Lexington Books Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future (After the Empire: The Francophone World & Postcolonial France)

Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future offers a critical reflection on some of the leading figures of twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, cinema, and philosophy. Specialists re-evaluate the historical, political, and artistic legacies of twentieth-century France and the French-speaking world, proposing new formulations of the relationships between fiction, aesthetics, and politics. This collection combines interdisciplinary scholarship, nuanced theoretical reflection, and contextualized analyses of literary, cinematic, and philosophical practices to suggest alternative critical paradigms for the twenty-first century. The contributors' reappraisals of key writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals trace an alternative narrative of their historical, cultural, or intellectual legacy, casting a contemporary light on the aesthetic, theoretical, and political questions raised by their works. Taken as a whole, the essays generate a series of fresh perspectives on French and Francophone literary and cultural studies. Review Thought-provoking, challenging, controversial at times, Vallury's edited volume presents a series of brilliant and fruitful dialogues on aesthetics and politics between philosophical discourses (from Camus and Lévinas to Deleuze) and analyses of literary fiction and criticism (Dib, Djebar, Genet, Klossowski, Barthes) as well as filmic texts (Ruiz, Straub and Huillet) that brought a significant contribution to intellectual and artistic debates during the second half of the twentieth century in the French-speaking world and beyond (Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Philip Watts, J. M. Coetzee, and Vilém Flusser).--Caroline Eades, University of Maryland This timely collection teases out new affinities and filiations among fiction, aesthetic form, and politics in the Francophone world. In doing so, it reminds readers that objects of the past retain clues leading us toward that which we cannot yet think. Its analyses of works by Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Jacques Rancière, J.M. Coetzee, Assia Djebar, Raúl Ruiz, Mohammed Dib, Pierre Klossowksi, Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, and the Eichmann trial are broad in range and often daring in their revelation. The result is an apt tribute to the memory of Philip Watts.--Steven Ungar, University of Iowa About the Author Rajeshwari S. Vallury is Director of Women's Studies and Associate Professor of French at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of 'Surfacing' the Politics of Desire: Literature, Feminism, and Myth (2008)