Related Guides
Featured Resources
- Digital French-Language Newspaper Portal - EuroDocs This portal to online French-language newspapers includes publications regardless of geographic location. The emphasis is on historical newspaper holdings; lists of current digital editions can be found in the Internet Public Library and elsewhere. General news is the main focus; specialized, narrow, trade or niche newspapers are not well represented.
Women's Writing in Contemporary France: : New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s by
The 1990s witnessed an explosion in women's writing in France, with a particularly exciting new generation of writer's coming to the fore, such as Christine Angot, Marie Darrieussecq and Regine Detambel. Other authors such as Paule Constant, Sylvie Germain, Marie Redonnet and Leila Sebbar, who had begun publishing in the 1980s, claimed their mainstream status in the 1990s with new texts. The book provides an up-to-date introduction to an analysis of new women's writing in contemporary France, including both new writers of the 1990s and their more established counter-parts. The editors' incisive introduction situates these authors and their texts at the centre of the current trends and issues concerning French literary production today, whilst fifteen original essays focus on individual writers. The volume includes specialist bibliographies on each writer, incorporating English translations, major interviews, and key critical studies. Quotations are given in both French and English throughout. An invaluable study resource, this book is written in a clear and accessible style and will be of interest to the general reader as well as to students of all levels, to teachers of a wide range of courses on French culture, and to specialist researchers of French and Francophone literature.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2003-01-23
Autobiographical Tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé by
"In order to write" said Simone de Beauvoir, "the first essential condition is that reality can no longer be taken for granted." She and four other French women writers of the second half of the twentieth century--Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé--illustrate that producing autobiography is like performing a tightrope act on the slippery line between fact and fiction. Autobiographical Tightropes emphasizes the tension in the works of these major writers as they move in and out of "experience" and "literature," violating the neat boundaries between genres and confusing the distinctions between remembering and creating. Focusing on selected works, Leah D. Hewitt for the first time anywhere explores the connections among the authors. In doing so she shows how contemporary women's autobiography in France links with feminist issues, literary tradition and trends, and postmodern theories of writing. In light of these theories Hewitt offers a new reading of de Beauvoir's memoirs and reveals how her attempt to represent the past faithfully is undone by irony, by literary and "feminine" detours. Other analysts of Nathalie Sarraute's writing have dwelt mainly on formal considerations of the New Novel, but Hewitt exposes a repressed, forbidden feminine aspect in her literary innovations. Unlike Sarraute, Duras cannot be connected with just one literary movement, political stance, style, or kind of feminism because her writing, largely autobiographical, is marked by chameleon like transformations. The chapters on Wittig and Condé show how, within the bounds of feminism, lesbians and women of color challenge the individualistic premises of autobiography. Hewitt demonstrates that, despite vast differences among these five writers, all of them reveal in their autobiographical works the self's need of a fictive other.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PQ629 .H49 1990Publication Date: 1992
Beauvoir and Her Sisters: The Politics of Women's Bodies in France by
Beauvoir and Her Sisters investigates how women's experiences, as represented in print culture, led to a political identity of an "imagined sisterhood" through which political activism developed and thrived in postwar France. Through the lens of women's political and popular writings, Sandra Reineke presents a unique interpretation of feminist and intellectual discourse on citizenship, identity, and reproductive rights. Drawing on feminist writings by Simone de Beauvoir, feminist reviews from the women's liberation movement, and cultural reproductions from French women's fashion and beauty magazines, Reineke illustrates how print media created new spaces for political and social ideas. This sustained study extends from 1944, when women received the right to vote in France, to 1993, when the French government outlawed anti-abortion activities. Touching on the relationship between consumer culture and feminist practice, Reineke's analysis of a selection of women's writings underlines how these texts challenged traditional gender models and ideals. In revealing that women collectively used texts to challenge the state to redress its abortion laws, Reineke renders the act of writing as a form of political action and highlights the act of reading as an essential but often overlooked space in which marginalized women could exercise dissent and create solidarity.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks HQ1617 .R43 2011 and OnlinePublication Date: 2011
Nomadic Voices of Exile: feminine identity in francophone literature of the Maghreb by
Contemporary French writing on the Maghreb -- that part of Africa above the Sahara -- is truly postmodern in scope, the rich product of multifaceted histories promoting the blending of two worlds, two identities, two cultures, and two languages. Nomadic Voices of Exile demonstrates how that postmodern sentiment has altered perceptions concerning Maghrebian feminine identity since the end of the French-colonial era. The authors discussed here, both those who reside in the Maghreb and those who have had to seek asylum in France, find themselves at the intersection of French and North African viewpoints, exposing a complicated world that must be negotiated and redefined. In looking at the authors whose writings extend beyond a gender-based dialogue to include such issues as race, politics, religion, and history, Valérie Orlando explores the rich and changing landscape of the literature and the culture, addresses the stereotypes that have defined the past, and navigates the space of the exiled, a space previously at the peripheries of Western discourse. Nomadic Voices of Exile will be useful to a variety of classrooms -- women's studies, Middle East studies, Francophone literature, Third World women writers -- and to anyone interested in postcolonial and postmodern theory and philosophy and the history of the Maghreb through literature.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PQ3988.5.N6 O75 1999Publication Date: 1999
Selected Films
- Hiroshima Mon Amour. Dir. Alain Resnais. The Criterion Collection, 1959. Kanopy. A cornerstone of the French New Wave, the first feature from Alain Resnais is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming mutual fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. With an innovative flashback structure and an Academy Award-nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR is a moody masterwork that delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish.
- Chronicle of a Summer. Dir. Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch. The Criterion Collection, 1961. Kanopy. Few films can claim as much influence on the course of cinema history as Chronicle of a summer. The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin termed cinèma- vèritè is a brilliantly conceived and realized sociopolitical diagnosis of the early sixties in France.
- Vagabond. Dir. Agnès Varda. The Criterion Collection, 1985. Kanopy. Sandrine Bonnaire won the Best Actress Cesar for her portrayal of the defiant young drifter Mona, found frozen to death in a ditch at the beginning of VAGABOND. Agnes Varda pieces together Mona's story through flashbacks told by those who encountered her (played by a largely nonprofessional cast), producing a splintered portrait of an enigmatic woman. With its sparse, poetic imagery, VAGABOND (SANS TOIT NI LOI) is a stunner, and won Varda the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.
