About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Marcel Proust once wrote, There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents' grave. Investigating the origin and significance of this statement, Antoine Compagnon offers new insight into the great author's underappreciated Jewish side.

Compagnon traces Proust's ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother's successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust's masterpiece In Search of Lost Time in the 1920s and 1930s. Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust's work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source for pride in their Jewish identity. He also considers Proust's portrayal of homosexuality and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. A work of remarkable erudition and deep research, Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the vanished world of Proust's first Jewish readers and shows how it can illuminate our reading of the great novelist today.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Freud and psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in the contemporary entertainment culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom--and against what?

Julia Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. These figures, according to Kristeva, took part in a revolution against accepted notions of identity--of one's relation to others. She places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics, also offering an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion.

Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune (1907) de Gaston Leroux est un roman policier français classique mettant en vedette le jeune journaliste et détective amateur Joseph Rouletabille. L'histoire tourne autour du crime apparemment impossible d'une tentative de meurtre dans une pièce verrouillée, connue sous le nom de Chambre Jaune . Mathilde Stangerson, la victime, est retrouvée grièvement blessée à l'intérieur de la pièce fermée à clé de l'intérieur sans possibilité apparente pour l'agresseur de s'échapper. Rouletabille enquête, utilisant son intellect aiguisé pour percer le mystère, découvrir des secrets et remettre en question les hypothèses tout en s'efforçant de résoudre cette affaire déconcertante. Le roman est un chef-d'oeuvre du genre policier locked-room, célèbre pour son intrigue complexe et sa résolution intelligente.

Offering a new history of a formative cultural and political era through the cosmic phenomena that captured the public's imagination

In the winters of 1664-65 and 1680-81, the French public was galvanized by two bright comets whose elliptical orbits could not be mapped with contemporary geometry and that thus seemed to appear in random and unpredictable locations. Bookending the period during which Louis XIV's sun king mythology was created, these comets defied the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired. As Claire Goldstein demonstrates, literary texts, cultural institutions, and architecture inspired by comets offer a different perspective on the relationship between sensory experience, ideology, and artistic form.

In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France presents an alternative view of a formative era in cultural and political history, when distinctly modern forms of power and control were established through a regime of the spectacular. Goldstein shows how comets allow us to see the seventeenth century in ways that complicate the narrative of a race toward rationalization, classicism, and modernity, indexing instead a messy period in which the spectacular was sometimes also inscrutable.

Influential philosopher Michel Serres's foundational work uses fable to explore how human relations are identical to that of the parasite to the host body. Among Serres's arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue--creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought.

Michel Serres is professor in history of science at the Sorbonne, professor of Romance languages at Stanford University, and author of several books, including Genesis.

Lawrence R. Schehr is professor of French at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University. His books include Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota, 2003).

To receive a royal pardon in sixteenth-century France for certain kinds of homicide-unpremeditated, unintended, in self-defense, or otherwise excusable-a supplicant had to tell the king a story. These stories took the form of letters of remission, documents narrated to royal notaries by admitted offenders who, in effect, stated their case for pardon to the king. Thousands of such stories are found in French archives, providing precious evidence of the narrative skills and interpretive schemes of peasants and artisans as well as the well-born.

This book, by one of the most acclaimed historians of our time, is a pioneering effort to us the tools of literary analysis to interpret archival texts: to show how people from different stations in life shaped the events of a crime into a story, and to compare their stories with those told by Renaissance authors not intended to judge the truth or falsity of the pardon narratives, but rather to refer to the techniques for crafting stories.

A number of fascinating crime stories, often possessing Rabelaisian humor, are told in the course of the book, which consists of three long chapters. These chapters explore the French law of homicide, depictions of hot anger and self-defense, and the distinctive characteristics of women's stories of bloodshed.

The book is illustrated with seven contemporary woodcuts and a facsimile of a letter of remission, with appendixes providing several other original documents. This volume is based on the Harry Camp Memorial Lectures given at Stanford University in 1986.

Drawing on early modern French thought to free nature and aesthetics from metaphysical humanism

What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why.

This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today's plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever.

During the interwar years in France, modernist literature challenged norms around sex and sexuality through daring portrayals of homosexuality and queerness. The same moment, however, witnessed the crystallization of the Western gender binary and its stark lines of division between male and female. Bringing together trans theory with French literary studies, Mat Fournier offers a new understanding of how the gender binary emerged in the modernist era.

