From Surrealism To Less Exquisite Cadavers

Les nouveaux mystères de Paris (1954-1959), Léo Malet’s fifteen-novel detective series inspired by Eugène Sue’s nineteenth-century feuilleton, almost achieved the goal of setting a mystery in each of the twenty Parisian arrondissements, with Nestor Burma at the center of the action. In Burma, the “détective de choc” first introduced in 1943’s 120 rue de la gare, Malet, considered the “father” of the French roman noir, creates a cultural hybrid, bringing literary references and surrealist techniques to a criminal milieu. Michelle Emanuel’s groundbreaking study is particularly insightful in its treatment of Malet as a pioneer within the literary genre of the French roman noir while making sure to also focus on his surrealist roots. Against the archetypes of Simenon’s Maigret and Christie’s Poirot, Burma is brash and streetwise, peppering his speech with colorful and evocative slang. As the reader’s tour guide, Burma highlights Paris’s forgotten past while providing insight to the Paris of (his) present, referencing both popular culture and contemporary issues. Malet’s innovation of setting a noir narrative in France serves as a catalyst for further change in the policier genre in France, including his contemporary Jean Amila, the néo-polar of Jean-Patrick Manchette, and the historical roman noir of Didier Daeninckx.

Les nouveaux mysteres de Paris (1954-1959), Leo Malet s fifteen-novel detective series inspired by Eugene Sue s nineteenth-century feuilleton, almost achieved the goal of setting a mystery in each of the twenty Parisian arrondissements, with Nestor Burma at the center of the action. In Burma, the detective de choc first introduced in 1943 s 120 rue de la gare, Malet, considered the father of the French roman noir, creates a cultural hybrid, bringing literary references and surrealist techniques to a criminal milieu. Michelle Emanuel s groundbreaking study is particularly insightful in its treatment of Malet as a pioneer within the literary genre of the French roman noir while making sure to also focus on his surrealist roots. Against the archetypes of Simenon s Maigret and Christie s Poirot, Burma is brash and streetwise, peppering his speech with colorful and evocative slang. As the reader s tour guide, Burma highlights Paris s forgotten past while providing insight to the Paris of (his) present, referencing both popular culture and contemporary issues. Malet s innovation of setting a noir narrative in France serves as a catalyst for further change in the policier genre in France, including his contemporary Jean Amila, the neo-polar of Jean-Patrick Manchette, and the historical roman noir of Didier Daeninckx."

This work addresses historical and contemporary manifestations of poems, drawings, collages, and performance works that employ the ritual of the 'cadaver exquis'.

Corpses mark surrealism's path through the twentieth century, providing material evidence of the violence in modern life. Though the shifting group of poets, artists, and critics who made up the surrealist movement were witness to total war, revolutionary violence, and mass killing, it was the tawdry reality of everyday crime that fascinated them. Jonathan P. Eburne shows us how this focus reveals the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the thought and artwork of the surrealists and establishes their movement as a useful platform for addressing the contemporary problem of violence, both individual and political. In a book strikingly illustrated with surrealist artworks and their sometimes gruesome source material, Eburne addresses key individual works by both better-known surrealist writers and artists (including André Breton, Louis Aragon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí) and lesser-known figures (such as René Crevel, Simone Breton, Leonora Carrington, Benjamin Péret, and Jules Monnerot). For Eburne "the art of crime" denotes an array of cultural production including sensationalist journalism, detective mysteries, police blotters, crime scene photos, and documents of medical and legal opinion as well as the roman noir, in particular the first crime novel of the American Chester Himes. The surrealists collected and scrutinized such materials, using them as the inspiration for the outpouring of political tracts, pamphlets, and artworks through which they sought to expose the forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the state, its courts, and respectable bourgeois values. Concluding with the surrealists' quarrel with the existentialists and their bitter condemnation of France's anticolonial wars, Surrealism and the Art of Crime establishes surrealism as a vital element in the intellectual, political, and artistic history of the twentieth century.

Through analysis of three case study videogames – Left 4 Dead 2, DayZ and Minecraft – and their online player communities, Digital Zombies, Undead Stories develops a framework for understanding how collective gameplay generates experiences of narrative, as well as the narrative dimensions of players' creative activity on social media platforms. Narrative emergence is addressed as a powerful form of player experience in multiplayer games, one which makes individual games' boundaries and meanings fluid and negotiable by players. The phenomenon is also shown to be recursive in nature, shaping individual and collective understandings of videogame texts over time. Digital Zombies, Undead Stories focuses on games featuring zombies as central antagonists. The recurrent figure of the videogame zombie, which mediates between chaos and rule-driven predictability, serves as both metaphor and mascot for narrative emergence. This book argues that in the zombie genre, emergent experiences are at the heart of narrative experiences for players, and more broadly demonstrates the potential for the phenomenon to be understood as a fundamental part of everyday play experiences across genres.

In the first major study of representations of World War II in French crime fiction, Margaret-Anne Hutton draws on a corpus of over a hundred and fifty texts spanning more than sixty years. Included are well-known writers (male and female) such as Aubert, Simenon, Boileau-Narcejak, Vargas, Daeninckx, and Jonquet, as well as a broad range of lesser-known authors. Hutton's introduction situates her study within the larger framework of literary representations of World War II, setting the stage for her discussions of genre; the problem of defining crimes and criminals in the context of the war; the epistemological issues that arise in the relationship between World War II historiography and the crime novel; and the temporal textures linking past crimes to the present. Filling a gap in the fields of crime fiction and fictional representations of the War, Hutton's book calls into question the way both crime fiction and the French theatre of World War II have been conceptualized and codified.

This annual French XX Bibliography provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. Unique in its scope, thoroughness, and reliability of information, it has become an essential reference source in the study of modern French literature and culture. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. Number 59 in the series contains 12,703 entries. William J. Thompson is Associate Professor of French and Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Memphis.

Almost all of us know French literature, even if we don’t know French, because it is probably the second largest and certainly the most translated into English. And, even if we don’t read, we would have seen film and television versions (think Count of Monte-Cristo) and even a musical rendition (Les Mis). So this is a particularly interesting volume in the literature series, since it covers French literature from the earliest times to the present. It is also a particularly rich literature, espousing ever genre from poetry, to novel, to biography, to drama, and adopting every style, including realism and surrealism, and expressing the views of all classes and political stands, with recently strong feminist and gay strains. Obviously, the core dictionary section includes among its panoply of often substantial and detailed entries, hundreds of authors, dozens of significant works, the various styles mentioned above and many others, events that have impacted literature such as the Dreyfus Affair and the Algerian War, and literary prizes. The chronology manages to cover about 1,200 years of literary output. And the introduction sets it all out neatly from one historical and literary period to the next. The bibliography, broken down by period and author, directs us to further reading in both French and English.