Jacques Prévert is a poetic icon in France today, his poems are part of the school curriculum. Given the poet's deliberate distance from high culture and notably from traditional school education, this is not devoid of irony. The present eBook sketches a portrait of the poet in five chapters. In each chapter, English adaptations of selected works by Prévert serve as an introduction to individual aspects of his work.

For Bataille, the absence of myth had itself become the myth of the modern age. In a world that had lost the secret of its cohesion, Bataille saw surrealism as both a symptom and a beginning of an attempt to address this loss. His writings on this theme are the result of a profound reflection in the wake of World War Two. The Absence of Myth is the most incisive study yet made of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Clarifying Bataille's links with the surrealist movement, and throwing revealing light on his complex and greatly misunderstood relationship with Andre Breton, The Absence of Myth shows Bataille to be a much more radical figure than his postmodernist devotees would have us believe: a man who continually tried to extend Marxist social theory; a pessimistic thinker, but one as far removed from nihilism as can be.

Focusing on the career of the surrealist poet Jacques Prevert, this book explores the stylistic and thematic currents that prevailed in French films of the 1930s. Prevert's involvement with the surrealists, his contribution to the avant-grade theatre company Groupe Octobre, and his unique collaboration with Marcel Carne are examined.

A wide-ranging study of Prévert’s promethean imagination and creativity in the interwoven realms of theatre, film, poetry, art, photography, and song, Michael Bishop’s Jacques Prévert seeks to demonstrate the originality of a genial fabricator of image and word whose essential focus, unpretentious yet urgently felt, unintellectualised yet buoyantly and wittily intelligent, ever remains the quality of our daily being-in-the-world, the possibility of our self-transformation, the stunning availability – should we truly will it, and despite all that can weigh upon existence, above all ideologically – of joy and love and freedom.

To a large extent, the story of French filmmaking is the story of moviemaking. From the earliest flickering images of the late nineteenth century through the silent era, Surrealist influences, the Nazi Occupation, the glories of the New Wave, the rebirth of the industry in the 1990s with the exception culturelle, and the present, Rémi Lanzoni examines a considerable number of the world's most beloved films. Building upon his 2004 best-selling edition, the second edition of French Cinema maintains the chronological analysis, factual reliability, ease of use, and accessible prose, while at once concentrating more on the current generation of female directors, mainstream productions such as The Artist and The Intouchables, and the emergence of minority filmmakers (Beur cinema).

"The literary in the every day" is a resources for a transdisiplinary approach to reading/writing at the first and second year levels of college French. These will serve as foreign language templates in the form of an OER to bridge the wellknown divide between lower level language courses and upper level literature "content" courses. Language teachers, with the help of these templates, can develop their own reading and writing activities to highlight the metaphorical

In Dusan Makavejev's controversial and explicit WR - Mysteries of the Organism (1971), 'WR' is Wilhelm Reich, the Marxist psychoanalyst who preached sexual enlightenment as a gateway to a better society. Reich is a 'intellectual maverick' and 'sexual pioneer', and theorist of 'Orgone energy' and 'world revolution'. Loosely inspired by Reich's 'The Function of the Orgasm' WR stages an encounter between psychotherapy and Marxism, sexual permissiveness and socialism. Juxtaposing hippie America and cold war Yugoslavia, it is a film of ideas and sensations which speaks to the contemporary world. It was banned in Yugoslavia, under pressure from Moscow, as politically offensive. This book explores the film and how its spectators interact with it.

The definitive biographical guide to poetry throughout the world in the twentieth century and the only book of its kind to look at non-English language poets in such detail. Written in lively prose, with over 900 entries by over 75 international contributors, it brings a uniquely global perspective to bear on modern verse, encapsulating the lives and works of a vast array of poets in precise, compact detail alongside expert critical comment. Who's Who in Twentieth Century World Poetry is a scholarly and hugely enjoyable guide through the diverse arena of modern international poetry.