Yacine, Kateb
b. 1929, Constantine, Algeria;
d. 1989, Grenoble
Playwright and director
A well-known North African playwright and director, Yacine has worked in French since the 1950s. His texts in French, noted for their liveliness, movement and flexibility, and for dealing with Algeria, revolutions, national identity, etc., include Polygone étoilé (Starry Zone) and L'Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc (The Man in Rubber Sandals). He has also written many plays in Arab dialect.
ANNIE SPARKS
See also: francophone performing arts: North Africa; theatre
Yourcenar, Marguerite
b. 1903, Belgium;
d. 1987, Maine, USA
Writer
Yourcenar was a half-Belgian, half-French writer, who in 1980 became the first woman to be elected to the Academic Française; she had been elected to its Belgian counterpart nine years before. Her best-known work, published in 1951, Memoirs of Hadrian (Mémoires d'Hadrien), is a first person fictional portrait of the Roman emperor. Since 1939, she had lived in the United States with her long-term partner, Grace Frick, but lesbianism is less prominent in her writing than male homosexuality, an important theme in Mémoires d'Hadrien and Alexis (1929), whose central character reveals his sexual problems in a long letter to his wife. Yourcenar's geographical marginality to French culture was mirrored by her distance from its dominant intellectual movements, most notably the nouveau roman. She was at work on the third and final volume of her autobiography at the time of her death.
KEITH READER
See also: women's/lesbian writing
youth culture
La culture jeune is a somewhat slippery term, usually denoting the leisure practices or (more
-569-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture.
Contributors: Alex Hughes - Editor, Keith Reader - Editor.
Publisher: Routledge.
Place of publication: London.
Publication year: 1998.
Page number: 569.
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