French Cultural Studies

This chapter examines the international influence of Pierre Boulez and Pierre Schaeffer, two outstanding figures of French contemporary culture, from a rather unexplored prism, namely, that of their respective roles in the decolonization of French diplomacy during the central decades of the past century. More specifically, it aims to ascertain to what extent, if any, Boulez and Schaeffer’s possible contributions to the decolonization of French diplomacy and culture may be explained—beyond their personal views and intellectual dispositions—in terms of their interaction with the various institutional contexts and material infrastructures and artifacts in which they were involved over the course of their long professional careers. In so doing, this study contends that diplomacy operates through countless practices, observable not only at ministerial headquarters and embassies or international governmental summits but also in a variety of sites, including radio stations and concert halls. The argument this chapter aims to put forth is that the variety of infrastructures and artifacts in which the activities of these two singular personalities were embedded had an additional political effect that reverberates in the wider cultural and political context, facilitating either the continuity of the existing power relations or conversely creating the basis for its subsequent contestation. Despite the participation of Boulez in some important mobilizations in favor of Algerian independence, his combination of sharp modernism as composer and his careful cultivation of European classical music tradition in his role as conductor may be understood as a supreme form of Western cultural rationalism perfectly compatible with a merely superficial reformulation of colonial mentality in comfortable continuity with its corresponding diplomatic inertia. Conversely, Schaeffer’s radical attempt to redefine the frontiers between music and sound, combined with his involvement in different professional capacities—including colonial administration—as an expert in the politics of broadcasting, worldwide and more specifically in Africa, entailed a somewhat paternalistic but real engagement with the course of events that finally were conducive to the decolonization of French diplomacy.

Over 50 years have passed since the 17 October 1961 massacre and, though the event has gained wider recognition, it still occupies a tenuous place in French history. Scholars have turned to fictional literary and filmic representations of the massacre that have appeared since the 1980s, but have largely overlooked its commemoration in music. In this essay, the author analyses two works: French rapper Me ́dine’s song ‘17 octobre’ (2006), which reimagines the massacre from the perspective of a witness who dies, and an Internet montage video (2008) which sets Me ́dine’s song to archival and non-archival video clips. Both the song and montage highlight the limits of official historical discourse through a variety of practices, including manipulating perspective, sampling and putting 17 October into dialogue with other obscured histories. The historical and historiographical work these texts accomplish illustrates the potential of such media to construct a postmemorial archive that blurs boundaries between archive and fiction, creative works and history.

In the 20th century, jazz music spread throughout global culture like few other musical forms. Over the 40-year period in which jazz was assimilated into French culture, myths about the origin of jazz played an important role in the discourse surrounding the music. By examining both how these myths functioned in the discourse and examining how they changed over time depending on cultural circumstances, this article shows how writers increasingly used jazz etiologies and writing on the importance of New Orleans to the history of jazz to bridge the cultural gap and to make a French connection with jazz music, so that the enjoyment of it could be experienced as authentically French. From early abstract expressivist origins, to the latter strategic deployment of these myths as a feature of New Orleans revivalism, this discourse played an important role in the integration of jazz into French cultural identity.

This article uses the controversy sparked by the 2012 California foie gras ban as springboard for conceptualizing French and Francophone objections to US cultural imperialism and the so-called " obesity epidemic. " In particular, it explores the controversial practice of force-feeding or gavage as a way of examining how ideas about feeding and fattening animalize fat people in subtle ways. It argues that, as a form of consumption involving asymmetrical (and often sexualized, racialized and classed) relations of power, the logic of gavage invokes a plurality of practices for different ends – interpersonal as well as intrapersonal, cultural and cross-cultural – that frame the collective body of " America " as a fattened, but also fattening, " beast. " By probing the complex and unstable network of relationships that gavage signifies and enacts, it shows that animalized representations of the fat American pivots on issues germane to many discussions of " obesity " in general.

This article will examine representations of the Liberation of France in the war reports of Lee Miller, an accredited photographer and correspondent for American and British Vogue during the Second World War. Miller’s frontline reports framed Liberation France in idealised images of feminine beauty and elegance, making use of fashion as a primary conduit for understanding the war and occupation for readers on the home front. As this article will argue, examining Miller’s choices and perspective as a female photographer sheds new light on the intersection of fashion, war photography and the female body. In Miller’s work, fashion becomes a site for imagining liberation in ways that foreground the gendering of war experience and the legacies of conflict for women. By charting Miller’s representations of French women at the Liberation, and above all the chastised figure of the femme tondue, this article will analyse how French women function as carriers of multiple messages about war, l...

