French and Francophone Literature | Open Access Articles

The Construction Of The Other And The Self In André Gide's Travels In The Congo And Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks , Raphaël Lambert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Reportedly, André Gide's Travels in the Congo (1929) had fostered reforms of the colonial policy in French Africa. In Travels, Gide reports cases of economic exploitation, abuses of power, use of terror, torture, and even homicidal raids against recalcitrant villagers and, at least in one case, Gide takes it upon himself to have a man prosecuted. Yet his account, through the lense of post-colonial thinking, betrays reactionary and biased views of Africans. Gide does not object to the colonial system per se, but rather blames its malfunction on both a lack of infrastructures and administrative involvement. In Black …

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Surreal And Canny Selves: Photographic Figures In Claude Cahun , Gayle Zachmann

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her 1975 essay, Le Rire de la méduse, Hélène Cixous enthusiastically announced that it was high time for women to enter into discourse. A full half-century earlier, Claude Cahun (1894-1954), a powerful writer and a haunting photographer and artist, was already inscribing herself, Woman, and a woman's voice in visual and verbal self-portraits, photomontages, prose texts, poetry, and aesthetic and political treatises. Cahun's uncanny interventions in both verbal and visual discourse cannily interrogate conventions of literary and pictorial representation and the constructions of self, gender and culture that they exhibit. Insistently asking readers and spectators, "What's wrong with …

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Aesthetic Deviation: Victor Segalen In China , Kimberley Healey

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Victor Segalen's early twentieth-century writings on China provide an alternative to nineteeth-century French literary exoticism. In his examination of the self and the other, much admired by postcolonial critics, he attempts to embrace a new aesthetics of diversity. Segalen's writing on the other opens the door to a jarring and heterogeneous aesthetic of exotic encounter by reevaluating the position of the European abroad as well as the literary forms used to depict the foreign. However, Segalen's encounters with difference as illustrated in his two main narratives on China, Equipée and René Leys, deviate from the desire for absolute difference …

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Full-Text Articles in French and Francophone Literature

The Construction Of The Other And The Self In André Gide's Travels In The Congo And Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks , Raphaël Lambert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Surreal And Canny Selves: Photographic Figures In Claude Cahun , Gayle Zachmann

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Aesthetic Deviation: Victor Segalen In China , Kimberley Healey

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature