Suchergebnisse

Verne's first cautionary tale about the dangers of science ― first modern and corrected English translation. When two European scientists unexpectedly inherit an Indian rajah's fortune, each builds an experimental city of his dreams in the wilds of the American Northwest. France-Ville is a harmonious urban community devoted to health and hygiene, the specialty of its French founder, Dr. François Sarrasin. Stahlstadt, or City of Steel, is a fortress-like factory town devoted to the manufacture of high-tech weapons of war. Its German creator, the fanatically pro-Aryan Herr Schultze, is Verne's first truly evil scientist. In his quest for world domination and racial supremacy, Schultze decides to showcase his deadly wares by destroying France-Ville and all its inhabitants. Both prescient and cautionary, The Begum's Millions is a masterpiece of scientific and political speculation and constitutes one of the earliest technological utopia/dystopias in Western literature. This Wesleyan edition features notes, appendices, and a critical introduction as well as all the illustrations from the original French edition. ; https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/worldlanguages_books/1018/thumbnail.jpg

Better known as the Trilogie Marseillaise, the films Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936) by Marcel Pagnol have shaped our perception of the city of Marseille and its environs. Marius was written first as a play and performed in 1929 in Paris. Following its adaptation to film, Pagnol wrote the play, Fanny with the intention of adapting it to film. Unlike the previous films, Pagnol wrote the screenplay for César first and then converted it to a play. The trilogy is among the first talking films and follows the amorous relationship between Marius and Fanny. Marius is torn between his love for the sea and Fanny. Marius chooses the sea, leaving Fanny in Marseille. When Fanny discovers she is pregnant she feels compelled to marry an older, richer man - Panisse. When Marius realizes his error, he can no longer claim Fanny and his son. Only after Panisse dies is he able to reconnect with his family and marry Fanny. The films' nostalgic origins, clearly-delineated yet melodramatic plot, and "théâtre filmé" aspect, allowed Pagnol to inform our perspective of Marseille and its culture through the viewpoints and interactions of the protagonists. To do this Pagnol emphasizes language, tonalities, and mis-en-scène – all of which were adapted from preconceived notions of Marseillais culture. This portrayal of Marseillais culture came at time when there was a national push to create a French identity by highlighting regional identities. In addition it coincides with numerous socio-political forces from leftist support for working-class ideals that would lead to the formation of the Popular Front, the emergence of fascism and shifts in national identity. By examining the political and socio-economic climate and the ways in which the characters and city are represented in the films, this thesis will determine whether Pagnol's Marseille promoted an accurate portrayal of a specific regional identity or if it created a skewed vision that appealed to the rest of the country.

"Our tendency to read French Enlightenment political writing from a narrow disciplinary perspective has obscured the hybrid character of political philosophy, rhetoric, and natural science in the period. As Michèle Duchet and others have shown, French Enlightenment thinkers developed a philosophical anthropology to support new political norms and models. This book explores how five important eighteenth-century French political authors-Rousseau, Diderot, La Mettrie, Quesnay, and Rétif de La Bretonne-also constructed a "political zoology" in their philosophical and literary writings informed by animal references drawn from Enlightenment natural history, science, and physiology. Drawing on theoretical work by Derrida, Latour, de Fontenay, and others, it shows how these five authors signed on to the old rhetorical tradition of animal comparisons in political philosophy, which they renewed via the findings and speculations of contemporary science. Engaging with recent scholarship on Enlightenment political thought, it also explores the links between their political zoologies and their family resemblance as "liberal" political thinkers"--

Through investigative research, this thesis examines the transition from Alfred de Musset's poem Namouna (1832) and Prosper Mérimée's novella Carmen (1845) to the operas by Georges Bizet that they inspired (Djamileh [1872] and Carmen [1875], respectively). When the two literary works were published, not much controversy ensued over them or their exotic subject matter. Nearly half a century later, however, the debuts of both of Bizet's operas were poorly received, to say the least. I highlight what changed between the works, not just structurally, but contextually as well. The operas obviously were altered vastly in format during their transition from literary work, but they were also presented to a different audience than their sources, and in a different social and political climate. I believe a combination of change in medium and change in historical atmosphere caused Bizet's works (with the topics mostly unchanged) to be accepted much less readily than their earlier textual counterparts, and that the representations of the exotic "other" so realistically portrayed in his operas were unsettling to the socially elite Parisian opera audience, perhaps because it brought the distant "other" a bit too close in their consciousness.

