{"title":"Nostalgia, Melancholy, Trauma: Backlash Postfeminism in Contemporary French Screen Romance","authors":"Mary Harrod","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0356","url":null,"abstract":"This article draws on Diane Negra’s (2009) assessment of neo-global postfeminist popular culture and cinema as displaying an obsession with time-control that is largely inimical to feminist progress, arguing that similar currents are visible in 2010s French screen romances. While manifestations of this obsession with relevance for the contemporary French context range from celebrations of ritualized, time-sensitive milestones (marriage, pregnancy) to narratives of female professional retreatism in the face of ‘time-poverty’ or the expansion of sexualized female identities across ages, this article focuses in depth on themes of actual or symbolic historical reversion in the intimate sphere through a close analysis of the films Camille redouble (Noémie Lvovsky, 2012) and Un peu, beaucoup, aveuglément (Clovis Cornillac, 2015). After surveying other cognate fictions, the discussion demonstrates that both these films reflect a wider backdrop of time-related trauma informing contemporary French onscreen romance and are accordingly melancholic, as well as openly nostalgic, in theme and tone. The article interrogates the backlash aspects of such narratives but also the different resonances associated with regressive ‘postfeminist’ elements in French as opposed to American culture. It thus demonstrates that postfeminism bears a specific relationship to the distinctive past history comprised by local feminist movements and intersects with other Gallic customs and ideologies – notably nationalistic ones – in particular ways.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49410040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Le Mariage heureux du féminisme et du néolibéralisme: pistes pour analyser une union récente","authors":"P. Delage","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0357","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0357","url":null,"abstract":"By tracing the transformations of gender-based violence policies in France, this article highlights how they reflect neoliberal feminist dynamics. While the notion of ‘neoliberal feminism’ was developed to focus on the cultural and symbolic arena to analyse the changing representations of feminism, as well as the norms and subjectivities that were shaped by both a managerial and an egalitarian ethos, the role of the state in these processes was left aside. Therefore, the article aims at putting the state back into the analysis of neoliberal feminism by showing how state feminism has been driven in part by a neoliberal rationale when designing policies and has progressively excluded a structural perspective on the problem of gender-based violence.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48724438","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hiding in Plain Sight: Intersectional Violence and Postfeminism in Chanson douce (2016) by Leïla Slimani","authors":"Jasmine Cooper","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0359","url":null,"abstract":"The first Moroccan woman to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt (in 2016, for Chanson douce), Leïla Slimani is the darling of the French literary world, a poster-girl of Macron’s France. But she is also accused of being a collabeurette, of pandering to white audiences and sensibilities. Chanson douce reveals the true cost of bobo (bourgeois-bohemian) life amongst the metropolitan elite. Exploring the pressures of gendered labour, compounded by economic and social stratification, Slimani holds up a mirror to French society, directly challenging any postfeminist claim that gender equality has been achieved. However, whilst racial – or at least linguistic, national and religious – difference is visible in the text, its presentation is dubious. In this article, I argue that postfeminist logic converges with the colour-blind universalism of France. I suggest that Slimani subsumes discussions of racial difference into a polemic which privileges gender and class inequalities, ultimately seeing her capitulate to French Republican values.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42851018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vanessa Springora, Gabriel Matzneff and the Problem of Consent","authors":"Douglas Morrey","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0358","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0358","url":null,"abstract":"The publication of Vanessa Springora’s Le Consentement in January 2020, which led to the public shaming of the paedophile writer Gabriel Matzneff, has been seen as a key #MeToo moment in French culture. In her account of her adolescent relationship with Matzneff, Springora stops short of condemning all sex with minors and does not call for any strengthening of French laws around sexual consent. Does this imply a misplaced confidence, arguably shared by some strains of postfeminist thought, in young girls’ sexual agency and resolve? And is this, in turn, complicit with Matzneff’s own romanticized account of adolescent sexuality? I suggest, instead, that Springora frames her account in terms of consent precisely in order to suggest – as a number of feminist critics have recently done – the inadequacy of consent discourse as a means of protecting young women and girls within a patriarchal culture. Rather, Le Consentement stands as a redressing of the discursive balance within a literary and extra-literary system of representation that, for some six decades, worked to legitimize Matzneff’s compulsive desire for young girls and boys while disregarding the damage inflicted by the subjective experience of those young people.