Download or read book Love Desire and Transcendence in French Literature written by Paul Gifford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European literature and theory of the twentieth century have been intensely preoccupied with questions of 'Desire', whereas 'love' has increasingly represented a fractured and strange, if not actually suspect, proposal: this is a prime symptom of an age of deep cultural mutation and uncertainty. Paul Gifford's book allows this considerable contemporary phenomenon to be observed steadily and whole, with strategic understanding of its origins, nature and meaning. Gifford paints a clear and coherent picture of the evolution of erotic ideas and their imaginary and formal expressions in modern French writing. He first retraces the formative matrix of French tradition by engaging with five classic sources: Plato's Symposium, the Song of Songs, the myth of Genesis, the tension between Greek Eros and Christian Agape and the repercussions of Nietzsche's declaration of the 'death of God'. Modern variations on these perennial problematics are then pursued in ten chapters devoted to Proust, Valéry, Claudel, Breton, Bataille, Duras, Barthes, Irigarary, Emmanuel, Kristeva. Literary and theoretical perspectives are perfectly blended in his study of these attempts at 'deciphering Eros'. The book will appeal not only to students of French literature, but to all those interested in the cultural upheavals of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Joie de vivre in French Literature and Culture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The apparent self-sufficiency of joie de vivre means that, despite the widespread use of the phrase since the late nineteenth century, the concept has rarely been explored critically. Joie de vivre does not readily surrender itself to examination, for it is in a sense too busy being what it is. However, as the essays in this collection reveal, joie de vivre can be as complex and variable a state as the more negative emotions or experiences that art and literature habitually evoke. This volume provides an urgently needed study of an intriguing and under-explored area of French literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era. While the range and content of contributions embraces linguistics, literature, art, sport and politics, the starting point is, like that of the term joie de vivre itself, in French language and culture. This volume will be of special interest to researchers across the full range of French studies, from literature and language to cultural studies. It will be of direct appeal to specialist readers, university libraries, graduate and undergraduate students, and general readers with a lively interest in French literature and culture of the medieval, early modern and broad modern periods. This book’s fresh perspectives on the theme of joie de vivre and its relation to questions of privacy, contemplation, voyeurism, feasting and nationhood will also be of relevance to researchers in comparative and cognate disciplines.

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 Alienation and Alterity written by Paul Cooke and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discussions of French 'identity' have frequently emphasised the importance of a highly centralised Republican model inherited from the Revolution. In reality, however, France also has a rich heritage of diversity that has often found expression in contingent sub-cultures marked by marginalisation and otherness - whether social, religious, gendered, sexual, linguistic or ethnic. This range of sub-cultures and variety of ways of thinking the 'other' underlines the fact that 'norms' can only exist by the concomitant existence of difference(s). The essays in this collection, which derive from the conference 'Alienation and Alterity: Otherness in Modern and Contemporary Francophone Contexts', held at the University of Exeter in September 2007, explore various aspects of this diversity in French and Francophone literature, culture, and cinema from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The contributions demonstrate that while alienation (from a cultural 'norm' and also from oneself) can certainly be painful and problematic, it is also a privileged position which allows the 'étranger' to consider the world and his/her relationship to it in an 'other' way.

Download or read book Thomas Hardy and Desire written by Jane Thomas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-03-28 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a broad concept of desire, informed by poststructuralist theorists this book examines the range of Hardy's work. It demonstrates the sustained nature of his thinking about desire, its relationship to the social and symbolic network in which human subjectivity is constituted and art's potential to offer fulfilment to the desiring subject.

Download or read book How We Became Human written by Pierpaolo Antonello and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From his groundbreaking Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, René Girard’s mimetic theory is presented as elucidating “the origins of culture.” He posits that archaic religion (or “the sacred”), particularly in its dynamics of sacrifice and ritual, is a neglected and major key to unlocking the enigma of “how we became human.” French philosopher of science Michel Serres states that Girard’s theory provides a Darwinian theory of culture because it “proposes a dynamic, shows an evolution and gives a universal explanation.” This major claim has, however, remained underscrutinized by scholars working on Girard’s theory, and it is mostly overlooked within the natural and social sciences. Joining disciplinary worlds, this book aims to explore this ambitious claim, invoking viewpoints as diverse as evolutionary culture theory, cultural anthropology, archaeology, cognitive psychology, ethology, and philosophy. The contributors provide major evidence in favor of Girard’s hypothesis. Equally, Girard’s theory is presented as having the potential to become for the human and social sciences something akin to the integrating framework that present-day biological science owes to Darwin—something compatible with it and complementary to it in accounting for the still remarkably little understood phenomenon of human emergence.

