Reconsidering the relationship between autobiography and self-portraiture, "The Body as Medium and Metaphor" explores the intertextuality of self-representation in twentieth-century French art. Situating the body as the nexus of intersections between the written word and the visual image, this book rethinks the problematic status of the self. Starting at the twentieth-century's departure from figurative and mimetic representation, this study discusses the work of seminal artists and writers - including Marcel Duchamp, Michel Leiris, Francis Bacon, Bernard Nol, Gisle Prassinos, Louise...

In Alterite et identite dans les histoires anglaises au XVIIIe siecle. Contexte(s), reception et discours Beatrijs Vanacker offers new insights into the widespread Anglomania-movement that pervaded French literary and cultural life during the 18th century. She examines the ambivalent discourse on literary and cultural "Englishness" as it took form in a wide array of non-fictional textual practices (French travel literature, literary journals, ...). She also analyses the sociocultural and literary dynamics at work in a corpus of histoires angloises, by making use of concepts...

Dans L'Elaboration du mythe de soi Solveig Hudhomme demontre comment les oeuvres de Samuel Beckett construisent leur propre mythe, mythe d'un espace, d'une interiorite permanente par-dela les frontieres textuelles. Cette interiorite, ce que l'on peut appeler "le soi," est un lieu affranchi du biographique, du "moi," mais peuple d'invariants. Cette etude se concentre sur la facon dont les histoires introduisent un principe de repetition et de reconnaissance, reconnaissance d'un lieu, d'une trame, d'un personnage. Dans l'ordre du recit, la contingence laisse place a la necessite. In...

Que se passe-t-il lors du surgissement de l'inspiration ? Comment traverser des experiences-choc ? Ou encore, quels sens donner a la transposition du vecu dans la fiction ? Le processus de creation dans l'oeuvre de J.M.G. Le Clezio examine les etapes du travail createur dans l'oeuvre du laureat du prix Nobel de litterature 2008. L'analyse des modes d'inscription du processus de creation dans le narratif apporte un nouvel eclairage sur l'oeuvre de J.M.G. Le Clezio au croisement du poetique et des discours philosophique et psychanalytique. What happens when inspiration bursts forth? How...

Cinquante ans jour pour jour apres son foudroyant premier roman, Le Dernier des Justes, parait posthumement L'Etoile du matin (2009). C'est le moment de revisiter l'ensemble de l'oeuvre d'Andre (1928-2006) et de Simone Schwarz-Bart (1938), pour y deceler d'abord les traces d'un triple trauma: la Shoah, l'Affaire Schwarz-Bart et la relative marginalisation dans le double canon (etudes juives, etudes caribeennes). En effet, que ce soit dans la litterature de la Shoah ou dans la litterature de l'esclavage, l'auteur antillais d'adoption semble comme ex-communie . Or, de l'Univers de...

According to Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) philosophy is not for the privileged few or the specialized ones: it is an activity that appeals to anyone who is attuned to the desire for the ethical life. Inspired by Spinoza's concepts of desire and freedom, Deleuze's ethical life is a life that aims at experimenting with sustainable ways of coping with the earth, with society, with the long term struggles and contemporary crisis that matter to us all. An ethical life defines thinking as the invention/intervention of new concepts and takes the risk of working with them in the real world. This book...

Since the 1874 publication in Belgium of the first posthumous edition of Les Chants de Maldoror, the enigmatic work has served as an inspiration for the poetic and creative liberation of countless twentieth-century writers and artists. Little is known, however, about the book's elusive French author Isidore Ducasse, known as le comte de Lautreamont, and his abbreviated life (1846-1870). In the absence of an original manuscript, Lautreamont's readers have over time altered his poetry for personal, political, and aesthetic reasons. Symbolist literary journals, first editions of his work,...