La ligne d’écume: Encountering the French beach

~ john hutnyk

new book from pavement with chapters by Ffrench, Collier, Launchbury, Gledhill, Fuggle etc.,…

Laligne\

Edited by Sophie Fuggle and Nicholas Gledhill

As a trope, theme, myth and very real space, what is at stake in the frequent artistic, cultural and philosophical articulations of the beach in French thought? Adopting a variety of approaches, this is the question that the essays in this collection seek to address. The beach in twentieth and twenty-first century French philosophy, literature and visual culture represents both limit and liminal space. It is a site of multiple encounters with both the other and the self, of arrivals and departures, of both hedonistic freedom and colonial subordination. At the same time, it is the no-man’s land where, as Michel Foucault suggests at the end of The Order of Things, man’s image is literally washed away.

The essays compiled in this collection, explore the French and Francophone beach via the various encounters this complex and multiple space engenders alongside the role it has come to play in both a French and global cultural imaginary. Bringing together a range of critical perspectives from scholars working in fields such as literature, film, philosophy, gender and cultural studies, the collection analyses the violent erasures and appropriations associated with the French beach whilst also calling for a reimagining of the beach as creative, ethical space.

Strands book series

ISBN: 978-0-9571470-7-2

£18.99 (inc. postage)

Table of Contents

Introduction
SOPHIE FUGGLE & NICHOLAS GLEDHILL

I. Beach Archaeologies

Beneath the Cobblestones, the Beach: An Idea in Everyone’s Mind?
CHRISTOPHER COLLIER

Devant la mer: Thresholds of Fiction and Theory
PATRICK FFRENCH

Death on the Sand: From Tragic Humanism to Depressive Realism
NICHOLAS GLEDHILL

II. Framing the Beach

Proust and the Beach as Écran
ÁINE LARKIN

Vacance: Vacancy and Vacation in the Films of Jacques Rozier
GILLES CHAMEROIS

III. War Zones

Bodies on the Sand: Corporeality and the Beach in the Films of Catherine Breillat and François Ozon
FIONA HANDYSIDE

Colonies de Vacances
SOPHIE FUGGLE

‘Elle ne sera bientôt qu’une épave soudée à ses rochers’: Women Writing the Wreck of Beirut
CLAIRE LAUNCHBURY

IV. Eroded Identities

Between Real and Ideal Space: Embodiment and the Beach in Michel Houellebecq
ZOË ROTH

The Beach as Liminal Site in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Heremakono
THÉRÈSE DE RAEDT

 

Buy it here: http://www.pavementbooks.com/lalignedecume

Published by john hutnyk

Writer on culture, cities, diaspora, history, film, prisons, colonialism, education, Marxism. Studied and taught in Australia at Deakin and Melbourne Universities; and in the UK in Manchester University’s Institute for Creative and Cultural Research; before moving to Goldsmiths University of London in 1998, and becoming Academic Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies in 2004-2014. Has held visiting researcher posts in Germany at the South Asia Institute and Institute fur Ethnologie at Heidelberg University, and Visiting Professor posts in InterCultural Studies at Nagoya City University Japan, Zeppelin University and Hamburg University, Germany, Sociology at Mimar Sinan University, Istanbul, Turkey and at the Graduate Institute for Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Immediate past adjunct Professor of RMIT University, Melbourne and GIAN Visiting Professor Jadavpur Uni Kolkata. Currently Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.