About the Book
Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future offers a critical reflection on some of the leading figures of twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, cinema, and philosophy. Specialists re-evaluate the historical, political, and artistic legacies of twentieth-century France and the French-speaking world, proposing new formulations of the relationships between fiction, aesthetics, and politics. This collection combines interdisciplinary scholarship, nuanced theoretical reflection, and contextualized analyses of literary, cinematic, and philosophical practices to suggest alternative critical paradigms for the twenty-first century. The contributors’ reappraisals of key writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals trace an alternative narrative of their historical, cultural, or intellectual legacy, casting a contemporary light on the aesthetic, theoretical, and political questions raised by their works. Taken as a whole, the essays generate a series of fresh perspectives on French and Francophone literary and cultural studies.
Table of Contents:
Foreword
Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Introduction
Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Chapter One. Commemorating Past History or Documenting the Persistence of Struggles?: Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, and Phil Watts as Archaeologists
Yves Citton
Chapter Two. Free Indirect, or Who is the Subject of the Work of Fiction?
Timothy Bewes
Chapter Three. Time, Sense, and the Image in Raoul Ruiz’s La Vocation Suspendue and L’Hypothèse du Tableau Volé
Giuseppina Mecchia
Chapter Four. Lévinas and Camus: Love, Literature, and Resistance
Christian C. Wood
Chapter Five. Sacrificial Filiations: The Eichmann Trial, Hannah Arendt, and the Dangers of “Monumental History”
Richard J. Golsan
Chapter Six. Linking the Aesthetic and the Political in Jean Genet: From Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs to Les nègres to the Black Panther Party
Pamela A. Pears
Chapter Seven. Torture, Terror, and Revolution under the Algerian Sun: Tragic Consciousness in Mohammed Dib’s Un été africain
Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Chapter Eight. L’Amour, La Fantasia, ou comment (ré)écrire l’histoire coloniale
Réda Bensmaïa
Chapter Nine. Desiring Anthropology. Roland Barthes’s Ethnological Temptation
Vincent Debaene
Index
About the Editor
About the Contributors
About the Author :
Rajeshwari S. Vallury is professor of French at the University of New Mexico.
Review :
Thought-provoking, challenging, controversial at times, Vallury’s edited volume presents a series of brilliant and fruitful dialogues on aesthetics and politics between philosophical discourses (from Camus and Lévinas to Deleuze) and analyses of literary fiction and criticism (Dib, Djebar, Genet, Klossowski, Barthes) as well as filmic texts (Ruiz, Straub and Huillet) that brought a significant contribution to intellectual and artistic debates during the second half of the twentieth century in the French-speaking world and beyond (Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Philip Watts, J. M. Coetzee, and Vilém Flusser).
This timely collection teases out new affinities and filiations among fiction, aesthetic form, and politics in the Francophone world. In doing so, it reminds readers that objects of the past retain clues leading us toward that which we cannot yet think. Its analyses of works by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Jacques Rancière, J.M. Coetzee, Assia Djebar, Raúl Ruiz, Mohammed Dib, Pierre Klossowksi, Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, and the Eichmann trial are broad in range and often daring in their revelation. The result is an apt tribute to the memory of Philip Watts.
