{"title":"La Vagabonde assise – space, place and the meaning of home in Colette and other women writers","authors":"D. Holmes","doi":"10.1177/09571558221144368","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144368","url":null,"abstract":"Nick Hewitt wrote wonderfully well about the significance of different places in French history and culture, and in our lives. Colette was a chronicler of places, from the famous childhood house and garden in Burgundy, to Brittany, Provence and of course Paris. But as her writing moves across regions and houses, home recurs as a crucial place in the emotional landscape of a human life. Nick was also always attentive to the relationship between canonical and ‘minor’ authors, and to the interplay between socio-political moment and cultural production. In this article home is examined as a vital and recurring theme not only in the work of Colette but also in that of her lesser-known female contemporaries – for home as a place has particular practical and emotional meanings for women.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"62 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47864650","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Placing lost intersectional plots in Houellebecq's Anéantir (2022): Race, climate and scandalous textual necropolitics","authors":"R. Cruickshank","doi":"10.1177/09571558221145188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221145188","url":null,"abstract":"Placed in the context of scandals surrounding Houellebecq's earlier novels, Anéantir (2022) is described as strategically losing its political and other plots to focus on the death of its protagonist. This narrative choice cannot, however, dispense with questions raised by representations of race (universalism, colourism, racialization, Islamophobia); of colonial and postcolonial exploitation (including the Françafrique); and of ‘green-bashing’, anthropocentrism and the elision of differential impacts of climate catastrophe. These questions are considered in terms of necropolitical power over who lives or dies, and precarious lives experienced as ‘slow death’. Fiction is established as always already a form of necropolitics–of textual decisions of life and death. Whilst climate catastrophe is not foregrounded in this predominantly anthropocentric narrative, the ultimate question is whether Houellebecq intends any kind of self-reflexive ‘ecocritique’, or whether the gravest global scandal—of human contributions to climate crisis—is ignored.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"92 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46560866","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Behind the mask: An introduction to the fiction of Anne-Claire Decorvet","authors":"J. Flower","doi":"10.1177/09571558221150701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221150701","url":null,"abstract":"Recognized in Switzerland by numerous prizes, Anne-Claire Decorvet's fiction has yet to make its mark abroad. With the exception of her biographical novel, Un lieu sans raison, inspired by the life of Marguerite Sirvins, it is set predominantly in and around Geneva, explores family and social instability, insanity and psychiatric care in the twentieth century. This article explores some of the distinctive and characteristic features of her writing with a view towards introducing her work to new readers.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"83 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46819958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Breaking the Republican mold: French independent schools and agonistic pluralism amidst Franco-conformity*","authors":"Carol Ferrara","doi":"10.1177/09571558221151001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221151001","url":null,"abstract":"The modern French school system was established in the late nineteenth century upon an acculturating, assimilationist, and secular ideology of making “French people French” and emphasizing unity over cultural diversity. Thus, most scholarship on the French education system aptly highlights the system's French Republican “mold” characteristics—hyper-centralization, Franco-conformity, and “Republican sanctuary”—even if adherence to the mold is not always achieved. However, French hors contrat or independent schools are afforded significant freedoms in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, admittance criteria, and the incorporation of religion. These independent schools represent a veritable rainbow of ethical and educational perspectives that break from the French Republican schooling mold. Drawing upon seven months of ethnographic research in a variety of French independent schools, I suggest that these schools’ existence illustrate flexibility and plasticity within the otherwise monolithic French education system, collectively pointing to a surprising form of agonistic pluralism on the margins of French Republicanism.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46919728","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reinventing democracy in Paris and Madrid: Sylvain George’s Benjaminian urban montage","authors":"M. O'shaughnessy","doi":"10.1177/09571558221144374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144374","url":null,"abstract":"Sylvain George is one of the most interesting French filmmakers working today. He has made a series of poetic, experimental documentaries about migrants and refugees around Calais and has brought together migrant figures and Occupy movements in his two ‘city symphonies’, Vers Madrid (The Burning Bright) (2012) and Paris est une fête (2018). The principal theoretical influence on George's cinema is the work of Walter Benjamin. This article shows how certain essential Benjaminian concepts can help us understand George's films as they seek productive alignments and collisions between contemporary mobilisations and the history embedded in urban spaces. But it also argues that, even as they point towards a renewal of fundamental European political traditions, they show that a politics no longer limited by national belonging remains to be found.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"106 - 125"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47716355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A sense of place: Special number in honour of Nicholas Hewitt","authors":"Michael Kelly","doi":"10.1177/09571558221144372","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144372","url":null,"abstract":"This is the introductory editorial to a special issue in honour of former editor of French Cultural Studies, Nicholas Hewitt (NH). It includes some reflections on the author's collaboration with NH and on the process of founding the journal in the late 1980s. It outlines the themes discussed in the nine substantive articles especially around the guiding theme of the sense of place, which NH did much to inspire.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"3 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46570412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Colette and Saint-Tropez","authors":"E. Wilson","doi":"10.1177/09571558221144373","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221144373","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes the novelist Colette, who bought a house outside Saint-Tropez in 1925, and examines moments and feelings from her time in that place. Inspired by Hewitt's approach, and by his example of ‘the unique hold exerted by Marseille on the nation's imagination’, it traces, through Colette, imaginative modes of inhabiting a space, seeing it as a psychic as much as material location, a repository of feelings. Colette's work invests a place with meaning through writing, so that it becomes an imaginary space, intimate, sensory, and consciously feminine. Since Colette's feminism resides most surely in her pursuit of pleasure, this place can be a house of feelings, about love, about present pleasures shaded by past experience, a space accessed through the senses. In this way, her house in Saint-Tropez appears as a space of speculation and exploratory relations, in which to think too about the lived and dreamed realities of other female lives.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"73 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44090495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Love, grief and violence – A study of Camille Kouchner's La Familia grande (2021)","authors":"Orsolya Katalin Petocz","doi":"10.1177/09571558221143492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221143492","url":null,"abstract":"In her 2021 book La Familia grande, Camille Kouchner testifies to the event of sexual violence more precisely that of incestuous hebephiliac rape within her family. In extensive discussions that followed the publication of the book, the media has focused on the allegations of incestuous rape against Olivier Duhamel upon his stepson, twin-brother of Kouchner, nicknamed ‘Victor’ in La Familia grande. Kouchner's nuclear and extended family is part of a French politico-cultural elite that has been shaken by Kouchner's unveiling of violence. Acknowledging this context, this article looks closely at the text itself, and also situates it in relation to works by other woman members of Kouchner's family, with a sharp focus on the work of Évelyne Pisier, Kouchner's mother. This article teases out questions of love, grief and violence as related to Kouchner's testimony, presenting a case for close attention to the literary work alongside its paratexts. I argue that shifting away from the violence of Duhamel's acts, the book turns towards the ways in which the heteropatriarchal structures of the family allow for the perpetration of such an act and the perpetuation of its violence through silencing. This reading argues for the necessary unveiling of a filiation of women, to form a possible resistance to normative narratives of the family. This article further connects Judith Butler's thoughts about incest prohibition and Évelyne Pisier's queer-inclusive feminism.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"394 - 410"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49427858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bringing French modernism to Singapore: Nanyang painter Georgette Chen","authors":"C. Neal","doi":"10.1177/09571558221109703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221109703","url":null,"abstract":"A veritable world citizen, Nanyang painter Georgette Chen (1906–1993) melded artistic influences from both the East and West, bringing French modernism to Singapore. Much has been written about her contribution to the art of Singapore, her role in the establishment of the Nanyang Style, the lasting influence that she exerted on younger artists, and her considerable artistic achievements. Never before examined is the development of her oeuvre that reflects this mixture. The works selected for this investigation reveal her artistic development from student to teacher, the range of her thematic interests, and the stimuli that she absorbed from a life ensconced in eastern and western cultures.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":"191 - 210"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49167141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"La figure du Noir ou la persistance de l’imagerie coloniale dans les aventures d’Astérix","authors":"Marie-Dominique Duval","doi":"10.1177/09571558221085428","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09571558221085428","url":null,"abstract":"Cet article porte sur la représentation des personnages noirs dans la bande dessinée française Astérix. Écrite par René Goscinny et illustrée par Albert Uderzo, la série est parue pour la première fois en 1959 au moment des guerres de décolonisation de l’Empire français. Bien que destiné à divertir, Astérix reste néanmoins un produit de son époque dans sa représentation de personnages d’origine africaine. La série est peuplée de pygmées, de cannibales ou d’hommes noirs aux caractéristiques simiesques. Presque tous ont de petits crânes déformés, d’énormes lèvres rouges et parlent avec des accents grotesques. Bien que l’imagerie coloniale et raciste de la jeune bande dessinée franco-belge ait fait l’objet d’un examen minutieux, les caricatures racistes d’Astérix ont été étonnamment peu étudiées. Cet article aborde les origines de ces influences coloniales, fournit des exemples de stéréotypes raciaux et discute de la persistance de telles représentations dans les albums contemporains.","PeriodicalId":12398,"journal":{"name":"French Cultural Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":"328 - 344"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45192443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}