"French Music and Trauma Between the World Wars illustrates that coping with trauma was a central concern for French musicians active after World War I. The losses and violent warfare of World War I shaped how interwar French musicians-from those fighting in the trenches and working in military hospitals to more well-known musicians-engaged with music. Situated at the intersections of musicology, history, sound and performance studies, and psychology and trauma studies, Resonant Recoveries argues that modernists' compositions and musical activities were sonorous locations for managing and performing trauma. Through analysis of archival materials, French medical, philosophical, and literary texts, and the music produced between the wars, this book illuminates how music emerged during World War I as an embodied technology of consolation. Resonant Recoveries demonstrates that music making came to be understood by French interwar musicians as a consolatory practice that enhanced their abilities to remember lost loved ones, gave them opportunities to perform their grief publicly and privately, allowed them to create healing bonds of friendship, and soothed them with sonic vibrations and the rhythmically regular bodily movements required in order to perform many French neoclassical compositions. In revealing the importance music making held for interwar French musicians, this book refigures French modernist music as a therapeutic medium for creators, performers, and audiences, while also underlining the importance of addressing trauma, mourning, and people's emotional lives in music scholarship"--

Fiction. Translated from the French by Paul Knobloch. Originally published in 1947. "In the Exopotamian desert, where hepatrols blossom and children collect little animals called sandpeepers, the sun shines in an unusual way: it produces eerie black zones whose mysteries remain unexplained. Above all, Vian's pecurilar way with language proves that, indeed, life in the desert is equal to none. Since unusual language is bound to produce unusual fiction, it follows that the story does not take place in the fall, nor is it set in China" - from the Foreword by Marc Lapprand. The fourth novel by Vian, who was a contemporary of Sartre and Beauvoir. His innovative style, cutting-edge during his lifetime, but only successful in the sixties, made him an icon of the May 1968 student movement.

It is a close study of four novels by Boris Vian. It aims to show how L'Ecume des jours, L'Automne a Pekin, L'Herbe rouge and L'Arrache-coeur form a unified and coherent tetralogy. By establishing close links between these four texts, it becomes possible to achieve a more comprehensive understanding, not only of the significance of the tetralogy in exposing a complex and multi-layered novelistic strategy at the heart of the vianesque, but of the individual novels as autonomous creations. An examination of the novels reveals that they are not merely joined to one another via a superficial network of textual similarities (that which I refer to as intratextuality), but that this intertwining is emblematic of a common method of narrative construction. Each Vian novel is dependent, for a thorough understanding of the text to be possible, upon the multiple lines of external influence running through it. The sources of this influence (which I refer to as intertextuality) are located in various major texts of twentieth century literature, anglophone as well as francophone. Thus, in each instance the narrative is driven by a complicated interaction of intratextuality and intertextuality."

A narrative about an engineer, Wolf, who invents a bizarre machine that allows him to revisit his past and erase inhibiting memories.

In Genius Envy, Adrianna M. Paliyenko uncovers a forgotten history: the multiplicity and diversity of nineteenth-century French women’s poetic voices. Conservative critics of the time attributed the phenomenon of genius to masculinity and dismissed the work of female authors as “feminine literature.” Despite the efforts of leading thinkers, critics, and literary historians to erase women from the pages of literary history, Paliyenko shows how these female poets invigorated the debate about the origins of genius and garnered considerable recognition in their time for their creativity and bold aesthetic ideas. This fresh account of French women poets’ contributions to literature probes the history of their critical reception. The result is an encounter with the texts of celebrated writers such as Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Anaïs Ségalas, Malvina Blanchecotte, Louisa Siefert, and Louise Ackermann. Glimpses at the different stages of each poet’s career show that these women explicitly challenged the notion of genius as gender specific, thus advocating for their rightful place in the canon. A prodigious contribution to studies of nineteenth-century French poetry, Paliyenko’s book reexamines the reception of poetry by women within and beyond its original context. This balanced and comprehensive treatment of their work uncovers the multiple ways in which women poets sought to define their place in history.