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44460608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Annie Ernaux’s ‘Photojournal’ in Écrire la vie: Photo-Diaristic Archives as a Model of Life Writing","authors":"Fabien Arribert-Narce","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0351","url":null,"abstract":"In Ecrire la vie (2011), an anthology of her major works to date, Annie Ernaux published for the first time about eighty images of herself and her family; these pictures are inserted in an opening ‘photojournal’, and combined with extracts from the author’s private diary, thus giving direct access to her past life and to the idiosyncrasies of her self. Readers/viewers are compelled to confront the texts and images and to construct their own reading of the pictures, which can also be matched with the numerous descriptions of photographs in Ernaux’s autobiographical works since La Place (1983). In contrast to Les Années (2008), the writer’s narrative attempt to produce a total and impersonal autobiography, this photo-textual assemblage constitutes an alternative material and archival form of life-writing; it constructs a singular temporality and a list-like, serial aesthetic which directly emanate from specific characteristics of the diary and photography.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43320029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Dans le tissage de la vie’: The Poetic Notebook as an Ecological Form of Exploration","authors":"Emily McLaughlin","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0350","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0350","url":null,"abstract":"A slow but steady stream of critical studies on the diary form have emerged throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although a remarkable number of notebooks ( carnets, in French) have been published by poets in the same period, they have not attracted the same critical attention. Taking some steps to redress this imbalance, this article questions whether the lack of critical work on the poetic notebook is due to the pronounced interest that many of these works show in the nonhuman world. Drawing on contemporary models of nonhuman or ecological thought, this article explores how the poet Lorand Gaspar conceives of the notebook as a woven or entangled form of writing. It investigates how his notebook interlaces different knowledge systems, perspectives and styles in order to explore the entangled nature of worldly forces and humanity’s immersion in this immense weave.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49308138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: Diaries and the Question of Literature","authors":"Sam Ferguson","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0345","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42402519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Maurice Blanchot: ‘Theorist’ of the Diary?","authors":"Sam Ferguson","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0346","url":null,"abstract":"Maurice Blanchot’s writing on the diary has been presented as ignorant and contemptuous of its object, and as misrepresenting the diary by focusing on its literary qualities. This article rehabilitates Blanchot as a critic and theorist of the diary, and moreover, as a pivotal figure in realising the diary’s literary potential. Blanchot’s discussion of particular diarists (including Benjamin Constant, Joseph Joubert, Søren Kierkegaard, Franz Kafka, and André Gide), together with his critical reflections, were instrumental in his creation of conceptions of literature that exerted a strong influence on the avant-garde movements of the following decades, even though these avant-gardes rejected the introspective aspect of intimate writings. Furthermore, Blanchot produced a programme for how the diary might become a literary work, which was picked up again by Roland Barthes in 1979, and casts light on experimental uses of the diary in recent decades.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41928079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Le Journal avec et après Barthes: de l’écriture désœuvrée à l’écriture exposée","authors":"A. Matei","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0347","url":null,"abstract":"Although Barthes never published a diary in his lifetime, his work possesses a subjective dimension in which we encounter writing practices that reflect on the diary or even approach diary writing itself. Barthes’s experience of mourning the loss of his mother and of a “désœuvrement” (Jean-Luc Nancy) led him to pursue a synthesis that would never see the light of day, the project of Vita nova. Would the idea of a synthesis be taken up by writers who came to diary writing after Barthes? A brief comparison with Éric Chevillard’s l’Autofictif will show, in the last part of this article, that the transformations that the material culture of literature has undergone have overturned the Barthesian idea of the synthesis between the Book and the Album.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42849714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Le Défi des diaristes maghrébins: situations, contraintes et horizons de l’écriture journalière au Maghreb","authors":"Khalid Lyamlahy","doi":"10.3366/nfs.2022.0348","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/nfs.2022.0348","url":null,"abstract":"In Maghrebi literature, the diary remains a marginal genre and writers have an ambivalent relationship with diaristic writing. This article begins by identifying and studying four major situations of Maghrebi diaristic writing based on its relationship with fiction, history, politics and autobiography. A more focused study of the diaries of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, Abdelkébir Khatibi and Abdellatif Laâbi then sheds light on the constraints of diaristic practice. The diary, whether interrupted or diverted towards other forms of writing, is construed by the three Moroccan writers as hybrid and unstable, favouring the duplication of the ‘I’ and forming connections with the diarist’s œuvre. Driven by a complex and dynamic writing, the diary seems to tend toward the fragment that embodies both the uncertainty of the diarist and his quest for a literary work of which the diary could be the core, the margin or the horizon.","PeriodicalId":19182,"journal":{"name":"Nottingham French Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47485625","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}