Something to Declare

Something to Declare PDF Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Random House Canada
ISBN: 0307368459
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book

Book Description
Anyone who loves France (or just feels strongly about it), or has succumbed to the spell of Julian Barnes's previous books, will be enraptured by this collection of essays on the country and its culture. Barnes's appreciation extends from France's vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Here are the prolific and priapic Simenon, Baudelaire, Sand and Sartre, and several dazzling excursions on the prickly genius of Flaubert. Lively yet discriminating in its enthusiasm, seemingly infinite in its range of reference, and written in prose as stylish as haute couture, Something to Declare is an unadulterated joy.

Something to Declare

Something to Declare PDF Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Random House Canada
ISBN: 0307368459
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book

Book Description
Anyone who loves France (or just feels strongly about it), or has succumbed to the spell of Julian Barnes's previous books, will be enraptured by this collection of essays on the country and its culture. Barnes's appreciation extends from France's vanishing peasantry to its hyper-literate pop singers, from the gleeful iconoclasm of nouvelle vague cinema to the orgy of drugs and suffering that is the Tour de France. Above all, Barnes is an unparalleled connoisseur of French writing and writers. Here are the prolific and priapic Simenon, Baudelaire, Sand and Sartre, and several dazzling excursions on the prickly genius of Flaubert. Lively yet discriminating in its enthusiasm, seemingly infinite in its range of reference, and written in prose as stylish as haute couture, Something to Declare is an unadulterated joy.

Essays in French Literature

Essays in French Literature PDF Author: F. Brunetieve
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780849001277
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description


Essays in French Literature

Essays in French Literature PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : French literature
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book

Book Description


Essays in French literature

Essays in French literature PDF Author: George Saintsbury
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description


The Party of Humanity

The Party of Humanity PDF Author: Peter Gay
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307831434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book

Book Description
THE ENLIGHTENMENT has long been the victim of uninformed or hostile criticisms. Even so respected a source as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the Enlightenment as “shallow and pretentious intellectualism, unreasonable contempt for authority and tradition,” thus collecting in one sentence most of our current prejudices. In this provocative book—at once a scholarly study and a vigorous polemic—Peter Gay sets out to shatter old myths, to sort out illusion from reality, and to restore the men of the Enlightenment—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot—to the esteem they deserve. The nine related essays in The Party of Humanity fall into three divisions: three are on Voltaire, presenting the great philosophe as a tough-minded, realistic man of letters who tried to reshape his world, rather than as merely brittle and shallow wit. Then, three essays characterize the French Enlightenment as a whole, and seek for the unity underlying the diversity of tempers and attitudes among its leaders. The last three, which include Mr. Gay’s well-known critique of Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, are polemics against widely accepted views of the Enlightenment. The longest chapter here is a detailed examination of Rousseau, the philosopher, and of his reputation among his interpreters. What all nine essays have in common, apart from their portrayal of the philosophes as serious and engage partisans of humanity, is that they are all essays in the “social history of ideas”; they all treat ideas as inseparable from the specific social and cultural setting from which they emerge and which they affect.

French Fairy Tales

French Fairy Tales PDF Author: Denyse Delcourt
Publisher: Cognella Academic Publishing
ISBN: 9781516511761
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description
French Fairy Tales: Essays on a Major Literary Tradition provides a unique opportunity to revisit and deepen our appreciation and understanding of French fairy tales, many of which we can recall with a sense of wonder from childhood. These carefully selected essays, written by a variety of distinguished scholars, introduce and analyze the original versions of many French fairy tales published in France between 1691 and 1715. These range from the works of Charles Perrault (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty), to Madame Leprince de Beaumont (Beauty and the Beast), to the radically different tales of Madame d'Aulnoy (The Blue Bird, The White Cat). This anthology includes essays that analyze the complexities and importance of these tales, as well as a bibliography and filmography that give readers a chance to explore the genre further. The English translations of several French fairy tales by Jack Zipes serve as an excellent teaching tool. Readers of French Fairy Tales will enjoy the stories and be challenged by the recent and provocative scholarship on this major literary tradition that continues to influence literature and film today.

