Recherche multi-critères

Reconfigurations of space in Partition novels par Sandrine Soukaï, publié le 19/09/2019

This article examines two Indian novels Clear Light of Day (1980) by Anita Desai and The Shadow Lines (1988) by Amitav Ghosh along with Burnt Shadows (2009) by Anglo-Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie, books written about the Partition of India that accompanied independence in 1947. Partition led to violence on an enormous scale; the exact number of people who were killed has never been ascertained, and estimates vary between one and two million. Partition also caused massive displacements of population, estimated between 12 and 18 million. This paper examines the way in which space – national, familial and communal – was divided and then reshaped by and through Partition. After discussing the fractures, ruptures and uprooting brought about by this trauma, I will consider the way in which diasporic writers devise fictional maps of memory of the past that foster exchanges across geographical borders.

The Gay Liberation Front and queer rights in the UK: a conversation with Jeffrey Weeks par Jeffrey Weeks, publié le 23/05/2019

Jeffrey Weeks is a gay activist and historian specialising in the history of sexuality. His work includes Socialism and the New Life (1977) and Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1977). He was invited at the LGBT Centre in Lyon to talk about his latest book What is sexual history (2016), which has been translated in French and published by the Presses Universitaires de Lyon. The discussion was moderated by Quentin Zimmerman.

We’re Going on a Bear Hunt: Traditional and Counter-traditional Aspects of a Classic Children’s Book par Véronique Alexandre, publié le 07/07/2017

The read-aloud book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, “retold” by Michael Rosen and illustrated by Helen Oxenbury designed for very young children may be unlikely teaching material for EFL students in French middle and senior schools. But if studied in conjunction with the video released by The Guardian in 2014 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the book, and if additional literary and artistic references are brought into the lesson plan, the teaching project may prove rewarding on many levels.

Morality (Adelle Waldman) par Adelle Waldman, publié le 26/08/2015

Two of my favorite authors, Jane Austen and George Eliot, are very concerned with characters’ moral lives. In “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” I look closely at how Nathaniel P. justifies his behavior to himself. Today, books or films about romantic relationships, or dating, are often seen as very light—mere amusements and escapes—but this is the area in life when most of us will reveal how we treat others: how kind we are to those we don’t (or no longer) love and how we respond when differences arise with those we do love. I wanted to write a book about relationships that was truthful without being escapist, and I wanted to look closely at how dating behavior reflects morality in the deepest sense.

The Politics of Fear par Corey Robin, publié le 19/12/2014

In my 2004 book Fear: The History of a Political Idea, I argued that “one day, the war on terrorism will come to an end. All wars do. And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear: not of terrorism or radical Islam, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind.” When I wrote “one day,” I was thinking decades, not years. I figured that the war on terror—less the invasions, wars, torture, drone attacks, and assassinations than the broader atmosphere of pervasive and militarized dread, what Hobbes called “a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known” and an enemy is perceived as permanent and irrepressible—would continue at least into the 2010s, if not the '20s. Yet even before Osama bin Laden was killed and negotiations with the Taliban had begun, it was clear that the war on terror, understood in those terms, had come to an end.

Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) par ENS Lyon La Clé des Langues, publié le 21/11/2014

Travel books were very fashionable in the eighteenth century. Real travelers sometimes included elements of fiction in their accounts of their wanderings to make them sound more exotic and interesting. In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift makes fun of this literary genre by introducing a fictitious traveler, Gulliver, who tells us about his encounters with strange creatures and countries. Gulliver's first person narrative is introduced by a fake publisher's note which is also written in the first person...

Rachel Cusk: Love narratives par Rachel Cusk, publié le 28/08/2014

If it’s true that we use narrative as a frame to make sense of the randomness of our human experience, then the story of romantic love might be seen as reflecting our profoundest anxieties about who and what we are, about what happens to us and why. The love narrative is ostensibly a story of progress, yet its true goal is to achieve an ending, a place of finality where nothing further needs to happen and the tension between fantasy and reality can cease. At the wedding of man and woman a veil is drawn, an ending arrived at: the reader closes the book, for marriage as it is lived represents the re-assertion of reality over narrative. Having committed this public act of participation and belief in the notion of life as a story, man and woman are left to order and confer meaning on their private experiences as best they can...

Notebooks (Toby Litt) par Toby Litt, publié le 03/07/2014

Chaque année, les invités des Assises Internationales du Roman rédigent la définition d'un mot de leur choix : il s'agit ici du mot "notebooks", défini par l'auteur anglais Toby Litt.

Minorities and democracy par Siddhartha Deb, publié le 17/01/2014

In 1916, the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore delivered a series of lectures that would eventually be collected into the book, Nationalism. Tagore was writing in the glow of his own celebrity (he had just won the Nobel Prize for literature) and from within the heart of the crisis engulfing the modern world, two years into the slow, grim war that had converted Europe into a labyrinth of trenches covered over with clouds of poison gas. For Tagore, this was the tragic but inevitable outcome of a social calculus that valued efficiency, profit and, especially, the spirit of us versus them that bonded together the inhabitants of one nation and allowed them to go out, conquer and enslave other people, most of them members of no nation at all.