Cet article propose une lecture de trois films, Delicatessen de Jeunet et Caro, Le Ventre de l’architecte de Peter Greenaway et Dans ma peau de Marina de Van. Il étudie le corps tel qu’il y est pensé en s’appuyant sur la thèse de Nancy selon laquelle on ne peut toucher le corps qu’avec « l’incorporel du sens » et que le corps sert d’«archi-tectonique » de ce sens. Partant de l’idée d’un corps opérationnel, l’article examine d’abord la problématique de l’appropriation d’une entité étrangère à travers le discours ; puis il se penche sur quelques cas d’échec de l’extension du corps par le langage ; enfin, il revient sur l’idée que, le discours corpologique ne pouvant qu’effleurer son objet, il devient un commentaire agrammatical sur sa propre quasi-impossibilité, donc un discours prenant ses distances par rapport à son propre monolinguisme.

This paper considers two very different 1960s adaptations of the Carmen narrative − 1-2-3-4 ou Les Collants noirs (1962) and Carmen 63 (1963) − to show how they articulate common social and political concerns. The first of these, common to many of the Carmen films, is the fear of women’s increasing independence, linked to the development of the post-war consumer culture. The second is a converging concern with the Algerian War, hidden deep in the films, but emerging symptomatically through, amongst other features, the choice of star in one of the films (Jacques Charrier), the fear of the ‘foreign’, and the dilution of Carmen as a nineteenth-century French heritage icon.

Michel Houellebecq’s cultural transgressions are widely recognised in media and criticism as contributing to his renown as an author today. The deeper significance of cultural transgressions in Houellebecq’s work is a rich seam for exploration, which was undertaken during a symposium on 29 September 2018. This article traces the conceptualisation of our approach and develops a framework for understanding transgression in the context of Houellebecq’s work. It then introduces six of the papers presented at the symposium which examine the notion of transgression not only as the process of crossing social and generic boundaries, but also as a means of assuming and overcoming the constraints placed upon contemporary literary works. Rather than assigning Houellebecq to a given artistic, cultural or political viewpoint, we ask what we can learn from Houellebecq’s cultural transgressions.

In this article, I examine Charlie Hebdo, under the editorship of Philippe Val from 1994 to 2005, and how it reported on themes related to Islam and Muslims, both in France and abroad, particularly in relation to the satanic breasts controversy and the Hebron massacre in 1994, the Kosovo war, 9/11, and the 2005 banlieues riots in France. I argue that despite the plurality of voices within the magazine, Val succeeded through his editorial line to establish and promote a link between antisemitism and Muslims and produce a narrative that harbours Islamophobia. By conflating Arabs and Muslims, pro-Palestinianism and postcolonialism, and by arguing that anti-Semitism is inherent in Islam, Val sowed the first seeds of Islamophobia in Charlie Hebdo’s editorial line as early as 1994. This reached its culmination first in 9/11 then in the Mohamed caricatures, and has consistently and irreversibly continued to shape the magazine’s ethos.

The terrorist atrocities perpetrated against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015 led to a national and international outpouring of anger and solidarity with the victims. This solidarity came to be expressed most clearly via the social media hashtag #JeSuisCharlie which spread across networks such as Facebook and Twitter in the hours and days after the shootings. In the first part of this article, I explore how the ‘Je suis Charlie’ slogan was not universally accepted, and how it was problematic for individuals to express themselves if they condemned the terrorist attacks but did not want to proclaim ‘Je suis Charlie’. The second and main part of the article will focus in particular on the freedom of thought of certain intellectuals, whose voices have arguably been sidelined and discredited in the wake of the attacks because their analysis of events did not correspond to the logic of the ‘Je suis Charlie’ response.

