Special Issues
The Art Novel
Edited by Paul Smith
JANUARY 2007 Volume 61, Number 1
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This special issue of French Studies examines a body of narratives featuring French art and artists published at representative periods during the nineteenth century (in both French and English). There are strong thematic continuities between many of the examples discussed, particularly as regards their concern over the social and economic position of the artist, and the nature and gendering of creativity. The topoi of the genius and the raté also recur throughout. Several texts are vehicles for voicing aesthetic and political positions. And many draw closely on contemporary figures, events, and debates for their content. Yet this special issue does not aim to identify a discursive unity so much as to exhibit the variety and richness of the art novel’s evolution. It is also concerned to address some of the methodological issues involved in reading this kind of text, including the selectivity of the canon, intertextual connections, and the relationship between fiction and fact. It is hoped it will not only plot some new and unfamiliar material in an area still represented for most by a mere handful of ‘major’ texts, but also bring some of the questions involved by this expanded configuration of the field into sharper focus.
Memory and Innovation in the Post-Holocaust Generation in France
Edited by Victoria Best and Kathryn Robson
JANUARY 2005 Volume 59, Number 1
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This special issue explores different representations of cultural memory in France since the Holocaust, a period overshadowed by historical trauma (wars, decolonization, genocide), in which memory has become an increasingly dominant cultural obsession. Contested representations of cultural memory have given rise to important critical and philosophical debates, which pivot on the relation between memory and history, the individual and the collective. Covering a broad range of spheres including literature, cultural history and theory, psychoanalysis and film, the essays collected here draw on and contribute to these critical debates in analyses that seek to rethink the relation between memory and representation. Where recent critical work on cultural memory has tended to emphasize its failures and frustrations, these essays highlight a different model of memory as innovation and creative representation. Central to all the essays is the idea that memories are constructed and mediated via specific culturally constructed frames, within which individual memory is irrevocably and sometimes troublingly bound up with collective modes of remembering. Yet the representations of memory examined here show how memory can work productively in and through tensions such as the relation between the individual and the collective without trying to overcome them: these tensions remain as crucial elements in the quest to find new forms of representation of memory.