Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France

Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France
Author: Daniel Just
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2015-02-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107093880

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A wide-ranging account of French literature of the 1950s and 1960s showing how politically engaged leading writers were.

From Revolution to Ethics

From Revolution to Ethics
Author: Julian Bourg
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2007
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0773576215

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The French revolts of May 1968, the largest general strike in twentieth-century Europe, were among the most famous and colourful episodes of the twentieth century. Julian Bourg argues that during the subsequent decade the revolts led to a remarkable paradigm shift in French thought - the concern for revolution in the 1960s was transformed into a fascination with ethics. Challenging the prevalent view that the 1960s did not have any lasting effect, From Revolution to Ethics demonstrates that intellectuals and activists turned to ethics as the touchstone for understanding interpersonal, institutional, and political dilemmas. In absorbing and scrupulously researched detail Bourg explores the developing ethical fascination as it emerged among student Maoists courting terrorism, anti-psychiatric celebrations of madness, feminists mobilizing against rape, and pundits and philosophers championing human rights. Based on newly accessible archival sources and over fifty interviews with men and women who participated in the events of the era, From Revolution to Ethics provides a compelling picture of how May 1968 helped make ethics a compass for navigating contemporary global experience.

Postcolonial Duras

Postcolonial Duras
Author: J. Winston
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2002-02-08
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780312240004

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Taking an innovative approach, Jane Winston's Postcolonial Duras radically revises our understanding of both Duras and a crucial swath of French cultural and literary history by studying each one through the lens of the other. This is the first book to read Duras's work in relation to the broad historical contexts excluded from our analytic optics since the 1950s - colonial education and propaganda, the postwar left-wing political radicalization of intellectuals and their challenge to the French cultural subject, and the anti-racist writings of African-American Richard Wright - as well as in relation to the fin de siècle work of Vietnamese diasporic artists Tran Anh Hung and Linda Lê. Rewriting Duras into this broad historical context, Postcolonial Duras establishes Wright's central role in the postwar French literary field and Duras's crucial intermediary place between the French literary and cultural fields and their Francophone successors. Around them rises up an account of postwar France locked in the struggle for its cultural memory, as representational tools deployed in the conservative 1950s still seek to maintain their exclusions, while the ongoing displacement of peoples from the former colonies continues to transform its cultural and literary fabrics. Required reading for students and scholars of Duras, this book will interest specialists in the fields of contemporary French and Francophone literary and cultural studies, Diaspora Studies, African American literary studies, postcolonial and transnational studies, comparative literary studies, feminist theory, and gender studies.

Literature, Interpretation and Ethics

Literature, Interpretation and Ethics
Author: Colin Davis
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2024-04-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1040011144

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Literature, Interpretation and Ethics argues for the centrality of hermeneutics in the context of ongoing debates about the value and values of literature, and about the role and ethics of literary study. Hermeneutics is the endeavor to understand the nature of interpretation, as it poses vital questions about how we make sense of works of art, our own lives, other people and the world around us. The book outlines the contribution of hermeneutics to literary study through detailed accounts of role of interpretation in the work of key thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It also illustrates problems of interpretation posed by specific literary texts and films, emphasising how our interpretive acts also entail ethical engagements. The book develops a ‘hermeneutics of (guarded) trust’, which calls for attention to the agency of art without surrendering critical vigilance. Through a series of forays into theoretical texts, literary works and films, the book contributes to contemporary debates about critical practice and the cultural value. Interpretation, it suggests, is always fallible but it is also essential to our place in the world, and to the importance of the humanities.

Disarming Intelligence

Disarming Intelligence
Author: Zakir Paul
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2024-08-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691257981

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A critical account of the idea of intelligence in modern French literature and thought In the late nineteenth century, psychologists and philosophers became intensely interested in the possibility of quantifying, measuring, and evaluating “intelligence,” and using it to separate and compare individuals. Disarming Intelligence analyzes how this polyvalent term was consolidated and contested in competing discourses, from fin de siècle psychology and philosophy to literature, criticism, and cultural polemics around the First World War. Zakir Paul examines how Marcel Proust, Henri Bergson, Paul Valéry, and the critics of the influential Nouvelle revue française registered, negotiated, and subtly countered the ways intelligence was invoked across the political and aesthetic spectrum. For these writers, intelligence fluctuates between an individual, sovereign faculty for analyzing the world and something collective, accidental, and contingent. Disarming Intelligence shows how literary and critical styles questioned, suspended, and reimagined what intelligence could be by bringing elements of uncertainty and potentiality into its horizon. The book also explores interwar political tensions—from the extreme right to Walter Benjamin’s engaged essays on contemporary French writers. Finally, a brief coda recasts current debates about artificial intelligence by comparing them to these earlier crises of intelligence. By drawing together and untangling competing conceptions of intelligence, Disarming Intelligence exposes its mercurial but influential and urgent role in literary and cultural politics.

