Foreign Language Study : French

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This book studies the development of Artaud's thinking throughout his career on such issues as the body, theology, language, and identity. His late poetry is discussed in depth and new attention is paid to the verbal details of his writing and to the way he builds up his ideas. Artaud emerges as a man of ideas performing disturbing conceptual work, but needs to be considered not as a contestatory psychotic but as a writer of the first order. - ;Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), perhaps best known as a dramatic theorist, is an important but extremely difficult writer. This book studies the development of his thinking, from the early texts of the 1920s through to the acclaimed but lesser known 1940s writings, on such issues as the body, theology, language, identity and the search for an elusive and unsayable self-presence, and then uses this as a framework in which to read his late texts. New attention is paid to the processes by. which his texts generate meanings, the logics that hold these meanings together, and the internal contradictions of the late poetry. This allows a new picture to emerge that accounts for the coherent if unequal development of his ideas as well as the drive towards systematisation to be found in even. his most opaque writings. By returning to the texts and focusing on the specific terms of Artaud's writing, as well as their gleeful resourcefulness and ludicity, it is argued that Artaud needs to be considered not as a contestatory psychotic but as a writer of the first magnitude. Accessible to both scholar and newcomer, this illuminating and original study will refocus critical thought on both the development of Artaud's thinking and the significance of his oft-neglected later work. - ;Morfee's book is an excellent guide for the reader wishing to find ways into the late texts, ways of reading Artaud's extravagantly inventive record of his writing body's battle with 'the loss that occurs in telling' - Mary Noonan, Fren more...

Price: $163.50

For more than fifty years, Assia Djebar, Silver Chair of French at New York University and winner of the Neustadt Prize for Contribution to World Literature, has used the tools of poetry, fiction, drama and film to vividly portray the world of Muslim women in all its complexity. In the process, she has become one of the most important figures in North African literature. In Assia Djebar , Jane Hiddleston traces Djebar’s development as a writer against the backdrop of North Africa’s tumultuous history. Whereas Djebar’s early writings were largely an attempt to delineate clearly the experience of being a woman, an intellectual, and an Algerian embedded in that often violent history, she has in her more recent work evinced a growing sense that the influence of French culture on Algerian letters may make such a project impossible. The first book-length study of this significant writer, Assia Djebar will be of tremendous interest to anyone studying post-colonial literature, women’s studies or Francophone culture. more...

Price: $70.00

As the most successful female writer from Francophone Africa, Calixthe Beyala occupies an unusual place in French literary and popular culture. Her novels are bestsellers, and she appears regularly on French television and radio, yet her reputation has in recent years been tarnished by allegations of plagiarism. She is lauded both as a consecrated, best-selling ‘authentic’ African author and a proven literary ‘fake’, found guilty of plagiarism in the High Court in Paris but in the same year awarded the highly prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie Française for one of the novels in which she had allegedly plagiarized. In Calixthe Beyala , Nicki Hitchcott considers Beyala as an icon and a writer. She explores representations of Beyala in the media, the varied critical responses to her writing, and Beyala’s efforts to position herself as a champion of women’s rights in Africa. Hitchcott pays equal attention to the novels themselves, tracing their explorations of the role of migration in the creation of personal identity. Calixthe Beyala is a nuanced attempt to understand the work – and public role – of one of the most important women writing today. more...

Price: $70.00

This collection of essays celebrates the work of the French Nobel prize-winning novelist Claude Simon. Scholars from France, Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom reconsider the fifty years of Simon’s fiction in the light of his large-scale autobiographical novel Le Jardin des Plantes (1997). From a variety of perspectives – postmodernist, psychoanalytic, aesthetic – contributors reflect on the central paradox of Simon’s work: his writing and rewriting of an experience of war so disruptive and traumatic that words can never be adequate to communicate it. The layers of artifice in Le Jardin des Plantes and the nature of Simon’s aesthetic are analysed in essays which explore intertextual resonances between Simon and Proust, Flaubert, Borges and Poussin. A complementary view of Simon’s Photographies 1937–1970 shows that it too can be seen as form of indirect autobiography. more...

Price: $75.00