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This chapter proposes a revision of Dionyýz Ďurišin's concept of interliterary community and Pierre Bourdieu's concept of Field, in order to explain the possibilities of an inner comparative frame in Catalonia, in the context of Iberian peninsula. The main reflection by Ďurišin is a good framework to understand the place of Catalan literature within European literature in the twentieth century. But it is necessary to consider that interliterariness is deeply conditioned by tensions between the political, intellectual and literary fields. Catalonia develops a double interliterary process: on one hand, it belongs to the Iberian interliterary community, but on the other hand it relates to literatures written in Spanish in Catalonia and to an increasing number of works written in other languages there. In addition, Catalan literature has always been in functional proximity to European and American literatures. So a new definition of interliterary community from a Catalan point of view must take cognizance of the fact that Catalan literature relates to other literatures both outside and inside its nominal space, in a double dimension almost unique in Europe. In this respect, Catalan literature may play a key role in the contemporary redefinition of European cultural identity.

Cécile Marshall, whose doctoral thesis analysed Harrison’s poems, films and plays (Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux 3, Bordeaux, France), went on to translate some of these works into French. In this article, she concentrates on the more creative side of her engagement with Harrison’s poetry, her activity as Harrison’s French translator. Providing a few samples from her French translations, she describes the processes at work in translating rhymed verse into French, acknowledging difficulties, doubts and discoveries, and analyses the specificities of rhythm and meter in Harrison’s poetry that must flow, even if differently, from one language into another. She also traces the different French translations, from Quebec to Belgium and France from the late 1990s onwards which show the appeal of Harrison’s poems, as well as the difficulty of making this prolific poet accessible in translation. Cécile Marshall comments on her own contributions as a translator of Harrison into French for different occasions: poetry readings and screenings in Paris or Nantes; publications in monolingual or bilingual editions. She also underscores the vital help and encouragement she received from Harrison who was always attentive to the music of the French versions of his own poetry, a collaboration that owed the poet and his translator to be honoured with the Strasbourg European Prize for Literature in 2010.

‘Intra-Israeli Conflict’ examines how the primary corpus represents conflict between different ethnic and political demographics among Jews in Israel. Using cognitive science, social psychology, and cognitive psychology, Cairns attempts to understand how and why conflict comes to be. The chapter takes an in-depth view at the immigrants who form the main constituents of Francophone communities in Israel, namely those of Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian descent, and highlights their intra-ethnic differences and the intense emotions felt between them.

‘Modern Israeli Paradigms of Identity’ considers how texts inscribe key elements within paradigms of Israeli identity from 1948 onwards and in doing so provides a general discussion of Zionism, the kibbutzim - old and new, and the self-division of diasporic Jews. Also referred to in this chapter is the cult of the ‘New Hebrew’ and the role of the Israeli army in the formation of Israeli identity. Cairns concludes with an exploration of the influence of the Francophone community in inflecting modern Israeli identities and Israel’s perception of France.

‘Identities in Flux’, written by Régine Robin, is the first essay in the ‘Contemporary Politics and French Thought’ section and traces the major forces that have impacted post-colonial France: global capitalism, immigration and its resultant multiculturalism, the rise of the political right, and the persistent crises of memory that have occupied the second half of the twentieth century.

‘The Paradoxes of Being Contemporary’, written by Lawrence D. Kritzman, addresses contemporary crises in the United States. The essay activates Derrida’s reflections on force and justice to think through our contemporary moment, using the 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri as bellwether for Derridean political philosophy, and building on the philosopher’s work on apartheid in South Africa and the undocumented in France. Kritzman also assesses Derrida’s political praxis within his theoretical and ethical speculations, and demonstrates his vision of responsibility and political engagement as a negotiation between contradictory and irreconcilable demands.

‘Of Sade, Blanchot, and the French Twentieth Century: Thoughts at Columbia’, written by Jeffrey Mehlman, retraces the peregrinations of Maurice Blanchot and considers his relevance today. The essay’s attention to authors’ reading (Blanchot’s readings of Sade and Duras; Marty’s readings, in turn, of Blanchot and Genet) underscores the critical valences of rereading as a contemporary practice.

