Creating French Culture


Book Description

From monastic cloisters in the time of Charlemagne to the book-lined studies of twentieth-century authors, this splendid book presents an overview of the literary and artistic world in France. The Bibliothèque nationale de France, today rich in collections of illuminated manuscripts, books, medals, maps, and prints, had its beginnings when Charles V established his library in the falcon tower of the Louvre. During the Middle Ages, culture was the handmaiden of Church and government; during the absolute monarchy, it became an instrument of propaganda; in the eighteenth century, it developed an independent voice. This book explores the changing relationship between power and culture in France as seen in the history of its national library.




It's So French!


Book Description

Looks at the influence of French culture on a variety of motion pictures in the 1950s and 1960s, including "Gigi" and "Funny Face."




The Death of French Culture


Book Description

For a long time, France and its culture have been one and the same. However, of this past glory, all that is left today is navel-gazing, nostalgia and timidity. Covering art, fashion, philosophy, literature and cinema, Donald Morrison argues that French culture no longer has the kind of international standing it once did.




Changing France


Book Description

How do European states adjust to international markets? Why do French governments of both left and right face a public confidence crisis? In this book, leading experts on France chart the dramatic changes that have taken place in its polity, economy and society since the 1980s and develop an analysis of social change relevant to all democracies.




French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater


Book Description

This book revives what was unique, strange and exciting about the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes. Laura Weigert brings together a wealth of visual artifacts and practices to explore this tradition of late medieval performance located not in 'theaters' but in churches, courts, and city streets and squares. By stressing the theatricality rather than the realism of fifteenth-century visual culture and the spectacular rather than the devotional nature of its effects, she offers a new way of thinking about late medieval representation and spectatorship. She shows how images that ostensibly document medieval performance instead revise its characteristic features to conform to a playgoing experience that was associated with classical antiquity. This retrospective vision of the late medieval performance tradition contributed to its demise in sixteenth-century France and promoted assumptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the contemporary disciplines of art and theater history.




Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution


Book Description

This landmark collection by an international group of scholars and public intellectuals represents a major reassessment of French colonial culture and how it continues to inform thinking about history, memory, and identity. This reexamination of French colonial culture, provides the basis for a revised understanding of its cultural, political, and social legacy and its lasting impact on postcolonial immigration, the treatment of ethnic minorities, and national identity.




Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution


Book Description

When this book was published in 1984, it reframed the debate on the French Revolution, shifting the discussion from the Revolution's role in wider, extrinsic processes (such as modernization, capitalist development, and the rise of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes) to its central political significance: the discovery of the potential of political action to consciously transform society by molding character, culture, and social relations. In a new preface to this twentieth-anniversary edition, Hunt reconsiders her work in the light of the past twenty years' scholarship.




French Lessons


Book Description

“[A] cultural odyssey, a brave attempt to articulate the compulsions that drove [Kaplan] to embrace foreignness in order to become truly herself.” —The Washington Post Book World Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning. In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, Kaplan describes how, as a student in a Swiss boarding school and later in a junior year abroad in Bordeaux, she passionately sought the French “r,” attentively honed her accent, and learned the idioms of her French lover. When, as a graduate student, her passion for French culture turned to the elegance and sophistication of its intellectual life, she found herself drawn to the language and style of the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine. At the same time, she was repulsed by his anti-Semitism. At Yale in the late 70s, during the heyday of deconstruction she chose to transgress its apolitical purity and work on a subject “that made history impossible to ignore”: French fascist intellectuals. Kaplan’s discussion of the “de Man affair” —the discovery that her brilliant and charismatic Yale professor had written compromising articles for the pro-Nazi Belgian press—and her personal account of the paradoxes of deconstruction are among the most compelling available on this subject. French Lessons belongs in the company of Sartre’s Words and the memoirs of Nathalie Sarraute, Annie Ernaux, and Eva Hoffman. No book so engrossingly conveys both the excitement of learning and the moral dilemmas of the intellectual life.




French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870-1939


Book Description

Heroism, art, and new media : France and identity formation. Unifying the French nation : Savorgnan de Brazza and the Third Republic / Edward Berenson ; New media, source-bonding, and alienation : listening at the 1889 Exposition Universelle / Annegret Fauser ; Debussy and the making of a musicien français : Pelléas, the press, and World War I / Barbara L. Kelly ; A bas Wagner! : the French press campaign against Wagner during World War I / Marion Schmid -- Canon, style, and political alignment. D'Indy's Beethoven / Steven Huebner ; Messidor : republican patriotism and the French revolutionary tradition in Third Republic opera / James Ross ; The symphony and national identity in early twentieth-century France / Brian Hart ; Transcending the word? : religion and music in Gauguin's quest for abstraction / Debora Silverman ; Jolivet's search for a new French voice : spiritual otherness in Mana (1935) / Deborah Mawer -- Regionalism. Rameau in late nineteenth-century Dijon : memorial, festival, fiasco / Katharine Ellis ; Becoming Alsatian : anti-German and pro-French cultural propaganda in Alsace, 1898-1914 / Detmar Klein ; National identity and the double border in Lorraine, 1870-1914 / Didier Francfort.




The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance


Book Description

An examination of how Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge transformed notions of sex and sexuality in France.