En 1517, Pierre Gringore met en scène Ies spectacles de rue pour l'Entree de la royne [Claude] de France a Paris faicte le mardy XII. jour du mays de May. L'an de grace mil cinq cens et XVII.2 Un an plus tard Guillaume Michel, dit de Tours,3 reprend Ia plupart des personnages représentés dans Ies spectacles de Gringore et Ies fait défiler dans son Soulas de Noblesse sus le coronnement de la Rayne de France Claude (1518), qui est Ia dernière pièce de son Penser de Royal Memoire, ouvrage à visée politique et religieuse, dédié au roi de France, Francois Ier.4

The surrealist movement began as a consequence of the social, economical, and political disruptions caused by World War I. Artists, poets, photographers, painters, and movie producers recognized that elements of the surrealist movement formed a medium well-matched to attain their artistic goals. The founder of the movement, André Breton, was highly inspired by the psychoanalytical techniques of Freud, while explaining theories of surrealism and dreams. In 1924, Breton defined surrealism for the first time in his book, Surrealism Manifesto, "surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought." The mesmerizing phenomenon that people refer to surrealism is not limited to being technical or thematic in terms of its art form. In fact, it is an individual perspective, and according to Wilkins it is a "way of life", interconnected with the theories of Freud and Marx. The goal of this movement is to cause an upheaval amongst the traditional way of things, to liberate art from rules and norms, while also giving a new meaning to the notion of dreams. In this paper, I will be analyzing three well-known surrealist movies: La Coquille et Le Clergyman (Germaine Du Lac), Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel), and Étoile De Mer (Man Ray). In this analysis, I will explain how the notion of dreams brings the spectators a new understanding of surrealist movies.

The particular cultural positioning described as the beur predicament and often summed up in the phrase "belonging neither here nor there," is clearly a result of French colonial history. As such, it hardly refers to subjects able or willing to assume the vantage point of the classic European travel narrative or to employ its poetics. Beurs are children of North African immigrants (primarily from Algeria, but also Morocco and Tunisia) who arrived in France after the Second World War to work in the developing auto industries. While entitled to French citizenship (born in pre-independence Algeria, their parents are French subjects), these French-born subjects are routinely referred to as "second generation immigrants," a practice which underscores their problematic status in the French national imagination. In the early 1980s they burst onto the political scene with a series of marches and demonstrations for equal treatment and on the library scene with a series of debut novels and autobiographical narratives. While many of their texts are fundamentally structured by a specific itinerary (a journal from France to Algeria and back to France is imagined, postponed, undertaken and often repeated by beur protagonists), as far as I know, writers of the beur generation have not produced travel narratives in the traditional sense of the genre.

"Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature explores an aspect of modern French literature that has been consistently overlooked in literary histories: the relationship between the colonies--their cultures, languages, and people--and formal shifts in French literary production. Starting from the premise that neither cultural identity nor cultural production can be pure or homogenous, Leslie Barnes initiates a new discourse on the French literary canon by examining the work of three iconic French writers with personal connections to Vietnam: André Malraux, Marguerite Duras, and Linda Lê. In a thorough investigation of the authors' linguistic, metaphysical, and textual experiences of colonialism, Barnes articulates a new way of reading French literature: not as an inward-looking, homogenous, monolingual tradition, but rather as a tradition of intersecting and interdependent peoples, cultures, and experiences. One of the few books to focus on Vietnam's position within francophone literary scholarship, Barnes challenges traditional concepts of French cultural identity and offers a new perspective on canonicity and the division between "French" and "francophone" literature. "--