Download or read book French XX Bibliography written by William J. Thompson and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008-08 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This annual French XX Bibliography provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. Unique in its scope, thoroughness, and reliability of information, it has become an essential reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. Number 59 in the series contains 12,703 entries. William J. Thompson is Associate Professor of French and Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis.

Download or read book Georges Bataille written by Mark Hewson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georges Bataille (1897 - 1962) was a philosopher, writer, and literary critic whose work has had a significant impact across disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, economics, art history and literary criticism, as well as influencing key figures in post-modernist and post-structuralist philosophy such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In recent years, the number of works published on Georges Bataille, as well as the variety of contexts in which his work is invoked, has markedly increased. In Georges Bataille: Key Concepts an international team of contributors provide an accessible introduction to and survey of Bataille's thought. The editors’ introduction provides an overview of Bataille’s work, while the chapters in the first section cover the social, political, artistic and philosophical contexts that shaped his thought. In the second part, each chapter engages with a key theme in Bataille’s philosophy, including: art, eroticism, evil, inner experience, heterology, religion, sacrifice, and sovereignty. The final chapter addresses Bataille’s literary writings. Georges Bataille: Key Concepts is an invaluable guide for students from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, coming to Bataille’s work for the first time. Contributors: Giulia Agostini, Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield, Tiina Arppe, Marcus Coelen, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Patrick ffrench, Marina Galletti, Nadine Hartmann, Mark Hewson, Andrew Hussey, Stuart Kendall, Claire Nioche, Gerhard Poppenberg, and Michèle Richman.

Download or read book Colourworks written by Susan Harrow and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do modern writers write colour? How do today's readers respond to the invitation to 'think colour' as they read poetry and art writing, and explore paintings? To what extent can critical thought on colour in visual media illuminate the textual life of colour? These are some of the lines of enquiry pursued in this bold new study of modern poetry and art writing in French, where colour, Susan Harrow argues, is integral to the exploration of ethics, ekphrasis, objects, bodies, landscape and interiority. The question of colour, in a variety of disciplines and media, has provoked debate from Aristotle to Goethe, and from Baudelaire to Derek Jarman. If the past twenty years have witnessed a 'colour turn' in contemporary cultural studies and screen research, colour values in literary and textual media are often elided or, simply, overlooked. Colourworks tackles this lacuna in the study of modern poetry and art writing in French, revealing the integral role of colour in the work of three iconic French writers in the modern tradition: Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Yves Bonnefoy. This book spans the broad modern period from the 1860s to the early twenty-first century in taking an exploratory approach to the visuality of the verbal medium through an adventurous reading of text and image. Harrow uncovers how colour moves and morphs in texts as it challenges the traditionalist containments of chromatic symbolism. Beyond its primary area of investigation in modern poetry and art writing in French, this richly colour-illustrated study has significant interdisciplinary implications-conceptual, methodological, and practical-for the study of visuality in humanities research, from literature studies to material and visual culture studies.

Download or read book Reading the Late Byzantine Romance written by Adam J. Goldwyn and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The corpus of Palaiologan romances consists of about a dozen works of imaginative fiction from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries which narrate the trials and tribulations of aristocratic young lovers. This volume brings together leading scholars of Byzantine literature to examine the corpus afresh and aims to be the definitive work on the subject, suitable for scholars and students of all levels. It offers interdisciplinary and transnational approaches which demonstrate the aesthetic and cultural value of these works in their own right and their centrality to the medieval and early modern Greek, European and Mediterranean literary traditions. From a historical perspective, the volume also emphasizes how the romances represent a turning point in the history of Greek letters: they are a repository of both ancient and medieval oral poetic and novelistic traditions and yet are often considered the earliest works of Modern Greek literature.

Download or read book God s Mirror written by Katherine Davies and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2014-12-01 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathering in one place a cohesive selection of articles that deepen our sense of the vitality and controversy within the Catholic renewal of the mid-twentieth century, God’s Mirror offers historical analysis of French Catholic intellectuals. This volume highlights the work of writers, thinkers and creative artists who have not always drawn the attention given to such luminaries as Maritain, Mounier, and Marcel. Organized around the typologies of renewal and engagement, editors Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt provide a revisionist and interdisciplinary reading of the narrative of twentieth-century French Catholicism. Renewal and engagement are both manifestations of how the Catholic intellectual reflects and takes position on the relationship between the Church, personal faith and the world, and on the increasingly problematic relationship between intellectuals and the Magisterium. A majority of the writings are based on extensive research into published texts, with some occasional archival references, and they give critical insights into the tensions that characterized the theological and political concerns of their subjects.

