Moderato Cantabile

A distressed young man murders the woman he loves in a caf�, watched by a large crowd. Fascinated by the crime she has witnessed, Anne Desbaresdes returns several times to the scene, forming a relationship with a man who also saw the murder, and drinking through the afternoon with him as he patiently answers her eager questions. Slowly, they find themselves being taken over by forces which threaten their own stability.Moderato Cantabile is a carefully woven tapestry of emotion, in which the characters' inner lives are reflected by the story's spaces and landscapes.

French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.

The work of writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras raises theoretical issues of representation and formal issues of cinematic and literary languages. The novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein and the film India Song are examine using a psychoanalytic model of interpretation.

"In this volume of four short novels, Duras demonstrates her remarkable ability to create an emotional intensity and unity by focusing on the intimate details of the relationships among only a few central characters: from the park bench couple in "The Square" (1955) to the double love triangle in "10:30 on a Summer Night" (1960), each novel probes the depths and complexities of human emotion, of love and of despair. Exceptional for their range in mood and situation, these four novels are unparalleled exhibitions of a poetic beauty that is uniquely Duras."--Publisher description.

The extraordinary range, complexity and power of Marguerite Duras – novelist, dramatist, film-maker, essayist – has been justly recognized. Yet in the years following her death in 1996, there has been an increasing tendency to consecrate her work, particularly by those critics who approach it primarily in biographical terms. The British and American specialists featured in this interdisciplinary collection aim to resurrect the Duras corpus in all its forms by submitting it theoretically to three main areas of enquiry. By establishing how far Duras’s work questions and redefines the parameters of literary and cinematic form, as well as the categories of race and ethnicity, homosexuality and heterosexuality, fantasy and violence, the contributors to this volume "revision" Duras’s work in the widest sense of the term.

This book offers a study of the whole of Duras's written oeuvre, covering journalism and lesser-known works as well as more famous texts. It brings out the constant presence of ethical questions in and around the experiences of passion and excess with which her work is always concerned, andsubjects Duras's texts to an unprecedented level of close reading, carrying her beyond the terms of her usual reception. On the basis of this approach, and with reference to Duras's involvement with her intellectual and political contexts, the book demonstrates the detailed engagement of Duras'swriting in the ethical and political issues of her day. Careful textual analysis shows the particular, fragile nature of this engagement, as well as the intricate textures of Duras's work; this leads to a striking new model of the relation between the literary text and the ethical life of itsreaders, which will be of importance not only to specialists in French Studies, but to all those interested in ethical criticism and modern literary studies.

A young woman, who works as a maid for a living, takes her charge out to play in a Parisian garden square. Sitting on a bench, she starts talking to a stranger, a travelling salesman, and their conversation gradually turns into an exchange of confidences, as she speaks of her desire for a more stable future and he of his feelings of rootlessness and disillusionment. As the afternoon wears on, the two sense an increasing connection between them. Understated and impressionistic, and consisting almost entirely of dialogue, The Garden Square is one of Marguerite Duras's finest novels, which she also adapted for the stage.