Pre-text, Text, Context

Pre-text, Text, Context PDF Author: Robert L. Mitchell
Publisher: Columbus : Ohio State University Press
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Get Book

Book Description
The nineteenth century in France is a nightmare for literary historians. Their thirst for categorization is more easily quenched by prior centuries, to which, because they seem unified by cohesive preoccupations and common goals, such appellations as the Renaissance, the Classical Age or le grand siècle, and the Enlightenment or Age of Ideas are appropriately applied. For the protean nineteenth century, for which no such handy tag has been or can be devised, is beyond all else distinguished by extreme heterogeneity and eclecticism. A period of chaotic social and political instability, of scientific and industrial revolution, it is, in literature, a time, not of solidarity, but of unprecedented individualism. Collective social consciousness yields to isolated probings into the uncharted recesses of the human mind and soul, and revolt agains standardized (even valorized) literary practice is seen in such developments as the slow undermining of the "accepted" literary lexicon, and of the qualities of unity, clarity, and reason, and in a radical overhauling of the system of prosody. If such diversity precludes coherence in nineteenth-century French literature, it can itself be recognized as the 2organizing3 element of this literary epoch. And it is precisely this paradox that the essays in this volume intend to reflect. They are not unified, as orthodoxy might dictate, by a common approach or theme or author. Rather they are marked, as was the century that is their context, by divergence and variety, not harmony and consistency. Multiformity in theme is reflected in discussions of such varied topics as pygmalionism, allegory, mirage, self-consciousness, plagiarism, madness, feminism, the grotesque, dance, and alchemy, which are addressed, in turn, from a variety of critical approaches: thematic, intertextual, historical, stylistic, psychocritical, sociological, and semiotic. Ecclecticism, indeed, has shaped the basic conception of the collection. Part 1 examines themes, presented as "pretext", that inform either authorial motivation or the orientation of a text prior to its actual inscription. Part 2 approaches the process of writing from the perspective of the text itself. And Part 3 is concerned with those spatial, temporal, and linguistic elements (context) that surround the literary text.

The Assault on French Literature, and Other Essays

The Assault on French Literature, and Other Essays PDF Author: Percy Mansell Jones
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN:
Category : French literature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
This book offers one professor's critical observations and constructive suggestions on the teaching of foreign literatures, specifically French, which is his métier. The condition of humane studies, and their risk of being degraded to the status of poor relations to the sciences, are a continuing source of disquiet. Thus, the descriptions and disclosures of what went wrong in the past are meant to encourage, demonstrating by contrast the improvements in the organization of studies that have been made. With one exception, the pieces in Part Two, Commentaries & Discussions, are exercises in how to introduce literary topics within the official lecture 'hour' of fifty minutes.

Essays on the French Revolution

Essays on the French Revolution PDF Author: Steven G. Reinhardt
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9780890964989
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Get Book

Book Description
Clarke Garrett examines the differing responses of Catholics and Protestants and the resulting disturbances. Roderick Phillips describes the wide variation in provincial response to the revolutionary assembly's family reform measures. He traces the different reactions of urban and rural residents to such legal measures as liberalization of divorces, secularization of birth, death, and marriage registrations, and inheritance reform. Peasants in central France were already engaged in total revolution when Joseph Fouche arrived there in late 1793. Nancy Fitch argues that Fouche was formed by his encounter with indigenous peasant radicalism as much as the peasants were influenced by his rhetoric of a new political culture. Donald Sutherland, summarizing scholarly debate on the subject, argues that, in the final analysis, the Revolution itself was tragically and profoundly alien to many French men and women in 1789.

Transmissions

Transmissions PDF Author: Isabelle Frances McNeill
Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book

Book Description
As a concept, transmission is crucial to our understanding of how ideas circulate within and across cultures. It opens up a series of questions that link to key debates concerning the exchange of knowledge. Bringing together research from a broad range of areas in French studies, this volume investigates the workings of transmission in relation to canonical and contemporary figures alike, including Proust, Barthes, Derrida, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claire Denis. The essays collected here offer a lively response to the themes of transmission, considering literature and philosophy from the medieval period onwards, as well as modern cinema and critical theory. The first section traces concepts of malign transmission that have informed medieval, early modern and finally contemporary representations of contagion. The second section addresses the impact of trauma, along with its imperative to testify to, or transmit, painful experiences such as rape and the Holocaust. The final section considers transmission in terms of a signal that carries a message, as well as the media that transport or encode that signal.