Taking History Personnally par Cynthia Carr, publié le 12/12/2013

Two black men were lynched in Marion, Indiana, on the night of August 7, 1930. That was my father’s hometown, the town where I have my roots, and I heard this story when I was a little girl: The night it happened someone called my grandfather, whose shift at the Post Office began at three in the morning. "Don’t walk through the courthouse square tonight on your way to work," the caller said. "You might see something you don’t want to see." Apparently that was the punchline, which puzzled me. Something you don’t want to see. Then laughter. I was in my late twenties — my grandfather long dead — when I first came upon the photo of this lynching in a book. It has become an iconic image of racial injustice in America: two black men in bloody tattered clothing hang from a tree and below them stand the grinning, gloating, proud and pleased white folks.

Are You Going to Write That in Your Book? par Siddhartha Deb, publié le 03/12/2013

Born in north-eastern India in 1970, Siddhartha Deb is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors in the UK and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University. His latest book, a work of narrative nonfiction, ((The Beautiful and the Damned)), was a finalist for the Orwell Prize in the UK and the winner of the PEN Open award in the United States. His journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harpers, The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Bookforum, The Daily Telegraph, The Nation, n+1, and The Times Literary Supplement.

The Essential David Shrigley par Johanna Felter, publié le 21/05/2013

"David Shrigley is a multidisciplinary artist who started his career in the early nineties self-publishing art books containing cartoon-like drawings for which he is mainly famous. Their trademarks, which are also recognizable in his varied artistic productions – clumsy execution, sloppy handwriting, disturbing or puzzling text, dark humour and uncanny atmosphere – helped Shrigley to gradually shape a clearly distinctive personality in his work which brought him out as one of the current key figures of British contemporary art scene."

Victorian printing and William Morris’s Kelmscott Press par Laura Mingam, publié le 09/05/2013

During the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution reached the field of printing, and profoundly altered book production in England. Even though technical innovations led to the creation of dazzling volumes, the artist designer William Morris denounced the corruption of traditional printing methods. As a reaction against the standards of his time, William Morris decided to open his own printing press, with the aim of “producing [books] which would have a definite claim to beauty”. The Kelmscott Press was to become a new landmark in the history of English printing.

Going Solo par Eric Klinenberg, publié le 19/02/2013

About five years ago I started working on a book that I planned to call ALONE IN AMERICA. My original idea was to write a book that would sound an alarm about a disturbing trend: the unprecedented rise of living alone. I was motivated by my belief that the rise of living alone is a profound social change – the greatest change of the past 60 years that we have failed to name or identify. Consider that, until the 1950s, not a single human society in the history of our species sustained large numbers of people living alone for long periods of time. Today, however, living alone is ubiquitous in affluent, open societies. In some nations, one-person households are now more common than nuclear families who share the same roof. Consider America. In 1950, only 22 percent of American adults were single, and only 9 percent of all households had just one occupant. Today, 49 percent of American adults are single, and 28 percent of all households have one, solitary resident.

How Healing Are Books? par Pierre Zaoui, publié le 22/01/2013

The idea that novels, theater, or poetry often help us live, that they help us feel cleansed or feel stronger, more energized, more alive, or that they at least help us survive by giving us the boost we need to hang on a little longer, is not simply a constant topos of literature, be it western, eastern, or universal. It is an indisputable truth for those who make use of it, whether they write it, read it, comment on it, or transform it into a first-aid kid of maxim-prescriptions and citation-medicines to use as needed.

Declaration of Disinclinations par Lynne Tillman, publié le 11/12/2012

I like the theoretical ideal of neutrality, of non-hierarchical thinking. I’d like to be a writer, a person, but I am not. None of this naming is my choice. I’m a woman, “still” or I’m “only a woman.” “A good, bad woman, a silly, frivolous woman, an intelligent woman, a sweet woman, a harridan, bitch, whore, a fishmonger, gossipy woman. A woman writer.” What is “a woman writer”? Does “woman” cancel or negate “writer”? Create a different form of writer? Or does “woman” as an adjective utterly change the noun “writer”? “Man writer”? Not used. “Male writer,” rarely employed. Are there “man books” being read in “man caves?” OK, I declare: I’m a woman who writes, a person who writes. But how am I read?

Kate Colquhoun on the blurred boundaries between fiction and non-fiction par Kate Colquhoun, publié le 11/09/2012

Truman Capote called his 1966 book In Cold Blood the first non-fiction novel. Since then, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction have become increasingly blurred. Are these false definitions? At least we could say that novelists are able to articulate the internal worlds – the thoughts and feelings – of their characters while non-fiction relies entirely on evidence.

