Description
Book SynopsisHexagonal Variations provides an essential overview of key debates about contemporary French society and culture. Concise, challenging and comprehensive, its chapters each address the processes of change and redefinition that characterise France today. Contributors analyse and situate cinematic, literary, online and visual texts, mediatic, political and everyday discourses, in each case pinpointing how diversity, plurality and reinvention inflect cultural and social evolution in France. The chapters in the collection share a key set of thematic concerns and raise topics for debate among scholars and students alike. Central to these are questions about France’s uncertain place and role in Europe and the wider world; the morphing topography of its capital; and the many conundrums posed by the persistence of Republican paradigms in a global environment. If France is no longer the exception, what are the versions and varieties of being French that are lived, thought and imagined in the new millennium?
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Jo McCormack, Murray Pratt and Alistair Rolls: Towards a Preface Murray Pratt and Alistair Rolls: Variations on the Hexagon: Getting the Measure of Culture Change in Contemporary France Section 1: Perspectives on Hexagonality Rada Iveković: The Global Nostalgia of a Non-global Language Brigitte Jandey: Frenchness in Perspective(s) Jean-Marc Kehrès (Translated by Alistair Rolls): National Genius and Universal Sociability: The Relevance of the Enlightenment Today Section 2: Expressing Plurality Joe Hardwick: So Over the Rainbow? The Singular Plurality of Martineau and Ducastel’s Drôle de Félix Monique Monville-Burston: Youth Speech au pluriel in the Written Press Sam Haigh: Integration or Interaction? Disability in France Today Section 3: Identity and Ethnicity Hélène Jaccomard: Racaille versus Flics? Who’s to Blame for Criminality and Delinquency in Franco-Maghrébine (Beur) Fiction? Francesco Ricatti: ‘Je ne suis pas noir’: Global Football and (Post)Colonial France Martine Fernandes (Translated by Murray Pratt): Tos Ethnic Identity in France through the Blogs of Young People of Portuguese Descent Section 4: Measuring Cultural Change in Contemporary France Kiran Grewal: The Natives Strike Back: ‘L’Appel des Idigènes de la République’ and the Death of Republican Values in Post-colonial France Lawrence R. Schehr: Soukaz in a Staccato Mode Martin O’Shaughnessy: Hidden Violences: Work and the Working Class in Recent French Film Section 5: Reordering Regionality Chris Reynolds: May-June 1968. Reflector and Vector of a Nation’s Diversity: The Case of Strasbourg, Alsace Angela Giovanangeli (Translated by Travis Watters): French Unity and the European Union: The Role of French Regions Russell West-Pavlov: Haunted Europe: Virilio and Sangatte Section 6: Paris au pluriel Ben McCann: A Many Splendoured Thing? Plural Visions of the City in Paris, je t’aime Carolyn Stott: Belleville au pluriel: Representations of a Parisian Suburb in the Néo-Polar Katherine Gantz: Concrete Criticism: Annotation and Transformation in Haussmannized Paris Section 7: Hexagonal Variations Vladimir Kapor: On a Postcolonial Dialogue de Sourds: Exotisme in Contemporary French Criticism Fiona Barclay: Postcolonial France: Immigration and the De-Centring of the Hexagon Enda McCaffrey and Murray Pratt: Erasmus, Exchange Value and Euronormativity in Cédric Klapisch’s L’Auberge espagnole and Les Poupées russes Contributors’ Biographies Index
