown and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout his career, Henri Matisse used imagery as a means of engaging critically with poetry and prose by a diverse range of authors. Kathryn Brown offers a groundbreaking account of Matisse's position in the literary cross-currents of 20th-century France and explores ways in which reading influenced the artist's work in a range of media. This study argues that the livre d'artiste became the privileged means by which Matisse enfolded literature into his own idiom and demonstrated the centrality of his aesthetic to modernist debates about authorship and creativity. By tracing the compositional and interpretive choices that Matisse made as a painter, print maker, and reader in the field of book production, this study offers a new theoretical account of visual art's capacity to function as a form of literary criticism and extends debates about the gendering of 20th-century bibliophilia. Brown also demonstrates the importance of Matisse's self-placement in relation to the French literary canon in the charged political climate of the Second World War and its aftermath. Through a combination of archival resources, art history, and literary criticism, this study offers a new interpretation of Matisse's artist's books and will be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and researchers in book history and modernism.
Download or read book Writing and Life Literature and History written by Liran Razinsky and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1963, French-Spanish writer Jorge Semprun published Le Grand Voyage (The Long Voyage), a fictional account of his deportation to Buchenwald. Later, Semprun became an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and served as Spain's minister of culture. This volume of the Yale French Studies series constitutes an overall assessment of his work, spanning his broad range of genres and traditions. Including both new perspectives and pieces by authors who have written widely on Semprun, this volume is a refreshing and dynamic look at one of the twentieth-century's most interesting literary voices.
Download or read book Renegotiating French Identity written by Jane F. Fulcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Renegotiating French Identity, Jane Fulcher addresses the question of cultural resistance to the German occupation and Vichy regime during the Second World War. Nazi Germany famously stressed music as a marker of national identity and cultural achievement, but so too did Vichy. From the opera to the symphony, music did not only serve the interests of Vichy and German propaganda: it also helped to reveal the motives behind them, and to awaken resistance among those growing disillusioned by the regime. Using unexplored Resistance documents, from both the clandestine press and the French National Archives, Fulcher looks at the responses of specific artists and their means of resistance, addressing in turn Pierre Schaeffer, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, and Olivier Messiaen, among others. This book investigates the role that music played in fostering a profound awareness of the cultural and political differences between conflicting French ideological positions, as criticism of Vichy and its policies mounted.
Download or read book Unlikely Collaboration written by Barbara Will and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reader's Digest Endowed Book Fund.
Download or read book Three Against the Third Republic written by Michael Curtis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Third Republic of France was characterized by weak and short-term governments. This book is a study of three writers, Georges Sorel, Maurice Barres, and Charles Maurras, their writings in the years between 1885 and 1914, and their reactions to the deficiencies they saw in the Third Republic and in the system of French democracy. The study begins in 1885 with the appearance of certain new political factors. It ends in 1914 because the three writers had by this time completed their original contributions to the thought of the country, even if not their total impact on France.A relative position of each of these figures in the French political spectrum is deduced from a combination of attitudes toward a number of issues. These include the extent of economic and social reform, centralization of the power of the state, the nature of the parliamentary system, the desirability of political parties, the relation of Church and State, the responsibility of authority, the use of force or coercion, and national power versus international collaboration. Their views span the political spectrum.Sorel, Barres, and Maurras are important not only because they provided the chief ideological weapons for the attack on the regime but also, in a wider context, because they contribute significantly to understanding of a later period of European political history. In their contemporary significance, all three illustrated the various attitudes of the conservative, the .reactionary, and the moralist. The names and parties may have changed but the same ideas continue to impact French politics and western ideology today. This is a key book for an epoch whose importance lingers in current discourse.
Download or read book Co Managing International Crises written by Markus Kornprobst and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do states succeed or fail in managing crises together? Kornprobst examines the structures and processes of cross-national crisis co-management.
Download or read book The Americanization of Europe written by Alexander Stephan and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using Germany as a case study of the impact of American culture throughout a period characterized by a totalitarian system, two destructive wars, ethnic cleansing, and economic disaster, this book explores the political and cultural parameters of Americanization and anti-Americanism.
Download or read book Memory and Complicity written by Debarati Sanyal and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-03-02 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A sophisticated, nuanced, and beautifully written account of the intersecting legacies of genocide and colonialism in postwar France.” —Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization Since World War II, French and Francophone literature and film have repeatedly sought not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma but rather to connect its memory with other memories of violence, namely that of colonialism. These works produced what Debarati Sanyal calls a “memory-in-complicity” attuned to the gray zones that implicate different regimes of violence across history as well as those of different subject positions such as victim, perpetrator, witness, and reader/spectator. Examining a range of works from Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Paul Sartre to Jonathan Littell, Assia Djebar, Giorgio Agamben, and Boualem Sansal, Memory and Complicity develops an inquiry into the political force and ethical dangers of such implications, contrasting them with contemporary models for thinking about trauma and violence and offering an extended meditation on the role of aesthetic form, especially allegory, within acts of transhistorical remembrance. What are the political benefits and ethical risks of invoking the memory of one history in order to address another? What is the role of complicity in making these connections? How does complicity, rather than affect-based discourses of trauma, shame, and melancholy, open a critical engagement with the violence of history? What is it about literature and film that have made them such powerful vehicles for this kind of connective memory work? As it offers new readings of some of the most celebrated and controversial novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights from the French-speaking world, Memory and Complicity addresses these questions in order to reframe the way we think about historical memory and its political uses today.
Download or read book Complicity written by Thomas Docherty and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-10-03 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complicity argues that all existing modes of cultural critique are regarded as legitimate and productive if and only if they are complicit with the very ideologies and values that the criticism sets out to undermine. Through philosophical, literary and theoretical analysis, Thomas Docherty shows how easy it has been for criticism to become essentially an act of political collaboration with existing governmental power. The book explores the various ways in which, both historically and theoretically, critical activity has become complicit with the over-arching social and political norms that it aims to undermine. Philosophically, ethically and politically, criticism’s fundamental impulse is too often intrinsically negated. In extreme political form, this places criticism in line with collaborationist activity. Docherty then finds a productive way out of the double-bind in which criticism has traditionally found itself, through an idea of criticism as a mode of ‘reserve’, a mode of commitment that eschews fundamentalism of all kinds.
Download or read book Writing the Political Test written by Claude Lefort and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the preeminient political philosophers of the 20th century makes a compelling argument for the political cogency of literary writing in this book which among to his intellectual autobiography and an introduction to his work.
