Faculty Bookshelf
New and Forthcoming Releases, listed by Authors |
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A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry |
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Thomas M. Kavanagh |
| Dice, Cards, Wheels argues that the ways people gambled tell us something otherwise unrecognized about the values, conflicts, and cultures that defined a period or class. This study examines a series of flash points, significant intersections of a game and its literary representation, that show how gambling's dialectic between the random and the determined puts in play the ethical, economic and cultural conflicts that define a period. Bodel's dicing in a medieval tavern for the conversion of the Moslem world, Pascal's post-Reformation redefinition of salvation as the gambler's prize, the aristocratic libertine's celebration of the bluff, Balzac's submersion of the gambler in the debris of history, Barbey’s portrayal of the whist player as the new aristocrat of mystery, Bourget's baccarat as the discovery of a self that can never be avowed, and the casino's deployment of metaphoric space all show how French culture has responded to the challenge of understanding what identity, responsibility and freedom can mean in a world ruled largely by chance. | |
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Compris entre la critique littéraire et les nouveaux jeux esthétiques la question de l’identité et la subjectivité en littérature sollicite sans cesse de nouvelles lectures. Les effets de la poétique sur l’autobiographi et sur l’histoire, par exemple, ouvrent tout grand les débats sur le langage, et ce à une époque où identité et subjectivité deviennent des concepts de plus en plus flottants. Pas question donc de tradition, de mimétisme, ni de chapelle littéraire. Il s’agit plutôt de réflechir sur une transmutation ou une élaboration d’une pensée mise en texte par la nécessité la plus urgente. Les quatres auteurs étudiés ici, Michaux, Jacob, Cracq er Tournier illustrent la position du créateur face à la question lancinante de l’être et du sujet. Il est donc essentiel de repenser à neuf la relation de la subjectivité à celle de la poétique et du temps. Le mystère de l’écriture s’impose plus que jamais aujourd’hui en se réappropriant l’interrogation philosophique : à qui a-t-on à faire quant on dit je? |
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Christopher Miller The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade |
The French slave trade forced more than one million Africans across the Atlantic to the islands of the Caribbean. It enabled France to establish Saint-Domingue, the single richest colony on earth, and it connected France, Africa, and the Caribbean permanently. Yet the impact of the slave trade on the cultures of France and its colonies has received surprisingly little attention. Until recently, France had not publicly acknowledged its history as a major slave-trading power. The distinguished scholar Christopher L. Miller proposes a thorough assessment of the French slave trade and its cultural ramifications, in a broad, circum-Atlantic inquiry. This magisterial work is the first comprehensive examination of the French Atlantic slave trade and its consequences as represented in the history, literature, and film of France and its former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. Miller offers a historical introduction to the cultural and economic dynamics of the French slave trade, and he shows how Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire mused about the enslavement of Africans, while Rousseau ignored it. He follows the twists and turns of attitude regarding the slave trade through the works of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century French writers, including Olympe de Gouges, Madame de Staël, Madame de Duras, Prosper Mérimée, and Eugène Sue. For these authors, the slave trade was variously an object of sentiment, a moral conundrum, or an entertaining high-seas “adventure.” Turning to twentieth-century literature and film, Miller describes how artists from Africa and the Caribbean—including the writers Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, and Edouard Glissant, and the filmmakers Ousmane Sembene, Guy Deslauriers, and Roger Gnoan M’Bala—have confronted the aftermath of France’s slave trade, attempting to bridge the gaps between silence and disclosure, forgetfulness and memory.
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Jean-Jacques Poucel Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory The University of North Carolina Press |
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Maurice Samuels |
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