Tag
French Literature
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“I Will Write to Avenge My Race”: Baglin, Louis, and Ernaux on Class Transition
“When people write about the working-class world, which they rarely do, it is most often because they have left it behind,” admits Didier Eribon, in his 2009 French memoir of class transition, Returning to Reims. “They thereby contribute to perpetuating the social illegitimacy of the people they are speaking of in the very moment of…
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Proust Curious: “The Captive“
“The possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.”
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Proust Curious: “Sodom and Gomorrah”
“It was only at that moment, more than a year after her burial, because of that anachronism, which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings, that I became conscious that she was dead.”
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Proust Curious: “The Guermantes Way”
“So, too, the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one.”
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“The Lover” @40: A Roundtable
What, almost 15 years after it was a set text on an undergraduate French literature syllabus, still drew me to “The Lover?” I put this question to a group of other writers.
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Proust Curious: “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”
“Thus it can be only after one has recognized, not without having had to feel one’s way, the optical illusions of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible.”
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Proust Curious: “Swann’s Way”
“The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment. And houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”
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Making Fascism Work for Moderates
“The Southern Poverty Law Center describes The Camp of the Saints as ‘the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US.’”
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B-Sides: Georges Perec’s “W, or the Memory of Childhood”
One of the strangest, most devastating works of Holocaust literature is about games.
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Filling in Time Reading Vasily Grossman While Waiting for S
Public Books and the Sydney Review of Books have partnered to exchange a series of articles with international concerns.
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Putting French Literary History on Trial
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s Goncourt-winning novel confronts the racist history of France’s literary prizes.
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A Dad Cartoonist Travels into Factory Life
The artist comes as a class outsider to the factory, marveling at the complexity of its machinery and the dexterity and dangers of manual labor.
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France and the Question of Consent
Two memoirs trenchantly critique the ways in which France has framed sexual consent, legally and culturally, since the 1970s.
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What Will Be Impossible?
Why excavate these Reformation characters—the preacher and the werewolf—now? What do they have to teach us?
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The Murder of Theory
Reports of theory’s death have been greatly exaggerated, but new villains keep on attempting its murder. Those who would vanquish abstraction with description, trade jargon for vernacular, and discard concepts to embrace particulars have recently enjoyed easy incorporation in the university of administered instrumentality. Lately, they can welcome among their ranks contemporary novelists depicting theory…
