French Cultural Studies recent issues

Building a Sexological Concept Through Fictional Narrative: The Case of `Frigidity' in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Cryle, P. — 2008-05-16

This paper raises a question about the role of literary texts in intellectual and cultural history, taking the particular example of middle-brow novels published by a set of Parisian publishers during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. It locates those novels with respect to medical writing about sexual pathology, with a particular focus on the notion of female frigidity, which was something of a new topic at that time. The Parisian publishers' catalogues contained a range of texts from popular medical `libraries' to outright pornography, but the greater part of the books they offered for sale were more or less respectable novels with some intellectual pretensions. The paper identifies some commonplaces about frigidity that emerged at the time, and shows that middle-brow novels sometimes led medical writing in the production of those commonplaces, notably by their construction and rehearsal of typical narratives about women characters.

The Quai Branly Museum: Political Transition, Memory and Globalisation in Contemporary France

Thomas, D. — 2008-05-16

The Parisian landscape was repeatedly altered during the second half of the twentieth century by various presidential `grands projets' or `grands travaux', most notably the Grande Arche of La Défense, the Bastille Opera, and the Institut du Monde Arabe. In June 2006, during Jacques Chirac's final months in office, the latest of these projects (and the first of the twenty-first century) was inaugurated, namely the Musée Quai Branly. This museum, dedicated to the arts and civilisations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, has triggered discussion in a broad interdisciplinary context. This essay endeavours to contextualise these debates and accordingly to provide a more nuanced understanding of contemporary France as it confronts its position, status and role according to the coordinates of an increasingly globalised world.

Les Visiteurs and the Quixotic Text

Mcmorran, W. — 2008-05-16

The article offers a comparative analysis of two stories of knights in anachronistic conflict with the modern world: Cervantes' Don Quixote, a novel that continues to live a rich afterlife in contemporary Western culture, and Poiré's Les Visiteurs, the most successful French film comedy of the 1990s. It explores parallels between Cervantes' parodying of chivalric romance and Poiré's engagement with heritage cinema, and finds a common ambivalence in these texts towards both the romanticised past and the mundane present.

Finding France on Film: Chocolat, Amelie and Le Divorce

Durham, C. A. — 2008-05-16

Three contemporary films, Lasse Hallström's Chocolat (2000), Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain (2001), and James Ivory's Le Divorce (2003), provide an especially promising context in which to explore the complex nature of cultural representation and reception at a time of renewed conflict and misunderstanding between France and the United States. All three films raise important questions related to national identity and to audience response. All three also confirm that the romantic comedy set in a picturesque Paris or a quaint rural village is one place where we can still expect to find France on film, whether the film is made in the United States or in France.

Of GMOs, McDomination and Foreign Fat: Contemporary Franco-American Food Fights

Willging, J. — 2008-05-16

This essay examines some recent developments in the food market and in eating habits in France and the anxieties that these developments — blamed by many on the forces of `Americanisation' — appear to be provoking among many French men and women. The specific developments it discusses are (1) the increasing pressure by the American government to force France and the European Union to import genetically modified organisms and hormone-treated beef; (2) the astonishing growth of the fast-food industry in France over the last several years in particular; and (3) the equally astonishing increase over the same period in the obesity rate there, especially among children. This essay argues that the presumed Americanisation of one of the most emphatically and enduringly French aspects of that nation's identity, its cuisine (and perhaps, more importantly, its culinary customs) has proven even more difficult for the French to `swallow' than that of other national domains, such as industry, cinema or even politics. This is so because this particular American `invasion' seems to constitute a penetration not only of national and local borders and public and private spaces, but also, more alarmingly, of individual, biological bodies.

The Alliance Francaise, Empire and America

Gosnell, J. — 2008-05-16

The Alliance Française was founded more than a century ago and is the largest non-profit-making cultural institution in the world. Its longstanding mission has been to foster global understanding of the French language and to promote increased dialogue between French and other cultures. Since 1902, the Federation of Alliances Françaises USA has facilitated American access to French language and culture. The American Alliance has been marked by the republican and colonial ethos of the late nineteenth-century organisation. A network of Alliance chapters was established within postcolonial Francophone communities in the United States in the early twentieth century. The institution might be thought of, consequently, as helping to preserve a French cultural heritage dating back four hundred years. By giving voice to different constituencies within the French diasporic family, and by creating spaces for cultural exchange, the Alliance has helped to define the contours of New World Francophone identities.

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Looseley, D. — 2008-05-16

Being There: Colette in the Crowd

Freadman, A. — 2008-01-21

This article studies three pieces from Colette's early journalism which describe events or behaviours of popular culture. Her focus is on `being in the crowd'. The events are identified as genres, and the study draws on genre theory to consider the issue of what it is to take up or participate in conventional forms. From there, it raises two further questions: the nature of cultural knowledge, and what it is to observe, then to describe, what is going on for the participants.

