BiblioVault - Books about French

Je me souviens

Histoire, culture, et littérature du Québec francophone

Elizabeth Blood et J. Vincent H. Morrissette

Georgetown University Press, 2016

Je me souviens invites post-intermediate students of French to improve their language skills while exploring the complex history and culture of Québec.

Drawing on cultural products from the earliest days of exploration to the present day, Elizabeth Blood and J.Vincent H. Morrissette curate an array of texts that sample Québécois literature, popular culture, art, music, and politics and frame the texts with pre-reading and post-reading activities, cultural notes, and historical overview sections. The interdisciplinary approach challenges students to improve their French language skills while learning about Québec. Thematically organized writings delve into issues central to understanding the many facets of contemporary Québécois identity, while prompts direct students to search for a range of materials online. Je me souviens is an essential resource for students interested in understanding the francophone world.

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Je me souviens

Histoire, culture, et littérature du Québec francophone

Elizabeth Blood

Georgetown University Press

"With Je me souviens, Blood and Morrissette have produced a unique one-semester cultural and literary reader that will acquaint students in French with the history and contemporary issues that have made Québec the complex and fascinatingly vibrant society it is today. Even instructors already familiar with this francophone region will find selections that will engage their students' curiosity and enrich their own understanding." -- Miléna Santoro, vice-president for the Americas and Asia Pacific for the International Association for Québec Studies and associate professor of French and Québec Studies, Georgetown University

"Using an interdisciplinary approach through a variety of texts and documents, Je me souviens provides an excellent overview of Québec from different perspectives. Well organized, thought-provoking, and enriched by a wealth of illustrations, this textbook is unique for its content and will appeal to students from various backgrounds." -- Marie-Christine Weidmann Koop, professor of French, University of North Texas and past president, American Association of Teachers of French

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Jean Genet

Stephen Barber

Reaktion Books, 2004

An engaging and challenging introduction to Jean Genet, this concise biography of the French writer and his work cuts directly to the intersection of thought and life that was essential to Genet's creativity. Arguing that Genet's life was an extraordinary spectacle in which the themes of his most revolutionary works were played out, Stephen Barber gives both the work and its singular inspiration in Genet's life their full due.

Abandoned, arrested, and repeatedly incarcerated, Genet, who died in 1986, led a life that could best be described as a tour of the underworld of the twentieth century.

Similarly, Genet's work is recognized by its nearly obsessive and often savage treatment of certain recurring themes. Sex, desire, death, oppression, domination-these ideas, central to Genet's artistic project, can be seen as preoccupations that arose directly from the artist's travels, imprisonments, sexual and emotional relationships, and political engagements and protests. This trenchant volume focuses directly on the moments in Genet's life in which those preoccupations are vividly projected in his novels, theater works, and film projects.

Genet's works have been hugely influential for a vast array of writers, filmmakers, choreographers, and directors, especially at moments of social crisis; thus Genet's life is not only at the root of his own work but also that of many important artists of the twentieth century. With its frank and illuminating introduction by Edmund White, Jean Genet gives readers access to this brilliant and brutal mind.

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Jean-Claude Grumberg

Three Plays

By Jean-Claude Grumberg and Seth Wolitz

University of Texas Press, 2014

Winner of seven Molières, the Pulitzer Prize of France, Jean-Claude Grumberg is one of France’s leading dramatists and a distinguished voice of modern European Jewry after the Shoah. His success in portraying contemporary Parisian Jews on the stage represents a new development in European theater and a new aesthetic expression of European Jewish experience and sensibility of the Holocaust and its aftermath, a perspective quite different from either the American or the Israeli one. Grumberg’s Jews are French to their fingertips, yet they have been made more consciously Jewish by the war and the difficulties of reintegrating into a society in which too many neighbors denounced them or ignored their pleas to save their children. Affirming the new status of Jewish culture, Grumberg’s plays insist on the recognition of Jewish identity and uniqueness within the majority societies of Europe.

This volume offers the first English translation of three of Grumberg’s prize-winning plays: The Workplace (L’Atelier, 1979), On the Way to the Promised Land (Vers toi Terre promise, 2006) and Mama’s Coming Back, Poor Orphan (Maman revient, pauvre orphelin, 1994). Presented in the order of the history they record and steeped in Grumberg’s personal experience and insights into contemporary Parisian life, these plays serve as documentary witnesses that begin with the immediate postwar reality and continue up to the end of the twentieth century. Seth Wolitz provides notes on the plays’ themes, structures, characters, and settings, along with an introduction that discusses Grumberg’s place within the emergence of French-Jewish drama and a translation of an interview with the playwright himself.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Transparency and Obstruction

Jean Starobinski

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Jean Starobinski, one of Europe's foremost literary critics, examines the life that led Rousseau, who so passionately sought open, transparent communication with others, to accept and even foster obstacles that permitted him to withdraw into himself. First published in France in 1958, Jean-Jacques Rousseau remains Starobinski's most important achievement and, arguably, the most comprehensive book ever written on Rousseau. The text has been extensively revised for this edition and is published here along with seven essays on Rousseau that appeared between 1962 and 1970.

