French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

by Christie McDonald (Editor), Susan Suleiman (Editor)

Overview

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture.

The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231147408
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	10/25/2010
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Christie McDonald is Smith Professor of French Language and Literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Her books include The Extravagant Shepherd: A Study of the Pastoral Vision in Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse, Dispositions on Music and Text, The Dialogue of Writing: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Literature, and The Proustian Fabric.

Susan Rubin Suleiman is C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University. Her books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, and Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The National and the Global, by Susan Rubin Suleiman and Christie McDonald
Acknowledgments
Part I. Spaces
1. Worlding Medieval French, by Sharon Kinoshita
2. "There's a New World Here": Pantagruel via Oronce Finé, by Tom Conley
3. The Global and the Figural: Early Modern Reflections on Boundary-Crossing, by Jacob Vance
4. Globality and Classicism: The Moralists Encounter the Self, by Eric Méchoulan
5. From the Rectangle to the Globe: Theater in the Ancien Régime, by Jérôme Brillaud
6. Planetary Perspectives in Enlightenment Fiction and Science, by Natasha Lee
7. Homesickness in an Expanding World: The Case of the Nineteenth-Century Lyric, by Evelyne Ender
8. Critical Conventions, Literary Landscapes, and Postcolonial Ecocriticism, by Françoise Lionnet
9. Literature, Space, and the French Nation-State After the 1950s, by Verena Andermatt Conley
10. All Over the Place: Global Women Writers and the Maghreb, by Alison Rice
Part II. Mobilities
11. Speaking the Other: Constructing Frenchness in Medieval England, by Kimberlee Campbell
12. Walking East in the Renaissance, by Philip John Usher
13. Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal, by Faith E. Beasley
14. On the Ethnographic Imagination in the Eighteenth Century, by Christie McDonald
15. The Slave Trade, La Françafrique, and the Globalization of French, by Christopher L. Miller
16. The Voyage and Its Others: Nineteenth-Century Inscriptions of Mobility, by Janet Beizer
17. Traffic in Translation: Rereading Supervielle, by Sylvia Molloy
18. From the French Roman Colonial to the Francophone Postcolonial Novel:
René Maran as Precursor, by F. Abiola Irele
19. French Literature in the World System of Translation, by Gisèle Sapiro
20. Intellectuals Without Borders, by Lawrence D. Kritzman
Part III. Multiplicities
21. Language, Literature, and Identity in the Middle Ages, by Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet
22. Negotiating with Gender Otherness: French Literary History Revisited, by Danielle Haase-Dubosc
23. Specters of Multiplicity: Eighteenth-Century Literature Revisited from the Outside In, by Yves Citton
24. Speculation and Economic Xenophobia as Literary World Systems: The Nineteenth-Century Business Novel, by Emily Apter
25. Jews and the Construction of French Identity from Balzac to Proust, by Maurice Samuels
26. Traversal of Languages: The Québecois Laboratory, by Lise Gauvin
27. Space, Identity, and Difference in Contemporary Fiction: Durgaas, Genet, Ndiaye, by Michael Sheringham
28. "Présence Antillaise": Hybridity and the Contemporary French Literary Landscape, by Mylène Priam
29. Choosing French: Language, Foreignness, and the Canon (Beckett/Némirovsky), by Susan Rubin Suleiman
Bibliography
List of Contributors, by Index, by

Editorial Reviews

In a fascinating chronological series of mental voyages beyond the usual territorial boundaries, this comprehensive and rich compendium represents the beginning of the end—or perhaps the end—of 'national' literature, while retaining the specificity of a language of expression and helping us rethink the usual paradigms of French literature 'from the outside in,' as if 'Francophonie' had always existed.

Philip Stewart

an innovative work first and foremost for reintroducing literary history as an approach to reading texts.

European Legacy - Maria Lupas

...a powerful and persuasive revision of the monumental and monolithic idea of French literature, redefined as a multifaceted process fraught with differences and contradictions and bearing the stamp of transnational movements.

French Studies - Oana Panaite

In our era of comparatism, world literature and 'littérature-monde,' cosmopolitanism, and universalism and migration, the idea of a national literature may well be obsolete. Yet this is not exactly what readers of French Global will find. Read together, these rewarding essays present a more fraught relation between the global and the national, or the local, and a more complex history leading to an accent on 'worlding' and cultural interconnections. Paradoxically, perhaps, they adumbrate a multifaceted series of specifically French conceptions of the global.

Marianne Hirsch

French Global is an invaluable text for students and scholars of French-speaking literatures and cultures.

— Arcana Albright

H-France

...a powerful and persuasive revision of the monumental and monolithic idea of French literature, redefined as a multifaceted process fraught with differences and contradictions and bearing the stamp of transnational movements.

— Oana Panaite

French Studies

French Global is an invaluable text for students and scholars of French-speaking literatures and cultures.

H-France - Arcana Albright

French Global marks a unique and innovative approach to the history of "French" literary studies. It is the great merit and originality of this volume to propose an open, cross-cultural narrative of the heterogeneity that has always been a part of French literary production. This book is a welcome reference tool that offers students of French a useful guide to an alternative reading of French literature and literary history.

Mitchell Greenberg