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About This Guide
This Research Guide will help you find French language and literature resources available thru the BU Libraries. Here you will find information on:
- Language resources - dictionaries and grammar books
- Background information - guides, encyclopedias, biographies
- Open Access resources including websites and digital collections
- French related programs at Boston University
New Books -- Recent Acquisitions
Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces: Colonial Borders in French and Francophone Literature and Film by
Colonialism advanced its project of territorial expansion by changing the very meaning of borders and space. The colonial project scripted a unipolar spatial discourse that saw the colonies as an extension of European borders. In his monograph, Mohit Chandna engages with narrations of spatial conflicts in French and Francophone literature and film from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. In literary works by Jules Verne, Ananda Devi, and Patrick Chamoiseau, and film by Michael Haneke, Chandna analyzes the depiction of ever-changing borders and spatial grammar within the colonial project. In so doing, he also examines the ongoing resistance to the spatial legacies of colonial practices that act as omnipresent enforcers of colonial borders. Literature and film become sites that register colonial spatial paradigms and advance competing narratives that fracture the dominance of these borders. Through its analyses Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces shows that colonialism is not a finished project relegated to our past. Colonialism is present in the here and now, and exercises its power through the borders that define us. Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR and Project Muse.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
The Living Death of Modernity: Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola by
Living-dead characters appear surprisingly often in the realist works of Balzac and Zola, and in the modern poetry of Baudelaire. In this era of industrialization and modernization, images of the living dead disrupt this state of the new and make visible the impossibility of erasing the past. A skeleton that communicates with a character during a shopping trip, a body taken over by a past ancestor, a ghost that haunts through the floorboards, or a more symbolic dead heart - living death takes many shapes. In readings of these authors, Dorothy Kelly, who has written extensively on the literature of this period, charts the various ways that this image permeates certain works of these three authors and the meanings that it generates.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2021
The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature: Writing with Facts by
The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature identifies a documentary impulse in French literature that emerges at the end of the nineteenth century and culminates in a proliferation of factual writings in the twenty-first. Focusing on the period bookended by these two moments, it highlights the enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage either with current events or the historical archive. Specifically, it considers a set of ideas and practices centered on the conceptualization and use of documents. In doing so, it contests the widespread narrative that twentieth-century French literature abandons the realist enterprise, and argues that writers instead renegotiate the realist legacy outside, or at the margins of, the fictional space of the novel. Analyzing works by authors including Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano, the book defines a specific documentary mode of literary representation that records, assembles, and investigates material traces of reality. The document is a textual, visual, or material piece of evidence repurposed through its visual insertion, textual transcription, or description within a literary work. It is a fact, but it also becomes a figure, standing for literature's confrontation with the real. The documentary imagination involves a fantasy of direct access to a reality that speaks for itself. At the same time, it gives rise to concrete textual practices that open up new directions for literature, by interrogating the construction and interpretation of facts.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty-First-Century France by
A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears--immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union--but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward "degenerative realism." She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age's confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today's reactionary revival.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
Les Impatientes: roman by
Three women, three stories, three linked destinies. This polyphonic novel traces the fate of young Ramla, torn from her love to be married to Safira's husband, while Hindu, her sister, is forced to marry her cousin . Patience! This is the one and only advice given to them by those around them, since it is unthinkable to go against Allah's will. As the Fulani proverb says: 'At the end of patience, there is has the sky. ' But heaven can become hell. How will these three impatient women manage to free themselves? Forced marriage, marital rape, consensus and polygamy: this novel by Djaïli Amadou Amal breaks taboos by denouncing the condition of women in the Sahel and gives us a moving novel on the universal question of violence against women.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PQ3989.3.A754 I67 2020Publication Date: 2020
Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings by
As animals recede from our world, what tale is being told by literature's creatures? Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings examines incongruous animals in the works of four major contemporary French writers: an airborne horse in a novel by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, extinct orangutans in Éric Chevillard, stray dogs in Marie NDiaye, vanishing (bits of) hedgehogs in Marie Darrieussecq. Resisting naturalist assumptions that an animal in a story is simply--literally or metaphorically--an animal, Thangam Ravindranathan understands it rather as the location of something missing. The animal is a lure: an unfinished figure fleeing the frame, crossing bounds of period, genre, even medium and language. Its flight traces an exorbitant (self-)portrait in which thinking admits to its commerce with life and flesh. It is in its animals, at the same time unbearably real and exquisitely unreal, that literature may today be closest to philosophy. This book's primary focus is the contemporary French novel and continental philosophy. In addition to Toussaint, Chevillard, NDiaye, and Darrieussecq, it engages the work of Jean de La Fontaine, Eadweard Muybridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett, and Francis Ponge.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between by
The definitive biography of a leading twentieth-century French writer A leading exponent of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999) was also one of France's most cosmopolitan literary figures, and her life was bound up with the intellectual and political ferment of twentieth-century Europe. Ann Jefferson's Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between is the authoritative biography of this major writer. Sarraute's life spanned a century and a continent. Born in tsarist Russia to Jewish parents, she was soon uprooted and brought to the city that became her lifelong home, Paris. This dislocation presaged a life marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. A stepchild in two families, a Russian émigré in Paris, a Jew in bourgeois French society, and a woman in a man's literary world, Sarraute was educated at Oxford, Berlin, and the Sorbonne. She embarked on a career in law that was ended by the Nazi occupation of France, and she spent much of the war in hiding, under constant threat of exposure. Rising to literary eminence after the Liberation, she was initially associated with the existentialist circle of Beauvoir and Sartre, before becoming the principal theorist and practitioner of the avant-garde French novel of the 1950s and 1960s. Her tireless exploration of the deepest parts of our inner psychological life produced an oeuvre that remains daringly modern and resolutely unclassifiable. Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between explores Sarraute's work and the intellectual, social, and political context from which it emerged. Drawing on newly available archival material and Sarraute's letters, this deeply researched biography is the definitive account of a life lived between countries, families, languages, literary movements, and more.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2020
At Night All Blood Is Black by
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called "Chocolat" soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man's Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa's mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German's severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa's deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn't a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man's descent into madness.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PQ3989.2.D563 F7413 2020Publication Date: 2020
The Price of Literature: : The French Novel's Theoretical Turn by
The Price of Literature examines the presence of theory in the nineteenth-century French novel, something Proust likened to leaving a price tag on a gift. Emerging after the French Revolution, what we now call literature was conceived as an art liberated from representational constraints. Patrick M. Bray shows how literature's freedom to represent anything at all has meant, paradoxically, that it cannot articulate a coherent theory of itself--unless this theory is a necessarily subversive literary representation, or "the novel's theoretical turn." Literary thought, or the theory produced by the text, can only function by exploring what escapes dominant representations. The Price of Literature analyzes how certain iconic texts from the nineteenth century (by Mme de Staël, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust) perform a theoretical turn to claim the freedom to represent anything in the world, but also literature's ability to transform the world it represents. The conclusion advances a new way of thinking about literary scholarship--one based on how literature redistributes ways of writing by lending form to thought.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2019
Le Personnel Est Politique: Médias, esthétique et politique de l'autofiction chez Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume et Nelly Arcan by
