This chapter provides an extensive analysis of the 2016 drama and one of Ozon’s most recent and s... more This chapter provides an extensive analysis of the 2016 drama and one of Ozon’s most recent and successful films. An unusual film within his oeuvre, given its setting outside of France, for the most part, and the use of black-and-white, Frantz, this chapter argues, interrogates hegemonic masculinity – with the help of Kaja Silverman’s conceptualisation of historical trauma and overall work on marginal masculinities – and the notion that it should be crystallised by war. In doing so, the director unsettles heteronormative conventions. Further, this analysis pays particular attention to Édouard Manet’s Le Suicidé to identify connections between homosexuality and the death drive (established by the painting).
This series studies the role foreign languages have played in the creation of the linguistic and ... more This series studies the role foreign languages have played in the creation of the linguistic and cultural heritage of Europe, both western and eastern, and at the individual, community, national or transnational level. At the heart of this series is the historical evolution of linguistic and cultural policies, internal as well as external, and their relationship with linguistic and cultural identities. The series takes an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of historical issues: the diffusion, the supply and the demand for foreign languages, the history of pedagogical practices, the historical relationship between languages in a given cultural context, the public and private use of foreign languages-in short, every way foreign languages intersect with local languages in the cultural realm.
With postmodernism being associated with playfulness, parody, irony, and even négationnisme, how ... more With postmodernism being associated with playfulness, parody, irony, and even négationnisme, how suitable a medium is the postmodern novel for representing the Holocaust? The readings of Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, Pierre Assouline’s La Cliente, Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de Brodeck, and Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski reveal that postmodern self-consciousness may help to voice the dilemmas attached to cultural representations of the Catastrophe. While postmodern anachronism, intertextuality, and intrusive narrators foreground the challenges of retelling the Shoah in the post-witness era, the postmodern novel’s fragmentariness, confused chronology, and silences enable the articulation of trauma. In exploring the ethical risks and benefits of Holocaust fiction, this book questions the political implications for the French memory of the Occupation of six novels written in the wake of Chirac’s acknowledgement of France’s embroilment in the Nazis’ genocidal project.
This article compares and contrasts the representational strategies used by Piotr Rawicz and Jona... more This article compares and contrasts the representational strategies used by Piotr Rawicz and Jonathan Littell in their Holocaust novels. Separated by 40 years, Le Sang du ciel (1961) (Blood from the Sky) and Les Bienveillantes (2006) (The Kindly Ones) differ in terms of structure, style, and point of view. The article examines the import of these strategies for the way Rawicz’s and Littell’s narratives portray Ukrainians. Its main contention is that, while casting Ukrainians primarily as complicitous in the Holocaust, the two novels frame their complicity with Ukraine’s wartime hopes for sovereignty which it hoped to achieve through collaboration with Hitler’s Germany. By foregrounding Ukraine’s protracted statelessness, oppression by Russia (and later the Soviet Union), and exploitation by Polish landowning gentry, the two novels succeed at offering a nuanced view of Ukrainians without, however, redeeming them.
This chapter provides an extensive analysis of the 2016 drama and one of Ozon’s most recent and s... more This chapter provides an extensive analysis of the 2016 drama and one of Ozon’s most recent and successful films. An unusual film within his oeuvre, given its setting outside of France, for the most part, and the use of black-and-white, Frantz, this chapter argues, interrogates hegemonic masculinity – with the help of Kaja Silverman’s conceptualisation of historical trauma and overall work on marginal masculinities – and the notion that it should be crystallised by war. In doing so, the director unsettles heteronormative conventions. Further, this analysis pays particular attention to Édouard Manet’s Le Suicidé to identify connections between homosexuality and the death drive (established by the painting).
This chapter provides an extensive analysis of the 2016 drama and one of Ozon’s most recent and s... more This chapter provides an extensive analysis of the 2016 drama and one of Ozon’s most recent and successful films. An unusual film within his oeuvre, given its setting outside of France, for the most part, and the use of black-and-white, Frantz, this chapter argues, interrogates hegemonic masculinity – with the help of Kaja Silverman’s conceptualisation of historical trauma and overall work on marginal masculinities – and the notion that it should be crystallised by war. In doing so, the director unsettles heteronormative conventions. Further, this analysis pays particular attention to Édouard Manet’s Le Suicidé to identify connections between homosexuality and the death drive (established by the painting).
