Lhomme Revolte

This book studies major works of literature from classical antiquity to the present that reflect crises in the evolution of Western law: the move from a prelegal to a legal society in The Eumenides, the Christianization of Germanic law in Njal's Saga, the disenchantment with medieval customary law in Reynard the Fox, the reception of Roman law in a variety of Renaissance texts, the conflict between law and equity in Antigone and The Merchant of Venice, the eighteenth-century codification controversy in the works of Kleist, the modern debate between "pure" and "free" law in Kafka's The Trial and other fin-de-siècle works, and the effects of totalitarianism, the theory of universal guilt, and anarchism in the twentieth century. Using principles from the anthropological theory of legal evolution, the book locates the works in their legal contexts and traces through them the gradual dissociation over the centuries of law and morality. It thereby associates and illuminates these masterpieces from an original point of view and contributes a new dimension to the study of literature and law. In contrast to prevailing adherents of Law-and-Literature, this book professes Literature-and-Law, in which the emphasis is historical rather than theoretical, substantive rather than rhetorical, and literary rather than legal. Instead of adducing the literary work to illustrate debates about modern law, this book consults the history of law as an essential aid to the understanding of the literary text and its conflicts.

Greece sits at the center of a geopolitical storm that threatens the stability of the European Union. To comprehend how this small country precipitated such an outsized crisis, it is necessary to understand how Greece developed into a nation in the first place. Enlightenment and Revolution identifies the ideological traditions that shaped a religious community of Greek-speaking people into a modern nation-state--albeit one in which antiliberal forces have exacted a high price. Paschalis Kitromilides takes in the vast sweep of the Greek Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, assessing developments such as the translation of modern authors into Greek; the scientific revolution; the rediscovery of the civilization of classical Greece; and a powerful countermovement. He shows how Greek thinkers such as Voulgaris and Korais converged with currents of the European Enlightenment, and demonstrates how the Enlightenment's confrontation with Church-sanctioned ideologies shaped present-day Greece. When the nation-state emerged from a decade-long revolutionary struggle against the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, the dream of a free Greek polity was soon overshadowed by a romanticized nationalist and authoritarian vision. The failure to create a modern liberal state at that decisive moment is at the root of Greece's recent troubles.

Analyzes the ways in which four contemporary novelists depict the rebel and the world that rejects him. Bibliogs

Art and politics are often regarded as denizens of different realms, but few artists have been comfortable with the notion of a purely aesthetic definition of art. The artist has a public and thus political vision of the world interpreted by his art no less than the statesman and the legislator have a creative vision of the world they wish to make. The sixteen original essays in this volume bear eloquent witness to this interpenetration of art and politics. Each confronts the intersection of the aesthetic and the social, each is concerned with the interface of poetic vision and political vision, of reflection and action. They take art in the broadest sense, ranging over poets, dramatists, novelists, essayists, and filmmakers. Their focus is on art and its political dilemmas, not simply on the artist. They consider the issues raised for politics and culture by alienation, violence, modernization, technology, democracy, progress, and revolution. And they debate the capacity of art to stimulate social change and incite revolution, the temptations of social control of culture and of political censorship, the uncertain relationship between art and history, the impact of economic structure on artistic creation and of economic class on artistic product, the common ground between art and legislation and between crea-tivitv and control.

This is the first full-length study in English of Camus's life-long fascination with the works of the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate the ways in which Dostoevsky's thought and fiction served to stimulate and crystallize Camus's own thinking. Davison lucidly identifies the lines of divergence and counter-arguments which Camus produced as answers to the challenge of Dostoevsky's Christian/Tzarist vision of life. The traditional methods of comparative literary criticism are jettisoned in favour of the more exciting claim that Camus's literary and philosophical texts can be read as precise and detailed replies to some of Dostoevsky's central beliefs about immortality, religion and politics. The study ranges freely over the entirety of the works of both major writers.

There can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard. This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was largely responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard's international reception that took place in the twentieth century. In Kierkegaard's writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature. Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers. The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism. They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement.

Designed for the general reader, this splendid introduction to French literature from 842 A.D.—the date of the earliest surviving document in any Romance language—to the present decade is the most compact and imaginative single-volume guide available in English to the French literary tradition. In fact, no comparable work exists in either language. It is not the customary inventory of authors and titles but rather a collection of wide-angled views of historical and cultural phenomena. It sets before us writers, public figures, criminals, saints, and monarchs, as well as religious, cultural, and social revolutions. It gives us books, paintings, public monuments, even TV shows. Written by 164 American and European specialists, the essays are introduced by date and arranged in chronological order, but here ends the book’s resemblance to the usual history of literature. Each date is followed by a headline evoking an event that indicates the chronological point of departure. Usually the event is literary—the publication of an original work, a journal, a translation, the first performance of a play, the death of an author—but some events are literary only in terms of their repercussions and resonances. Essays devoted to a genre exist alongside essays devoted to one book, institutions are presented side by side with literary movements, and large surveys appear next to detailed discussions of specific landmarks. No article is limited to the “life and works” of a single author. Proust, for example, appears through various lenses: fleetingly, in 1701, apropos of Antoine Galland’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights; in 1898, in connection with the Dreyfus Affair; in 1905, on the occasion of the law on the separation of church and state; in 1911, in relation to Gide and their different treatments of homosexuality; and at his death in 1922. Without attempting to cover every author, work, and cultural development since the Serments de Strasbourg in 842, this history succeeds in being both informative and critical about the more than 1,000 years it describes. The contributors offer us a chance to appreciate not only French culture but also the major critical positions in literary studies today. A New History of French Literature will be essential reading for all engaged in the study of French culture and for all who are interested in it. It is an authoritative, lively, and readable volume.