Regardant les questions de témoignage, de confession, detraumatisme, de sexualité et de violence dans les ?uvres (semi-)autobiographiques,ce livre explore la co-construction d?identités personnelles et collectives pardes femmes écrivains à l?ère des médias et de l?autoreprésentation. À uneépoque où la littérature française est souvent accusée d''être égocentrique ettrop narcissique, Mercédès Baillargeon avance que l?autofiction des femmes aété reçue avec controverse depuis le tournant du millénaire parce qu?elleperturbe les idées reçues à propos des identités nationale, de genre et de race,et parce qu?elle questionne la distinction entre fiction et autobiographie. Eneffet, ces écrivaines se distinguent du reste de la production françaiseactuelle, car elles cultivent une relation particulièrement tumultueuse avecleur public, à cause de la nature très personnelle, mais également politique deleurs textes semi-autobiographiques et à cause de leurs « performances »comme personnalité publique dans les médias. On y examine donc simultanément lafaçon dont les médias stigmatisent ces écrivaines ainsi que la manière dont cesdernières manipulent la culture médiatique comme une extension de leur ?uvrelittéraire. Ce livre analyse ainsi simultanément les implications textuelles etsociopolitiques qui sous-tendent la (dé)construction du sujet autofictionnel,et en particulier la façon dont ces écrivains se redéfinissent constamment àtravers la performance rendue possible par les médias et la technologie. Deplus, ce travail soulève des questions importantes par rapport à la relationcomplexe qu?entretiennent les médias avec les femmes écrivains, en particuliercelles qui discutent ouvertement de traumatisme, de sexualité et de violence,et qui remettent également en question la distinction entre réalité et fiction.Cet ouvrage contribue à une meilleure compréhension des rapports de pouvoir misen jeu dans l?autofiction, tant au niveau de la production que de la réceptiondes ?uvres. Privilégiant l?autofiction comme phénomène principalement français,cet ouvrage s?intéresse à la valeur politique de ce genre semi-autobiographiquepar-delà sa mort annoncée avec la disparition de la littérature engagée del?après-guerre et des avant-gardes des années 50-60, dans le contexte françaiset francophone actuel, traversé par une crise des identités, lemulticulturalisme et une redéfinition du nationalisme à travers l?écriture. The Personal Is Political: Media, Aesthetics and Politics in the Autofiction of Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume and Nelly Arcan Looking at questions of testimony, confession, trauma,sexuality, and violence in (semi-) autobiographical works, this book explores the co-construction of personal and collectiveidentities by women writers in the age of self-disclosure and mass media. In a time when literature is accused of being self-centeredand overly narcissistic, women?s autofictionin France since the turn of the millennium has been received with controversybecause it disrupts readily accepted ideas about personal andnational identities, gender and race, and fiction versus autobiography. Through the study of polemical writersChristine Angot, Chloé Delaume, and Nelly Arcan, Mercédès Baillargeon contendsthat, by recounting personal stories of trauma and sexuality, and thus opposing themselves in opposition to social convention, and by refusing to dispel doubtsregarding the fictional or factual nature of their texts, autofiction resists and helps redefine categories of literary genreand gender identity. This book analyzes concurrently the textual andsociopolitical implications that underlie the (de)construction of the autofictional subject, and particularlyhow these writers constantly redefine themselves through performance andself-fashioning made possible by media and technology. Moreover, this workraises important questions relating to the media?s complicated relationshipwith women writers, especially those who discuss themes of trauma, sexuality,and violence, and who also question the distinction between fact and fiction.Proposing a new understanding of autofictionas a form of littérature engagée, this work contributes to a broader understanding of the French publishingestablishment and of the literary field as a cultural institution, as well asnew insight on shifting notions of identity, the Self, and nationalism intoday?s ever-changing and multicultural French context.
Call Number: OnlinePublication Date: 2019
Experiments with Empire: anthropology and fiction in the French Atlantic by
In Experiments with Empire Justin Izzo examines how twentieth-century writers, artists, and anthropologists from France, West Africa, and the Caribbean experimented with ethnography and fiction in order to explore new ways of knowing the colonial and postcolonial world. Focusing on novels, films, and ethnographies that combine fictive elements and anthropological methods and modes of thought, Izzo shows how empire gives ethnographic fictions the raw materials for thinking beyond empire's political and epistemological boundaries. In works by French surrealist writer Michel Leiris and filmmaker Jean Rouch, Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, and others, anthropology no longer functions on behalf of imperialism as a way to understand and administer colonized peoples; its relationship with imperialism gives writers and artists the opportunity for textual experimentation and political provocation. It also, Izzo contends, helps readers to better make sense of the complicated legacy of imperialism and to imagine new democratic futures.
Call Number: Mugar Stacks PQ3897 .I98 2019Publication Date: 2019