Dysphoric Modernism considers gender deviance in works by a broad range of French authors, both writers who are canonical for queer theory, such as Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Genet, and Colette, and lesser-known figures, including René Crevel, Raymond Radiguet, Maurice Sachs, and Maurice Rostand. Its trans readings track the dysphoria inherent to modern gender and the many ways these texts both disrupt and reinforce it. Examining the complex entanglements of gender and sexuality with the colonial project, Fournier argues that modernist writers' representations of sexual dissidence came at the cost of their enforcement of racial and gendered discrimination. A groundbreaking transgender analysis of French modernist literature, this book also demonstrates the significance of the concept of dysphoria for a number of fields.

In a philosophical erotic narrative, an essay on poetry and in poems, Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible. The narrator engages in a journey, one reminiscent of the Grail quest; failing, he experiences truth. He describes a movement toward a disappearing object, the same elusive object that moved Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to ecstasy.

Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death--precisely the perspective of poetry--and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility. Only the useful, the real, have a serious character. We are never within our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us. Indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights.--Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including Erotism, The Tears of Eros and Story of the Eye.

Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes, Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?

Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life's deepest wonderings.

A critical account of the idea of intelligence in modern French literature and thought

In the late nineteenth century, psychologists and philosophers became intensely interested in the possibility of quantifying, measuring, and evaluating intelligence, and using it to separate and compare individuals. Disarming Intelligence analyzes how this polyvalent term was consolidated and contested in competing discourses, from fin de siècle psychology and philosophy to literature, criticism, and cultural polemics around the First World War.

Zakir Paul examines how Marcel Proust, Henri Bergson, Paul Valéry, and the critics of the influential Nouvelle revue française registered, negotiated, and subtly countered the ways intelligence was invoked across the political and aesthetic spectrum. For these writers, intelligence fluctuates between an individual, sovereign faculty for analyzing the world and something collective, accidental, and contingent. Disarming Intelligence shows how literary and critical styles questioned, suspended, and reimagined what intelligence could be by bringing elements of uncertainty and potentiality into its horizon. The book also explores interwar political tensions--from the extreme right to Walter Benjamin's engaged essays on contemporary French writers. Finally, a brief coda recasts current debates about artificial intelligence by comparing them to these earlier crises of intelligence.

By drawing together and untangling competing conceptions of intelligence, Disarming Intelligence exposes its mercurial but influential and urgent role in literary and cultural politics.

Based on details and information reported in contemporaneous newspaper reports, Screaming at the Window is the true and tragic story of Blanche Monnier, the young daughter of Louise, an aristocratic mother and Emile, a former dean of the faculty of letters, who became known throughout France as The Prisoner of Poitiers (La Séquestrée de Poitiers).

Just before her twenty-fifth birthday, Blanche Monnier was imprisoned in an upstairs room by her mother and her brother. In May 1901, an anonymous letter alerted the police to the fact that Blanche was imprisoned in a dark room with padlocked shutters. According to the letter, Blanche had been imprisoned for twenty-five years. When the police found her, she was half-starved, naked, sedated and screaming.

Part French history, part true crime study, part courtroom drama, Screaming At The Window is Blanche Monnier's harrowing story.

During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but memory to go on, the Polish artist and soldier J zef Czapski brought Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust's masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work's originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust's great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust's world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

An intersectional investigation of identity formation in Marcel Proust's magnum opus.

As metonyms for broader categories such as class, sexuality, and ethnicity, the three most discussed identity groups in Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu - snobs, inverts, and Jews - prove to be deeply intertwined and perplexing representations. Attentive to these interwoven complexities, Proust's Snobs, Inverts, and Jews examines the novelist's exploitation of classification systems as a means to subvert the notion of a fixed identity.

To illustrate Proust's challenges to a social order that restricts our perceptions of identity, Adeline Soldin addresses the inconsistencies and friction surrounding the portrayal of these key figures in his seven-volume novel. Many scholars have recognized that the narrator's formative journey in La Recherche leads to disillusionment and increased mockery of his fellow characters. Soldin contends, however, that Proust does not merely deride characters' behavior, but rather interrogates their diverse motivations and tendencies, thereby exposing the performative nature of identity.

