Being contemporary : French literature, culture, and politics today / [edited by] Lia Brozgal and Sara Kippur.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Brozgal, Lia Nicole, 1972- editor.

Kippur, Sara, editor.

Series:

Contemporary French and francophone cultures ; 39.

Contemporary French and Francophone cultures ; 39

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Contemporary, The, in literature.

French literature--20th century--History and criticism.

French literature.

French literature--21st century--History and criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 411 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2016.

Summary:

Being Contemporary is a volume of original essays by 23 preeminent scholars of French and Comparative literature, hailing from both sides of the Atlantic, in response to the editors' invitation to "think through the contemporary." The volume offers a sustained critical reflection on the contemporary as a concept, a category, a condition, and a set of relationships to others and to one's own time. Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of a critical urgency to probe the notion of "the contemporary," and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Its point of departure is Susan Suleiman's book Risking Who One Is (Harvard, 1994), which proposed two decades ago that "being contemporary" offers a heuristic category for assessing the role of the scholar and critic, for studying the current moment in literature, art, and culture, and for engaging with historical and philosophical questions in a way that resonates with readers in the present day. Returning to these ideas with renewed vigor, the thought-provoking essays that comprise this volume center on 20th- and 21st-century French literature, politics, memory, and history, and problematize the contemporary as a critical position with respect to the current moment.

Contents:

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Being Contemporary, Then And Now

I. Conceptualizing the Contemporary

1. Coping with Contemporariness

2. Rethinking Periodization for the 'Now-Time'

3. (After) Conceptualism

II. Contemporary Politics and French Thought

4. Identities in Flux

5. The Paradoxes of Being Contemporary

6. Of Sade, Blanchot, and the French Twentieth Century

7. Alain Badiou and Antisemitism

III. The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives

8. What Does 'Vichy' Mean Now?

9. Forces of Solidarity and Logics of Exclusion

10. Narrative, Testimony, Fiction: The Challenge of Not Forgetting the Holocaust

11. 'Moral Witnessing'?: An Israeli Perspective on Jonathan Littell's Les Bienveillantes

12. From 'Never Forgetting' to 'Post-Remembering' and 'Co-witnessing'

IV. Writing the Contemporary Self

13. 'I' in the Plural: A New Writing of History

14. Selves at Risk: Reading Susan Suleiman with Marc Augé, La Vie en double

15. Risking Who One Is, at the Risk of Thinking

16. 'La Connaissance par corps' : Writing and Self-Exposure in Annie Ernaux

V. Novel Rereadings

17. Long Live Anachronism

18. Colette's Côtelettes, or the Word Made Flesh

19. Choices: Beckett's Way

20. Making L'Etranger Contemporary

VI. Memory: Past and Future

21. A Nest in the Air: Phantom Pain and Contemporary Narrative

22. Adrien and Marcel Proust : Fathering Neurasthenic Memory

23. Vulnerable Times

Contributors

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 11 Aug 2017).

ISBN:

1-78694-519-3

1-78138-434-7

OCLC:

956277698