This collection of essays is an attempt to capture the drama of the encounter, of the 'facing' of Levinas and the biblical text. It seeks to link Jewish experience and Levinasian themes such as responsibility, substitution, hospitality, suffering and forgiveness, and at the same time make the biblical text accessible in a new way.The book offers new insights on the opening up of Levinas's thought and biblical stories to one another; it considers the ways in which Levinas can open u...

In this groundbreaking study of Francophone Jewish poetry of the Shoah, Gary D. Mole engages with an extensive corpus of poetry by more than forty poets, all of whom were active after the war in France, Belgium, Switzerland, or Quebec but who came originally from Eastern Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East. Some were adolescents or adults during the war, either in hiding, interned or deported, first-hand witnesses to the Nazi persecution of European Jews. Others were hidden children, ...

A "marvelously readable" critique of Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and other French postwar intellectuals that "consistently entertains and provokes" ( The Washington Post).The uniquely prominent role of French intellectuals in European cultural and political life following World War II is the focus of this book by the acclaimed author of Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. Tony Judt analyzes this intellectual community's most divisive conflict...

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhls...

A look at how four French writers of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s contributed to the rise of Stalin in their country and abroad.Generation Stalin traces Joseph Stalin's rise as a dominant figure in French political culture from the 1930s through the 1950s. Andrew Sobanet brings to light the crucial role French writers played in building Stalin's cult of personality and in disseminating Stalinist propaganda in the international Communist sphere, including withi...

Albert Camus is one of the iconic figures of twentieth-century French literature, one of France's most widely read modern literary authors and one of the youngest winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. As the author of L'Etranger and the architect of the notion of 'the Absurd' in the 1940s, he shot to prominence in France and beyond. His work nevertheless attracted hostility as well as acclaim and he was increasingly drawn into bitter political controversies, especially the issue of Fr...

A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irène Némirovsky Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a “foreign Jew” in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite française, Némirovsky’s posthumous novel, became an international best selle...

Joseph Acquisto examines literary writers and critical theorists who employ theological frameworks, but who divorce that framework from questions of belief and thereby remove the doctrine of salvation from their considerations. Acquisto claims that Baudelaire inaugurates a new kind of amodern modernity by canceling the notion of salvation in his writing while also refusing to embrace any of its secular equivalents, such as historical progress or redemption through art.Through a ser...

First published in 1971, this work provides a helpful introduction to the French Symbolism movement. After an introduction to the defining ideas of the movement, it explores five key Symbolist writers: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Valéry. The book concludes with a discussion of the impact of Symbolism across Europe.This book will be of interest to those studying nineteenth-century French literature.

A total of 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. In this compelling new study, Philip Nord addresses how the Deportation, as it came to be known, was remembered after the war and how Deportation memory from the very outset, became politicized against the backdrop of changing domestic and international contexts. He shows how the Deportation generated competing narratives – Jewish, Catholic,...

Michael Tobin's study is part literary criticism, part biography. Tobin follows Bernanos and his family from France to Spain during the Civil War and then to Brazil and North Africa. He also provides a thematic synthesis of Bernanos' novels and his extensive body of non-fiction, demonstrating that one fundamental theological truth - the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ - was the the unifying factor of Bernanos's entangled political and social criticism and the engine of his creative imag...

The association of ideas became the foundation of Freudian psychoanalysis, informed the nascent semiology of Saussure, and characterized the literary works of Sterne, Joyce, Woolf, and especially Marcel Proust. The author of Remembrance of Things Past, acutely aware of how philosophical, historical, and narrative writing intersected, gave years of thinking and planning to his multivolume masterpiece. Its shape was protean. Each successive volume reconfigured the previous ones and ...