Michael Haneke's Caché/Hidden (2005) has generated a level of critical discussion that has quickly established the film as a defining work of early twenty-first century French cinema. Noticeably absent from this wealth of analysis is an examination of how Caché's formal experimentation with surveillance technology directly informs its treatment of the political and ethical issues of postcolonialism. Drawing from the practices of 1960s ‘surveillance art’, as well as the CCTV aesthetic of reality television, this article addresses this critical gap by focusing on how Caché's filmic apparatus captures the alienation of emotion from phenomenological experience. Caché presents an alternative to Foucault's visual economy of self-regulation (panopticisme) in that its protagonist Georges internalizes the disinterested and subject-less gaze of the ever-present camera rather than the interested gaze of the prison guard. This process results in a state of emotional indifference: Georges is an unmoved witness to traumatic events as well as his own history. In Caché, Haneke shows how this indifference helps produce the stratification and paranoia of a postcolonial society.

Résumé Des pièces comme Incendies permettent de libérer des voix silencieuses afin qu’elles puissent raconter des histoires de peine et de souffrance, et le théâtre donne un espace sûr pour présenter ces histoires. L’analyse suivante explore le comportement énigmatique de la protagoniste Nawal et cherche à expliquer pourquoi elle a choisi de s’éloigner de son monde et de vivre en silence. Il y a deux côtés à Nawal. Dans son pays natal, elle est une combattante qui ne recule devant rien. Au Canada, toutefois, Nawal est le contraire. Elle apparaît comme timide et effacée. Le silence dans la pièce revêt de nombreuses formes qui méritent une attention particulière et une analyse poussée. En outre, on peut trouver dans ce silence des dichotomies qui cherchent la réconciliation. La lentille à travers laquelle l’analyse est présentée souligne l’importance que les récits de difficultés et de souffrance soient racontés par ceux qui ont un lien direct avec leur propre histoire.

Drawing on a wide range of Francophone and Anglophone writing by critics such as Bazin (1995), Boucher (1998), Huq (2006) and Mitchell (2001), this article explores how the music of the multi-ethnic French band Zebda examines issues of citizenship and belonging in suburban France. It focuses on local, national and transnational identities as well as issues of difference, discrimination and exclusion. Zebda's music in general will be situated in relation to relevant musical and sociological contexts, before a specific song is analysed in depth. The song in question is J'y suis j'y reste (" I'm here I'm staying here "), which exemplifies how Zebda's music has engaged with issues such as discrimination, racism and integration. The article shows how the song's lyrics and music reflect Zebda's hybrid identities and a desire to challenge French Republican concepts of nationhood. It argues that J'y suis j'y reste highlights several of the key issues that gave rise to the autumn 2005 unrest in suburban France, and provides a vibrant example of political engagement within contemporary French popular music.

in H Dauncey and S. Cannon, Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno. Culture, Identity and Society, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, pp.57-75. ISBN 0-7546-0849-2.

Abstract:
The relationship between on the one side the music industry and the musical audience and on the other the broadcasting media in France is in a sense similar to other countries: music is used especially by the young initially as a defining feature of a sub-culture that gives them identity. Radio in particular meshes into this in so far as recorded music is a relatively cheap staple diet of radio programming aimed at the adolescent audience and young adults. Equally, but serving a different psycho-social function, music is a staple part of programming on radio stations serving an older audience, whether these stations be monothematic, bi-thematic or multi-thematic. Thus radio also provides free advertising for the music recording industry, which takes a keen interest in any regulation affecting this relationship. As regards television, the deregulation of broadcasting (that came later in France than in comparable western countries) allied with the growth of cable TV networks and satellite channels and their subsequent digitalisation (which came earlier than in other European countries), have encouraged the creation of many new thematic channels, including music channels. As in Holland, for example, the indigenous French music channels compete with the global channel MTV for the youth audience. What is different about France is the complicating factor of linguistic protectionism that is the public policy manifestation of the link between the French language and national cultural identity. Whereas young people have since the 1960s been fascinated by American culture and especially American music, French elites, both conservative and radical, have been suspicious of it. Direct condemnation of 'Anglo-Saxon' cultural imperialism may have given way more recently to a more veiled anti-Americanism in the form of attacks on globalisation in the name of protecting French and other particularisms. Such has been the backdrop to French government introduction of protectionist measures affecting, in particular, radio. Fears in the 1990s that French song (and consequently the French music industry) was in danger of being swamped in a tidal wave of Anglo-American products dominating radio play-lists led directly to the imposition of linguistic broadcasting quotas limiting radio and television stations' musical programming freedom - measures that have proved controversial, difficult to enforce and of unpredictable effect.

