Synopses & Reviews
The explosive proliferation of pictures in advertising and pop culture, mass media, and cyberspace following World War II, along with the profusion of critical thinking that tries to make sense of it, has had wide-ranging implications for cultural production as such.
Pictures into Words explores how this proliferation of graphic images has profoundly affected narrative writing in France, especially, as Ari J. Blatt argues, the structure, content, and symbolic logic of contemporary French fiction. By examining a specific corpus of narratives by authorsand#160;Claude Simon, Georges Perec, Pierre Michon, and Tanguy Vieland#8212;books that originate amid, conjure up, and indeed are essentially about picturesand#8212;Blatt addresses the most salient questions pertaining to the relationship between literature and visual culture today.
Each of the novels considered here engages the work of several postwar artists, from Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Vincent van Gogh, and Orson Welles to Jeff Koons, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Pierre Huyghe, and Marcel Duchamp. As Blattand#8217;s cross-disciplinary readings show, despite their gleeful raiding of the visual archive to generate and enrich their stories, many contemporary narratives that tell tales about pictures simultaneously express a cautious skepticism toward vision and visual representation. Pictures into Words examines how such novels, while seemingly complicit with the visual, simultaneously and#8220;write backand#8221; against the images they exploit, reclaiming some of literatureand#8217;s lost ground in our visually inundated world.
Review
“This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking study that contains remarkable insights. Remembering French Algeria makes an important contribution to current scholarship on postcolonial relations between France and Algeria and fills an important gap in that scholarship by focusing specifically on the oft-overlooked category of the community of Pieds-Noirs.”—Alison Rice, author of Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb
Review
"A welcome addition to studies by Jean Duffy, Warren Motte and Jand#233;rand#244;me Game, among many others, Blatt's Pictures into Words, written with erudition and many stylistic sparks (alliterations are vocal on the page), sets us off, for better than worse, in not so well charted directions, to think again about our basic need and common passion for literature."and#8212;Marie-Claire Barnet, Modern and Contemporary France
Review
"Ari J. Blatt has succeeded in writing a book that should give confidence to all those who believe in the capacities of French literature to say what is really at stake in today's world."and#8212;Jan Baetens, Image and Narrative
Review
"[Pictures into Words is] a wide-ranging and masterful discussion of the complex interactions between contemporary French fiction and visual culture."and#8212;Katherine Shingler, French Studies
Review
"Illuminating. . . . Pictures into Words is an informed and challenging study, and also a learned one. The monograph has an impressive bibliography, and makes salient use of contemporary theory."and#8212;William Cloonan, H-France Review
Synopsis
Autobiography in France has taken a decidedly visual turn in recent years: photographs, shown or withheld, become evidence of what was, might have been, or cannot be said; photographers, filmmakers, and cartoonists undertake projects that explore issues of identity.
Textual and Visual Selves investigates, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, the ways in which the textual and the visual combine in certain French works to reconfigure ideasand#8212;and imagesand#8212;of self-representation.
Surprisingly, what these accounts reveal is that photography or film does not necessarily serve to shore up the referentiality of the autobiographical account: on the contrary, the inclusion of visual material can even increase indeterminacy and ambiguity. Far from offering documentary evidence of an extratextual self coincident with the and#8220;Iand#8221; of the text, these images testify only to absence, loss, evasiveness, and the desire to avoid objectification. However, where Roland Barthes famously saw the photograph as a prefiguration of death, in this volume we see how the textual strategies deployed by these writers and artists result in work that is ultimately life-affirming.
Synopsis
Colonized by the French in 1830, Algeria was an important French settler colony that, unlike its neighbors, endured a lengthy and brutal war for independence from 1954 to 1962. The nearly one million Pieds-Noirs (literally “black-feet”) were former French citizens of Algeria who suffered a traumatic departure from their homes and discrimination upon arrival in France. In response, the once heterogeneous group unified as a community as it struggled to maintain an identity and keep the memory of colonial Algeria alive.
Remembering French Algeria examines the written and visual re-creation of Algeria by the former French citizens of Algeria from 1962 to the present. By detailing the preservation and transmission of memory prompted by this traumatic experience, Amy L. Hubbell demonstrates how colonial identity is encountered, reworked, and sustained in Pied-Noir literature and film, with the device of repetition functioning in these literary and visual texts to create a unified and nostalgic version of the past. At the same time, however, the Pieds-Noirs compulsion to return compromises these efforts. Taking Albert Camuss Le Mythe de Sisyphe and his subsequent essays on ruins as a metaphor for Pied-Noir identity, this book studies autobiographical accounts by Marie Cardinal, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Leïla Sebbar, as well as lesser-known Algerian-born French citizens, to analyze movement as a destabilizing and productive approach to the past.
About the Author
Natalie Edwards is an assistant professor of French at Wagner College and coeditor of This Self Which Is Not One:and#160;Womenand#8217;s Life Writing in French. Amy L. Hubbell is an associate professor of French at Kansas State University, lecturer in French at the University of Queensland, and the author of and#192; la recherche dand#8217;un emploi: Business French in a Communicative Context. Ann Miller is a university fellow at the University of Leicester and the author of Reading Bande Dessinand#233;e: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip.