Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World

Filiations Past and Future

Edited by Rajeshwari S. Vallury - Contributions by Réda Bensmaïa; Timothy Bewes; Yves Citton; Vincent Debaene; Richard J. Golsan; Giuseppina Mecchia; Pamela A. Pears; Rajeshwari S. Vallury and Christian C. Wood

Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future offers a critical reflection on some of the leading figures of twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, cinema, and philosophy. Specialists re-evaluate the historical, political, and artistic legacies of twentieth-century France and the French-speaking world, proposing new formulations of the relationships between fiction, aesthetics, and politics. This collection combines interdisciplinary scholarship, nuanced theoretical reflection, and contextualized analyses of literary, cinematic, and philosophical practices to suggest alternative critical paradigms for the twenty-first century. The contributors’ reappraisals of key writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals trace an alternative narrative of their historical, cultural, or intellectual legacy, casting a contemporary light on the aesthetic, theoretical, and political questions raised by their works. Taken as a whole, the essays generate a series of fresh perspectives on French and Francophone literary and cultural studies.

Lexington Books

Pages: 176 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-4985-7038-1 • Hardback • March 2019 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-4985-7039-8 • eBook • March 2019 • $95.00 • (£73.00)

Series: After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / French, Philosophy / General, Social Science / World / Europe, Literary Criticism / Critical Theory / Modernism, Literary Criticism / Critical Theory / Postcolonialism

Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World

Filiations Past and Future

Hardback

eBook

Summary

Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future offers a critical reflection on some of the leading figures of twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, cinema, and philosophy. Specialists re-evaluate the historical, political, and artistic legacies of twentieth-century France and the French-speaking world, proposing new formulations of the relationships between fiction, aesthetics, and politics. This collection combines interdisciplinary scholarship, nuanced theoretical reflection, and contextualized analyses of literary, cinematic, and philosophical practices to suggest alternative critical paradigms for the twenty-first century. The contributors’ reappraisals of key writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals trace an alternative narrative of their historical, cultural, or intellectual legacy, casting a contemporary light on the aesthetic, theoretical, and political questions raised by their works. Taken as a whole, the essays generate a series of fresh perspectives on French and Francophone literary and cultural studies.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 176 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-4985-7038-1 • Hardback • March 2019 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-4985-7039-8 • eBook • March 2019 • $95.00 • (£73.00)

Series: After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / French, Philosophy / General, Social Science / World / Europe, Literary Criticism / Critical Theory / Modernism, Literary Criticism / Critical Theory / Postcolonialism

Author

Rajeshwari S. Vallury is professor of French at the University of New Mexico.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Rajeshwari S. Vallury

Introduction

Rajeshwari S. Vallury

Chapter One. Commemorating Past History or Documenting the Persistence of Struggles?: Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, and Phil Watts as Archaeologists

Yves Citton

Chapter Two. Free Indirect, or Who is the Subject of the Work of Fiction?

Timothy Bewes

Chapter Three. Time, Sense, and the Image in Raoul Ruiz’s La Vocation Suspendue and L’Hypothèse du Tableau Volé

Giuseppina Mecchia

Chapter Four. Lévinas and Camus: Love, Literature, and Resistance

Christian C. Wood

Chapter Five. Sacrificial Filiations: The Eichmann Trial, Hannah Arendt, and the Dangers of “Monumental History”

Richard J. Golsan

Chapter Six. Linking the Aesthetic and the Political in Jean Genet: From Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs to Les nègres to the Black Panther Party

Pamela A. Pears

Chapter Seven. Torture, Terror, and Revolution under the Algerian Sun: Tragic Consciousness in Mohammed Dib’s Un été africain

Rajeshwari S. Vallury

Chapter Eight. L’Amour, La Fantasia, ou comment (ré)écrire l’histoire coloniale

Réda Bensmaïa

Chapter Nine. Desiring Anthropology. Roland Barthes’s Ethnological Temptation

Vincent Debaene

Index

About the Editor

About the Contributors

Reviews

Thought-provoking, challenging, controversial at times, Vallury’s edited volume presents a series of brilliant and fruitful dialogues on aesthetics and politics between philosophical discourses (from Camus and Lévinas to Deleuze) and analyses of literary fiction and criticism (Dib, Djebar, Genet, Klossowski, Barthes) as well as filmic texts (Ruiz, Straub and Huillet) that brought a significant contribution to intellectual and artistic debates during the second half of the twentieth century in the French-speaking world and beyond (Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Philip Watts, J. M. Coetzee, and Vilém Flusser).
— Caroline Eades, University of Maryland

This timely collection teases out new affinities and filiations among fiction, aesthetic form, and politics in the Francophone world. In doing so, it reminds readers that objects of the past retain clues leading us toward that which we cannot yet think. Its analyses of works by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Jacques Rancière, J.M. Coetzee, Assia Djebar, Raúl Ruiz, Mohammed Dib, Pierre Klossowksi, Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, and the Eichmann trial are broad in range and often daring in their revelation. The result is an apt tribute to the memory of Philip Watts.
— Steven Ungar, University of Iowa