Indochine 1910 et Vendee 1940 dans Ma s{oelig}ur aux yeux d'Asie de Michel Ragon: Une mise en scene de l'Histoire

Slawy-Sutton, C. — 2008-01-21

Dans Ma sœur aux yeux d'Asie (1982), la lecture que Michel Ragon fait des lettres que son père avait envoyées d'Indochine entre 1910 et 1920 est entrecoupée de réflexions sur l'Occupation (1940). A partir de cette structure curieuse du roman, cet article montre qu'autant que la mémoire de son père et de sa sœur, c'est l'Histoire que Ragon met en scène, avec son scénario confus, ses ironies dramatiques, ses acteurs qui ne connaissent pas très bien leur rôle. En analysant les contrepoints entre deux lieux (Tonkin, Vendée), deux époques (1910, 1940) deux formes d'occupation (colonisation, Occupation), deux peuples paysans (annamites, vendéens), je propose que ce roman des années 80 esquissait déjà des discussions sur la mémoire coloniale et la représentation de l'Histoire semblables à celles qui enflamment la France aujourd'hui.

Guilt and Betrayal in the Works of Azouz Begag and Linda Le

Lay-Chenchabi, K., Do, T. — 2008-01-21

Azouz Begag and Linda Lê, although of different backgrounds, share the common legacy of French colonisation, a legacy which translates in their works into obsessive feelings of guilt and betrayal of their origins. This article provides a comparative analysis of the different ways in which the two writers deal with questions of integration and identity, guilt and betrayal. Guilt results from what is perceived as betrayal in the choice of the French language (Lê), in the desire for integration into French society at the expense of the community (Begag), but principally, for both authors in their relationship to their father. Writing about the father, initially experienced as a strong source of guilt, becomes, for both, the means of expiating this guilt and also of redefining their identity.

Reconstituting Cultural Memory through Image and Text in Leila Sebbar's Le Chinois vert d'Afrique

Howell, J. — 2008-01-21

Despite the impact of the Algerian War on Franco-Algerian relations, the war's atrocities have all but vanished from French collective memory — until relatively recently. Legislative debates in the French National Assembly regarding the revision of textbooks attest to this: does France have the right to teach future generations about colonialism's positive effects? This article examines how Leïla Sebbar comes to terms with post-war trauma through a combination of text and image. Should one then read Sebbar's novel, Le Chinois vert d'Afrique, as a piece of ecphrastic writing? And more importantly, does Sebbar's use of photography function effectively as a vector of memorial transmission?

9/11 and the Affair of the Muslim Headscarf in Essays by Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdelwahab Meddeb

Bourget, C. — 2008-01-21

Ben Jelloun's L'Islam expliqué aux enfants and Meddeb's La Maladie de l'islam, both prompted by 9/11, share the similar intent and didactic function of countering reductive representations of Islam fostered by Islamic extremists and the media, and of tracing historically the link between terrorism and the Muslim faith. Taking into account their location (Ben Jelloun and Meddeb are prominent Maghrebian intellectuals who have been residing in France, for decades), this article demonstrates that these essays do not foster a better understanding of Islam by their French readership. In particular, thay fail to present a balanced account of the issues surrounding the headscarf affair in France and contribute to the confusion between Islam and terrorism, in part because international news bears on domestic issues. In addition, this article addresses 9/11's impact on the translation of literature from the Francophone Arab world.

Sur les quais des brumes: Mist, Mystification and Demystification in the French Reception of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront

Smith, D. — 2008-01-21

The French reception of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) constitutes a revealing case study in cultural relations between France and the United States during the Cold War, demonstrating how procedures of demystification may remystify the ideological object they critique. In an American context, On the Waterfront is widely regarded as a particularly overdetermined film, combining a literal politics of labour relations with an allegorical apologia for McCarthyism. French reactions to the film set out to decode its multiple subtexts from an outsider perspective but sometimes end up reproducing the film's mystifications at another level. Thus the French reception demonstrates both an assimilation and distancing of the film in political terms, an aesthetic rejection of the film from the different quarters of Brechtian dramaturgy and auteur theory, a popular embrace of the film through its insertion into a changing celebrity culture, and a misunderstanding or disavowal of its gendered subtext.

