Qu’est-ce que la spontanéité ? Comment se manifeste-t-elle ? Que nous enseigne-t-elle ? Peut-on être spontané quand on apprend une langue étrangère ? Autant de questions qui ont animé cette recherche-action conduite au sein de l’Université de Nouvelle-Galles du Sud (Australie). Associant les théories psychodramatique et interactionnelle, l’ouvrage décrit une série de jeux de rôles enregistrés en vidéo dans des classes d’adultes débutants en Français Langue Etrangères.

In this engrossing book, Hollis Clayson provides the first description and analysis of French artistic interest in women prostitutes, examining how the subject was treated in the art of the 1870s and 1880s by such avant-garde painters as Cézanne, Degas, Manet, and Renoir, as well as by the academic and low-brow painters who were their contemporaries. Clayson not only illuminates the imagery of prostitution-with its contradictory connotations of disgust and fascination-but also tackles the issues and problems relevant to women and men in a patriarchal society. She discusses the conspicuous sexual commerce during this era and the resulting public panic about the deterioration of social life and civilized mores. She describes the system that evolved out of regulating prostitutes and the subsequent rise of clandestine prostitutes who escaped police regulation and who were condemned both for blurring social boundaries and for spreading sexual licentiousness among their moral and social superiors. Clayson argues that the subject of covert prostitution was especially attractive to vanguard painters because it exemplified the commercialization and the ambiguity of modern life.

Jonathan Edwards has most often been considered in the context of the Puritanism of New England. In many ways, however, he was closer to the thinkers of the European Enlightenment. In this book. Leon Chai explores that connection, analyzing Edwards' thought in light of a number of the issues that preoccupied such Enlightenment figures as Locke, Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz. The book comprises three parts, each of which begins with a detailed analysis of a crucial passage from a classic Enlightenment text, and then turns to a major theological work of Jonathan Edwards' in which the same issue is explored.

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation and resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. But the controversies attending his life--and death, which some ascribed to the CIA--are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative. Fanon's Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience--the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath--in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt. Reviews of this book: "The goal of this often brilliant and always engaging book is to 'read Fanon's texts as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative'; the principal subject of this dramatic narrative, according to Sekyi-Otu, is 'political experience'. It is his deployment of a dialectical analysis of Fanon's 'dramatic personae' that permits Sekyi-Otu's fresh and insightful readings to take place." DD--Anthony C. Alessandrini, Minnesota Review "Ato Sekyi-Otu departs from the postmodernist paradigm and ushers in an alternative hermeneutic that primarily considers Fanon's texts as forming 'one dramatic dialectical narrative,' that is a narrative whose complexity is correlative of the intricate configurations of African social experience during the post-independent era...[His] book is an invaluable contribution that offers broader scope for a new appreciation of Fanon's political thinking." DD--Marc Mve Bekale, Revue AFRAM Review [UK] "[I]mportant...The author succeeds in...revealing the complexity and nuanced character of Fanon's thought." DD--Choice "Those who would dismiss or exult Fanon as the high priest of revolutionary violence will be chastened by this patient and completely convincing exposition of his work. Sekyi-Otu produces a reflexive, 'Gramscian' Fanon who, working as a 'detective of the politics of truth,' has produced insights that need to be taken over into the core of democratic political thought." DD--Paul Gilroy, University of London

What can one man accomplish, even a great man and brilliant scientist? Although every town in France has a street named for Louis Pasteur, was he alone able to stop people from spitting, persuade them to dig drains, influence them to undergo vaccination? Pasteur’s success depended upon a whole network of forces, including the public hygiene movement, the medical profession (both military physicians and private practitioners), and colonial interests. It is the operation of these forces, in combination with the talent of Pasteur, that Bruno Latour sets before us as a prime example of science in action. Latour argues that the triumph of the biologist and his methodology must be understood within the particular historical convergence of competing social forces and conflicting interests. Yet Pasteur was not the only scientist working on the relationships of microbes and disease. How was he able to galvanize the other forces to support his own research? Latour shows Pasteur’s efforts to win over the French public—the farmers, industrialists, politicians, and much of the scientific establishment. Instead of reducing science to a given social environment, Latour tries to show the simultaneous building of a society and its scientific facts. The first section of the book, which retells the story of Pasteur, is a vivid description of an approach to science whose theoretical implications go far beyond a particular case study. In the second part of the book, “Irreductions,” Latour sets out his notion of the dynamics of conflict and interaction, of the “relation of forces.” Latour’s method of analysis cuts across and through the boundaries of the established disciplines of sociology, history, and the philosophy of science, to reveal how it is possible not to make the distinction between reason and force. Instead of leading to sociological reductionism, this method leads to an unexpected irreductionism.