Serious Play: Formal Innovation and Politics in French literature from the 1950s to the present investigates how 20th- and 21st-century French authors play with literary form as a means of engaging with contemporary history and politics. Authors like Georges Perec, Monique Wittig, and Jacques Jouet often treat the practice of writing like a game with fixed rules, imposing constraints on when, where, or how they write. They play with literary form by eliminating letters and pronouns; by using only certain genders, or by writing in specific times and spaces. While such alterations of the French language may appear strange or even trivial, by experimenting with new language systems, these authors probe into how political subjects—both individual and collective—are formed in language. The meticulous way in which they approach form challenges unspoken assumptions about which cultural practices are granted political authority and by whom. This investigation is grounded in specific historical circumstances: the student worker-strike of May '68 and the Algerian War, the rise of and competition between early feminist collectives, and the failure of communism and the rise of the right-wing extremism in 21st-century France. Analysis of pronominal subjects in Perec and Wittig shows how they interrogate power struggles during May '68; both authors imagine shared textual production as the bedrock of new political communities. Moving into the 21st century, Jouet stages various "bad" communists, in order to pay tribute to dying communist communities and to unpack the ongoing legacy of communism's collapse. In the end, formal play offers an antidote to 20th- and 21st-century crises of community by creating virtual communities through the text itself.

Inspired by his youth in the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil, Ladj Ly's first feature film explores the presence of the police in the banlieue from the point of view of a special crime unit. Released in 2019, after the murder of Adama Traoré and increased debate on police surveillance, Les Misérables portrays the contemporary reality of life in the suburbs through a shocking act of police brutality caught on camera and the events that follow for the policemen. This thesis explores the systems of the banlieue and their representation in the film and discusses how the shortfalls of the French government in serving the banlieue have attributed to the corruption of the police. Further, this paper analyzes each of the three members of the special crime unit. Despite their stark differences in upbringing, personality, and work ethic, each member contributes to the atrocities of the team as a whole. Because of the prejudices that exist against the banlieue and the relationship that the police have with its inhabitants, acts of police brutality are rampant. The symbols and characters in Les Misérables demonstrate that it is not simply an immoral police officer that commits acts of violence against certain citizens, but rather that the entire law enforcement system, governed by the administration's nationalistic ideology, is at fault.

The colonial endeavor as argued by Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism is neither an evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor an aid system to combat systems of ignorance, sickness, and tyranny (32). It is a system of power relations based on exploitation and violence without concern for the Other. To borrow Césaire's term, colonialism is nothing other than chosification; it makes objects of people, tearing them from their land, home, and families, depriving them of essential, life-providing commodities. Colonization's social and economic policies disrupted traditional society and the Algerian way of life more so than the physical military conquests had done. Albert Camus, as a Pied-Noir author, provides an outsider's perspective on the suffering of the Algerian population, declaring, "Pour aujourd'hui, j'arrête ici cette promenade à travers la souffrance et la faim d'un peuple. On aura senti du moins que la misère ici n'est pas une formule ni un thème de méditation. Elle est. Elle crie et elle désespère. Encore une fois, qu'avons-nous fait pour elle et avons-nous le droit de nous détourner d'elle ?" (Camus 40) 'For now, I must end this survey of the suffering and hunger of an entire population. The reader will have seen, at least, that misery here is not just a word or a theme for meditation. It exists. It cries out in desperation. What have we done about it, and do we have the right to avert our eyes.' Mohammed Dib's Algerian trilogy gives flesh to Camus's statement; misery in these novels shouts and despairs, it shows itself through the characters and narration. This literature shows, as only literature can, the Algerians' misery, and their desperation; it creates a collective trauma to be shared and understood by many through the act of storytelling. This collective trauma brings out the emotions of the characters and allows the reader to feel empathy toward the plight of the Algerians.