This series studies the role foreign languages have played in the creation of the linguistic and ... more This series studies the role foreign languages have played in the creation of the linguistic and cultural heritage of Europe, both western and eastern, and at the individual, community, national or transnational level. At the heart of this series is the historical evolution of linguistic and cultural policies, internal as well as external, and their relationship with linguistic and cultural identities. The series takes an interdisciplinary approach to a variety of historical issues: the diffusion, the supply and the demand for foreign languages, the history of pedagogical practices, the historical relationship between languages in a given cultural context, the public and private use of foreign languages-in short, every way foreign languages intersect with local languages in the cultural realm.
With postmodernism being associated with playfulness, parody, irony, and even négationnisme, how ... more With postmodernism being associated with playfulness, parody, irony, and even négationnisme, how suitable a medium is the postmodern novel for representing the Holocaust? The readings of Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, Pierre Assouline’s La Cliente, Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de Brodeck, and Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski reveal that postmodern self-consciousness may help to voice the dilemmas attached to cultural representations of the Catastrophe. While postmodern anachronism, intertextuality, and intrusive narrators foreground the challenges of retelling the Shoah in the post-witness era, the postmodern novel’s fragmentariness, confused chronology, and silences enable the articulation of trauma. In exploring the ethical risks and benefits of Holocaust fiction, this book questions the political implications for the French memory of the Occupation of six novels written in the wake of Chirac’s acknowledgement of France’s embroilment in the Nazis’ genocidal project.
This article compares and contrasts the representational strategies used by Piotr Rawicz and Jona... more This article compares and contrasts the representational strategies used by Piotr Rawicz and Jonathan Littell in their Holocaust novels. Separated by 40 years, Le Sang du ciel (1961) (Blood from the Sky) and Les Bienveillantes (2006) (The Kindly Ones) differ in terms of structure, style, and point of view. The article examines the import of these strategies for the way Rawicz’s and Littell’s narratives portray Ukrainians. Its main contention is that, while casting Ukrainians primarily as complicitous in the Holocaust, the two novels frame their complicity with Ukraine’s wartime hopes for sovereignty which it hoped to achieve through collaboration with Hitler’s Germany. By foregrounding Ukraine’s protracted statelessness, oppression by Russia (and later the Soviet Union), and exploitation by Polish landowning gentry, the two novels succeed at offering a nuanced view of Ukrainians without, however, redeeming them.
This chapter provides an extensive analysis of the 2016 drama and one of Ozon’s most recent and s... more This chapter provides an extensive analysis of the 2016 drama and one of Ozon’s most recent and successful films. An unusual film within his oeuvre, given its setting outside of France, for the most part, and the use of black-and-white, Frantz, this chapter argues, interrogates hegemonic masculinity – with the help of Kaja Silverman’s conceptualisation of historical trauma and overall work on marginal masculinities – and the notion that it should be crystallised by war. In doing so, the director unsettles heteronormative conventions. Further, this analysis pays particular attention to Édouard Manet’s Le Suicidé to identify connections between homosexuality and the death drive (established by the painting).
Can it be ever possible to write about war in a work of fiction? asks a protagonist of one of Mak... more Can it be ever possible to write about war in a work of fiction? asks a protagonist of one of Makine’s strongly metafictional and intensely historical novels. Helena Duffy’s World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction redirects this question at the Franco-Russian author’s fiction itself by investigating its portrayal of Soviet involvement in the struggle against Hitler. To write back into the history of the Great Fatherland War its unmourned victims — invalids, Jews, POWs, women or starving Leningraders — is the self-acknowledged ambition of a novelist committed to the postmodern empowerment of those hitherto silenced by dominant historiographies. Whether Makine succeeds at giving voice to those whose suffering jarred with the triumphalist narrative of the war concocted by Soviet authorities is the central concern of Duffy’s book.
With postmodernism being associated with playfulness, parody, irony, and even négationnisme, how ... more With postmodernism being associated with playfulness, parody, irony, and even négationnisme, how suitable a medium is the postmodern novel for representing the Holocaust? The readings of Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder, Pierre Assouline’s La Cliente, Soazig Aaron’s Le Non de Klara, Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, Philippe Claudel’s Le Rapport de Brodeck, and Yannick Haenel’s Jan Karski reveal that postmodern self-consciousness may help to voice the dilemmas attached to cultural representations of the Catastrophe. While postmodern anachronism, intertextuality, and intrusive narrators foreground the challenges of retelling the Shoah in the post-witness era, the postmodern novel’s fragmentariness, confused chronology, and silences enable the articulation of trauma. In exploring the ethical risks and benefits of Holocaust fiction, this book questions the political implications for the French memory of the Occupation of six novels written in the wake of Chirac’s acknowledgement of France’s embroilment in the Nazis’ genocidal project.
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