Download or read book Blood Dark written by Louis Guilloux and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set during World War I, this monumental philosophical novel about human despair inspired Albert Camus' own writing and prefigured the greater existential movement. Blood Dark tells the story of a brilliant philosopher trapped in a provincial town and of his spiraling descent into self-destruction. Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.
Download or read book Louis Guilloux written by Walter Redfern and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-12-28 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first truly comprehensive study, in any language, of the writings of Louis Guilloux. It embraces all his fiction, including his short stories, to which little or no attention has previously been paid. The title refers to Guilloux's lifelong stance: an empathetic witness and listener to the lives of other people, who lifts anecdotes to the level of social and psychological life-studies. Highly valued by writers such as Malraux and Camus, Guilloux's work is studied here under several key categories (which represent overlaps and tensions rather than bleak opposites): memory and forgetfulness; the shifting relationship of individual and community; roots (stasis) and escape (movement); Guilloux and committed literature (La Maison du Peuple, Les Batailles perdues, and the trip to the USSR with Gide and Dabit). A long chapter is devoted to a close reading of Guilloux's baroque masterpiece, Le Sang noir, a much richer and less cerebral epic of an intellectual enmeshed in a provincial society than its successor, Sartre's La Nausée. Detailed attention is given to Guilloux's recycling of the model for the hero Cripure, the rogue elephant thinker Georges Palante. Le Sang noir is a haunted book. Guilloux's experiments with chronological dislocation (Le Jeu de patience), with narrative voices, essais de voix, (Coco perdu), with multiple personality (La Confrontation), and with the ambiguous pseudo-science of physiognomy (passim) are all fully analysed. Throughout, wherever called for, the culturally cosmopolitan Guilloux is compared or contrasted with writers from various countries: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Silone, Dickens, Vallès, Camus, and Sartre. This is a matter less of influence than of Guilloux's choice of companions.
Download or read book OK Joe written by Louis Guilloux and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-10 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keeping company with American soldiers and immersed in translating accounts of these horrific crimes, Louis encounters a casual and insidious racism in military culture as he comes to realize that the accused men are almost all African Americans."
Download or read book The Interpreter written by Alice Kaplan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-09-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No story of World War II is more triumphant than the liberation of France, made famous in countless photos of Parisians waving American flags and kissing GIs, as columns of troops paraded down the Champs Élysées. Yet liberation is a messy, complex affair, in which cultural understanding can be as elusive as the search for justice by both the liberators and the liberated. Occupying powers import their own injustices, and often even magnify them, away from the prying eyes of home. One of the least-known stories of the American liberation of France, from 1944 to 1946, is also one of the ugliest and least understood chapters in the history of Jim Crow. The first man to grapple with this failure of justice was an eyewitness: the interpreter Louis Guilloux. Now, in The Interpreter, prize-winning author Alice Kaplan combines extraordinary research and brilliant writing to recover the story both as Guilloux first saw it, and as it still haunts us today. When the Americans helped to free Brittany in the summer of 1944, they were determined to treat the French differently than had the Nazi occupiers of the previous four years. Crimes committed against the locals were not to be tolerated. General Patton issued an order that any accused criminals would be tried by court-martial and that severe sentences, including the death penalty, would be imposed for the crime of rape. Mostly represented among service troops, African Americans made up a small fraction of the Army. Yet they were tried for the majority of capital cases, and they were found guilty with devastating frequency: 55 of 70 men executed by the Army in Europe were African American -- or 79 percent, in an Army that was only 8.5 percent black. Alice Kaplan's towering achievement in The Interpreter is to recall this outrage through a single, very human story. Louis Guilloux was one of France's most prominent novelists even before he was asked to act as an interpreter at a few courts-martial. Through his eyes, Kaplan narrates two mirror-image trials and introduces us to the men and women in the courtrooms. James Hendricks fired a shot through a door, after many drinks, and killed a man. George Whittington shot and killed a man in an open courtyard, after an argument and many drinks. Hendricks was black. Whittington was white. Both were court-martialed by the Army VIII Corps and tried in the same room, with some of the same officers participating. Yet the outcomes could not have been more different. Guilloux instinctively liked the Americans with whom he worked, but he could not get over seeing African Americans condemned to hang, Hendricks among them, while whites went free. He wrote about what he had observed in his diary, and years later in a novel. Other witnesses have survived to talk to Kaplan in person. In Kaplan's hands, the two crimes and trials are searing events. The lawyers, judges, and accused are all sympathetic, their actions understandable. Yet despite their best intentions, heartbreak and injustice result. In an epilogue, Kaplan introduces us to the family of James Hendricks, who were never informed of his fate, and who still hope that his remains will be transferred back home. James Hendricks rests, with 95 other men, in a U.S. military cemetery in France, filled with anonymous graves.
