French Cultural Studies recent issues

Frigidity, Gender and Power in French Cultural History: From Jean Fauconney to Marie Bonaparte

Moore, A. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

This paper interrogates the commonplace view of frigidity as a notion always founded upon the misogynist failure to understand female sexual specificity. As an historical explanation, this view fails to take into account the contextual parameters of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about female desire within which the notion of la femme frigide emerged and developed. This paper discusses the work of a range of French medical and psychoanalytic thinkers across the turn of the twentieth century and through the interwar period, showing how ‘frigidity’ was developed at this time by those who saw themselves precisely as contesting prevailing notions of normative feminine desire, or as defending the rights of women to maximum pleasure. But the inventors of frigidity were no feminist avengers either. Their demands for female pleasure assumed a delicate axis between the avoidance of excess, on the one hand, and the dangers of perversion that would result from any attempt to deny sexuality generally, on the other. Viewed within the context of early twentieth-century French gender anxieties, thinkers like Fauconney and Marie Bonaparte are ambivalent exemplars of the ‘management’ of sexuality referred to by Michel Foucault.

Au c{oelig}ur de notre corps: Recit realiste et imaginaire du corps dans le discours psycho-corporel francais

Grauby, F. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

Cet article se propose d’interroger le discours psycho-corporel dans les publications du bien-être (self-help) qui rencontrent aujourd’hui un vif succès, à travers l’analyse de l’ouvrage de Marie-Lise Labonté, Au cœur de notre corps. A la lumière des observations de Philippe Hamon sur le roman réaliste, nous avons tenté de montrer que sa structure, tout autant que sa présentation du corps et de la maladie, épouse un ordre rhétorique hérité du roman réaliste. Sans être un récit littéraire, ce récit de guérison quasi-miraculeuse partage des préoccupations voisines: nourri de langage reichien et de savoirs intuitifs sur le corps, le récit rejoint un principe organisateur emprunté au roman réaliste — la logique du récit classique, son enchaînement, sa dramatisation tiennent en échec le hasard. Le corps y apparaît transparent, déchiffrable, authentique. Un nouvel imaginaire corporel populaire naît de ces déchiffrements: formaté selon des lois rhétoriques précises, ce discours impose un corps idéalisé, fait rimer maladie avec échec et renvoie ultimement le patient à lui-même.

Troubling Memories: Words and Images of Absence in Camille Laurens, Marie Darrieussecq and Nadine Trintignant

Kilduff, H. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

Although mourning commonly inspires cathartic creativity, the desire to render presence exposes the fault-lines of any mode of expression. This paradoxical ‘presence of absence’ is what links the literary and filmic texts by Camille Laurens, Marie Darrieussecq and Nadine Trintignant that this article addresses. Each of these works give the photograph a privileged position: it is cited as a source of anxiety, a trace of the real alongside other ‘écriture de corps’. Alongside inter-textual and other intermedial references, these photographs are drawn upon when single words seem to falter. Their role can be elucidated with reference to the Derridean supplement, revealing the ‘absence’ that subsists in all attempts to remember.

La Cote d'Azur: The terre privilegie of Invalids and Artists, c. 1860--1900

Woloshyn, T. A. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

This interdisciplinary article explores aesthetic and medical conceptions of the Côte d’Azur during the nineteenth century, discussing texts and images by French writers, invalids, tourists, physicians and artists. Through words and images, medico-tourist guides perpetuated a myth of the Côte d’Azur as the privileged site of beauty and health, especially to its visiting invalids, who sought in the climate a miraculous natural cure. Poetic descriptions of the landscape’s naturally regenerative potential pervade these works, not only by physicians and tourist writers but by the invalids themselves experiencing a pleasurable recovery on the coast. This article argues that such descriptions were, consciously or not, couched in a medical rhetoric, where the landscape’s typical topographic elements were understood as both beautiful and healing. In exploring these diverse visual and literary texts, the article shows how art and medicine intertwined in common French perceptions and imaginations of this landscape, c. 1860—1900.

