Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
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Seeing Double is a truly original study of Baudelaire’s gaze, in his recording of dualities in what Walter Benjamin called his ‘photographic plates,’ without the kind of understanding that was to come later. Meltzer’s own wide reading and understanding compose an intricately-woven texture from the poet’s verse and prose poems, the influences upon them, and their reception by various interpreters of the modernist visions that Baudelaire prefigured.”
Review
“Francoise Meltzers rich and suggestive study ranges widely over nineteenth-century thought and art to explore the bifurcated vision of modernity that Baudelaires work registers and into which the prose and verse poems lead the reader.”
Review
“Seeing Double brilliantly revisits the idea that modernity corresponded to a change in perception—or even sight itself—in response to the sensory overload caused by the rapid changes that transformed urban life and technological advances. Françoise Meltzer demonstrates with dazzling acuity that Charles Baudelaire recorded the clashing worlds of past and present as a ‘double vision—the shattered register of a moral and conceptual contradiction. Perceptive and powerfully imaginative, this book will interest all scholars and students of nineteenth-century thought, as well as those investigating the philosophical questions that arose from the emergence of a newly technologized world.”
Review
“In this beautifully written, remarkably clear book. . . Meltzer anchors the poets well known tensions and vacillations in the failed revolution of 1848. . . . A superb book, extensively researched, thoroughly absorbing. Essential.”
Review
“In an imaginative, carefully argued reading of prose poem, verse poem, and essay, Meltzer demonstrates that, far from giving shape and some degree of coherence to the chaotic processes of modernity through his use of diametric contrasts, as many critics have assumed, Baudelaire’’s texts embody the conflicting worlds of past and present simultaneously. . . . In a way, Meltzer’s book performs two valuable functions: it dispels the myth that the poet’s frequent use of binary oppositions means that he had a clear appreciation of the contours of modernity; and it provides a new way of considering his complex, burdensome relationship with the nineteenth century.”
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“Seeing Double portrays the profound connection between the philosophical and aesthetic dilemmas in Baudelaire’s art and the historical moment in which he lived.”
Review
“Thoughtful and thought-provoking. . . . Armed with a sure knowledge of the French nineteenth century and with impressive scholarship, from Pichois, Lawler, and Mauron to Blin, Chambers, and Poulet, Meltzer offers many other delights: on Baudelaires obsession with original sin, on the work of the image in his poetry, on the prose ‘Lhologe and on ‘Le cygnet.”
Review
“Barnes raises a crucial question at this juncture in francophone literary research, a question whose implications for future research far exceed the sole bounds of French literature, although she poses it in that domain: What impact did intercultural colonial contact have on the development of French culture?”—Jane Bradley Winston, author of Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France
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
Synopsis
The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. Seeing Double reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions that emerged in Baudelaires writing during a time of political and social upheaval.
Françoise Meltzer argues that Baudelaire did not simply describe the contradictions of modernity; instead, his work embodied and recorded them, leaving them unresolved and often less than comprehensible. Baudelaires penchant for looking simultaneously backward to an idealized past and forward to an anxious future, while suspending the tension between them, is part of what Meltzer calls his “double vision”—a way of seeing that produces encounters that are doomed to fail, poems that cant advance, and communications that always seem to falter. In looking again at the poet and his work, Seeing Double helps to us to understand the prodigious transformations at stake in the writing of modern life.
Synopsis
Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature explores an aspect of modern French literature that has been consistently overlooked in literary histories: the relationship between the colonies—their cultures, languages, and people—and formal shifts in French literary production. Starting from the premise that neither cultural identity nor cultural production can be
pure or homogenous, Leslie Barnes initiates a new discourse on the French literary canon by examining the work of three iconic French writers with personal connections to Vietnam: André Malraux, Marguerite Duras, and Linda Lê.
In a thorough investigation of the authors linguistic, metaphysical, and textual experiences of colonialism, Barnes articulates a new way of reading French literature: not as an inward-looking, homogenous, monolingual tradition, but rather as a tradition of intersecting and interdependent peoples, cultures, and experiences.
One of the few books to focus on Vietnams position within francophone literary scholarship, Barnes challenges traditional concepts of French cultural identity and offers a new perspective on canonicity and the division between “French” and “francophone” literature.
Synopsis
Roots are good to think with—indeed most of us use them as a metaphor every day. A root can signify the hiddenness of our beginnings, or, in its bifurcating structure, the various possibilities in the life of an individual or a collective. This book looks at rootedness as a metaphor for the genealogical origins of people and their attachment to place—and how this metaphor transformed so rapidly in twentieth-century Europe. Christy Wampole’s case study is France, with its contradictory legacies of Enlightenment universalism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. At one time, French nationalist rhetoric portrayed the Jews as unrooted and thus unrighteous people. After the two world wars, the root metaphor figured in the new French philosophy (notably Deleuze and Guattari). And recently, Caribbean thinkers in Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique have debated whether their roots were in Africa, France, the Caribbean, or in some pan-national network that could not be identified on a map. Walpole argues that while the metaphor was perhaps once useful in the establishment of communities and identities, that usefulness has expired. The longer we remain attached to the figure of rootedness, the more discord it sows. Giving up on the metaphor of rootedness, Wampole urges, allows us to see at last that we are in fact unbound by the land we inhabit.
About the Author
Françoise Meltzer is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she is also professor at the Divinity School and in the College, and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Meltzer is the author of four books, most recently of For Fear of the Fire: Joan of Arc and the Limits of Subjectivity (2001), a coeditor of the journal Critical Inquiry, and the coeditor of Saints: Faith without Borders (2011), all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Beliefs (Assommons les pauvres!)
Homo Duplex
More Duplexities
Maistre
Proudhons Spirits of Contradiction
Splitting the Difference: The Poem
Appendix: “Assommons les pauvres!”
Chapter 2. Seeing (A une passante)
The Will to Know
Images and Afterimages: The Poem
Certainty
Scopic Syllepsis
Which Is the Real One?
Optical Gaps
Energy: The Baroque
Appendix: “A une passante”
Chapter 3. Money (La chambre double)
Expenditure
Words Pay No Debts
Depletion: The Poem
Reversibility
Which Room Is Counterfeit?
The Other Side of the Coin
Appendix: “La chambre double”
Chapter 4. Time (Harmonie du soir)
God, Graves, and Scholars
In Memory of the Present
Angels Doing Time
Harmonics: The Poem
And Time and the World Are Ever in Flight
Appendix: “Harmonie du soir”
ConclusionIndex