Lucas Hollister
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942180
- eISBN:
- 9781789623642
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942180.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
In this chapter, I examine how Jean Echenoz transforms and repurposes popular genres—specifically crime fiction and the war novel--in subtly political manners. Through readings of Echenoz’s ...
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In this chapter, I examine how Jean Echenoz transforms and repurposes popular genres—specifically crime fiction and the war novel--in subtly political manners. Through readings of Echenoz’s (anti-)mystery novel A Year (1997) and his short war novel 1914 (2012), I show how Echenoz smuggles biopolitical and spectral problematics into his works, enlarging the conceptual scope of popular story forms and genre fictions. My reading of Echenoz positions him not as a writer that brings us back to the pleasures of story, but rather as a writer who demonstrates how we can alter the generic conventions and narrative strategies of popular violent fiction in order to account for biopolitical exclusion and mediated phantom pain. Echenoz is thus a writer who shows us some ingenious strategies for rethinking the uses of forms and genres.Less
In this chapter, I examine how Jean Echenoz transforms and repurposes popular genres—specifically crime fiction and the war novel--in subtly political manners. Through readings of Echenoz’s (anti-)mystery novel A Year (1997) and his short war novel 1914 (2012), I show how Echenoz smuggles biopolitical and spectral problematics into his works, enlarging the conceptual scope of popular story forms and genre fictions. My reading of Echenoz positions him not as a writer that brings us back to the pleasures of story, but rather as a writer who demonstrates how we can alter the generic conventions and narrative strategies of popular violent fiction in order to account for biopolitical exclusion and mediated phantom pain. Echenoz is thus a writer who shows us some ingenious strategies for rethinking the uses of forms and genres.
Lucas Hollister
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942180
- eISBN:
- 9781789623642
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942180.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature
Beyond Return examines how popular literary forms have been politicized or could be productively repoliticized in the literary period that we have called the contemporary (roughly: since 1980). In ...
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Beyond Return examines how popular literary forms have been politicized or could be productively repoliticized in the literary period that we have called the contemporary (roughly: since 1980). In the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), ‘contemporary’ French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’ Beyond Return proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, this book shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of ‘return,’ and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Beyond Return argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the ‘return to the story’ in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.Less
Beyond Return examines how popular literary forms have been politicized or could be productively repoliticized in the literary period that we have called the contemporary (roughly: since 1980). In the aftermath of the efflorescence of experimental literature and theory that characterized the Trente Glorieuses (1945-75), ‘contemporary’ French literature is often said to embrace more traditional or readable novelistic forms. This rejection of the radical aesthetics of mid-century French literature, this rehabilitation of fictional forms that have been called sub-literary, regressive, or outdated, has been given a name: the ‘return to the story.’ Beyond Return proposes new perspectives on the cultural politics of such fictions. Examining adventure novels, radical noir, postmodernist mysteries, war novels, and dystopian fictions, this book shows how authors like Jean Echenoz, Jean-Patrick Manchette, Jean Rouaud, and Antoine Volodine develop radically dissimilar notions of the aesthetics of ‘return,’ and thus redraw in different manners the boundaries of the contemporary, the French, and the literary. In the process, Beyond Return argues for the need to move beyond the nostalgic, anti-modernist rhetoric of the ‘return to the story’ in order to appreciate the potentialities of innovative contemporary genre fictions.
Roxanna Curto and Rebecca Wines (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800856899
- eISBN:
- 9781800853317
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800856899.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sport and Leisure
This edited volume gathers together studies examining various aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe and around the Francophone world. We define “physical culture” as ...
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This edited volume gathers together studies examining various aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe and around the Francophone world. We define “physical culture” as the systematic care for and development of the physique, and interpret it to include not only sport in the modern sense, but also all the athletic activities that preceded it or relate to it, such as bodily forms of exercise, leisure, and artistic creation. Our essays pursue diverse interpretive approaches and focus on texts from a wide variety of periods (medieval to the present) and genres (short stories, novels, essays, poetry) in order to consider the fundamental—yet highly neglected—place of physical activities in literature and culture from the French-speaking world. Some of the questions the essays explore include: Does the genre “sports literature” exist in French, and if so, what are its characteristics? How do governments or other political entities mobilize sports literature? What role do narratives about sports—especially the creation of teams—play in the construction of national, regional and/or local identities? How is physical culture used in literary works for pedagogical or ideological purposes? To what extent do sports performances provide a metaphorical and figurative discourse for discussing literature and culture?Less
This edited volume gathers together studies examining various aspects of physical culture in literature written in French from Europe and around the Francophone world. We define “physical culture” as the systematic care for and development of the physique, and interpret it to include not only sport in the modern sense, but also all the athletic activities that preceded it or relate to it, such as bodily forms of exercise, leisure, and artistic creation. Our essays pursue diverse interpretive approaches and focus on texts from a wide variety of periods (medieval to the present) and genres (short stories, novels, essays, poetry) in order to consider the fundamental—yet highly neglected—place of physical activities in literature and culture from the French-speaking world. Some of the questions the essays explore include: Does the genre “sports literature” exist in French, and if so, what are its characteristics? How do governments or other political entities mobilize sports literature? What role do narratives about sports—especially the creation of teams—play in the construction of national, regional and/or local identities? How is physical culture used in literary works for pedagogical or ideological purposes? To what extent do sports performances provide a metaphorical and figurative discourse for discussing literature and culture?
Cynthia Laborde
- Published in print:
- 2022
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781800856899
- eISBN:
- 9781800853317
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781800856899.003.0009
- Subject:
- Sociology, Sport and Leisure
Roxanna Curto examines how Echenoz’s turn to sport as a narrative subject corresponds to a rethinking of his notions of the relationship between fiction and reality, differences between elite and ...
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Roxanna Curto examines how Echenoz’s turn to sport as a narrative subject corresponds to a rethinking of his notions of the relationship between fiction and reality, differences between elite and popular culture, and questions of style and efficacy. She also considers how running, much like the other sports discussed in this volume, functions as a shifting signifier whose meaning changes according to the immediate cultural and political context, including Cold War history and contemporary politics. As Curto argues, first, the work plays with its own novelistic form, using a literary, at times journalistic style of writing to present a protagonist that at the beginning appears to be a purely fictional character, but the reader later realizes is based on a real-life figure. Second, the narrative, through its discussions of Zatopek, constructs a figurative discourse for the style of the novel itself. Zatopek’s style is described as simple and inelegant yet ‘it worked,’ much like the author’s means of telling the story could be said to be direct and functional. Finally, Courir, which was published in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, uses sport as a means of producing a political commentary about Communist regimes from the 1960s and today.Less
Roxanna Curto examines how Echenoz’s turn to sport as a narrative subject corresponds to a rethinking of his notions of the relationship between fiction and reality, differences between elite and popular culture, and questions of style and efficacy. She also considers how running, much like the other sports discussed in this volume, functions as a shifting signifier whose meaning changes according to the immediate cultural and political context, including Cold War history and contemporary politics. As Curto argues, first, the work plays with its own novelistic form, using a literary, at times journalistic style of writing to present a protagonist that at the beginning appears to be a purely fictional character, but the reader later realizes is based on a real-life figure. Second, the narrative, through its discussions of Zatopek, constructs a figurative discourse for the style of the novel itself. Zatopek’s style is described as simple and inelegant yet ‘it worked,’ much like the author’s means of telling the story could be said to be direct and functional. Finally, Courir, which was published in 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, uses sport as a means of producing a political commentary about Communist regimes from the 1960s and today.