Download or read book Bitter Victory written by Louis Guilloux and published by . This book was released on 1936 with total page 588 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Guilloux’s hometown during World War I, it has as its central character an idealist embittered by experience, driven by his sense of the absurdity of existence to a point beyond hope or despair.
Download or read book Ananda Devi written by Ritu Tyagi and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013-10-10 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ananda Devi: Feminism, Narration and Polyphony is the first full-length monograph devoted to Ananda Devi, a dynamic contemporary Francophone writer. Recipient of Prix Louis-Guilloux and Prix Télévision Suisse Romande du Roman, she is described by many as a prototype of a new generation of Mauritian writers. This book analyses Devi’s unconventional polyphonic narratives, particularly, her strategies that allow marginalized narrators to disrupt androcentric and dominant structures of narrative construction, thereby creating hybrid magical spaces for feminine expression. Drawing on the notion of feminist narratology that investigates the relation between gender and narrative, this book focuses on a wide range of Western and non-Western narrative strategies such as plot and plotlessness, narrative metalepsis, pluritemporality, multisubjectivity, myths, folktales and magic. It also demonstrates how her texts become the point of convergence of the West and the non-West, the feminine and the androcentric, the real and the extra-real as muted discourses resurface and traditional distinctions between categories are blurred in favor of alternate and new possibilities. As this book is interdisciplinary in its approach, it will appeal to a broad range of audience from those interested in Contemporary Francophone and Indian-Ocean Literature to scholars in Women’s Writing, Post-Colonial Studies, and Narratology.
Download or read book Small Lives written by Pierre Michon and published by Archipelago. This book was released on 2012-03-24 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Small Lives (Vies minuscules), Pierre Michon’s first novel, won the Prix France Culture. Michon explains that he wrote it "to save my own skin. I felt in my body that my life was turning around. This book born in an aura of inexpressible joy and catharsis rescued me more effectively than my aborted analysis." Le Monde calls it "his chef d’oeuvre. A bolt of lightening." In Small Lives, Michon paints portraits of eight individuals, whose stories span two centuries in his native region of La Creuse. In the process of exploring their lives, he explores the act of writing and his emotional connection to both. The quest to trace and recall these interconnected lives seared into his memory ultimately becomes a quest to grasp his own humanity and discover his own voice.
Download or read book Violence in French and Francophone Literature and Film written by James Day and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2008 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories of violence — such as the account in Genesis of Cain's jealousy and murder of Abel — have been with us since the time of the earliest recorded texts. Undeniably, the scourge of violence fascinates, confounds, and saddens. What are its uses in literature — its appeal, forms, and consequences? Anchored by Alice Kaplan's substantial contribution, the thirteen articles in this volume cover diverse epochs, lands, and motives. One scholar ponders whether accounts of Huguenot martyrdom in the sixteenth-century might suggest more pride than piety. Another assesses the real versus the true with respect to a rape scene inThe Heptameron. Female violence in fairy tales by Madame d'Aulnoy points to gender politics and the fragility of female solidarity, while another article examines similar issues in the context of Ananda Devi's works in present-day Mauritius. Other studies address the question of sadism in Flaubert, the unstable point of view of Emmanuel Carrère'sL'Adversaire, the ambivalence toward violence in Chamoiseau's Texaco, the notions of “terror” and “tabula rasa” in the writings of Blanchot, the undoing of traditions of narrative continuity and authority in the 1998 film,À vendre, and consequences of the power differential in a repressive Haiti as depicted in the filmVers le Sud (2005). Paradoxes emerge in several studies of works where victims may become perpetrators, or vice versa.