Chanson as Oral Poetry? Paul Zumthor and the Analysis of Performance

Cordier, A. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

Medievalist Paul Zumthor, in his study of oral poetry, has identified the specificities of oral texts and analysed their inherently social function. By applying Zumthor’s theories to the chanson genre, this article aims to question the traditional distinction between poetry and song by supporting instead the distinction between oral and written poetry, in order to highlight the importance of the oral and physical dimension of song. Through the analysis of the orality of chanson, this study investigates the nature of the connection established between an artist and an audience during a performance, and argues that this connection is not only an integral part of the song, in the same way that music and lyrics are, but also contains the social significance of chanson and its authors.

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Looseley, D., Mevel, P.-A. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:26:25 PDT

Social Gastronomy: Fourier and Brillat-Savarin

Sipe, D. — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:06:14 PDT

This article examines the imbricating discourses of modernity in the works of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin and Charles Fourier. In signalling significant intertextual relationships between Fourier's utopian writings and Brillat-Savarin's iconic gastronomic treatise, Physiologie du goût (first published 1825), the author proposes to elucidate the role that food writing played in fantasising about new forms of sociability in the post-Revolutionary period. Both Brillat-Savarin and Fourier propose a rational and pleasurable ordering of the objects and spaces of consumption, through which individual appetites and social function are harmonised. This pleasurable ordering is, it will be argued, the central operational imperative of an emerging class of gastronomic administrators. It is here, however, in the failed management of appetite, that the gastronomic systems of our like-minded authors can be seen to diverge, exposing the deeply political nature of the alimentary knowledge they propose.

Solidarism in the City Streets: La Societe protectrice contre les exces de l'automobilisme and the Problem of Traffic in Early Twentieth-Century Paris

Jackson, J. H. — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:06:14 PDT

By examining the case of La Société protectrice contre les excès de l'automobilisme, an early twentieth-century anti-automobile advocacy group composed of attorneys, this article explores how Parisians reacted to the changes wrought by the introduction of automobiles into the city streets. Cars were dangerous, and many believed they threatened to turn public thoroughfares into the private preserve of drivers whose speed changed the ways in which Parisians could use their streets. Drawing on Solidarist principles, this group promoted a kind of `urban Solidarism' in an attempt to rebalance the relationship between cars and their urban surroundings, and to shame drivers into showing more socially responsible behaviour.

French Perspectives on Eugenics as Seen Through Selected Writings of Georges Duhamel

Lyle, L. — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:06:14 PDT

This article considers changes in French attitudes towards eugenics, or the science of producing higher-quality human beings, during the 1930s, as viewed through the writings of the médecin-écrivain Georges Duhamel. Particular reference is made to Scènes de la vie future (1930), a satire inspired by the author's 1928 visit to the USA, and Les Maîtres (1937), an autobiographically inspired novel recounting the formative years of a young researcher in the scientific laboratories of 1900s Paris. Duhamel's writings reveal a strong hostility towards eugenics, seen as the extreme limit of mass-production technology in its direct application to human beings, which may be traced back to the beginning of his career and which remained constant thereafter. This article will aim to show how, in spite of this unchanging hostility, Duhamel's work reflects the growth of interest in eugenic issues in 1930s France.

Le Roman historique contemporain ou la voix/ voie marginale du passe

El Nossery, N. — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:06:14 PDT

Depuis presque un quart de siècle la question de la légitimation de l'Histoire comme récit véridique, qui suit une démarche scientifique et donc objective, a fait l'objet de sérieuses polémiques, avançant que le discours historiographique est le plus souvent limité, organisé de manière libérée et donc subjective et partielle. Or, dans la fiction historiographique contemporaine les enjeux d'une telle problématique se trouvent largement impliqués: le paradoxe tant narratif que discursif fait en sorte que le récit historiographique est à la fois intégré et dépassé dans la trame fictionnelle. Sous une optique comparative, cette étude se propose de mettre en évidence les modes de représentation de l'(H)istoire, par le truchement de voix marginales et marginalisées. D'autre part, l'analyse des instances énonciatives dans les romans pourrait aider à mieux comprendre cette incrédulité vis-à-vis de ce grand «métarécit» qu'est l'Histoire qui peut être narré, voire interprété de diverses manières. La fiction historique se pose en état de rupture avec l'Histoire, démontrant que tout rapport au passé est du même coup tributaire du présent qui est perpétuellement questionné et réfuté parce que souvent incompréhensible et même insupportable.

