Contemporary French Research Articles

Heideggerian Ethics and Kantian Ethics: Diverging Interpretations in Contemporary French Debate

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to show how the interaction between Kantian ethics and some aspects of Heideggerian philosophy can lead to the model of a subject in immediate relationship with others and with his or her community. The positions of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida on this question are presented in contrast with those of Alain Renaut and Emmanuel Lévinas to elucidate their differing ways of interpreting the relationship between Kant and Heidegger with regard to ethics, apriorism, and subjectivity.

Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology. By Tarek R. Dika and W. Chris Hackett

Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology. By Tarek R. Dika and W. Chris Hackett

Book Review: Nathan Coombs, History and Theory: From Marxism to Contemporary French Theory

Book Review: Nathan Coombs, <i>History and Theory: From Marxism to Contemporary French Theory</i>

The Eternal Other: (Franco-)Asians through the Lens of Contemporary French Cinema

ABSTRACTImmigrant identities occupy the foreground in contemporary French films such as the anthology Paris, je t'aime (Paris) and Entre les murs by Laurent Cantet, signaling the changing cultural and ethnic faces that comprise the Hexagon. Yet the portrayal of East/Southeast Asians remains atemporal, confining them to the realm of the unassimilated other. In comparison, an increasing number of individuals of black and North African heritage are gradually being profiled as more linguistically and culturally—albeit never completely—“French” as in Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine, his segment in Paris, je t'aime, and in Yamina Benguigui's television film series Aïcha. Does the political environment in France with respect to immigration create a hierarchy that determines the assimilability of specific racial and ethnic groups and/or do certain characteristics of East/Southeast Asian cultures contribute to crystallizing their other-ness? In order to tackle these perplexing queries, this paper considers how residual colonial ideologies underlying identity politics and citizenship as well as sociocultural elements of Asian ethnic groups help explain the perpetuation of Far Eastern Orientalism in contemporary French cinema.

АКТИВНIСТЬ ПРЕФIКСА ANTI- У ПРОЦЕСАХ НЕОЛОГIЗАЦIЇ СУЧАСНОЇ ФРАНЦУЗЬКОЇ МОВИ

The article deals with the issues of the productiveness of prefix anti- in contemporary French, revealing the semantic meanings of prefix anti- in different contexts.

Bernard Werber’s Poetics of Ecological Reconstruction: “In Praise of Amnesia”?

Contemporary French science fiction, influenced by American writers of the genre, is essentially dystopic. The novelist Bernard Werber, although deeply influenced by American science-fiction, proposes “other” modes of thinking as alternatives for a new ecological imagination. This article considers the five principal strategies that he uses to write a utopian fiction focused on new ways of thinking: the insertion of non-fiction, such as encyclopaedic fragments, in his novels; the use of interspecies analogies; the insertion of ideological arguments into the narrative; a description of otherness that interactively engages readers; a multidimensional perception of time.

Australian University Students Reading Francophone Picturebooks—An Original Study

Research on picturebooks and language and culture learning at tertiary level is rare. This article is concerned with how Australian students perceive French and Francophone children’s literature when it is used as a medium for university-level language and cultural studies. The emphasis is on the nature and depth of the students’ developing perception of the literature within the broader spectrum of language learning and cultural study. Questionnaires were administered before and after the semester of study to observe if any shift had taken place in the students’ notion of children’s literature and picturebooks and their perception of the books read in class. The answers were subjected to content analysis (Patton 463), allowing identification of patterns. In this article, I first detail the criteria governing the choice of picturebooks for mature language learners and then turn to their answers to the questionnaires. Finally, I compare the results of this analysis with those obtained from the analysis of students’ productions to confirm or not confirm our original results. I show in the conclusion that the picturebooks chosen with my established criteria were well received by the adult language learners and that their opinion of these books had changed in ways that suggested they had gained over the course of the study a better understanding of some of the characteristic features of contemporary French and Francophone children’s literature.

Writing the Real: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary French Poetry by Nina Parish &amp; Emma Wagstaff

Writing the Real: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary French Poetry by Nina Parish &amp; Emma Wagstaff

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema . Edited by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner

<i>A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema</i> . Edited by Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner

The Study on the Reception of Contemporary French Drama in Korean Female theater - Focusing on the Activities of Theatre Company Sanwoollim

The Study on the Reception of Contemporary French Drama in Korean Female theater - Focusing on the Activities of Theatre Company Sanwoollim

Fieldwork in Contemporary French Literature

ABSTRACTMany writers are no longer satisfied with telling about or representing the real, but envision literature as a means of testing, studying, even experimenting with it. Instead of proposing novels nurtured by their observations, their books narrate the practical experience, difficulties, and reflections that their very composition entails. Such works invent singular forms, irreducible to either the novel or the essay, opening a new literary space, based on their shared use of fieldwork, and therefore closer to the Humanities and Social Sciences. Rather than vainly searching to determine this genre, this essay attempts to establish a corpus of works that I name “Literary Fieldwork,” and to define their characteristics in terms of forms, systems, objects, practices, poetics, and aesthetics.

Contemporary French Sensory Ethnography

In France, sensorial anthropology (anthropologie sensorielle) or sensory ethnography (as it is also known) is a diffuse field of research. While the senses are evoked by many contemporary anthropol...

