scholarly journals The Grotte du Renne, Leroi-Gourhan and Flaubert's La Légende de Saint Julien l'Hospitalier (1877): The Question of ‘Préhistoire(s)’ to Delimit the Human

Paragraph ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-348
Author(s):  
Mary Orr
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Post War ◽  
French Cultural Studies

This article reconsiders the important work of Leroi-Gourhan through the lens of Christopher Johnson's ‘Leroi-Gourhan and the Limits of the Human’ (2011) by returning to the context of French prehistory of the 1860s that lies behind Leroi-Gourhan's discoveries and interpretations of hominid remains and artefacts in the Grotte du Renne. The Exposition universelle of 1867 and French publications of the period capture the importance of ‘préhistoire’ for Second Empire France materialized in Napoleon III's establishment at Saint-Germain-en-Laye of the first national Musée des Antiquités Nationales dedicated to their collections. The archaeological discoveries, and the debates they inspired, did not escape the encyclopaedic bricolage and designs of Flaubert. With delicious clins d'oeil to the question of ‘l'homme fossile’ and ‘l'homme futur’ that he had already debated with Louis Bouilhet, this article uncovers how Flaubert's Légende de Saint Julien details the ‘limits of the human’ in Johnson's reading of Leroi-Gourhan. By returning to ‘real’ counterparts for the legendary Stag in Flaubert's tale, its contextual, allegedly fantastical, ‘préhistoires’ can better be excavated. To find the non-legendary, extreme contemporary, sources for Flaubert's disturbing text crucially informs a critique of the dehistoricization of seeing in post-war French cultural studies and sciences of the human.

Revisiting Plozévet

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-359
Author(s):  
Charles Forsdick
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Genetic Function ◽  
French Sociology ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One ◽  
French Cultural Studies

A special issue of French Cultural Studies in 1999 sought to explore the ways in which Modern Linguists have often tended to erase traces of their personal lives from their work. Contributors responded in an autobiographical mode by exploring the ‘hidden selves of scholars and teachers’. This article builds on these reflections by exploring the extent to which Edgar Morin’s Commune en France (1967), his contribution to the multidisciplinary project in Plozévet in Brittany, may be understood as ‘autobiographie involontaire’. The study reads Morin’s Journal de Plozévet (published in 2001, over three decades after the research was completed) in relation to the original monograph and suggests that the diary operates as the second panel of a diptych that reveals the texts’ interdependence. The journal fulfils a ‘genetic’ function, providing the sources for elements of Morin’s monograph and giving an indication of the extent to which Morin drew on the work of his wider team to complement his own observations. More importantly, however, reading the two texts in counterpoint – the one providing spontaneous reflections in the field; the other revealing their processing in the immediate aftermath of the enquête – is part of the revelation of the ‘hidden selves’ of a researcher embedded in a monograph that has been long considered a classic of post-war French sociology.

Culture and the popular: Introduction to essays in memory of Brian Rigby

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 293-299
Author(s):  
Michael Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk ◽  
French Cultural Studies

This article introduces the special number of French Cultural Studies commemorating the role of Brian Rigby as the journal’s first Managing Editor. It situates his contribution in the emergence of cultural history and French cultural studies during the rapid expansion of higher education from the 1960s in France, the UK, the US and other countries. It suggests that these new areas of study saw cultural activities in a broader social context and opened the way to a wider understanding of culture, in which popular culture played an increasingly important part. It argues that the study of popular culture can illuminate some of the most mundane experiences of everyday life, and some of the most challenging. It can also help to understand the rapidly changing cultural environment in which our daily lives are now conducted.

Introduction Religion in France: Belief, identity and laïcité

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Michael Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Philosophical Argument ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
Living Together ◽  
Special Number ◽  
French Cultural Studies ◽  
The Relationship

This is the introduction to a special number of French Cultural Studies devoted to religion in France, focusing on the issues of belief, identity and laïcité. The articles deal with social and cultural issues of secularity and identity, and also reach into philosophical argument and literary representation. They explore the relationship between France and Islam, issues of Jewish and Catholic heritage, the philosophical issues of belief and non-belief, and the historical roots of French secularism and the search for ways of living together.

Stuart Hall's Discursive Turn

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 556-563
Author(s):  
JAY GARCIA
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Social History ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
Stuart Hall ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

Recalling his work as cofounder and contributor toUniversities and Left Review, or the ULR group, in the lead-up to the founding of cultural studies during the 1950s, Stuart Hall noted that much of that work had to do with the United States. “In geopolitical terms we were of course neutralists, hostile to the politics emanating from the State Department in Washington,” Hall wrote, “but culturally we were nonetheless attracted by the vitality of American popular life, indeed to the domain of mass culture itself.” If the ULR group and similar collectives shared an “anxiety about the stupendous power of the booming consumer capitalism of post-war America,” they were also united by an appreciation for the ways the “vitality and raucousness of American culture certainly loosened England's tight-lipped, hierarchical class cultures and carried inside it possibilities – or the collective dream? – for a better future, which we felt was a serious political loss to deny.” Not unrelatedly, by the 1960s and 1970s, cultural studies and certain quarters of American intellectual life were proceeding along comparable tracks. Many American scholars and at least some working in cultural studies moved toward social history that emphasized the “hidden experiences of subordinated groups and classes.” Undertaken in concert with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, this version of social history would ramify widely, furnishing the very questions and analytic habits of many fields, not least American studies.

Review: Contemporary French Cultural Studies

2002 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 558-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
French Cultural Studies

Stepping back from queer theory: Language, fieldwork and the everyday in sexuality studies in France

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 408-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis M. Provencher
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Queer Theory ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Gay Identity ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Sexuality Studies ◽  
French Cultural Studies

In a 2012 special issue of French Cultural Studies, Didier Eribon urges French studies scholars to step back from critical theory, and in particular queer theory as it has emerged in cultural and literary studies. He is also particularly critical of a version of queer theory conjugated with psychoanalysis. For Eribon, cultural studies scholars and those working in sexuality studies should move away from the ‘master narrative’ of the family and (re)turn to the cultural, the social, the field and empirical evidence. Over the last 15 years, I have conducted fieldwork and ethnographic interviews with self-identified same-sex desiring men in France. Their life stories can be read at times through the Anglo-American lens of a gay-identified, Western coming-out narrative with a telos of ‘progress’ that involves moving from the closet to being ‘out’. At the same time, however, a queer linguistic approach can help us to read against the grain of several norms and hence provide us with a broader understanding of their lived experiences. In this essay, I present empirical language data from my interview with ‘Tahar’ one of my self-identified same-sex desiring Maghrebi and Maghrebi-French interlocutors to illustrate how his speech acts are situated at the crossroads of multiple discourses, temporalities, identities and traditions. As we shall see, Tahar’s story involves being ‘beur’, ‘being homosexual’ and ‘being fat’. This subject speaks back against the empire, against heteronormativity, and against corporeal norms. While a postcolonial critique based on a ‘postcolonial identity’ (looking at ethnicity or religion, for example) or a linguistic analysis based on ‘gay identity’ could be helpful here, my point is that a queer linguistic analysis – one that takes a position counter to the normative broadly defined by considering simultaneously multiple subaltern subject positions – could provide a better approach for those of us working in an interdisciplinary French cultural studies context.

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