Digitamorphosis of Music Consumption Practices: The Case of Young Music Lovers

Granjon, F., Combes, C. — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:06:14 PDT

In this article I analyse recent trends that are changing the consumption patterns of music content. ICTs are contributing to a more general access to cultural works, as well as to the wider diffusion and circulation of cultural content. They are also triggering a reorganisation of the practices of music lovers and their relations with cultural works and the new objects through which they exist. Here I explore some of the arguments of a hypothesis that I call `digitamorphosis'. Drawing my inspiration from studies on discomorphosis, my aim is to identify what today's music lover owes in particular to the digitisation of sound, the dematerialisation of music media, and the diversification of equipment.

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Looseley, D., Mevel, P.-A. — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:06:14 PDT

Introduction

Cieplak, P. A., Wilson, E. — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:00:05 PDT

Le genocide des Tutsi dans la fiction narrative

Semujanga, J. — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:00:05 PDT

Cette étude vise l'analyse de récits narratifs sur le génocide des Tutsi, récits publiés dans le cadre du projet `Rwanda. Écrire par devoir de mémoire' en partant de l'hypothèse suivante: un texte littéraire se manifeste sous forme de double procès esthétique et axiologique dans lequel deux isotopies opèrent de manière solidaire. De type sémio-narratif, l'isotopie littéraire, qui engendre le procès esthétique, convoque les figures à connotation littéraire (genres, motifs, formes, etc.) et rattache le texte à un lieu discursif appelé `littérature' ou `art'. Un tel parcours isotope atteste de l'intentionnalité esthétique susceptible d'être analysée en quantité et en qualité. Parallèlement, une isotopie référentialiste et idéologique , qui articule le texte à un ancrage social et historique (onomastique, chronotopes, discours spécialisés, etc.), se met en place sous forme de procès axiologique et pose le rapport nécessaire entre un sujet écrivant et le monde représenté. Dans un premier temps, on analysera le procès esthétique du texte du roman en notant tous les procédés littéraires — intertextualité, symbole, thèmes et motifs stéréotypés, convocation des idéologies du discours social en amont du génocide — et dans un second temps, la dimension axiologique portera sur l'évaluation des narrateurs et des pratiques sociales dans une posture énonciative éthique. Jusqu'où peut-on dire que le texte littéraire, tout en parlant du social, ne saurait s'y réduire, puisque son intentionnalité est d'être d'abord littéraire?

Bleeding Scars from Rwanda: The Interplay of Text and Image in Alain Kazinierakis and Yolande Mukagasana's Les Blessures du silence

Norridge, Z. — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:00:05 PDT

Much of the photography and literature published in response to the Rwandan genocide focuses on catastrophic human damage and highly visual manifestations of suffering. This work, whilst essential to documenting the events and the aftermath of the killings, has been in danger of obscuring the individual person, a tendency which is exacerbated by international representations of `Africa' as a place of violence, illness and death. In Les Blessures du silence, a collection of photographs and testimonial interviews from Rwanda, Alain Kazinierakis and Yolande Mukagasana challenge this pervasive foregrounding of injury by focusing instead on the ongoing emotional suffering of the individual. This article will examine how Kazinierakis's photography interacts with Mukagasana's interviews to provide an unusual contribution to the literature memorialising genocide.