Download or read book Surrealism Feminism Psychoanalysis written by Natalya Lusty and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining historical and cultural methods of analysis with sophisticated theoretical discussions, Natalya Lusty explores how women artists and intellectuals responded to the appropriation of 'the feminine' in Surrealism and psychoanalysis. Reading work by

Download or read book Can We Survive Our Origins written by Pierpaolo Antonello and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are religions intrinsically violent (as is strenuously argued by the ‘new atheists’)? Or, as Girard argues, have they been functionally rational instruments developed to manage and cope with the intrinsically violent runaway dynamic that characterizes human social organization in all periods of human history? Is violence decreasing in this time of secular modernity post-Christendom (as argued by Steven Pinker and others)? Or are we, rather, at increased and even apocalyptic risk from our enhanced powers of action and our decreased socio-symbolic protections? Rene Girard’s mimetic theory has been slowly but progressively recognized as one of the most striking breakthrough contributions to twentieth-century critical thinking in fundamental anthropology: in particular for its power to model and explain violent sacralities, ancient and modern. The present volume sets this power of explanation in an evolutionary and Darwinian frame. It asks: How far do cultural mechanisms of controlling violence, which allowed humankind to cross the threshold of hominization—i.e., to survive and develop in its evolutionary emergence—still represent today a default setting that threatens to destroy us? Can we transcend them and escape their field of gravity? Should we look to—or should we look beyond—Darwinian survival? What—and where (if anywhere)—is salvation?

Download or read book Dances with Darwin 1875 1910 written by Rae Beth Gordon and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the influence of Darwin's evolutionary theory on French thought, Rae Beth Gordon weaves the history of medical science, ethnology, and popular culture into an exploration of the cultural implications of gesture in dance performances in Parisian café-concerts and music-halls. She illuminates the blurring of racial lines in the representations of the primitive and of nervous pathology that informed dances like the Cake-Walk. These dances with Darwin, she contends, constituted an aesthetic of disorder long before Dada and Surrealism.

Download or read book Diotima at the Barricades written by Paul Allen Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diotima at the Barricades argues that the debates that emerged from the burgeoning of feminist intellectual life in post-modern France involved complex, structured, and reciprocal exchanges on the interpretation and position of Plato and other ancient texts in the western philosophical and literary tradition. Paul Allen Miller shows how individual works of Anglo-American figures such as Toril Moi, Judith Butler, and Kaja Silverman, as well as movements such as queer theory, are rooted in feminist theoretical debates that began in the sixties in France and have continued right up to the present day. Miller demonstrates that French philosophy as represented by writers as diverse as Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Sarah Kofman, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Luce Irigaray have had a profound influence on literary, theoretical, and cultural studies in the Anglo-American world. He reveals that in order to understand the intellectual substructure of much of later Anglo-American critical theory, it is crucial to examine the development of post-modern French feminist thought in relation to its dialogue with antiquity. In modern feminism and post-structuralism, the ancient world, and Plato in particular, truly function as our theoretical unconscious.

Download or read book Traditionalism and Radicalism in the History of Christian Thought written by C. Simut and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the presentation and analysis of certain dogmatic issues such as christology, ecclesiology, pastoral work, anthropology, faith and bioethics among many others-all meant to illustrate how Christian thoughts stands between traditionalism and radicalism. It is both a dogmatic study and a historical overview of the topic.

Download or read book Cosmopolitan Sexuality written by Ahonaa Roy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In a historic verdict, the Supreme Court of India in September 2018, struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and decriminalized homosexuality and granted personal rights and freedom to the LGBTQIA community at large. However, in December 2018, the Transgender Persons Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha (the People's House and lower house of Indian Parliament) that has negated and undermined the rights of the trans community in India. The Bill omits the reference to a 'neither male nor female' formulation, and covers any person whose gender does not match the gender assigned at birth, as well as transmen, transwomen, those with intersex variations, the gender-queer, and those who designate themselves based on socio-cultural identities such as hijra, aravani, kinner and jogta. This book articulates the ethnographic and anthropological studies of hijras (eunuchs) and the popular transgender culture in India through the case study of contemporary Mumbai. It studies how their identity is shaped through consumption of various practices of beauty and takes into account the direct provincial dialogues as to how the hijras negotiate different spaces of surgeries, clinics and medicine to shape their new forms of identity. It highlights how globalizing modernity would build a concrete understanding of the way local patterns of transgender sexuality and eroticism are shaped by this sort of culture. It attempts to build a more robust and complex understanding of sexual experiences among these subjects in the locale, thus projecting the intersection of local meanings of transgender eroticism that intersect global patterns of similar identities with their desire and sexuality. The local specificity of the hijra sexual economy relates to global transgender practices, thus proposing a nuanced discourse of space, culture and sexuality to the local context of the globalized and modernized India, instead of the articulation of global homogeneity of transgender identities"--