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Since Romanticism, literature has embraced the myriad forms of powerlessness inherent in the complexity of the modern world. This book examines the reasons and methods that have transformed powerlessness into a literary object, from Balzac to Huysmans, from Proust to Queneau, from Malraux to Michaux, via Tinan, Amiel and Beckett to Chaillou, Senges, and the writers of post-mémoire and extrême contemporain. In particular, it shows how French literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century has been built on the enunciation of its own limits and those of man in the face of reality and history. It constitutes an invitation to reconsider contemporary discourses on the decline of the literary and to rethink the fictionalisation of powerlessness in terms of revival.
Since Romanticism, literature has embraced the myriad forms of powerlessness inherent in the complexity of the modern world. This book examines the reasons and methods that have transformed powerlessness into a literary object, from Balzac to Huysmans, from Proust to Queneau, from Malraux to Michaux, via Tinan, Amiel and Beckett to Chaillou, Senges, and the writers of post-mémoire and extrême contemporain. In particular, it shows how French literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century has been built on the enunciation of its own limits and those of man in the face of reality and history. It constitutes an invitation to reconsider contemporary discourses on the decline of the literary and to rethink the fictionalisation of powerlessness in terms of revival.
The contributors to this volume examine Racine’s stagecraft, his exploration of space, sound and silence, his language, and the psychology of those who exercise power or who attempt to maintain their freedom in the face of oppression. The reception and reworking of his plays by contemporaries and subsequent generations round off this wide-ranging study.
The contributors to this volume examine Racine’s stagecraft, his exploration of space, sound and silence, his language, and the psychology of those who exercise power or who attempt to maintain their freedom in the face of oppression. The reception and reworking of his plays by contemporaries and subsequent generations round off this wide-ranging study.
“I write with geography” Maylis de Kerangal explains. With geographies would be more accurate as her texts encompass the different aspects of this discipline showing the beauty of spaces as well as the way they are inhabited. This first monographic study of the work demonstrates the way places build the narration, influence the writing and allows aesthetics and ethics to join into a “poethics” which glorifies the world and sublimates the characters in socio-epics with a great narrative power. Escaping a naive vision, this creative impulse was born out of a political reflection that is close to the care theories and the new forms of literary commitment, thanks to the attention it pays to others as well as the respect for democratic fundamentals.
“I write with geography” Maylis de Kerangal explains. With geographies would be more accurate as her texts encompass the different aspects of this discipline showing the beauty of spaces as well as the way they are inhabited. This first monographic study of the work demonstrates the way places build the narration, influence the writing and allows aesthetics and ethics to join into a “poethics” which glorifies the world and sublimates the characters in socio-epics with a great narrative power. Escaping a naive vision, this creative impulse was born out of a political reflection that is close to the care theories and the new forms of literary commitment, thanks to the attention it pays to others as well as the respect for democratic fundamentals.
Third man of négritude, Léon Damas aligned himself with the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay), and Richard Wright, as well as with the surrealists like Apollinaire and G. Luca to transmit his urgent message: “a ti pa”, France is little by little undergoing its decolonial transformation. Damas is the “antillectuel transfuge” who crosses boundaries of color, “race”, class and gender. Hereby he announces the “City of tomorrow” where differences of all kind are tolerated and respected.
Third man of négritude, Léon Damas aligned himself with the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay), and Richard Wright, as well as with the surrealists like Apollinaire and G. Luca to transmit his urgent message: “a ti pa”, France is little by little undergoing its decolonial transformation. Damas is the “antillectuel transfuge” who crosses boundaries of color, “race”, class and gender. Hereby he announces the “City of tomorrow” where differences of all kind are tolerated and respected.
Cohabiter l’espace postcolonial focuses on the importance of ecological issues in African fiction. The book highlights the complex and diverse strategies deployed in French speaking Africa to incorporate environmental subjects in literary productions. Using ecocriticism, postcolonial and posthumanist theories to analyse a wide variety of novels, it brings to the fore, through the diversity of the issues it addresses, some contextual inflections of the relationship between the human and the non-human. From its discussion of animal otherness, cultural significance of plants, environmental racism, environmental justice, the fragility of the rural world and the survival in urban environments, the book demonstrates how ecological issues translate into socio-cultural and political challenges for local communities in Africa.