Download or read book Writing to Save a Life written by John Edgar Wideman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning writer traces the life of the father of iconic Civil Rights martyr Emmett Till--a man who was executed by the Army ten years before Emmett's murder. An evocative and personal exploration of individual and collective memory in America by one of the most formidable Black intellectuals of our time. In 1955, Emmett Till, aged fourteen, traveled from his home in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. Several weeks later he returned, dead; allegedly he whistled at a white woman. His mother, Mamie, wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. She chose to leave his casket open. Images of her brutalized boy were published widely. While Emmett's story is known, there's a dark side note that's rarely mentioned. Ten years earlier, Emmett's father was executed by the Army for rape and murder. In Writing to Save a Life, John Edgar Wideman searches for Louis Till, a silent victim of American injustice. Wideman's personal interaction with the story began when he learned of Emmett's murder in 1955; Wideman was also fourteen years old. After reading decades later about Louis's execution, he couldn't escape the twin tragedies of father and son, and tells their stories together for the first time. Author of the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Wideman brings extraordinary insight and a haunting intimacy to this devastating story. An amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination, Writing to Save a Life is completely original in its delivery--an engaging and enlightening conversation between generations, the living and the dead, fathers and sons. Wideman turns seventy-five this year, and he brings the force of his substantial intellect and experience to this beautiful, stirring book, his first nonfiction in fifteen years.
Download or read book Transnational Anti Communism and the Cold War written by Stéphanie Roulin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was anti-communism organised in the West? This book covers the agents, aims, and arguments of various transnational anti-communist activists during the Cold War. Existing narratives often place the United States – and especially the CIA – at the centre of anti-communist activity. The book instead opens up new fields of research transnationally.
Download or read book French XX Bibliography written by William H. Thompson and published by Susquehanna University Press. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. This book is for the study of French literature and culture.
Download or read book Temples for Tomorrow written by Genevià ̈ve Fabre and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-19 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harlem Renaissance is rightly considered to be a moment of creative exuberance and unprecedented explosion. Today, there is a renewed interest in this movement, calling for a re-evaluation and a closer scrutiny of the era and of documents that have only recently become available. Temples for Tomorrow reconsiders the period -- between two world wars -- which confirmed the intuitions of W. E. B. DuBois on the "color line" and gave birth to the "American dilemma," later evoked by Gunnar Myrdal. Issuing from a generation bearing new hopes and aspirations, a new vision takes form and develops around the concept of the New Negro, with a goal: to recreate an African American identity and claim its legitimate place in the heart of the nation. In reality, this movement organized into a remarkable institutional network, which was to remain the vision of an elite, but which gave birth to tensions and differences. This collection attempts to assess Harlem's role as a "Black Mecca", as "site of intimate performance" of African American life, and as focal point in the creation of a diasporic identity in dialogue with the Caribbean and French-speaking areas. Essays treat the complex interweaving of Primitivism and Modernism, of folk culture and elitist aspirations in different artistic media, with a view to defining the interaction between music, visual arts, and literature. Also included are known Renaissance intellectuals and writers. Even though they had different conceptions of the role of the African American artist in a racially segregated society, most participants in the New Negro movement shared a desire to express a new assertiveness in terms of literary creation and indentity-building.