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Jean-Paul Sartre

Andrew Leak

Reaktion Books, 2006

“What I have just written is false. True. Neither true nor false, like everything one writes about madmen, about men.” With these sentences, Jean-Paul Sartre undermines the truthfulness of his own autobiography, Les Mots. Undeterred by such circumlocutions, Andrew Leak here cuts through Sartre’s own disavowals to unearth the man behind the literary and philosophical giant.

This biographical study integrates Sartre’s works into his personal life, revealing the intimate contexts in which his philosophy developed. From Sartre’s beginnings as a bright and precocious student, Leak explores how he struggled against the repressive strictures of bourgeois expectations, endured cruelty at the hands of schoolmates, and forged his conflicted personality within a fragmented family life. The book probes his particularly influential relationships with a range of people—from Simone de Beauvoir to Gaston Gallimard—and how Sartre was transformed by historical events, in particular his service in World War II.

Telling anecdotes, personal correspondence, and archival photographs expose how Sartre’s own challenges emerged as predominant themes in his works—such as the often blurred delineation between the real and imaginary, and his preoccupation with definitions of “madness” in the individual. Leak’s astute and provocative examination of Sartre himself challenges the philosopher’s assertion about the limits of knowledge of the other.

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Jolliet and Marquette

A New History of the 1673 Expedition

Mark Walczynski

University of Illinois Press, 2023

Often viewed in isolation, the Jolliet and Marquette expedition in fact took place against a sprawling backdrop that encompassed everything from ancient Native American cities to French colonial machinations. Mark Walczynski draws on a wealth of original research to place the explorers and their journey within seventeenth-century North America. His account takes readers among the region’s diverse Native American peoples and into a vanished natural world of treacherous waterways and native flora and fauna. Walczynski also charts the little-known exploits of the French-Canadian officials, explorers, traders, soldiers, and missionaries who created the political and religious environment that formed Jolliet and Marquette and shaped European colonization of the heartland.

A multifaceted voyage into the past, Jolliet and Marquette expands and updates the oft-told story of a pivotal event in American history.

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The Juggler

Rachilde

Hawthorne, Melanie C

Rutgers University Press, 1990

The Juggler (La Jongleuse) is a "decadent" novel that was first published in 1900. Its author, Marguerite Vallette-Eymery (1860-1953), who used the pseudonym Rachilde, was a prolific novelist (over sixty works of fiction), playwright, literary critic and reviewer, and a forceful presence in French literary society of her time. The protagonist of the novel, Eliante Donalger, is in some sense an exaggerated double for her creator--bizarre in appearance, clothing, and interests. Instinctively grasping a medical and psychological truth that the turn-of-the-century scientific world was only beginning to understand, Eliante maintains that there is nothing "natural" about human sexual expression. She claims to be in love with an inanimate (though anthropomorphic and sexually ambiguous) object, a Greek amphora, and the novel traces the rivalry between this faithful partner and an ardent human suitor, a young medical student. It is only through juggling, both literally and metaphorically, that Eliante is able to use her seductive power to maintain desire. The surprise ending challenges the limits of such power in a controversial and surprising twist. Although Rachilde's work has been neglected in the past, the women's movement and feminist criticism have stimulated renewed interest in her fiction. The Juggler is a major rediscovery.

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Julie, or the New Heloise

Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Dartmouth College Press, 1997

An elegant translation of one of the most popular novels of its time. Rousseau's great epistolary novel, Julie, or the New Heloise, has been virtually unavailable in English since 1810. In it, Rousseau reconceptualized the relationship of the individual to the collective and articulated a new moral paradigm. The story follows the fates and smoldering passions of Julie d'Etange and St. Preux, a one-time lover who re-enters Julie's life at the invitation of her unsuspecting husband, M. de Wolmar. The complex tones of this work made it a commercial success and a continental sensation when it first appeared in 1761, and its embodiment of Rousseau's system of thought, in which feelings and intellect are intertwined, redefined the function and form of fiction for decades. As the characters negotiate a complex maze of passion and virtue, their purity of soul and honest morality reveal, as Rousseau writes in his preface, "the subtleties of heart of which this work is full." A comprehensive introduction and careful annotations make this novel accessible to contemporary readers, both as an embodiment of Rousseau's philosophy and as a portrayal of the tension and power inherent in domestic life.

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