French Culture

French Cultural Studies: An Introduction challenges received theories about France and French culture. Taking into account the major changes which have been taking place in French Studies (with the focus shifting to a broader range of cultural forms), the Introduction adopts an interdisciplinary approach in its wide-ranging study of French culture and society since 1870, and suggests new ways of looking at France and the French-speaking world through the ideas, images, and narratives of more than a century of turbulent history and political change.

More than 700 alphabetically organized entries by an international team of contributors provide a fascinating survey of French culture post 1945.Entries include:* advertising * Beur cinema * Coco Chanel * decolonization * eacute;criture feminine * football * francophone press * gay activism * Seuil * youth cultureEntries range from short factual/biographical pieces to longer overview articles. All are extensively cross-referenced and longer entries are 'facts-fronted' so important information is clear at a glance. It includes a thematic contents list, extensive index and suggestions for further reading.The Encyclopedia will provide hours of enjoyable browsing for all francophiles, and essential cultural context for students of French, Modern History, Comparative European Studies and Cultural Studies.

This book presents a series of highly readable, well-documented essays describing French life styles, attitudes, and entertainments as well as the writers and performers currently favored by the French public. Several chapters explore French tastes in popular literature and other reading matter, including comics, cartoons, mystery and spy fiction, newspapers and magazines, and science fiction. Film, popular music, radio, and television are also discussed in detail, and influences from other cultures--particularly American "imports"--are assessed. The remaining essays examine French sports, leisure, eating and drinking, and relations between men and women.

'Culture' is one of the most frequently used terms in the French vocabulary. It sells not only books, newspapers and magazines but also consumer products and political parties. But what are the meanings of 'culture populaire'? What have the French understood by it, and what is its history?Brian Rigby's lively and cogent study traces changing notions of popular culture in France, from 1936 - the year of the Popular Front - to the present day. Asking why 'culture' has become such a fiercely contested term, Rigby considers the work of the major French theorists, including Barthes, Bourdieu and Baudrillard.

French Terms and Abbreviations Introduction: The Politics of Culture Culture and the Search for Political Legitimation in France The Road to 1981: Local Roots of a National Policy Political Culture and Cultural Policy Television Architecture and the Politics of Grandeur The End of the Monopoly Conclusion: The House that Jack Built

France is defined by claims of uniqueness made by or about the French. Aspects of Contemporary France illuminates the contemporary economic, cultural, political and social climate of France. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this book explains the historical background to controversial issues. It also traces France's road to nationhood through religion, language and territory.Each chapter is by a specialist in the field and is based on the most up to date information and research. Beginning with the present day, the book traces the historical background to events and provides a context for evaluation. The wide-ranging and varied themes covered include:* political parties* regions in the market place* television and film* women* secularism and Islam* linguistic policies* French consumersThe book also offers a helpful chronology at the end of each chapter, a detailed bibliography and a recommended reading list. Aspects of Contemporary France presents an analytical as well as informative appraoch to French Studies. It provides a readily accessible but in-depth understanding for students of France or French civilization at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

This book is the first to address the relationship between gender and immigration in contemporary France and the political and personal issues that affect women of immigrant origin. Focusing on the social and political aspects of women's lives, the book investigates how they are affected by racism and changes in citizenship laws and explores the strategies they use to combat exclusion through movements such as the 'sans-papiers'.Authors go on to discuss ways in which immigrant women and their daughters negotiate their changing cultural identities in relation to their communities of origin and their positions in France, with reference to the Magrebhi family and attitudes to the Islamic headscarf.These issues are further developed through analyses of women's cultural production across a wide range of media, from the writing of Vietnamese women to 'Beur' Filmmaking, including Yamina Benguigui's highly acclaimed documentary Memoires d'Immigres.Combining a range of case studies and practical data with a theoretical overview of the topic, this is an important reference work for anyone studying postcolonial France and the role of women within it.

This book draws upon both musicology and cultural history to argue that French musical meanings and values from 1898 to 1914 are best explained not in terms of contemporary artistic movements but of the political culture. During these years, France was undergoing many subtle yet profound political changes. Nationalist leagues forged new modes of political activity, as Jane F. Fulcher details in this important study, and thus the whole playing field of political action was enlarged. Investigating this transitional period in light of several recent insights in the areas of French history, sociology, political anthropology, and literary theory, Fulcher shows how the new departures in cultural politics affected not only literature and the visual arts but also music. Having lost the battle of the Dreyfus affair (legally, at least), the nationalists set their sights on the art world, for they considered France's artistic achievements the ideal means for furthering their conception of "French identity." French Cultural Politics and Music: From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War illustrates the ways in which the nationalists effectively targeted the music world for this purpose, employing critics, educational institutions, concert series, and lectures to disseminate their values by way of public and private discourses on French music. Fulcher then demonstrates how both the Republic and far Left responded to this challenge, using programs and institutions of their own to launch counterdiscourses on contemporary musical values. Perhaps most importantly, this book fully explores the widespread influence of this politicized musical culture on such composers as d'Indy, Charpentier, Magnard, Debussy, and Satie. By viewing this fertile cultural milieu of clashing sociopolitical convictions against the broader background of aesthetic rivalry and opposition, this work addresses the changing notions of "tradition" in music--and of modernism itself. As Fulcher points out, it was the traditionalist faction, not the Impressionist one, that eventually triumphed in the French musical realm, as witnessed by their "defeat" of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Malraux's cabinet position was created in 1959 by Charles de Gaulle, who entered his presidency deeply concerned over unraveling social cohesion at home and the nation's weak standing abroad. To help him address these problems, he turned to a paragon of the engage French intellectual. Malraux was an acclaimed novelist, a daring adventurer, a flamboyant anti-colonialist and onetime leftist, a courageous resistance leader, and an inspired commentator on art. In his ten years as a cabinet minister, Malraux sought to "marry" the French people to their historic culture and to restore France to her place as artistic center of the West. Lebovics examines the successes and failures of Malraux's remarkable career and the reactions of artists, the political class, and the public to the French state's new engagement with the national culture.