Revisioning French Culture brings together a striking group of leading intellectuals and scholars to explore new avenues of research in French and Francophone Studies. Covering the medieval period through the twenty-first century, this volume presents investigations into a vast array of subjects, with global Francophonie as its primary focal point.

Alors que le théâtre d'Albert Camus reçoit de plus en plus de considération de la part des universitaires, cet ouvrage se consacre à la meilleure pièce camusienne, Caligula. Il en propose une analyse structurelle, pour en faire ressortir toute la métathéâtralité, et définit les rapports complexes que celle-ci entretient avec la folie et le politique: il cerne ainsi dans leur interaction les motifs qui sont au coeur de l'oeuvre. De plus, il établit des liens aussi riches que variés avec des textes historiographiques et des oeuvres-phares de la littérature occidentale, qui préfigurent le personnage si puissant qu'est Caligula. En somme, il situe la pièce sur le triple plan d'une tradition philosophique et littéraire qui remonte à l'Antiquité, du renouveau théâtral qui marque le milieu du XXe siècle, et de la production de Camus dans son ensemble. Il intéressera étudiants et professeurs qui se penchent sur la littérature française du XXe siècle, aussi bien que sur d'autres littératures, puisque par le biais camusien, il traite de la tragédie grecque, de Shakespeare, de Melville, de Pirandello... Il s'adresse plus spécialement à ceux qui étudient le théâtre, que ce soit dans une perspective historique, thématique ou esthétique.

Dans cet essai, Albert Camus analyse comment l'homme, au nom de la révolte s'accommode du crime, comment la révolte a eu pour aboutissement les Etats policiers et concentrationnaires de notre siècle.

Chronological in character, the book seeks to evaluate the evolution of Camus's lifelong preoccupation with sociopolitical justice, as expressed in a range of nonfictional genres (essays, journalism, articles, speeches, notebooks, and personal correspondence), where the writer's own concerns come directly to the fore.".

Writing French Algeria is a groundbreaking study of the European literary discourse on French Algeria between the conquest of 1830 and the outbreak of the Algerian War in 1954. For the first time in English, this intertextual reading reveals the debate conducted within Algeria - and between colony and metropole - that aimed to forge an independent cultural identity for the European settlers. Through astute discussions of various texts, Peter Dunwoodie maps the representation of Algeria both in the dominant nineteenth-century discourse of Orientalism, via the littérature d'escale of writers such as Gautier or Fromentein, and in the colonial writing of Louis Bertrand, Robert Randau, and the `Algerianists' who played a critical role in the construction of the new `Algerian'. Dunwoodie shows how this ultimate construction relied on an extremely selective process which marginalized the indigenous people of the Maghreb in order to rediscover the country's `Latin' roots. The book also focuses on the dialogism operative in the works of École d'Alger writers like Gabriel Audisio, Albert Camus, and Emmanuel Roblès, interrogating the way in which their voices countered the closure of those earlier strategies and yet still articulated the unresolvable dilemma of an inherently unstable and impermanent minority whose identity remained grounded in otherness.

The Violence of Modernity turns to Charles Baudelaire, one of the most canonical figures of literary modernism, in order to reclaim an aesthetic legacy for ethical inquiry and historical critique. Works of modern literature are commonly theorized as symptomatic responses to the trauma of history. In a climate that tends to privilege crisis over critique, Debarati Sanyal argues that it is urgent to rethink literary experience in terms that recall its contestatory potential. Examining Baudelaire's poems afresh, she shifts the focus of critical attention toward an account of modernism as an active engagement with violence, specifically the violence of history in nineteenth-century France. Sanyal analyzes a literary current that uses the traditional hallmarks of modernism—irony, intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and formalism—to challenge the historical violence of modernity. Baudelaire and the committed ironists writing in his wake teach us how to read and resist the violence of history, and thereby to challenge the melancholy tenor of our contemporary "wound culture." In a series of provocative readings, Sanyal presents Baudelaire's poetry as an aesthetic form that contests historical violence through rhetorical strategies of complicity, counterviolence, and critique. The book develops a new account of Baudelaire's significance as a modernist by dislodging him both from his traditional status as a practitioner of "art for art's sake" and from his more recent incarnation as the poet of trauma. Following her extended analysis of Baudelaire's poetry, Sanyal in later chapters considers a number of authors influenced by his strategies—including Rachilde, Virginie Despentes, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre—to examine the relevance of their interventions for our current climate of trauma and terror. The result is a study that underscores how Baudelaire's legacy continues to energize literary engagements with the violence of modernity.