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Looseley, D. — 2008-01-21

Terrain de lutte: Women's Football and Feminism in `Les annees folles'

Michallat, W. — 2007-09-12

This article traces the development of women's football in France in the context of the evolving political and social status of women over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. It specifically examines football alongside women's broader struggle for social, political and sexual emancipation. In the early 1920s, football was championed by the French feminist movement. Subservient not to men but to a team ethic, robust female players rebutted the myth of women's fragility — seen then as a major obstacle to women's suffrage. Football also appeared to offer a means to rally a new generation of working-class women to what had been a middle-class cause. Sponsored by the feminist movement and administered by the Fédération féminin sportive de France (FFSF) with state funding, French women's football flourished domestically and abroad. However, by the late 1920s it had been abandoned by the feminist movement and the FFSF in the midst of a sexual panic caricaturing participants as unnatural, `masculinised' and lesbian — a charge levelled at feminists in general with increasing vehemence as the suffrage issue made progress. This discussion links football's fall from favour over the course of the 1920s to the increasingly hostile political climate that faced the feminist movement and imperilled the survival of groups such as the FFSF who associated with it.

Reclaiming `Paradise Lost' in the Writings of Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant

Cunningham, C. — 2007-09-12

This article considers the paradisiacal image of the French Caribbean island of Martinique, focusing in particular on the writing of two contemporary authors, Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant. Beginning with the obvious exotic associations of Martinique in metropolitan France, and the Western world at large, and drawing on anti-colonialist theory, I argue that increasing levels of tourism in a global world can in fact be read as a form of neo-colonisation. Within this context, the role of the French Caribbean writer is perceived by both Chamoiseau and Glissant to be crucial in resisting this dominating, globalising force. I will demonstrate how the authors turn to their native landscape in their writing — and to the liminal space of the beach in particular — to combat this form of neo-colonisation.

Realising Identity: the Process and the Product: An Analysis of Au pays de mes racines by Marie Cardinal

Duffy, P. — 2007-09-12

For the displaced person, important questions are posed concerning identity and sense of place. In her autobiographical work Au pays de mes racines (1980), Marie Cardinal attempts to provide answers to her own dilemma. A pied-noir by birth, she was forced by the escalating violence of the Algerian War to quit the country of her roots in 1956 and move to France, a country whose language she spoke, but of whose culture she was largely ignorant. Needless to say, the involuntary nature of the shift from her native Algeria left her with a sense of cultural limbo which she struggled to address in her country of exile. Eventually, she returned, with very mixed emotions, 24 years later to confront the past and to find the self she left behind in a country from which she now feels estranged. Her discoveries are as surprising as they are life-changing and provide important insights into the issue of self-knowledge in an increasingly global environment.

Kechiche and the French Classics: Cinema as Subversion and Renewal of Tradition

Nettelbeck, C. — 2007-09-12

Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche would now appear to be fully integrated into the French filmmaking community. The success of his first two films, La Faute à Voltaire (2001) and especially L'Esquive (2004), which won a César for best script and best film, suggests that his future career will be guaranteed. The filmmaker's trajectory seems a perfect illustration of the utopian dream of French cinema by which anyone, no matter how much of an outsider, can find salvation through art. But Kechiche's work tells a very different story. Using canonical artefacts of French culture as markers, these films expose the many obstacles that confront those seeking integration into French society, and the systemic flaws that characterise life in France today. This study will analyse the portrayal of the tensions between inclusion and exclusion in each of Kechiche's films, notably in comparison with the more obviously `hardline' approach of Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche in Wesh wesh, qu'est-ce qui se passe? (2001). It will argue that Kechiche's use of traditional cultural artefacts is more than satirical: it is also a way of revitalising narrative, and a celebration of storytelling.

Jacques Bouveresse: Being UnFrench, Metaphorically

Baldwin, T. — 2007-09-12

Jacques Bouveresse is professor of philosophy at the Collège de France in Paris. He has published widely on Wittgenstein, Robert Musil and Karl Kraus. As an analytical philosopher, he has been, as it were, the mirror image of an Adorno at pre-war Oxford. Unlike his Anglo-Saxon counterparts at Oxford, he is the beleaguered minority in France. He does not have the option either of lofty disdain or Ayerish japery. He grumbles. Anyone familiar with philosophical debate or its journalistic variant in France over the past 20 years, and indeed with the `affaire Sokal', will be aware of the charge (some have regarded it as more of a jibe) made by some `analytical' philosophers that what passes for philosophy in France is not `scientific' or `precise' enough: it is little more and even less than `littérature'. This article argues that while Bouveresse is one who makes such a charge, and is well armed to do so, he nevertheless provides an interesting case in that he is by no means immune to literary materials, and indeed his treatment of metaphor leads us to question the content as well as the effectiveness of the charge.

