The Pedagogical Imagination: The Republican Legacy in Twenty-First-Century French Literature and Film

Popular media, both literature and film, provide a location in which animal suffering, resistance and solidarity are finally visible. An examination of Bong Joon-ho’s award-winning film Okja (2017) and Karen Joy Fowler’s New York Timesbest-selling novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013) reveals complex media representations of animals that highlight the significance of twenty-first century media in depicting the animal in the human world.

Download Full-text

Theorizing Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century

Theorizing Adaptation ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197511176.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 139-172

Author(s):

Kamilla Elliott

Keyword(s):

New Media ◽

Film Studies ◽

First Century ◽

Film Adaptation ◽

Adaptation Studies ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

Theoretical Pluralism ◽

Literature And Film

Chapter 4 traces the expansion of adaptation studies to new media and new theories in the twenty-first century. By 2006, literary film adaptation studies outnumbered general literature-and-film studies, and Linda Hutcheon authoritatively opened adaptation studies beyond literature and film and beyond dyadic disciplines and theoretical camps into a pluralism of media, disciplines, and theories, although debates between pre–theoretical turn and post–theoretical turn theories have continued. They continue because new theories have not resolved the problems of old theories for adaptation, so that scholars return to older theories to try to redress them. New theories have done a great deal for adaptation, but they have also introduced new theoretical problems: so much so, that the latest debates in adaptation study no longer lie between theoretical progressivism and theoretical return but between theoretical pluralism and theoretical abandonment. Beyond specific theories and differing modes of pluralism, this debate points to theorization’s failure to theorize adaptation more generally.

Download Full-text

Representing the Twenty-First Century Migrant Experience: Adam and Fleutiaux’s Problematic Empathy

ALTERNATIVE FRANCOPHONE ◽

10.29173/af29387 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 2 (6) ◽

pp. 65-88

Author(s):

Marianne Bessy ◽

Mary Sloan Morris

Keyword(s):

French Literature ◽

Mental States ◽

Living Conditions ◽

First Century ◽

White Female ◽

Migrant Background ◽

Female Protagonists ◽

Illegal Migrants ◽

French Woman ◽

Twenty First Century

In recent years, a trend in French literature has emerged among non-migrant French authors. In her 2018 study, The Migrant Canon in Twenty-First-Century France, Sabo describes this trend as “the emergence of French authors who write about migration” (27). Similarly, Louviot argued that “the drama of migrants dying on Europe’s doorstep has inspired many […] French writers with no postcolonial or (im)migrant background” (6). This article—which focuses on two texts, À l’abri de rien by Olivier Adam (2007) and Destiny by Pierrette Fleutiaux (2016)—examines how non-migrant French authors have attempted to give a voice to illegal migrants in their recent literary works. Each work recounts the story of a French woman who attempts to help one or several migrants as they navigate horrid living conditions (in a Calais-like city in À l’abri de rien and in Paris in Destiny), suffer mental and physical breakdowns, and face French authorities. This study demonstrates that there is an inherent ambivalence at the heart of how these two non-migrant French authors have attempted to voice the plight of today’s illegal migrants in France. While Adam and Fleutiaux’s texts aim to foster empathy toward migrants, they also feature complex altruistic motives that are far from selfless. Adam and Fleutiaux strive to humanize migrants and their trajectories by creating an empathic discourse of care. However, migrant characters are also portrayed as passive objects of fascination becoming pawn-like figures in the lives of the two white female protagonists. The article questions these characters’ altruism by analyzing how their own mental states overpower their empathic drives, thus bringing to light the questionable reasons why these two women become consumed by the need to help migrants. Ultimately, these considerations help build a critique of the problematic empathy Adam and Fleutiaux have constructed and its ethical ramifications.

Download Full-text

French literature into the twenty-first century

The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature ◽

10.1017/cbo9781139047210.032 ◽

2015 ◽

pp. 223-242

Author(s):

Brian Nelson

Keyword(s):

French Literature ◽

First Century ◽

Twenty First Century

Download Full-text

The Beauty of the Houri

10.1093/oso/9780190249342.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Nerina Rustomji

Keyword(s):

French Literature ◽

September 11 ◽

First Century ◽

September 11Th ◽

Multiple Functions ◽

Gender Parity ◽

Feminine Beauty ◽

Digital Material ◽

Twenty First Century

The fascination with the houri, the pure female of Islamic paradise, began long before September 11, 2001. The Beauty of the Houri demonstrates how the ambiguous reward of the houri, mentioned in the Qurʾan and developed in Islamic theological writings, has gained a distinctive place in English and French literature from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century and in digital material in the twenty-first century. The houri had multiple functions in Islamic texts that ranged from caretaker to pure companion to entertainment. French, English, and American writers used the houri to critique Islam and Muslim societies while also adopting the houri as a model of feminine beauty. Unlike earlier texts that presented different forms of the houri or universalized the houri for all women, writings about the houri after September 11th offer contradictory messages about Islam. In the twenty-first century, the image of the houri symbolizes a reward for violence and the possibility of gender parity. As a cosmic figure that inspires enduring questions about the promise of paradise and the idealized feminine form, the houri has a singular past and potential for future interpretation.

Download Full-text