New Books in French Studies

By: Marshall Poe
  • Summary

  • Interviews with Scholars of France about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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Episodes
  • Alistaire Tallent, "Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France" (U Delaware Press, 2023)
    Oct 31 2024
    Alistaire Tallent joins Jana Byars to talk about her new book, Fictions of Pleasure: The Putain Memoirs of Prerevolutionary France (University of Delaware Press, 2024). Out of the libertine literary tradition of eighteenth-century France emerged over a dozen memoir novels of female libertines who eagerly take up sex work as a means of escape from the patriarchal control of fathers and husbands to pursue pleasure, wealth, and personal independence outside the private, domestic sphere. In these anonymously published novels, the heroines proudly declare themselves prostitutes, or putains, and use the desire they arouse, the professional skills they develop, and the network of female friends they create to exploit, humiliate, and financially ruin wealthy and powerful men. In pursuing their desires, the putains challenge contemporary notions of womanhood and expose the injustices of ancien-régime France. Until the French Revolution spelled the end of the genre, these novels proposed not only an appealing libertine utopia in which libertine women enjoy the same benefits as their male counterparts but also entirely new ways of looking at systems of power, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    49 mins
  • Eric Helleiner, "The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History" (Cornell UP, 2021)
    Oct 29 2024
    At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell UP, 2021) helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West. Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States. The result is an exceptional study of a set of profoundly influential economic ideas. While rooted in the past, it sheds light on the present moment. The Neomercantilists shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought. Eric Helleiner is an author and professor of political science and the Faculty of Arts Chair in International Political Economy at the University of Waterloo. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    53 mins
  • Sonja Stojanovic, "Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
    Oct 20 2024
    Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost: Thinking Memory and the Untimely Through Contemporary Fiction in French (Liverpool UP, 2023) is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted. Maureen G. Shanahan, J.D., PhD is Professor of Art History, School of Art, Design & Art History, James Madison University Machine Modernisms, Masculinity, and the Trauma of War: The Art of Fernand Léger (Penn State University Press, May 2024). Colonial Wounds / Postcolonial Repair, exhibition catalog (University of Virginia 2019) Simón Bolívar: Travels and Transformations of a Cultural Icon (University Press of Florida 2016) LINKED IN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies
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    1 hr and 7 mins

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