Suchergebnisse

"Being Contemporary" is a volume of original essays by 23 preeminent scholars of French and Comparative literature, hailing from both sides of the Atlantic, in response to the editors' invitation to "think through the contemporary." The volume offers a sustained critical reflection on the contemporary as a concept, a category, a condition, and a set of relationships to others and to one's own time. Being Contemporary emerges from a sense of a critical urgency to probe the notion of "the contemporary," and the place of the contemporary critic, in French literary and cultural studies today. Its point of departure is Susan Suleiman's book Risking Who One Is (Harvard, 1994), which proposed two decades ago that "being contemporary" offers a heuristic category for assessing the role of the scholar and critic, for studying the current moment in literature, art, and culture, and for engaging with historical and philosophical questions in a way that resonates with readers in the present day.0Returning to these ideas with renewed vigor, the thought-provoking essays that comprise this volume center on 20th- and 21st-century French literature, politics, memory, and history, and problematize the contemporary as a critical position with respect to the current moment."--Adapted from back cover

"A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean brings together the fascinating personal stories of Jewish writers, scholars, and intellectuals who came of age in lands where Islam was the dominant religion and everyday life was infused with the politics of the French imperial project. Prompted by novelist Leïla Sebbar to reflect on their childhoods, these writers offer up a set of literary portraits that gesture to a universal condition while also shedding light on the exceptional nature of certain experiences. The childhoods captured here are undeniably Jewish, but they are also Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Turkish; each essay thus testifies to the multicultural, multilingual, and multi-faith communities into which its author was born. This translation makes this unique collection of essays available to a broad anglophone public for the first time. The original version, published in French in 2012, was awarded the Prix Haïm Zafrani, a prize given by the Elie Wiesel Institute of Jewish Studies to a literary project that valorizes Jewish civilization in the Muslim world"--