Travels in Inhumanity: Veronique Tadjo's Tourism in Rwanda

Hitchcott, N. — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:00:05 PDT

Africans, particularly women, rarely assume the travel writer's gaze. The traveller is generally assumed to be white, Western and male. In 1998, Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo travelled to Rwanda with a group of other African writers to reflect upon and write about the 1994 genocide. This article focuses on L'Ombre d'Imana: voyages jusqu'au bout du Rwanda (2000), the travel narrative she published as a result of this trip. It analyses the ways in which Tadjo positions herself and her reader as an ambiguous tourist in Rwanda and how, in doing so, she succeeds in challenging received ideas about the genocide.

Testimonial Encounter: Esther Mujawayo's Dialogic Art of Witnessing

Dauge-Roth, A. — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:00:05 PDT

For the survivors of the genocide of the Tutsis, testifying to their traumatic past must be envisioned in relation to the political and ideological tensions that define the representations of Rwanda's national history. Bearing witness represents the possibility `of' and the call `for' a dialogic space where survivors seek to redefine the present meaning derived from the experience of the genocide and its haunting resonance. In their attempt to re-envision and re-assert themselves through testimony, survivors move from a position of being subjected to political violence to a position that entails the promise of agency. In this regard, Mujawayo's dialogic and polyphonic art of witnessing is a unique resource. Her testimonies seek to generate a social space within which the survivors can negotiate, and eventually reclaim, the meaning of their survival and to assert the demands of the traumatic aftermath they face.

After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?: Cultural Representations of Reconciliation in Rwanda

Bromley, R. — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:00:05 PDT

This article examines a small number of documentary films made since 2000 which focus on the post-genocide situation in Rwanda. It begins by tracing some of the debates about the contested versions of national unity and reconciliation produced by the RPF-led government, which seeks, at least at the level of its rhetoric, to transcend the politics of ethnicity and to end once and for all the culture of impunity which is seen as one of the root causes of the genocide. Acknowledging that the government has achieved a measure of peace and security in a relatively short space of time, critics argue that ethnicity is, however, still an issue in Rwanda and that there is an official RPF narrative — `we are all Rwandans now' — which many academics, journalists and NGO officials have bought into, while at the same time ignoring the elements of authoritarianism and the suppression of dissent which, it is claimed, mark the behaviour of the ruling, Tutsi-dominated elite. The documentary films are analysed in the context of these conflicting accounts of the complexities of the reconciliation process and are shown as cultural practices which reflect upon the contradictions and tensions manifested in the attempts to find top-down solutions to problems which require sensitive deployment of local knowledge, local resources and the experiences of everyday life in still predominantly rural Rwanda.

Image and Memory: An Interview with Eric Kabera

Cieplak, P. A. — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:00:05 PDT

Eric Kabera is a Rwandan documentary and fiction filmmaker and producer. He collaborated on one of the first fictionalised films about the genocide, 100 Days (dir. Nick Hughes), and has participated in a variety of projects related to the process of memorialisation and commemoration of the events of 1994 and their aftermath. Kabera is also the founder of the Rwanda Cinema Centre and the Rwanda Film Festival, which aim to bring the moving image to the country's rural populations. This interview focuses on Kabera's documentary film The Keepers of Memory: Survivors' Accounts of the Rwandan Genocide (2005), which traces the individual trajectories of those affected by the genocide and gives them a platform to voice their experience. Special attention is paid to the relationship with physical surrounding, to image and to the internal and external experience of trauma and memory in their collective and individual forms. The theoretical assertions about memory recording are juxtaposed with pragmatic issues encountered by a filmmaker as practitioner. The interview was conducted on 30 March 2008 in Kigali, Rwanda.