Introduction: Music, both popular and ‘serious’, has of course been present on French radio and television since the very earliest days of both media. Entertainment, musical or otherwise, alongside news and information, and the educational functions of the transmission of culture, has been an important mission associated with both broadcasting media in France as in other western countries. And a major element of the western entertainment tradition is of course popular music. While the technology associated with broadcasting has been commonly available in the developed economies of Western Europe and North America at more or less the same time, French society and politics have developed differently from their neighbours. A major distinction between France and Britain for instance has been, firstly, the role of the State within society, in this context in controlling, restricting and regulating broadcasting systems, and, secondly, governmental attitudes to an independent commercial sector providing competition to the public service tradition. Recently, as globalisation has tended to erode national autonomy in broadcasting systems and to threaten national cultural identity, and since global culture has been purveyed mainly by English-speaking cultural phenomena and multinational businesses whose ideological home is often perceived as being in the United States of America, a further French ‘exception’ has been a concern to protect the position of the French language within France and the world. This concern that has taken political form in the shape of a protectionist policy towards French cultural productions and the national media that transmit them. Hence, the French film and cinema industry, and French popular music industry and the broadcasting of French popular song, for instance, have, in the one case, been the subject of international trade negotiations to prevent the import of cultural productions being treated like cars or bars of soap, and in the other, subject to legally enforced quotas to limit competition from American or British popular music. While some of these themes are relevant to both media and the ways in which popular music is treated by them, this chapter will deal separately with radio and then television, looking first at the chronologically earlier medium, that of radio.

full-text is in the link below

This article deals with the educational ideas and practices of the Orange-Nassau family over 120 years. Based on archival documents, mostly unpublished, it traces the relationship between the parents, the tutors and the children, while accessing various influences on the education of the future stadtholder. Particular attention is given to the reconstruction of the study programme and hierarchy.

Du croquis à la peinture à l’huile, restées à l’état original ou diffusées par l’intermédiaire de la gravure, seules ou en conjonction avec le récit viatique, les images du voyage en Orient véhiculent une image riche en contrastes et souvent ambivalente. Au siècle des Lumières, de l’Acropole et des Pyramides d’Égypte aux vestiges de l’Empire byzantin et aux prestiges de la Cour ottomane, il s’agit d’autant d’images apparemment disparates, mais qui proposent un regard nouveau sur l’Orient méditerranéen. Source d’inspiration et de réflexion pour les artistes et les architectes, les images viatiques, qui alimentèrent les débats artistiques de l’époque, sont un ensemble précieux et irremplaçable pour le géographe, l’historien, l’ethnologue et le littéraire. Dans une approche thématique de l’Orient méditerranéen, cet ouvrage traite successivement du paysage, de l’histoire naturelle, des vestiges antiques, de l’architecture moderne et des populations. Il s’attarde, en outre, sur les analogies, les divergences et la complémentarité des images viatiques françaises avec celles d’autres voyageurs notamment britanniques. Si l’iconographie viatique du XVIIIe siècle a repris et développé des stéréotypes existants, elle fut le témoignage d’un orientalisme précoce, original, coloré d’anciennes rêveries sur l’Orient des merveilles renouvelées par la civilisation ottomane et procurant aux restes de la Belle Antiquité le vernis de la nostalgie.

In this article we argue that in France one can identify work that corresponds to the key strands of socio-legal research in Anglo-American societies but that`socio-legal' as a category of research and scholarship does not have the presence it has in the United Kingdom. French law faculties continue to be strongly shaped by a traditional disciplinary orthodoxy rooted in a highly and distinctively structured form of doctrinal analysis. In the first part, we explain the relatively limited presence of socio-legal studies in French law faculties in terms of the historical and institutional mechanisms by which disciplinary closure has been created and maintained around traditional orthodoxies. In the second part, we trace the presence - predominantly outside law faculties - of significant fragments of socio-legal practice in the scholarship of law and allied disciplines.

Heading for the Pompidou Arts Centre through the Place Edmond-Michelet (1) in mid-afternoon in the 1990s, you may have started to make a detour around a large and appreciative circle of people intent on some performance on an imaginary stage, with members of the general public filling all the roles, under the direction of the prince of Parisian street theatre, John Guez (he pronounces the Z).

