BiblioVault - Books about French

A Genetic Approach to Structures in the Work of Jean Genet

Camille Naish

Harvard University Press, 1978

Camille Naish has written the first formalist study of the provocative French writer Jean Genet. She treats his major texts, from the erotic homosexual elegy Le Condamne a mort (1942) to the highly controversial epic Les Parvents (1966), and links the characteristic structure of his later plays with his relatively obscure first poems and early novels. Dr. Naish’s study insightfully discusses previous critical responses to Genet, examines Genet’s relationship with Cocteau and the Surrealists, and finally takes an original look at humor and parody in this unusual writer.

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Georges Perec's Geographies

Material, Performative and Textual Spaces

Edited by Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, and Richard Phillips

University College London, 2019

Georges Perec (1936–82) was one of the most inventive and original writers of the twentieth century. A fascinating aspect of his work as a novelist, filmmaker, and essayist is its intrinsically geographical nature. With many major projects on space and place, Perec’s writing speaks to a variety of geographical, urban, and architectural concerns—both in a substantive way, including a focus on cities, streets, and homes, and in a methodological way, as in his experiments with urban observation and exploration.

Georges Perec’s Geographies explores Perec’s geographical interests. The book is divided into two parts: Part I, “Perec’s Geographies,” explores space and place within Perec’s films, radio plays, and literature, from descriptions of actual streets to the fictional places within his work. Part II, “Perecquian Geographies,” explores geography in works directly inspired by Perec, including writing, photographs and photo essays, soundscapes, theater, and dance. Extending Perecquian criticism beyond literary and French studies to disciplines including geography, urban studies, and architecture, Georges Perec’s Geographies offers a complete and systematic examination that will be of interest not only to Perec scholars but also to students and researchers across these subjects.

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Globalizing Race

Antisemitism and Empire in French and European Culture

Dorian Bell

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself.

Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism.

As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.

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God and The End of Satan / Dieu and La Fin de Satan

Selections: In a Bilingual Edition

Victor Hugo

Swan Isle Press, 2014

While living in exile with his family on the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy, Victor Hugo wrote some of his greatest poetry and prose, including Les Misérables and two epic poems: Dieu and La Fin de Satan. Dieu pictures the imaginary search for God by a nameless protagonist, who must face the possibility of failure in this quest. La Fin de Satan, an indictment of prison, war, and capital punishment, depicts an attempt at reconciliation between good and evil.

This book brings together abbreviated editions of these two book-length poems—unfinished and unpublished at the time of the author’s death—comprised of selections that capture their visionary and mystical essence. The poems are accompanied by an introduction framing them within the author’s experience as an exile and tracing their publication history.

Victor Hugo is one of the most important figures in the history of French literature, and this beautifully rendered translation brings two of his lesser-known works deservedly to the forefront.

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Good Bread Is Back

A Contemporary History of French Bread, the Way It Is Made, and the People Who Make It

Steven Laurence Kaplan

Duke University Press, 2006

In Good Bread Is Back, historian and leading French bread expert Steven Laurence Kaplan takes readers into aromatic Parisian bakeries as he explains how good bread began to reappear in France in the 1990s, following almost a century of decline in quality. Kaplan describes how, while bread comprised the bulk of the French diet during the eighteenth century, by the twentieth, per capita consumption had dropped off precipitously. This was largely due to social and economic modernization and the availability of a wider choice of foods. But part of the problem was that the bread did not taste good. In a culture in which bread is sacrosanct, bad bread was more than a gastronomical disappointment; it was a threat to France's sense of itself. By the mid-1990s bakers rallied, and bread officially designated as "bread of the French tradition" was in demand throughout Paris. Kaplan meticulously describes good bread's ideal crust and crumb (interior), mouth feel, aroma, and taste. He discusses the breadmaking process in extraordinary detail, from the ingredients to the kneading, shaping, and baking, and even the sound bread should make when it comes out of the oven. Kaplan does more than tell the story of the revival of good bread in France. He makes the reader see, smell, taste, feel, and even hear why it is so very wonderful that good bread is back.

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The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism

By Michael Provence

University of Texas Press, 2005

The Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 was the largest and longest-lasting anti-colonial insurgency in the inter-war Arab East. Mobilizing peasants, workers, and army veterans, rather than urban elites and nationalist intellectuals, it was the first mass movement against colonial rule in the Middle East. The revolt failed to liberate Syria from French occupation, but it provided a model of popular nationalism and resistance that remains potent in the Middle East today. Each subsequent Arab uprising against foreign rule has repeated the language and tactics of the Great Syrian Revolt.

In this work, Michael Provence uses newly released secret colonial intelligence sources, neglected memoirs, and popular memory to tell the story of the revolt from the perspective of its participants. He shows how Ottoman-subsidized military education created a generation of leaders of modest background who came to rebel against both the French Mandate rulers of Syria and the Syrian intellectuals and landowners who helped the colonial regime to function. This new popular nationalism was unprecedented in the Arab world. Provence shows compellingly that the Great Syrian Revolt was a formative event in shaping the modern Middle East.

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