Johnnie Gratton

Michael Sheringham

The idea of the 'project' crosses generic, disciplinary and cultural frontiers. At a time when writers and artists are increasingly describing their practices as 'projects', remarkably little critical attention has been paid to the actual idea of the 'project'. This collection of essays responds to an urgent need by suggesting a framework for evaluating the notion of the project in the light of various modernist and postmodernist cultural practices, drawn mainly but not exclusively from the French-speaking domain. The overview offered by this volume promises to makes an original and thought-provoking contribution to contemporary literary, artistic and cultural criticism.

Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture

The Art of the Project

Paul Gifford

What can we currently make of 'the subject'? Under the sway of structuralism and poststructuralism, critical thinking took a distinctly negative turn, effectively disqualifying any form of subjectivity as a reference point in discussions of textual or literary meaning. Since the mid-1970s, however, throughout the human sciences, human agency has been restored as both a methodological principle and an ethical value: a phenomenon broadly designated as 'the return of the subject'. Yet the returning subject bears the traces of its problematization... The present collection of essays explores the ways in which the subject now 'matters', both in principle and in the variety of critical approaches in authorizes. Essays, which are both literary and theoretical in character, cover authors, texts and issues in French literature from Descartes to the present. A wide range of types of writing is examined, from established forms such as the novel to relatively marginal and generically unsystematized discursive practices such as automatic writing and the 'récit de rêve'. Though it shuns 'closure' in a matter which remains ultimately elusive, this book offers some account of the types of answer which remain open and of those we have learned to leave behind.

Subject and Self in French Literature from Descartes to the Present

Subject Matters

Brigitte Le Juez

The fifteen writers included in this anthology represent the best of the genre. Not only is there a substantial introduction covering the history of the short story, thematic trends, developments in narrative technique and the notion of the genre, but each story also comes with its own preface and notes.

Johnnie Gratton

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