At other times of day, access to Beaubourg through this unprepossessing pedestrian precinct,  is disrupted only by the occasional motorised city street-cleaning device.  But at three o'clock a dark-suited Parisian of 40 or so years will have unobtrusively deposited his rucksack on a convenient concrete bollard, extracted from it a home-made conductor's baton, cajoled the quickly growing crowd into a rough circle and, as if by magic, created a theatre.  Should you stop, you may see him strike the "trois coups" on a near-by sapling, direct a member of the audience to pull an imaginary rope to raise the curtain on whatever background he chooses to inject into your imagination, and the show begins, with Guez, like a conjuror pulling rabbits out of a hat, producing actors out of ordinary people who thought they were merely passers-by or tourists.  As the ubiquitous metteur-en-scène and prompt rolled into one, now coaxing now threatening, using his one prop now as a sword, now as the aerial of a walkie-talkie to call in his own imaginary security force, having sometimes in mid-spectacle to bring on an "understudy" as one of his actors melts back into the crowd, he manages the tour-de-force of playing every role himself and yet none of the roles, integrating the occasional spontaneous inventions of his cast into his own "text".

The story, whether Red Riding Hood or Les Misérables is merely a skeleton upon which, depending on the serendipity of talents and origins of that day's participants, Guez improvises topical allusions and socio-political commentary.

Just as it is difficult to categorize the work of Guez in terms of the type of culture in which he is operating, it is also impossible to use the traditional criteria to judge him as an artist, since his creative work is by its very nature intangible and transient.  Herein lies the difficulty in measuring his achievement.  One cannot, even if one recorded his "material", judge the performance (whether of Guez or of his random collaborators) by the same aesthetic standards that one might use to judge a film, or a stage performance which follows a written text, since the surface production is less important than the relationships established and the psychological impact on his "audience".  His achievement is more akin to that of psychiatrists in their relationship with their patient.  The effect of psychiatrists cannot be judged solely on their output of words, nor even on the output of words from the patient, but from the relationship established and the inner effect on the patient's personality or mental and emotional state. 

This problem of evaluation also finally links Guez to new cultural theorists and practitioners who refuse to restrict their yardstick of success in cultural activity to a judgment of the quality of an end-product, but who measure achievement in terms of the process of involvement of people in creative activity, at whatever level, even that of the interactive street busker.

Twin tales are short on survivors. On the one hand is the threat of implosion; on the other, outsiders can shatter the twin relationship. This fine line is walked by Quentin and Antoine, the protagonists of Pascal Alex Vincent’s Donne-moi la main (2008), who hitchhike from France to Spain to attend their mother’s funeral. Vincent’s film is both a twin tale and a road movie. In this mix, there is the potential for generic conflict since, in contrast to the claustrophobia of the twin relationship, the road movie emphasises a mobility which is emancipatory. Drawing on the work of Juliana de Nooy and on theory relating to the road movie, this article examines how Vincent’s film juggles the restrictions of the twin tale with the freedom of the road. In doing so, it questions the extent to which the road movie might offer liberation from hegemonic masculinity for its protagonists.

The 2008 restoration of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's recorded voice from 1860 has rekindled old debates over the "true" origins of sound reproduction. Although Charles Cros submitted his design for the paléophone to the Académie des Sciences on 30 April 1877, they did not open it until 3 December. In the meantime, Thomas Edison produced a working model of his own phonograph. For many, the dispossession of Cros' glory placed French national identity at stake. In this article, I draw from neglected primary sources and hyper-contemporary works of fiction to show how Cros has alternately been erased and glorified as a national hero and mythical inventor. As three distinct waves of attention reveal, no matter if Cros is celebrated or ridiculed, defeat remains his inescapable legacy. Given the fact that attention to Cros persists even after the First Sounds initiative crowned Scott as the earliest recorded human voice in history, I argue that it is therefore Cros' loss of glory that is most intensely felt by the French through time, marking their relationship to the birth of the music industry as a "national tragedy."

Raymond Aron (1905-1983) has been the subject of numerous studies, yet he has rarely been discussed as a theorist of empires, imperialisms, and colonies. Aron is interesting in the context of the present volume’s interrogation of German and U.S. imperialism as a theorist of imperialism whose work was informed by the neo-historicist epistemology of Weimar-era social science. This chapter argues that Aron is interesting in theoretically as a critic of theories that reduce empire to capitalism or economics and of explanations of imperialism based on the assumption of rational decision-making. Aron’s studies of colonialism and empire are also exemplary in their combination of social theory with close attention to complex conjunctures of political events and moment-to-moments changes. His work on empires is a historical sociology of geopolitical change.

