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