Fin de millénaire French Fiction: The Aesthetics of Crisis - Rilegato

Cruickshank, Ruth

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0199571759 ISBN 13: 9780199571758

Casa editrice: OUP Oxford, 2009

Riassunto

The turn of the millennium in France coincided with a number of tangible crises and apocalyptic discourses, and with the growth of the mass media and global market, further generating and manipulating crisis. In this original, wide-ranging but closely analytical study, Cruickshank contextualizes and reads the work of four influential writers of prose fiction ―- Angot, Echenoz, Houellebecq, and Redonnet ―- teasing out each one's response to this convergence. She suggests that the recurrent fictional and cultural trope of the turning point has both aesthetic and critical potential. Bringing together analyses spanning literature, thought, and culture, she identifies and critiques the ways in which, on the eve of the twenty-first century, different theoretical and fictional approaches confront the manipulation of crisis discourses. Drawing on a 'long twentieth century' of crisis thinking, Cruickshank counters the perception that a postmodern model of perpetual crisis is culturally dominant, and establishes instead a new critical framework with which to respond to the fin de millénaire aesthetics of crisis.

Through patient and illuminating readings, Cruickshank demonstrates how prose fictions afford critical purchase on the global market, and on French co-implication in it. She identifies how the four contrasting writers reflect, perpetuate, and challenge the misogyny and symbolic violence of late capitalism. Fin de millénaire prose fiction emerges as both problematic and problematizing, bespeaking the need to intervene in debates about the mass media, neoliberalism, global market economics, and sexual and postcolonial identities, while also demonstrating the enduring agency ― critical and creative ― of literature itself.

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Recensione:

To prepare for the discussion of these writers she begins with a brilliantly informed analysis of the 'long twentieth-century', concentrating on the last twenty years. She engages with the major topics of recent concern: the absence of the grand écrivain, the increased sensitivity towards violence against women, l'exception française, the rise and perhaps decline of feminism, and crisis manipulation by the media and trendy intellectuals. These pages display a combination of impressive research and remarkably clear synthesis. Her findings enable her to demonstrate that 'the defining features of the fin de millénaire French literary field are heterogeneity and competing crisis discourses' (p. 60), thus giving the lie to recent claims that France's literary and intellectual life has been enduring a period of prolonged hibernation. This section highlights Cruickshank's considerable gifts as a cultural historian. (French Studies)

L'autore:

Ruth Cruickshank is Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. She was educated at the University of Leeds and at Lady Margaret Hall and the Queen's College, Oxford. Her research investigates how post-war French writers, filmmakers, and thinkers respond to, resist, and contribute to the development of consumer culture in France. She investigates the political and aesthetic potential of turn-of-the-millennium French prose fiction; and the ways in which representations of food and drink in literature, cinema, and thought elucidate the relationship between aesthetic developments, consumption, and identity narratives in post-war France. She has written on Ernaux, Houellebecq, and Redonnet; on representations of food, drink, and consumption in the cinema of the Trente Glorieuses, Claire Denis, and Agnès Varda; and on globalization and symbolic violence in recent filmic images of Paris.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: OUP Oxford
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0199571759
• ISBN 13: 9780199571758
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 304