Conjuring up the image of the medieval buildings in the cradle of the capital of France triggers reflection on the nature of its lost religious and cultural legacy both in the material and spiritual aspect. It also evokes thoughts on the ideological significance of its – no longer existing – sacral architecture, which stood out from other buildings on the island. The temples were important not only from the religious perspective but also from political and propaganda ones. Holy relics kept in them, especially the Crown of Thorns brought to the island from Constantinople by King Louis IX in 1239, elevated Paris to the rank of a new ideological capital of the empire. Dedicating churches to the first Gallic saints can be viewed as evidence of the significance of the island at the dawn of Christianity. Its opulent sacral architecture raised the prestige of the city and proved both its religiosity and prosperity. Sacral architecture of Île de la Cité was the essence of old French religiosity in which the whole traditional culture of France was rooted.

Blog piece titled ‘A Charred Cathedral in Paris and A Modern Masterpiece in Glass: Le Jongleur de Notre Dame” published originally on the Open Book Publisher blog. The original posting can be found at https://blogs.openbookpublishers.com/a-charred-cathedral-in-paris/.

http://www.theses.fr/2015REN20024

French singing in the time of Gilbert Duprez : history, aesthetics and skills

Aus französische Gesangskunst in der Zeit Gilbert Duprez : .Geschichte, Ästhetik und Methode

Looking at opera, opéra-comique and salon music through the eyes of the first performers stresses the histrionic and vocal dimension of their art. Thus, this dissertation drives from the mutual appraisals of artists, which can be found in treaties, memoirs, archives of the Paris Conservatoire, letters, etc. The vocabulary used to describe singing in the 19th-century has been linked to 78rpm records and cylinder recordings. The relative focus on high-pitched male voices is only relevant because changes in the general taste for opera voices were mainly triggered by leading tenors during the romantic era. The impact of various locations and repertory on the audience's expectations was studied in order to define the aesthetic and social frame of vocal performance. Reinventing the practical know-how from the sources actually meets the growing expectations of both schedulers and singers who want to renew the approach of the so-called "romantic" French repertory - which currently goes widely unknown and unsung. A better understanding of tradition allows for more consistent historically informed performances.

This article examines the political style and rhetoric of the Manif pour tous (or MPT),
the main organization opposing same-sex marriage in France, from summer 2013 to the present.
It exposes how the MPT's style and rhetoric are different from those of their American
counterparts, and what this tells us about the different strategies of political movements in France
and the United States generally. It is based on an analysis of the language used by activists whom
I interviewed in 2014 and 2015 and on a discourse analysis of the MPT’s website, its Facebook
page, its Twitter feed, and press releases since 2013. This analysis of the distinctive features of
the MPT brings to light underlying concerns about French identity in the face of globalization. In
other words, for the MPT and its members, what is at stake is not just same-sex marriage but the
definition of Frenchness.

First published in Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6.3 (2016): 27-39.

For centuries and across cultures, food has played an enormous role in constructing, refining, and maintaining the idealized identities of groups, nations, and individuals—including ideals regarding gender. Renowned French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote in 1825, “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are”; in the same way, ideals about what an individual should eat in a given society at a given time are closely linked to the social expectations regarding who that subject is “supposed” to be. The following article critically examines the constructions of idealized masculinity in “BEEF!,” a just-for-men culinary magazine that ran in France from April 2014 to December 2015. While the magazine denies ties to a particular gendered agenda, its language and images both construct and perpetuate a standard of masculinity based on professional cooking (vs. the work of a home cook) and the consumption of products (vs. the consumption of food). An analysis of the magazine’s photography reveals not only the relationship between cultural mediums and identity production, but also the subtle politics that shape Western views regarding consumption, gender, and hunger.

Pretendemos neste texto tratar da
relação entre literatura, teoria e política na
obra de Nathalie Quintane. O livro em
questão, "Descente de médiums", discute, a
partir do "espiritismo", ou do duplo sentido da palavra "esprit", a relação entre literatura,
pensamento e política, buscando criticar toda
perspectiva centrada numa crença em nome de
uma relação entre literatura e realidade
reconfigurada. Trata-se de discutir, no interior
da literatura, a relevância política desta ou
pensá-la como uma decisão num cenário pós-morte
do autor. Salientaremos não apenas as
novidades teóricas desta escrita para a crítica
literária, bem como as experiências narrativas
que reconstroem uma nova literatura
engajada.