Palimpsestic Memory

Palimpsestic Memory
Author: Max Silverman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2013-02-01
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0857458841

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The interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust, colonialism and extreme violence in post-war French and Francophone fiction and film provide the central focus of this book. It proposes a new model of ‘palimpsestic memory’, which the author defines as the condensation of different spatio-temporal traces, to describe these interconnections and defines the poetics and the politics of this composite form. In doing so it is argued that a poetics dependent on tropes and techniques, such as metaphor, allegory and montage, establishes connections across space and time which oblige us to perceive cultural memory not in terms of its singular attachment to a particular event or bound to specific ethno-cultural or national communities but as a dynamic process of transfer between different moments of racialized violence and between different cultural communities. The structure of the book allows for both the theoretical elaboration of this paradigm for cultural memory and individual case-studies of novels and films.

Literature and its Language

Literature and its Language
Author: Garry L. Hagberg
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2022-10-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3031123301

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This stimulating volume brings together an international team of emerging, mid-career, and senior scholars to investigate the relations between philosophical approaches to language and the language of literature. It has proven easy for philosophers of language to leave literary language to one side, just as it has proven easy for literary scholars to discuss questions of meaning separately from relevant issues in the philosophy of language. This volume brings the two together in mutually enlightening ways: considerations of literary meaning are deepened by adding philosophical approaches, just as philosophical issues are enriched by bringing them into contact or interweaving them with literary cases in all their subtlety.

Narrative and Self-Understanding

Narrative and Self-Understanding
Author: Garry L. Hagberg
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2019-11-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030282899

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This exciting new edited collection bridges the gap between narrative and self-understanding. The problem of self-knowledge is of universal interest; the nature or character of its achievement has been one continuing thread in our philosophical tradition for millennia. Likewise the nature of storytelling, the assembly of individual parts of a potential story into a coherent narrative structure, has been central to the study of literature. But how do we gain knowledge from an artform that is by definition fictional, by definition not a matter of ascertained fact, as this applies to the understanding of our lives? When we see ourselves in the mimetic mirror of literature, what we see may not just be a matter of identifying with a single protagonist, but also a matter of recognizing long-form structures, long-arc narrative shapes that give a place to – and thus make sense of – the individual bits of experience that we place into those structures. But of course at precisely this juncture a question arises: do we make that sense, or do we discover it? The twelve chapters brought together here lucidly and steadily reveal how the matters at hand are far more intricate and interesting than any such dichotomy could accommodate. This is a book that investigates the ways in which life and literature speak to each other.

The Fact of Resonance

The Fact of Resonance
Author: Julie Beth Napolin
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0823288188

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Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism’s question “who speaks?” in the hidden acoustical questions “who hears?” and “who listens?” For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature’s ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. “Resonance” opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors—Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman—the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that “drift” through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music. A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for “resonance” as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of “voice” and “sound” across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book’s engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.

Transformative Fictions

Transformative Fictions
Author: Daniel Just
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2022-07-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100060800X

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Transformative Fictions: World Literature and Personal Change engages with current debates in world literature over the past twenty years, addressing the nature of literary influence in centers and peripheries, the formation of transnational literary and pedagogical canons, and the role of translation and regionalism in how we relate to texts from around the globe. The author, Daniel Just, argues for a supranational but sub-global perspective of regions that emphasizes practical reasons for reading and focuses on the potential of literary texts to stimulate personal transformation in readers. One of the recurring dilemmas in these debates is the issue of delimitation of world literature. The trouble with the world as a frame of reference is that no single researcher is bound to have the in-depth knowledge and linguistic skills to discuss works from all countries. In response, this book revives literary theory and recasts it for the purposes of world literature, by making a case for the continuing relevance of literature in the age of new media. With the examples of fictional and nonfictional writings by Milan Kundera, Witold Gombrowicz and Bohumil Hrabal, Just shows that regional literatures offer differing methods of activating readers and thereby prompting personal change. This book would be of general interest to anyone who wants to explore personal change through literature but is particularly indispensable for literary professionals, researchers, and postgraduate and graduate students.