‘Rethinking Periodization for the ‘Now-Time’, written by Emily Apter, addresses literary history and the issue of time. The essay foregrounds periodicity as a category of literary scholarship and places emphasis on the meaning of ‘now-time’ in particular. In her essay, Apter also suggests alternative approaches to the problem of periodization for comparative aesthetics.

‘Making L’Etranger Contemporary: Kamel Daoud’s Meursault, contre-enquête’, written by Alice Kaplan, completes the ‘Novel Rereadings’ section and highlights another facet of rereading by offering a critique of a recent polemical Algerian novel. Through this critique, Kaplan assesses official history and language politics in contemporary Algeria.

‘Authenticity and authorship’ is the first chapter in the ‘Mediations’ section of the text and explores how institutional conditions shaped and responded to notions of African authorial subjectivity in the early post-war period. The chapter builds on the primarily textual analyses of Jonathan Ngate and Michael Syrotinski, concerning narrative agency and African subjectivity, and approaches the discursive construction of an authorial subject in material terms.

‘(After) Conceptualism: Contemporaneity in Choreography’, written by Carrie Noland, is the last essay in the ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’ section, and investigates the study of cutting-edge conceptual choreography and dance performance as an index of contemporaneity. Noland provides a consideration of what comes after the contemporary and assesses performance as a test case for a broader inquiry into the notion of being contemporary.

‘Translating Africa in the French republic of letters’ is the concluding chapter in the ‘Mediations’ section of the text as well as the book itself, and focuses on the role of translation as a further worldly aspect of literary mediation in the period of decolonization. The chapter suggests that translation depends not only on the relative position of languages, but on material conditions, shaped by the prestige of the translated author and, at times, the translator, and delineates writers’ and translators’ often strained relationships to notions of literary value during the decades of decolonization. By situating three translations in relation to the context of their publication and early reception, Bush considers the ways in which normative ideas of French as a literary language, bound up with the political transitions of this period, informed and accommodated translations of Anglophone African literature.

‘Coping with Contemporariness’, written by Henry Rousso, is the first chapter within the ‘Conceptualizing the Contemporary’ section. This essay inquires into the meaning of writing contemporary history and deconstructs its definitional boundaries as a category and practice, decoupling it conceptually from relation terms in order to historicize the field of contemporary history in the French academy.

‘Alain Badiou and Anti-Semitism’, written by Maurice Samuels, focuses on current French debates over the ‘new anti-Semitism.’ In his essay, Samuels identifies the resurgence of anti-Semitism as one of the defining features of the contemporary moment in France, and through a series of close readings of Badiou’s writings, explores the ways in which Badiou’s positions on Jewish issues produce what he calls an ‘anti-Semitic effect.’

‘A Nest in the Air: Phantom Pain and Contemporary Narrative’, written by Emmanuel Bouju, is the first in the ‘Memory: Past and Future’ section, and provides a study on the intersection of new narrative and contemporary medical theories. Bouju’s essay posits contemporary European novels about loss and trauma as textual iterations of the ‘mirror-box’— a contraption designed by neuroscience researchers in order to permit amputees to visualize their missing limb through specular inversion, thus attenuating pain by imaginary muscular exercise of the phantom limb. Similarly, for Bouju, the ‘mirror-box of fiction’ allows for a certain form of ‘resolution, through make-believe, of the intractable problem of representation.’

This chapter is the first in the ‘Institutions’ section of the study, and considers the relative positions and strategies of selected editors who added literary voices concerning the Union française to their catalogues in the late 1940s. Editors included in Bush’s discussion are Paul Flamand at Le Seuil, Charles Fasquelle of Éditions Fasquelle, Charles-André Julien at Presses universitaires de France, and Guy Lévis Mano. Each assessment provides the opportunity to contemplate how anthologies and edited collections engaged with the politically volatile context of the Union française in a period marked by a sustained sense of both guilt and hope.

‘What does ‘Vichy’ Mean Now?’, written by Richard J. Golsan, is the first essay in the section, ‘The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives’, and offers an analysis of the changing signification of Vichy in the twenty-first-century imaginary. In his exploration of the Vichy period, Golsan navigates between past and present, bridging contemporary concerns and their origins. Combining a rigorous assessment of political and cultural debates, recent French laws, and new fiction, Golsan contends that the memory of Vichy has become dangerously allegorized, ‘ossified’, and ‘unmoored from historical realities.’