Reinventing France

Undermined from above by economic globalization and European integration, and from below by the rise of identity politics, the French state has attempted to redefine its relationship to its citizens. Reinventing France examines the ways in which state action has endeavoured to promote social integration in an increasingly fragmented nation and has challenged traditional concepts of an indivisible Republic and universal citizenship rights in order to achieve the core republican ideals of freedom, equality and solidarity.

How can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability, while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation's negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be understood historically, philosophically, and ethically. If translation never replicates a source exactly, what does it mean to communicate some elements and not others? What or who determines what is translatable, or what can or cannot be recontextualized? What linguistic, political, cultural, or historical factors condition such determinations? Central to these questions is the way translation negotiates with, and inscribes asymmetries among, languages and cultures, operations that are inevitably ethical and political as well as linguistic. This book explores how approaching questions of translatability and untranslatability through premodern texts and languages can inform broader interdisciplinary conversations about translation as a concept and a practice. Working with case studies drawn from the francophone cultures of Flanders, England, and northern France, it explores how medieval texts challenge modern definitions of language, text, and translation and, in so doing, how such texts can open sites of variance and non-identity within what later became the hegemonic global languages we know today.

Threatened from above by economic globalization and European integration, and from below by the rise of identity politics, the French state has attempted to redefine its relationship to its citizens. Reinventing France examines the ways in which state action has endeavored to promote social integration in an increasingly fragmented nation and has challenged traditional concepts of an indivisible Republic and universal citizenship rights in order to achieve the core republican ideals of freedom, equality and solidarity.

An original insight into how occupation officials and relief workers controlled and cared for Displaced Persons in the French zone.

This book chronicles the struggles of undocumented migrant women in France as they fight to become rights-bearing citizens, revealing how concepts of citizenship and nationality intersect with gender, sexuality, and immigration.

The concept of obscenity is an ancient one. But as Joan DeJean suggests, its modern form, the same version that today's politicians decry and savvy artists exploit, was invented in seventeenth-century France. The Reinvention of Obscenity casts a fresh light on the mythical link between sexual impropriety and things French. Exploring the complicity between censorship, print culture, and obscenity, DeJean argues that mass market printing and the first modern censorial machinery came into being at the very moment that obscenity was being reinvented—that is, transformed from a minor literary phenomenon into a threat to society. DeJean's principal case in this study is the career of Moliére, who cannily exploited the new link between indecency and female genitalia to found his career as a print author; the enormous scandal which followed his play L'école des femmes made him the first modern writer to have his sex life dissected in the press. Keenly alert to parallels with the currency of obscenity in contemporary America, The Reinvention of Obscenity will concern not only scholars of French history, but anyone interested in the intertwined histories of sex, publishing, and censorship.

"During recent years critics have increasingly expressed their loss of faith in existing cultural and political collective frameworks, drawing attention instead to irreducible singularity and to radical incommensurability between diverse positions or groups. Hiddleston analyses and challenges this trend, bringing together political, theoretical and literary analysis and juxtaposing the works of critical theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard and Nancy with literature by writers of North African immigrant origin. She presents a critique of those writers who underline the absence of communal identification, proposes a new emphasis on relational networks interconnecting diverse cultural groups, and argues for a more subtle understanding of the complex interplay of the singular and the collective in contemporary French writing."

How to tackle representation in landscape design Representation is a hot topic in landscape architecture. Whilecomputerization has been a catalyst for change across many fieldsin design, no other design field has experienced such drasticreinvention as has landscape architecture. As the world urbanizesrapidly and our relationship with nature changes, it is vitallyimportant that landscape designers adopt innovative forms ofrepresentation—whether digital, analog, or hybrid. In this book, author Diana Balmori explores notions ofrepresentation in the discipline at large and across time. Shetakes readers from landscape design's roots in seventeenth-centuryFrance and eighteenth-century England through to modern attempts atrepresentation made by contemporary landscape artists. Addresses a central topic in the discipline of landscapearchitecture Features historic works and those by leading contemporarypractitioners, such as Bernard Lassus, Richard Haag, Stig LAndersson, Lawrence Halprin, and Patricia Johanson Written by a renowned practitioner and educator Features 150 full-color images Drawing and Reinventing Landscape, AD Primer is aninformative investigation of beauty in landscape design, offeringinspiring creative perspectives for students and professionals.