Suchergebnisse

This article represents the first sustained critical analysis of Henri Barbusse's Staline (1935), the first official biography of Joseph Stalin. The author traces Barbusse's evolution from a Goncourt-winning pacifist writer in the immediate post-World War I years to his position as a Stalinist propagandist at the end of his life. This article reads Staline as propaganda in the service of Stalin's personality cult, examining its overarching themes, its narrative mechanics, its reception and its legacy. Staline ultimately presents a case study of the dangers of complicity with the extreme left in the interwar period.

This article addresses salient questions in literature and anthropology centring on the politics of writing, readership and representation in a context marked by highly charged public debates on the nature, causes and perpetrators of youth violence. It critically examines and juxtaposes two sets of texts, one set produced by incarcerated youths in a writing workshop at a juvenile detention facility in Bordeaux, and the other taken from court transcripts at juvenile trials in the Paris Palace of Justice. The workshop texts, written under the guidance of novelist François Bon, allow rare access to youths' familial milieux and to their understanding of their own place in a cycle of marginality. The texts taken from court trials privilege the voices of prosecutors, judges and attorneys who speak for, about and over the voices of young defendants. The texts produced by juvenile inmates are confronted with and speak to the plight of the young defendants.

Revisioning French Culture brings together a remarkable 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. Revisioning French Culture grapples with topics vital to the contemporary cultural landscape, including universalism, globalization, the idea of Francophonie, and religious and secular identity. This essay collection furthermore transcends and illuminates the contemporary by delving into matters that have long resonated in the humanities and letters, such as death, war, trauma, power and politics, notions of the truth, conceptions of the self, and modes of reading and writing. With contributions by a number of figures known across the humanities and the social sciences, Revisioning French Culture provides cultural, political, and historical context for the crisis facing democracy and liberalism around the world today. These essays were assembled in honor of Lawrence D. Kritzman, whose writing and editorial work in French studies inspired the wide-ranging themes examined here.