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This collection of essays arises from the 2005 Cambridge French Graduate Conference on the theme of threat. From the baleful and ubiquitous eyes of surveillance cameras to the ever-present possibility of total nuclear annihilation, threat is everywhere around us. Yet the phenomenon itself, if indeed it is a single phenomenon, has received little attention. This volume seeks to remedy this oversight with a collection of concise, hard-hitting essays on a variety of topics in French culture. Organized around central approaches to the problem of threat - (inter)cultural, philosophical, and approaches through the visual arts - the book examines anxiety, privacy, loss, invasion, and other issues related to the theme. Though emphasis is placed on the contemporary period, writers of the French Renaissance also receive due attention.
List of contents
Contents: Georgina Evans/Adam Kay: Introduction - Michael Harrigan : Méchant Chrétien ne sera jamais bon Turc - Roger Baines: Ta mère suce des Schtroumpfs: The Relationship between Face Threat and Solidarity in the Ritual ta mère ... Insult Used by French Adolescents - Emily Butterworth: Borrowed Soldiers, Borrowed Words: The Threat of the Foreign in Montaigne's 'De la phisionomie' - Laura McMahon: Touching Intact: Sophie Calle's Threat to Privacy -Isabelle McNeill: Threat and the Moving Image: Histoire(s) du Cinéma in the Twenty-First Century - Jenny Chamarette: Threatened Corpo-Realities: Decentring and Dissolving Subjectivities in Philippe Grandrieux's La Vie nouvelle - Geraldine McIlwaine: The Threat of the Urban Space in Three Novels by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio - Michael Seabrook: The Monster under the Bed: Threat to the Couple in the Early Works of Flaubert - Adam Kay: A Beautiful Evil: Erotic Invasion in Ronsard's Amours de Cassandre - Jennifer Burris: Quand on n'est plus qu'une ligne: The Threatened Subject in the Work of Henri Michaux - Jeffrey Kirkwood/David Logan Wright: Between Being and Otherwise: Lacunae, Lévinas and the Threat of Totality - Christopher Watkin: Paul Ricoeur and the Threatened Self.
About the author
The Editors: Georgina Evans is a College Lecturer and Director of Studies in French at St John's College, Cambridge, with particular interests in cinema, synaesthesia and questions of domesticity.
Adam Kay recently completed a doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where he worked on the influence of Greek erotic poetry on Renaissance Europe.