Download or read book Village Voices written by Odile Hellier and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of the legacy of the Village Voice bookshop in Paris, founded by Odile Hellier in 1982—a hub of social life and a refuge for artists, writers, and anglophone literary life for over three decades until it closed in 2012. “My entire sense of Paris centers on Odile and the bookshop.” —Richard Ford "For literature lovers, it’s a feast." —Publishers Weekly In July of 1982, on a quiet boulevard just off the bustling Boulevard Saint-German, Odile Hellier opened the Village Voice Bookshop. Over the next three decades, the blue-shuttered shop would become one of the most famous English-language bookstores in Paris—a vivacious hub for artists, writers, and a haven for anglophone literary life. After the its closing, Odile found herself with hundreds of tapes of various talks given at the bookshop by the greatest artists of their generation. These voices from the past were the spontaneous exchanges of literary and cultural icons such as Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Allen Ginsberg, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Jim Harrison, Barry Gifford, Adrienne Rich, David Sedaris, Amy Tan, Edmund White, Art Spiegelman, and Stephen Spender, all of whom were drawn to Odile’s tiny bookstore on Rue Princesse. This carefully curated historical archive is an enduring conversation across time, and a memoir of one woman’s beloved store. “… when you squeezed into the narrow event space on the Voice’s upper floor, French and international book lovers mingled with Parisian editors and publishers, shared a glass of wine, a new discovery, a heretical opinion, and took the conversation outside to the sidewalk of the Rue Princesse, for another shared pleasure: an unguilty cigarette.” — Livia Manera, The New Yorker “A stroll from rue de l’Odéon, Les Deux Magots or the Luxembourg Gardens, the hanging sign reads Village Voice: Anglo-American Bookshop. The narrow door and window frames are painted Greek island blue… Lingering a while in front of the window display, you’ll want to dive inside, into an ocean of story.” —Hazel Rowley, Bookforum
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of French Literature written by John Flower and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 659 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the possible exception of Great Britain, France can justifiably lay claim to possess the richest literary history of any country in Western Europe. This book covers the authors and their works, literary movements, and philosophical and social developments that have had a direct impact on style or content, and major historical events such as the two world wars, the Franco-Prussian War, the Algerian War, or the events of May 1968 that are directly reflected in a substantial body of imaginative writing. Historical Dictionary of French Literature, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on individual writers and key texts, significant movements, groups, associations, and periodicals, and on the literary reactions to major national and international events such as revolutions and wars. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about French literature.
Download or read book Correspondence 1932 1960 written by Albert Camus and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a philosophy teacher, mentor, and friend, Jean Grenier (1898?1971) had an enormous influence on the young Albert Camus (1913?1960), who, in fact, acknowledged that Grenier?s Les Iles had touched the very core of his sensibility and provided him with both a ?terrain for reflection, and a format? that he would later use for his own essays. Their correspondence, beginning when the seventeen-year-old Camus was Grenier?s student at the Grand Lycäe of Algiers, documents the younger man?s struggle to become a writer and find his own voice, a period in which he turned frequently to his mentor for advice, comfort, and direction. The letters cover a period of almost thirty years, from 1932 to Camus?s untimely death in 1960. Because Camus destroyed the earlier correspondence he received, the first twenty-six letters in the volume are his only; the full begins in 1940. ø These enlightening letters offer invaluable glimpses into the development of Camus?s aesthetic ideas, literary production, and political stance. In contrast to the correspondence of Grenier, who throughout remains somewhat reticent about his life and doubtful about himself and his works, Camus?s letters are a window into his most profound thoughts and sensitivities, delving deeply into his psyche and, at times, revealing a side of the writer unfamiliar to us. Undoubtedly they allow us a better understanding of Albert Camus, the man and the artist.
Download or read book Those Who Forget written by Geraldine Schwarz and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Makes] the very convincing case that, until and unless there is a full accounting for what happened with Donald Trump, 2020 is not over and never will be.” —The New Yorker “Riveting…we can never be reminded too often to never forget.” —The Wall Street Journal Journalist Géraldine Schwarz’s astonishing memoir of her German and French grandparents’ lives during World War II “also serves as a perceptive look at the current rise of far-right nationalism throughout Europe and the US” (Publishers Weekly). During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer—those who followed the current. Once the war ended, they wanted to bury the past under the wreckage of the Third Reich. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her paternal grandfather Karl took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. She finds letters from the only survivor of this family (all the others perished in Auschwitz), demanding reparations. But Karl Schwarz refused to acknowledge his responsibility. Géraldine starts to question the past: How guilty were her grandparents? What makes us complicit? On her mother’s side, she investigates the role of her French grandfather, a policeman in Vichy. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology, overcome by a fog of denial after the war, and, in Germany at least, eventually managed to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. She asks: How can nations learn from history? And she observes that countries that avoid confronting the past are especially vulnerable to extremism. Searing and unforgettable, Those Who Forget “deserves to be read and discussed widely...this is Schwarz’s invaluable warning” (The Washington Post Book Review).