Tracing the Evolution of Contemporary French Studies Through the Twentieth (and Twenty-first) Century French (and Francophone) (Literary) Studies Colloquium

ABSTRACTThis essay takes the call of the 2015 Twentieth (and Twenty-first) Century French (and Francophone) (Literary) Studies Colloquium to “trace the evolution of French and Francophone Literary Studies” quite literally in that it compares a sampling of programs over the colloquium's thirty-two-year history in order to analyze some of the signs of change in the field over this period. While the Colloquium is only one gauge of the multiple mutations that have occurred in French Studies over the last three decades, a reading of the shifts in the texts, topics, artists, geographical regions, and critical approaches treated at it, as well as in the types of scholars who have participated in it, can certainly tell us something about the ways in which the meaning of the evolving signifier “Twentieth (and Twenty-first) Century French (and Francophone) (Literary) Studies” has changed over time.

Translated Poe

Translated Poe

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema

Le Défi du roman: narration et engagement oblique à l'ère postmoderne

Elisa Bricco's welcome new study of the contemporary French novel explores what she sees as two significant characteristics of recent fiction: an intertextual and self-conscious ‘postmodern’ approach to narration, and a form of social critique, which she labels ‘oblique’ in comparison to the more ideologically forthright political commitment of earlier generations. The study gives its attention to nine writers, a little unequally. Sylvie Germain is explored over two chapters and part of a third, Antoine Volodine has a chapter and a half, Alain Nadaud a chapter, and a few pages each are accorded to the other six writers, who are Dominique Mainard, Marie NDiaye, Christian Oster, Marie Redonnet, Jean Rolin, and Philippe Vasset. Aside from Redonnet's Rose Mélie Rose (Paris: Minuit, 1987), all the texts examined were published in the 1990s or the first decade of this century. After an overview of the contemporary French publishing scene and the reading habits of the French population, Bricco offers a survey of academic work on the extrême contemporain. She notes that ‘roman’ now encompasses such a broad range of writing that the term ‘fiction narrative’ might be more apt. Taking postmodern narrative as her first object of enquiry, she examines self-consciousness, fragmentation, and the ‘post-exotic’ in Nadaud, Germain, and Volodine respectively, arguing that formal innovation and serious themes do not preclude a concern for well-crafted storytelling and for the reader's entertainment. Moving on to engagement oblique in the latter part of the study, Bricco examines malaise of various kinds in the representation of modern society, with particular emphasis on women's experience, and explores the use of humour and the fantastic as a writerly response. Through discussion of Germain and Volodine in both parts of the study, Bricco makes the point that postmodern narrative play and clear-eyed social critique are by no means incompatible. As Bricco states in her Conclusion, the study is very much ‘une lecture personnelle’ (p. 192) of the contemporary French novel, with no claim to be a systematic overview. The analysis ignores major literary figures who might support its thesis (Jean Echenoz for postmodern narrative; J. M. G. Le Clézio or Michel Houellebecq for engagement oblique), and excludes those who might counter it, as Bricco readily admits, such as more overtly committed writers like François Bon. Not a comprehensive état présent, then, but Bricco's study is nonetheless an engaging exploration of some important contemporary writers, several of whom have not previously received the attention they deserve.

Transformations in the Contemporary French Political Landscape: Between Electoral Strategies and Ideological Realignment

Transformations in the Contemporary French Political Landscape: Between Electoral Strategies and Ideological Realignment

The Influence of English on Contemporary French

Le Rouge et le Noir est un roman sur l’éducation sentimentale de Julien Sorel dont les idéaux juvéniles se heurtent à la réalité politique de la Restauration, origine du drame du héros romanesque. L’éducation sentimentale de Sorel et l‘évolution de son esprit sont dues aussi bien aux leçons tirées des livres qu’à celles de l’expérience de vie. Les lectures du héros stendhalien, loin de le divertir, l’éduquent et forgent son caractère. Le but de cette recherche est, en premier lieu, de présenter la culture littéraire de Julien Sorel, et d’analyser comment les lectures engendrent les idées des personnages romanesques et influencent leurs actes. La présente recherche tente aussi d’étudier le contexte sociopolitique des références littéraires fgurant dans ce roman politique par excellence.

Can the French be happy, or can happiness be French? Contemporary French discourses on happiness as cultural value

In this essay I analyze recent French discourses about contemporary conceptions of “happiness,” in particular several recent books that critique the apparent ascension of happiness as a primary social value in contemporary France, replacing, according to their authors, older principles such as piety, honor, glory, or sacrifice. These writers explore the effects on the human psyche of the post-1968 dismantling of sexual, gender, class, geographical, and other boundaries, and they do not like what they see. They lament the ever-widening spaces in which human desire is allowed, indeed – they argue – compelled to roam in contemporary French society and warn of the dangers to which the increasing loss of limits, interdictions, and impossibilities exposes us all. Henri Lefebvre, spiritual father of May ’68, argued that we are more likely to achieve happiness and fulfillment, at least sporadically, when we are experiencing “everyday life” (despite the increasing degree to which it was being organized and program...

Voicing Abjection: Narratives of Anorexia in Contemporary French Women’s (Life-)Writing

This article explores how contemporary French texts (including Lou Delvig’s Jours sans faim (2001) and Genevieve Brisac’s Petite (1994)) shift emphasis from the anorexic body (typically represented as repulsive and fascinating) to articulate anorexia through abjection. These texts thereby set up abject relations with the reader that constitute alternative autopathographies.