Melancholy Politics - Loss, Mourning, and Memory in Late Modern France

The current cultural climate in France is often described as one of "déclinisme" or "sinistrose," a mixture of pessimism about the national future, nostalgia for the past, and a sinister sense of irreversible decline concerning the present. The notion of "democratic melancholia" has become widely popular, cropping up time and again in academic papers and newspaper articles. In Melancholy Politics, Jean-Philippe Mathy examines the development of this disenchanted mood in the works of prominent French philosophers, historians, and sociologists since the beginning of the 1980s. This period represents a significant turning point in French intellectual life, as the legacy of major postwar and sixties theorists such as Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and Foucault was increasingly challenged by a younger generation of authors who repudiated both Marxism and structuralism. The book is not a classic intellectual or cultural history of post-1968 France, but rather a contribution to the understanding of the present-a collection of soundings into what remains largely a complex, ongoing process.

List of contents

"Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Loss, Mourning, Memory
1. Specters of the Sixties
2. French Postmodern
3. Le Débat, Year One: The Generation of 1980
4. The Return of the Prophet: Bourdieu, Zola, and the Dreyfusist Legacy
5. Desperately Seeking Marianne: The Uses of the Republic
6. Memory Wars
7. Old Wine, New Skins: Race, Laïcité, Frenchness
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Jean-Philippe Mathy is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Summary

A study of the cultural politics of loss and mourning in France from 1978 to the present. Focuses on national identity, secularism, Jacobin republicanism, and political-cultural exceptionalism.

Product details

• Authors: Jean-Philippe Mathy, Jean-Philippe (Professor of French and Comparative Literature Mathy
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.04.2016
• EAN: 9780271037844
• ISBN: 978-0-271-03784-4
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 18 mm
• Weight: 544 g
• Illustrations: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; France, European History, Political Ideologies, PHILOSOPHY / Social, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / General, HISTORY / Europe / France, 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French, Social & political philosophy, Literature: history & criticism, French Revolution, HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / General