Roissy Express

Author: François Maspero
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860913733
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Accompanied by photographer Anaik Frantz, Francois Maspero embarked on a journey along the RER, the express subway which leads through the Paris suburbs. Getting off the train at each stop, he and Frantz present a picture of daily life in France which tourists seldom see: a world where names don't make sense, where immigrants from Burkino Faso live in run-down tower-blocks called Debussy on the avenue Karl Marx, their children dodging the police between the lycee Jules Valles and the Yuri Gagarin youth-club; a world where there are still memories of the Commune, the Popular Front or the camp at Drancy from where French officials sent a hundred thousand Jews to Auschwitz; a world where no one is a racist, but National Front posters are everywhere. Maspero's aim is to put this world back on the map.

French Global

Author: Christie McDonald
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231147414
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Book Description
Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century.

New Europe

Author: Donald McNeill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1444119001
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
New Europe: Imagined Spaces traces the radical transformation of European places and spaces over the last two decades. Instead of the familiar 'schoolbook' map of a Europe of nation-states, the book unpacks the differing imaginations of European identity in recent years. Taking as its central problem the fluid nature of cultural and political identity, it moves firmly away from - and calls into question - the perspective of the nation-state as the primary source of imagined identity for Europeans. The book contributes to key debates, such as the emerging Europe of the Regions and the return of the city-state, examines the 'rebranding' of the nation-state and explores the impact of 'Europeanisation' on existing place identity. Emphasising mobility and movement, the chapters explore borderlands and travel, and also include a detailed discussion of the 'everyday life' of Europeans. Throughout, iconic images of contemporary Europe are invoked: Eurodisney, the Reichstag, Barcelona's Ramblas and the Bilbao Guggenheim, and the way in which mundane artefacts and practices such as football, walking, cars, food, passports and the Euro help construct identity is considered. New Europe: Imagined Spaces adopts a multidisciplinary approach to studying Europe, providing students with an exploration of contemporary European space and place identity.

Planning the Impossible

Author: Eirini Kasioumi
Publisher: Birkhäuser
ISBN: 3035621527
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
International airports have become an inherent part of many urban regions and key transport infrastructures for metropolitan economies. Yet they are also a source of tensions, often associated with the contrasting impacts of their operation. Taking the example of Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG) in Paris, the author analyzes the factors influencing urban development and the related spatial strategies. Step by step, she traces the history of the airport, examines prominent conflicts and their management by planners, and derives broader lessons. Intended for town planners, policy makers, and urban designers, the book makes an important contribution to understanding the challenges and assessing the effectiveness of planning approaches for airport regions.

The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature

Author: Atsuko Sakaki
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004306994
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
In The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature, Atsuko Sakaki closely examines photography-inspired texts by four Japanese novelists: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886-1965), Abe Kōbō (1924-93), Horie Toshiyuki (b. 1964) and Kanai Mieko (b. 1947). As connoisseurs, practitioners or critics of this visual medium, these authors look beyond photographs’ status as images that document and verify empirical incidents and existences, articulating instead the physical process of photographic production and photographs’ material presence in human lives. This book offers insight into the engagement with photography in Japanese literary texts as a means of bringing forgotten subject-object dynamics to light. It calls for a fundamental reconfiguration of the parameters of modern print culture and its presumption of the transparency of agents of representation.

Postcolonial Hospitality

Author: Mireille Rosello
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804742677
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Hospitality has emerged as a category in recent French thinking for addressing a range of issues associated with immigration. Concentrating primarily on France and its former colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa, this book considers how hospitality and its dissidence are defined, practiced, and represented in European and African fictions, theories, and myths at the end of the 20th century.

The Contradictions of Culture

Author: Elizabeth Wilson
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761969754
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Book Description
In this book, one of the most accomplished and thoughtful cultural commentators of the day, considers the contradictory nature of cultural relations. Elizabeth Wilson explores these themes through an examination of fashion, feminism, consumer culture, representation and postmodernism. Debates within feminism on the nature and effects of pornography are used to illustrate a particular kind of cultural contradiction. Wilson recognizes that postmodernism permitted the reappropriation of subjects that were not previously considered worthy of attention, or opposed to the idea of emancipation, chief among these was fashion. She shows that the association of an interest in this culturally significant subject with a revisionist project raises doubt

The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Paris

Author: Anna-Louise Milne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107433886
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
No city more than Paris has had such a constant and deep association with the development of literary forms and cultural ideas. The idea of the city as a space of literary self-consciousness started to take hold in the sixteenth century. By 1620, where this volume begins, the first in a long line of extraordinary works of the human imagination, in which the city represented itself to itself, had begun to find form in print. This collection follows that process through to the present day. Beginning with the 'salon', followed by the hybrid culture of libertinage and the revolutionary hotbeds of working-class districts, it explores the continuities and changes between the pre-modern era and the nineteenth century, when Paris asserted itself as cultural capital of Europe. It goes on to explore how this vision of Paris as a key capital of modernity has shaped contemporary literature.

Unsettling Cities

Author: John Allen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134636334
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
This text examines the global nature of cities - cities whose openness has shaped their dynamism and character. It explores cities as sites of movement, migration and settlement where different peoples, cultures and environments combine. Unsettling Cities explores the mix of proximity and difference that exists in the rich and diverse texture of city life. The contributors reveal the association between the changing fortunes of cities and the power and influence of global networks.

The Topographic Imaginary

Author: Ari J. Blatt
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1800855567
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Since the early 1980s, art photographers from metropolitan France have been training their lenses on ordinary landscapes throughout the country they call home. The Topographic Imaginary is the first book to study this important and flourishing trend. It examines work by artists who meld documentary and creative modes to attune viewers to places that mainstream culture tends to tune out, but which, as Ari J. Blatt argues, are in fact more meaningful than they initially appear. From views of building sites in Paris, peri-urban edgelands, or a tangle of trees in a forest, to those that ponder the play of light and shadow on roadside fields in Normandy or the tacky colors painted on dated village shopfronts, images that signal the emergence of a “topographic turn” in contemporary French photography constitute new ways of seeing and sensing France’s diverse national territory. As Blatt suggests, they also represent a visual laboratory through which to investigate how landscape “scapes” our understanding of French culture. In their efforts to reimagine a more traditional and time-worn idea of France’s shared common space, topographic photographs animate conversations about capital and class; cities and their peripheries; the politics and impact of development; migration and borders; memory, history, and affect; empire and postcolonialism; national identity; and the changing environment. The Topographic Imaginary thus reveals how attending to place in pictures provides valuable insight into the disposition of a nation in flux.