Nicholson Baker on his literary career and how he came to write about sex par Nicholson Baker, publié le 13/06/2012

I think the job of the novelist is to write about interesting things, including things that might not seem all that interesting at first glance--like, say, a lunch hour on an ordinary weekday – and to offer evidence that life is worth living. At least, that’s what I try to do – not always successfully. My first book was about a lunch hour – the second about sitting in a rocking chair holding a baby – the third about literary ambition. There was almost no sex in those three books. But I always wanted to be a pornographer – because after all sex is amazing and irrational and embarrassing and endlessly worth thinking about. My fourth book was called Vox, and it was about two strangers telling stories to each other on the phone. I decided to write it as one big sex scene, because if you’re going to do it, do it.

William Echikson évoque la culture Google et les grands projets de la firme de Mountain View par William Echikson, Gérard Wormser, publié le 13/12/2011

William Echikson est actuellement Directeur de Communication Europe de Google, après avoir été pendant 25 ans le correspondant européen du Christian Science Monitor, du Wall Street Journal et du Businessweek. Il répond aux questions de Gérard Wormser, professeur de philosopie à l'ENS de Lyon et directeur de la revue web Sens public, en passant en revue les innovations récentes et les grands projets de Google tels que Google Phones, Google Translator, Google Books, les voitures sans conducteur, ou encore le Google transparency report.

Introduction à The God of Small Things d'Arundhati Roy par Florence Labaune-Demeule, publié le 21/03/2011

The God of Small Things, roman publié en 1997, permit à son auteur, la romancière indienne Arundhati Roy, de recevoir le Booker Prize la même année. Publié dans de nombreux pays et traduit en plus de quarante langues, ce roman a été applaudi à maintes reprises par la critique, notamment en raison de l'analyse subtile des relations humaines qui y est abordée. Comme le dit A. Roy elle-même, « The book really delves, very deep I think, into human nature. The story tells of the brutality we're capable of, but also that aching, intimate love [shared by twins]. »

An interview with Virginia Heffernan on Digital Culture par Virginia Heffernan, Clifford Armion, publié le 21/02/2011

Dans cet entretien, réalisé à l'occasion de la rencontre "Web culture : nouveaux modes de connaissance, nouvelles sociabilités", organisée par la Villa Gillet, la journaliste américaine Virginia Heffernan revient sur la relation qu'entretiennent les journalistes avec internet.

Virginia Heffernan - The Digital Revolution par Virginia Heffernan, publié le 21/02/2011

Virginia Heffernan, journaliste, tient la rubrique « The Medium », consacrée à la web culture, dans le New York Times Magazine. Dans son prochain livre, The Pleasures of the Internet, elle porte un regard d'esthète sur le web qu'elle considère comme une œuvre d'art collective, véhicule d'expériences sensorielles fortes. Son approche unique nous permet de mieux appréhender le potentiel culturel des nouvelles technologies. Ce texte a été écrit à l'occasion d'une rencontre organisée par la Villa Gillet autour de la "webculture : nouveaux modes de connaissance, nouvelles sociabilités".

The Intensification of Punishment from Thatcher to Blair: From conservative authoritarianism to punitive interventionism par Emma Bell, publié le 12/03/2010

Emma Bell is a Senior Lecturer in British Studies at Savoie University (Chambéry). Her research focuses on contemporary British penal policy. She will be publishing a book on the subject entitled Criminal Justice and Neoliberalism at the end of 2010 with Palgrave Macmillan.

The spoken word and the written word in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies par Catherine Pesso-Miquel, publié le 16/10/2009

This article analyses the construction of voices in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies, in which the paradoxical relationship between printed signs on a page and phonemes uttered by human bodies is fore-grounded. Auster revels in creating lively dialogues that are carefully inscribed within a particular voice through the use of didascalia, but he also celebrates the physicality and euphony of a narrative voice which navigates between elegiac lyricism and sharp-witted humour. The Brooklyn Follies, like all Auster’s books, is a book about books, but this one is also a book about tales and story-telling, about speech and silence, and the very American tradition of tall tales.

Fiche de lecture : The Bear Boy, Cynthia Ozick par Anne Musset, publié le 07/05/2008

The story is set in the outskirts of the Bronx in 1935. Rose Meadows, orphaned at the age of 18, becomes an assistant to Professor Mitwisser, a specialist of a 9th-century heretic Jewish sect. Professor Mitwisser, his wife (a renowned physicist but now a near-madwoman) and their five children are German refugees who survive thanks to their young benefactor James A’Bair. James is heir to the fortune amassed by his father, who took him as a model for a very popular series of children’s books called The Bear Boy. James is extremely wealthy but troubled, dispossessed of his identity. He leads a nomadic life and his latest whim is to support the Mitwisser family. Rose enters into this chaotic household, which becomes even more unstable with the arrival of James. Very soon this little precarious world verges on disaster.

Fiche de lecture : Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen par Mélanie Roche, publié le 03/05/2008

Cohen's poetry – the title of the book makes no mystery of it – deals essentially with longing: longing for women, for God, or simply truth. What emerges from the whole book is the idea of an irretrievable loss. From the beginning, we learn that in spite of the author's retreat on Mount Baldy, enlightenment has hardly touched him: he has found neither God nor any essential truth.