Proust's Snobs, Inverts, and Jews draws on Judith Butler's theories of performativity to illustrate Proust's precocious portrayal of identity in La Recherche as an elusive, unattainable idea that characters pursue yet consistently fail to establish. Ultimately, the enigmatic and anonymous narrator models fluidity and promotes fantasy and imagination to compensate for the limitations imposed on individuals by social and linguistic conventions.

Talk of repair has become ubiquitous in recent years. In the age of trauma culture, art and literature have a new purpose: to do justice, to console, comfort, and heal. Drawing on works of twenty-first-century French-language literature, this monograph shows how literature can not only serve as a means of personal development, but expand our capacity for empathy, help repair the brokenness implied in victimhood, and redress individual and collective traumas. Centered on a critical reflection on discourses of repair (and reparations), it questions the canonical theories on the functions of literature and proposes a new way of writing (and reading) literary history.

Praise

Repair the World is an invigorating and essential call to arms. The modern category of the literary, it declares, is being outpaced by the contemporary uses of literature: as a medium of exorcism, empathy, reparation, testimony, commemoration, existential renewal, and ethical or political connectivity. Neither celebrating nor condemning such uses, Gefen models a much-needed style of criticism - interdisciplinary, pragmatic, relational - that comes to grips with their importance.

- Rita Felski, the John Stewart Bryan Professor and Professor of English at the University of Virginia (USA)

In an era where self-help, memoir, and autobiography command more than their fair share of publisher's lists in France, it's tempting, some fifty years after post-structuralism's heyday, to ascribe an impending 'death of literature' to a taste for narcissistic exhibitionism in French literary culture. But why bemoan the waning relevance of the question 'what is literature?, ' asks Alexandre Gefen, when evidence abounds in the new century that literary writing increasingly posits itself as a restorative, reparative act? In the best instances, authors who give form to embodied experience imaginatively forge with their readers empathetic bonds of the sort that secular and religious institutions long sustained. Repair the World is not only a capacious study of writers who hail from surprisingly broad sectors of French society, from health and social workers to skilled laborers, journalists, and educators; it's a situated call for a pragmatics of reading that makes of each book an intervention into the fabric of the real. Harnessing sources in affect theory, trauma studies, ethics, and cognitive science, Alexandre Gefen performs a critically reparative act all his own, reminding us that the notion of literature as autonomous object was itself a historical construct, in short: an ideology. Reading and writing have always conjoined care for the self and care for others, and it's upon that reciprocity that the communities of sense of tomorrow can flourish in a spirit of reparative humanism.

- Derek Schilling, Professor of French, Director of the Centre Louis Marin, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Johns Hopkins University (USA)

Alexandre Gefen's wide-ranging, thought-provoking study takes stock of a paradigm shift in contemporary French literature, away from a model of autonomy and intransitivity to ways of writing and reading that seek to repair, restore, reassure, and rebuild. From the varied forms of expressivity found in self-narratives to the empathetic projections of fiction, Repair the World maps out an expanding literary territory that seeks not critical negativity but rather the power to intervene for good in individual and collective life. While reserving judgment on the actual extent of literature's effects, Gefen demonstrates that contemporary projects and discourses undeniably center the therapeutic and remediative uses of literature. With its nuanced readings and keen insights, Repair the World has been rightly influential in France; its powerful diagnosis of contemporary sensibilities resonates far beyond, revealing both the promises and predicaments of literature in the twenty-first century.

- Alison James, Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago (USA)

What would it mean to ask Sartre's post-war question 'What is literature?' in the 21^st century? In this wonderful essay, Alexandre Gefen argues convincingly that the main purpose of literature today is to repair a broken world and memorialise forgotten lives. Taking examples from, predominantly, contemporary French literature, he proposes that literature as therapy has replaced religions of salvation, a politics of emancipation and formal experimentation. Today, literature's mission is to heal traumatised individuals and communities, resurrect the lives of the vulnerable and commemorate their deeds in the face of the forces of oblivion. For Gefen, Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997) is 'the contemporary literary archetype of these lost identities to be rehabilitated and reinhabited'. Gefen describes this new role for literature without taking sides; the writing is lucid, compelling and non-partisan. In an age of victimhood, testimony, empathy, self-expression and identity, Gefen's reparative paradigm is as persuasive as Sartre's political version in the age of ideology.

- Max Silverman, Professor of Modern French Studies, University of Leeds (UK)