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Looseley, D., Mevel, P.-A. — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:00:05 PDT

Modernist Melancholy: Guillaume Apollinaire and Francis Picabia after 1912

Rothman, R. — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:51:33 PST

The binary opposition that is said to hold between an enthusiastic, future-oriented avant-garde and a melancholic, past-oriented traditionalism deserves to be re-examined. This essay aims to complicate this binarism by highlighting a moment within the history of modernism when an enthusiasm regarding the future fused with a melancholy regarding the past. Both Guillaume Apollinaire and Francis Picabia were deeply committed to the avant-garde discourse of the new, yet a number of their works in the years after 1912 harbour an ambivalence that compels us to rethink the simple divide between modernism and anti-modernism and suggest that some of the central figures of modernism were simultaneously bound to the sentiment of nostalgia.

L'Exposition Anticoloniale: Political or Aesthetic Protest?

Palermo, L. E. — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:51:33 PST

In response to the 1931 Paris Exposition Coloniale, André Thirion and Louis Aragon organised the Exposition Anti-impérialiste in an attempt to bring about collaboration between Communists and Surrealists on political activity under the auspices of the Communist Party. However, tensions arose immediately, often as personal spats. Thirion's section of the exhibition adhered to the didactic method favoured by the Party. In contrast, Aragon's section, ostensibly dealing with the cultural impact of colonialism, reveals a distinctly surrealist approach with its irreverent tone and rich ambiguity. In this paper, I argue that the conflict between Aragon and Thirion was rooted in their respective notions of revolution, and therefore politics, resulting in an Exposition Anti-impérialiste containing two fundamentally different (even opposing) protests to French colonialism. Aragon's section of the exposition also reveals his commitment to surrealist ideals, even as he was moving toward his break with André Breton.

The American Dream -- or Nightmare: Views from the French Left, 1945--1965

Flower, J. — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:51:33 PST

The number of Americans in France — notably on former military bases and in areas of industrial investment and development — increased dramatically after 1945, and their values and influence gradually permeated all aspects of French life. Reactions from writers and intellectuals were varied. Some were positive; others, especially those clearly on or sympathetic to the Left, were not. But if America and things American were viewed by many with suspicion, disapproval and even distaste, there developed a growing acknowledgement that they had come to stay. This paper charts some of these reactions as they were expressed in essays, newspaper articles and imaginative writing during the two decades following the Liberation.

What Trauner Did Next: The Continuation of a French Design Aesthetic in an American Context

McCann, B. — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:51:33 PST

Alexandre Trauner is remembered for his highly evocative `poetic realist' designs in films such as Le Quai des brumes (1938), Hôtel du Nord (1938), Le Jour se lève (1939) and Les Enfants du paradis (1945). His designs intertwined familiar iconography with stylistic accentuation so that the decor became the narrative's organising image. This article will concentrate on three of Trauner's American films: Othello (1952), Land of the Pharaohs (1955) and The Apartment (1960). It will identify the consonances between Trauner's work in 1930s France and 1950s America and argue that his design methodology seamlessly adapted to a different set of professional imperatives, which in turn allowed a fuller development of the `poetic realist' style. The `Trauner style' — cultivated in France and refined in America — revolves around three recurring aspects: visual symbolism, the interplay between monumental and intimate, and the decor paraphrasing the narrative.

`Deux temps de lecture': Pellicule and pellicula in the Photographic Works of Natacha Lesueur

Jackson, A. C. — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:51:33 PST

This paper explores the process and practice of inscription and impression in the photographic works of Natacha Lesueur. It suggests that while Lesueur engages with the idiom of the fashion photograph, this is to subvert rather than affirm the genre. Her photographs play with and speak to the nature of the photographic medium itself (which is time-based, materially ephemeral and, in the popular consciousness, linked with stereotypical portrayals of the female subject). They serve to show, like Cindy Sherman's work, that the stereotype and essential femininities are constructed in the act of looking, rather than in the act of representation. Finally, it proposes that the epidermal inscriptions made on the skin ( pellicula) of Lesueur's models can be understood to function as a mise en abyme of the photographic process itself (pellicule). This leads to the conclusion that Lesueur's practice seeks at once to un-frame the real and to articulate identity as event.

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Looseley, D., Mevel, P.-A. — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:51:33 PST