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The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture Hardcover – 11 September 2003
by Nicholas Hewitt (Editor)
3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars 6 ratings
Part of: Cambridge Companions to Culture (19 books)
France entered the twentieth century as a powerful European and colonial nation. In the course of the century, her role changed dramatically: in the first fifty years two World Wars and economic decline removed its status as a world power, whilst the immediate post-war era was marked by wars of independence in its colonies. Yet at the same time, in the second half of the century, France entered a period of unprecedented growth and social transformation. Throughout the century and into the new millennium France retained its former international reputation as a centre for cultural excellence and innovation and its culture, together with that of the Francophone world, reflected the increased richness and diversity of the period. This 2003 Companion explores this vibrant culture, and includes chapters on history, language, literature, thought, theatre, architecture, visual culture, film and music, and discuss the contributions of popular culture, Francophone culture, minorities and women.
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Part of series
Cambridge Companions to Culture
Print length
374 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication date
11 September 2003
Product description
Review
'This is an ideal accompaniment to an undergraduate course on French society and culture, and a book so wide-ranging and thought-provoking that it will provide much enjoyment for more advanced readers, such as postgraduates and academics.' Forum for Modern Language Studies
Book Description
This 2003 volume is an invaluable source of materials for courses on all aspects of modern France.
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Product details
Publisher : Cambridge University Press; 1st edition (11 September 2003)
Language : English
Hardcover : 374 pages
ISBN-10 : 0521791235
ISBN-13 : 978-0521791236
Dimensions : 15.88 x 3.18 x 22.86 cmCustomer Reviews:
3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars 6 ratings
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Circleplane LTD
5.0 out of 5 stars Five StarsReviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 February 2017
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William R Niedzwiecki
3.0 out of 5 stars Several of the essays are just terrible, howeverReviewed in the United States on 19 August 2015
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Several of the essays are interesting, and it's hard to find overviews of French culture. I would buy it again. Several of the essays are just terrible, however: full of academic BS, and too often making relatively simple issues into complicated puzzles. The quality of the writing is very uneven.
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Derek Alsop
2.0 out of 5 stars I can’t recommend this bookReviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 December 2014
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I can’t recommend this book. Few of the chapters are well-written, and there is too little sense of the excitement of developments in modern French culture (especially in the arts, philosophy, and literary and cultural theory). But there are also important inaccuracies.
Take, for example, the work of Samuel Beckett, as described in the chapter on ‘Theatre’: ‘Samuel Beckett (wrote for the theatre 1948-85) was concerned from the start with metaphysical despair and how to express it on stage. This led him to a series of experiments in reduction of stage means, which began by seeming provocative and were later clearly systematic. In En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot, 1953), as we have seen, character, plot and setting are rubbed out; in Fin de partie (Endgame, 1956), two characters are imprisoned in a room, and two others in jars; in La Dernière Bande (Krapp’s Last Tape, 1958) and Oh les beaux jours! (Happy Days! 1961) there is only a solitary person, in a closed room or buried up to her neck in sand; in Pas moi (Not I, 1975) the character is reduced to a mouth. The essentials of the human quest for meaning and communication are thus brought into sharp focus’.
To start with the conventions, the French titles of these works are given in italics, but the English are not (the Amazon defaults do not allow me to represent the differences). Neither Oh les beaux jours nor the English original Happy Days should have an exclamation mark. The dates given are wrong or misleading. Not I was first published in English in 1973, and only in French in the given 1975. Happy Days (correctly given as 1961) preceded Beckett’s own translation into French by two years; Neither En attendant Godot (1952) nor Waiting for Godot (1954) were first published in the year given, 1953; nor were Fin de partie (1957) or Endgame (1958) first published in 1956. It’s important to give two (preferably correct) dates, as the French and English editions are very different texts. There are also simple errors of fact. So Nagg and Nell, in Endgame, are not ‘in jars’ but in ‘poubelles’ (in French) or ‘dustbins’ (in English). Winnie, in Happy Days, is absolutely not the only ‘solitary’ character. Willie’s appearance ‘on all fours, dressed to kill’, and his addressing of Winnie (‘ (just audible). Win.’) mean that, finally, this is indeed ‘a happy day’. Winnie is only buried up to her neck in Act Two (she is in above her waist in Act One). The idea (passing over the clumsy ellipsis) that ‘Samuel Beckett ([who] wrote for the theatre [from] 1948-85) was concerned from the start’ with anything ignores the fact that he was from the start a master of prose, whose first published writing was in 1929 (his published drama properly stretching from 1952-84, not 1948-85). Before his first play he had already published, in French, the first two novels of his greatest masterpiece, generally known as The Unnamable Trilogy. And then we come to the interpretation. The claim that ‘character, plot and setting are rubbed out’ in Godot is ridiculous. The play depends for its power on (compromised) notions of character (and identity), plot (the main characters are ‘waiting for Godot’) and setting (the tree must suffer gradual diminishment). Becket is certainly concerned with all kinds of despair, though he is also obsessed with hope, and it is our physical (not ‘metaphysical’) degeneration that is usually the starting point. Hamm and Clov are not ‘imprisoned’ in a room (in Endgame) any more than Vladimir and Estragon are imprisoned in a landscape. It is rather that there is nowhere else to go that would improve their condition (and they need each other to stay). The writing, too, is lazy: ‘in La Dernière Bande […] and Oh les beaux jours! […] there is only a solitary person, in a closed room or buried up to her neck in sand’. Even if it was true there was a solitary character in both plays, the expression here could imply the same character in both plays, and certainly implies that both have a ‘female’ character (neither true, of course). Also, ‘a series of experiments […] were later clearly systematic’ is obviously ungrammatical.
Meanwhile, in a different chapter by a different writer – ‘Narrative fiction in French’ – Samuel Beckett, perhaps second only in importance to Proust (his inspiration), doesn’t even get a look-in. First published in 2003, reprinted in 2009, and currently available in the same edition in 2014, these errors and weaknesses have gone uncorrected for eleven years.
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