Eleven scholars provide a new interpretation of Celine's work and its underlying historical, cultural, and political matrix.

First book to focus on Americanism and its consideration of French film and literature The book is organized around individual figures, texts, and films, making it easy to adopt for individual units in courses. The book is written in clear, accessible, and jargon-free language. The book brings a new and innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture. The books offers new perspectives on important figures that we thought we knew well. The book mixes cultural history with the analysis of individual films and novels in a way that is engaging to read.

Louis Ferdinand Céline (the pseudonym of Louis Destouches) was a famous novelist and ferocious anti-Semitic pamphleteer who rose to fame before Hitler, but perfectly represented the fascist mind-set that swept across Europe between 1932 and 1944. Never a Nazi himself, he was author of Journey to the End of the Night, Death on the Installment Plan, Guignol's Band, Homage to Zola, and a series of "pamphlets." The latter are a potpourri of racist editorials, ballet scenarios, and anti-Semitic confessions so violent that an aesthete like Andre Gide thought them parodies of other anti-Semitic literature. Little wonder the Nazis regarded Céline as a fellow-traveler. He retreated with the Nazis across the Rhine and sought refuge with them, first in Germany and then in Denmark. In 1951, he benefitted from an amnesty as a wounded veteran of both World Wars. Before his death in 1961 he had regained his popularity with the public and was regarded as a classic writer. Now that the body of his work is in translation, Céline's fame in the literary world circles the globe.Céline, perhaps more than any other analysis, helps shed some light on this enigmatic figure. It establishes his literary importance, and, at the same time, examines his anti-Semitism. After a final meeting, Hindus declared that "Celine is a splinter in my mind that I've got either to absorb completely or eject completely." The reader of this fascinating critical memoir of one of the twentieth century's most controversial literary figures is apt to be left with a similar dilemma.

The Aesthetics of Hate examines the writings of a motley collection of interwar far-right intellectuals, showing that they defined Frenchness in racial, gendered, and sexual terms. A broad, ambitious cultural and intellectual history, the book offers a provocative reinterpretation of a topic that has long been the subject of controversy. In works infused with rhetorics of abjection, disgust, and dissolution, such writers as Maulnier, Brasillach, Céline, and Blanchot imagined the nation through figures deemed illegitimate or inferior—Jews, colonial subjects, homosexuals, women. Sanos argues that these intellectuals offered an "aesthetics of hate," reinventing a language of far-right nationalism by appealing to the realm of beauty and the sublime for political solutions. By acknowledging the constitutive relationship of antisemitism and colonial racism at the heart of these canonical writers' nationalism, this book makes us rethink how aesthetics and politics function, how race is imagined and defined, how gender structured far-right thought, and how we conceive of French intellectualism and fascism.

"Freedman's final book is a tour de force that examines the history of Jewish involvement in the decadent art movement. While decadent art's most notorious practitioner was Oscar Wilde, as a movement it spread through western Europe and even included a few adherents in Russia. Jewish writers and artists such as Catulle Mèndes, Gustav Kahn, and Simeon Solomon would portray non-stereotyped characters and produce highly influential works. After decadent art's peak, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and Sigmund Freud would take up the idiom of decadence and carry it with them during the cultural transition to modernism. Freedman expertly and elegantly takes readers through this transition and beyond, showing the lineage of Jewish decadence all the way through to the end of the twentieth century"--

Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932), by Louis-Ferdinand Celine (1894-1961), and Zazie dans le metro (1959), by Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), were two revolutionary novels in their transposition of spoken language into written language. Since their publication they have been adapted into a broad range of media, including illustrated novel, bande dessinee, film, stage performance and recorded reading. What happens to their striking literary voices as they are transposed into media that combine text and image, sound and image, or consist of sound alone? In this study, Armelle Blin-Rolland examines adaptations sparked by these two seminal novels to understand what 'voice' means in each medium, and its importance in the process of adaptation.

What does citizenship mean? What is the process of "naturalization" one goes through in becoming a citizen, and what is its connection to assimilation? How do the issues of identity raised by this process manifest themselves in culture? These questions, and the way they arise in contemporary France, are the focus of this diverse collection. The essays in this volume range in subject from fiction and essay to architecture and film. Among the topics discussed are the 1937 Exposition Universelle; films dealing with Vichy France; François Truffaut's Histoire d'Adèle H.; the war of Algerian independence; and nation building under François Mitterrand. -- Amazon.com.