Being Contemporary

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Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of critical urgency to probe the notion of ‘the contemporary’, and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Consisting of twenty-two critical essays written by scholars in the field of French studies, the volume offers a sustained reflection on the status of the contemporary in French culture and takes a close look at the contemporary moment itself, as well as its concomitant discourse of crisis. The volume is split into four sections. The first section, ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’, offers distinct disciplinary approaches to broader questions about time, period, and categorization. The second section, ‘Contemporary Politics and French Thought’, brings broader theoretical inquiries to bear on the political sphere. The third section, ‘The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives’, rearticulates the concern that the difficult negotiation of the past continues to haunt the present. The fourth section, ‘Writing the Contemporary Self’, features essays that probe the limits of autobiographical writing and self-representation. The fifth section, ‘Novel Rereadings’, offers new interpretations of monumental works of French fiction by literary giants such as Flaubert, Colette, Proust, Beckett. The sixth and final section, ‘Memory: Past and Future’, concludes with three different approaches to memory and representation. The essays in this volume, organised by theme rather than by definitions or denotations, encourage an expansive and elastic theoretical framework that charts a broad conceptual course and attempts to define what it means to ‘be contemporary’ both broadly and in terms of practice.