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Looseley, D. — 2007-09-12

Introduction

Jordan, S., Kuhn, R. — 2007-05-10

La television de l'intimite

Mehl, D. — 2007-05-10

Cet article analyse le rapport complexe entre la `télévision de l'intimité' (`talk shows', `reality shows', `real télé') et l'évolution dans les perceptions des domaines `privé' et `public' en France. Quelles nouvelles for-mules et pratiques télévisuelles ont émergé depuis le début des années quatre-vingt-dix? Quels aspects de la vie quotidienne et personnelle sont ainsi mis en scène? Qu'impliquent ces émissions pour les participants et comment influent-elles sur le spectateur? Un climat dans lequel citoyens ordinaires aussi bien que membres de l'establishment s'exposent volontiers au regard finit par effacer les frontières entre le privé et le public, donnant libre cours aux définitions subjectives. L'article conclut que l'espace privé/public du témoignage ne signe ni la mort de l'espace public ni l'aphonie de l'espace privé mais une articulation particulière où le pluralisme des témoignages se présente comme le garant virtuel de l'énoncé de points de vue différents et donc de la potentialité même d'un débat.

Miniature Lives, Intrusion and Innocence: Women Filming Children

Wilson, E. — 2007-05-10

An examination of Lucile Hadzihalilovic's film of 2004, Innocence, this article argues that childhood, child experience and its representation, offer prescient and urgent material for thinking about the public and the private, raising issues about identity and newness/the newborn, about influence and intrusion, about intimacy and enclosure, about growth and metamorphosis. The malleable, mutating substance of children's bodies, of their environs and of their imaginings, is seen to offer new insights into the relation between private and public and new reflections on that relation as fluid and overlapping. Examining childhood offers evidence about identification and enculturation, the construction and production of social identity, and the position of the self within a community. Engagement with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy allows questions about intrusion and étrangeté to be pursued in material and political terms.

The Public and the Private in Contemporary French Politics

Kuhn, R. — 2007-05-10

This article examines selected aspects of the changing public/private interface in the mediatisation of politicians in contemporary France. It argues that there is normative confusion surrounding attempts to establish an agreed dividing line between the public and the private in both politicians' mediated communication and journalists' political coverage. Such confusion is a product of mutually reinforcing changes in the interdependent relationship between three sets of actors: politicians, journalists and the public. Politicians need to use the media for the purposes of self-publicity and the projection of a coherent electoral image; journalists operate in highly competitive media markets which are dominated by the pursuit of audiences and advertising revenue; and the public as voters have become disenchanted with the political class, while as media users they have become accustomed to the exposure of the private lives of celebrities.

Reconfiguring the Public and the Private: Intimacy, Exposure and Vulnerability in Christine Angot's Rendez-vous

Jordan, S. — 2007-05-10

This article analyses the public and the private in the work of Christine Angot with a particular focus on her 2006 text Rendez-vous and an emphasis on her articulation of intimacy, exposure and vulnerability. Angot is first contextualised through broad analysis of the trend in France for radically self-revelatory cultural production by women, which reconfigures the public/private divide and brings us to consider it in postfeminist perspective. Whereas the disruption of public/private categories remains clearly implicated in feminist narratives of empowerment in the case of writers such as Annie Ernaux and Catherine Millet, Angot appears to destabilise such narratives by repeatedly rehearsing, as well as engendering, vulnerability. The article argues that vulnerability stems from the central textual problematic of incest in Angot, and posits a double reading of incest: incest as testimony and incest as trope. In conclusion, it is suggested that Angot's potently insistent exposure of the incest taboo is not merely an example of, but an overarching metaphor for, the contemporary culture of exposure in `reality' genres.

An Interstitial Intimacy: Renegotiating the Public and the Private in the Work of Zineb Sedira

McGonagle, J. — 2007-05-10

This article examines the role of history, memory and gender in the work of British-based French Algerian artist Zineb Sedira, with particular reference to the politics of veiling in France and Algeria and hidden family histories of the Algerian War. Habitual boundaries drawn between public and private spheres in France have been questioned in the work of several French artists of ethnic minority origin. The work of Sedira engages directly with the interplay between public and private lives through her film, photography and video works. By examining both her and her parents' past, Sedira prioritizes the private side of public conflicts and controversies, and asserts its pivotal role in remembering the past.

The Public and the Private in the Lives of Jean-Paul Sartre

Drake, D. — 2007-05-10

This article examines some of the complexities of biographical writing with specific reference to five biographies of Jean-Paul Sartre: a memoir (Simone de Beauvoir), a biography (Annie Cohen-Solal), a récit (Liliane Siegel), a psychological biography (Jean-Pierre Boulé) and a third-party account of the Sartre—Beauvoir relationship (Hazel Rowley). These different texts have been selected because each illustrates a particular aspect of the relationship between the public and the private both with specific regard to the life of Sartre and more generally in the genre of biography. These biographies differ from each other not just because of the discovery of new primary material over time, but because the authors examine their subject from radically different perspectives.

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Looseley, D. — 2007-05-10