L'Enigme-poesie presente une serie d'entretiens avec vingt-et-une poetes francaises contemporaines. Une grande diversite de voix et d'approches face a l'objet poeme se fait entendre dans ces discussions exceptionnelles. A travers un dialogue en profondeur, chaque poete cherche a definir et a explorer sa conception et sa pratique de la poesie. Les ecrivaines reconnaissent toutes l'influence des ancetres poetiques, surtout celle des poetes de la modernite francaise et europeenne. Ces entretiens fournissent une excellente introduction a la poesie francaise contemporaine, ce volume s'adressant a...

To trace the life of Marie Dorval through the turbulences and exhilarations of her epoch is to engage not just with the genesis and the full flowering of a rare theatrical genius but also with the teeming literary, emotional, economic and material dramas in which such a genius is implacably embroiled. Dumas, Vigny, Hugo, Sand, Gautier and many others mingle their creative and affective energies with Dorval's in a ceaseless dynamic interplay. But to read Bettina Knapp's exceptional story is to realize too the so easily overlooked backcloth to life in Marie Dorval's times: poverty, the need to...

Method in Madness looks at the ways in which nineteenth-century French literature of the fantastic reflected what psychoanalysis would later define as mechanisms of defence. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a particular mechanism - fetishization, projection, intellectualization, mechanization, and compulsion - and to a representative set of texts which illustrate and embody the process concerned. The book thus systematizes what has remained up to now a rather vague perception of the psychological processes at work in fantastic narrative and of the relationship between the fantastic...

L'activite litteraire de Jeanne Hyvrard ne reste plus a presenter : de Les prunes de Cythere, Mere la mort, Les doigts du figuier jusqu'a Canal de la Toussaint, La pensee corps, Cellla, Le fichu ecarlate et bien au-dela, la voix de Jeanne Hyvrard, emouvante et ferme, terriblement ancree et radieusement visionnaire, est parvenue a fonder, sans conteste, une des grandes /uvres de notre temps. Les dialogues que presente ce livre interrogent avec une chaleureuse intelligence le cheminement de la pensee qui sous-tend l'aventure ontologique exceptionnelle de cette /uvre et cherchent a penetrer dans...

James Brown's study of Camus' Noces explores the many crossovers from mind to text by recording the writer's consciousness as an emanation and the reader's consciousness as a reception-perception. Writer and reader become one in this movement. Their shared mental space is analogous to the locus of the transmission of wisdom in many spiritual traditions. This book focuses on the textual and linguistic means through which the crossover takes place. Brown's new reading of Camus is an outgrowth of bare awareness meditation. He subjects a text that was intended by Camus as meditation to another...

A wide-ranging study of Prevert's promethean imagination and creativity in the interwoven realms of theatre, film, poetry, art, photography, and song, Michael Bishop's Jacques Prevert seeks to demonstrate the originality of a genial fabricator of image and word whose essential focus, unpretentious yet urgently felt, unintellectualised yet buoyantly and wittily intelligent, ever remains the quality of our daily being-in-the-world, the possibility of our self-transformation, the stunning availability - should we truly will it, and despite all that can weigh upon existence, above all...

If the transgressions of modern French poetry have been amply noted at thematic and formal levels, they remain largely unremarked at the most visceral level of reading. Indebted to, while problematizing the Kristevan concept of semiotique, Scott Shinabargar's The Revolting Body of Poetry reveals how the very "matter" of key works forces us to enact these transgressions, when articulating textures of offensive lexica and imagery. While certain phonemes provide access to previously untapped forces, first apparent in Baudelaire and Lautreamont, compulsive repetitions produce...

Un Jesus postmoderne offers a thorough discussion of some forty contemporary French novels depicting the life of Jesus within the framework of today's debate on fundamentalism and secularism. Focusing on the interplay of narrative viewpoints and (anti)theological perspectives, this study scrutinizes the postmodern representation of Jesus for readers who belong to a time marked by incredulity towards meta-narratives. Drawing on Marcel Gauchet and Julia Kristeva, as well as Rene Girard's 'scapegoat theory', among many others, this study examines Jesus as a 'problematic hero' and a...

Face a la surenchere des representations mediatiques, artistiques et iconographiques de la violence, en quoi consiste le contre-discours qu'articulent les litteratures francophones emergentes pour penser les violences du monde contemporain ? En adoptant une approche comparatiste et largement interdisciplinaire, mettant en evidence le travail esthetique et l'engagement ethique d'ecrivains issus d'aires geographiques diverses, Emmanuel Bruno Jean-Francois tente, dans Poetiques de la violence et recits francophones contemporains, de repondre a cette question en mettant en dialogue des...

In Le clair-obscur - extreme contemporain -: Pascal Quignard, Pierre Michon, Pierre Bergounioux, and Patrick Modiano Julia Holter proposes that a chiaroscuro aesthetic and mode of thought underlie and unite the work of four well-known contemporary French writers, studied together for the first time. Chiaroscuro, the bold or delicate contrast between light and shadow, is treated as a visual metaphor that evokes the tension between the senses and reason, in which the latter must take into account the former in order to temper its own totalitarian and conservative tendencies. Julia...