Francophone Literature as World Literature

by Christian Moraru (Editor), Nicole Simek (Editor), Bertrand Westphal (Editor)

Overview

Francophone Literature as World Literature examines French-language works from a range of global traditions and shows how these literary practices draw individuals, communities, and their cultures and idioms into a planetary web of tension and cross-fertilization.

The Francophone corpus under scrutiny here comes about in the evolving, markedly relational context provided by these processes and their developments during and after the French empire. The 15 chapters of this collection delve into key aspects, moments, and sites of the literature flourishing throughout the francosphere after World War II and especially since the 1980s, from the French Hexagon to the Caribbean and India, and from Québec to the Maghreb and Romania. Understood and practiced as World Literature, Francophone literature claims--with particular force in the wake of the littérature-monde debate--its place in a more democratic world republic of letters, where writers, critics, publishers, and audiences are no longer beholden to traditional centers of cultural authority.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501347153
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	06/25/2020
Series:	Literatures as World Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	617 KB

About the Author

Christian Moraru is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. His recent publications include Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011) and Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015). He is co-editor of Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College, USA. Her publications include Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life (2016) and Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation (2008).

Bertrand Westphal is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Limoges, France. His recent publications include L'œil de la Méditerranée. Une odyssée littéraire (2005), Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (trans. 2011), A Plausible World (trans. 2013), and La cage des méridiens. Le roman et l'art contemporain face à la globalisation (2016).
Christian Moraru is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. His recent publications include Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011), Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015), Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary (Bloomsbury, 2023).
Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA. Her latest books include Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life (2016) and Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Condé and the Ethics of Interpretation (2008). She is also co-editor of Francophone Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020) and translator of Maryse Condé's The Belle Créole (2020)
Bertrand Westphal is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Limoges, France. His latest publications include Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (trans. 2011), A Plausible World (trans. 2013), La cage des méridiens. Le roman et l'art contemporain face à la globalisation (2016), and Atlas des égarements. Etudes géocritiques (2019). Founder of geocriticism, he specializes in world literature, postmodernism, and the interplay of art and literary cartographies.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Reading Francophone Literature with the World
Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, and Bertrand Westphal
Part I Systems and Institutions of Literary Francophonie: Language, Written Culture, and the Publishing World
1. African Literature, World Literature, and Francophonie
Bertrand Westphal (University of Limoges, France)
2. Francophone African Publishing and the Misconceptions of World Literature
Raphaël Thierry (University of Mannheim, Germany)
3. Malinke, French, Francophonie: African Languages in World Literature
Bi Kacou Parfait Diandué (Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire)
4. Globalizing the Spiritual and the Mythological: Indian Writing in French from Pondicherry
Vijaya Rao (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Part II Francophone Spatialities: Cities, Landscapes, Environments
5. Mapping World Literature from Below: Tierno Monénembo and City Writing
Eric Prieto (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
6. Questions of Diversity in the Global Literary Ecology and banlieue Literature
Laura Reeck (Allegheny College, USA)
7. As the World Falls Apart: Living through the Apocalypse in Christian Guay-Poliquin's Le poids de la neige and Catherine Mavrikakis's Oscar de Profundis
Vincent Gélinas-Lemaire (University of British Columbia, Canada)
8. Poetry in the World: Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and the Language of Landscape
Jane Hiddleston (University of Oxford, UK)
Part III Relational Identities: Sex, Gender, and Class in Francophone World Arenas
9. World Literature, littérature-monde, and the Politics of Difference
Thérèse Migraine-George (University of Cincinnati, USA)
10. Queer Desire on the Move: Resistance to Homoglobalization in World Literature in French
Jarrod Hayes (Monash University, Australia)
11. Locations of Identity: Littérature-mondaine and the Ethics of Class in Evelyne Trouillot's Le Rond-point
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles (Boston College, USA)
Part IV Francophone Literature and Planetary Intertexts
12. Writing French in the World: Transnational Identities and Transcultural Ideals in the Works of Michel Houellebecq and Boualem Sansal
Jacqueline Dutton (University of Melbourne, Australia)
13. Literature's Purchase: Remaking World Economic Relations in Crusoe's Footsteps
Nicole Simek (Whitman College, USA)
14. Worlding Négritude, or Aimé Césaire's Global Caliban
Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College, USA)
15. From Postmodern Intertextuality to “Decomposed Theater”: Matei Visniec between Romanian and Francophone Literatures
Emilia David (University of Pisa, Italy)
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

Francophone Literature as World Literature revisits a fruitful paradigm in modern literary criticism in the light of crosspollinations in various francophone areas. This rich collection of essays renews epistemological frameworks by exploring borderlands in four directions: systems and institutions, spatialities, relational identities, and planetary intertexts. It also carries on the discussion about 'worlding' ('faire-monde') in a ecological perspective for languages and literatures in the French Caribbean, Subsaharian Africa, India, North America, and Central-Eastern Europe.
Catherine Mazauric, Professor of Contemporary Francophone Literature, Aix Marseille University, France

An important contribution to the lively and ongoing debate on what constitutes World Literature in French as well as a global mapping of its institutional, spatial and identity positionalities, Francophone Literature as World Literature is an original volume offering diverse approaches that are theoretically rigorous and planetary in scope.
Women in French Studies

This fascinating and timely book is distinguished not just by the scholarly caliber of its contributors but by the range of its approaches, the breadth of its concerns, and the quality of its writing.
Patrick McGuinness, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Oxford, UK

From the Publisher