Ces créatures d’images polymorphes que sont les avatars jouables nous font exister dans les mondes numériques des jeux vidéo, et même dans certains sites Web communautaires ou ludiques. Parce qu’elles nous y métamorphosent, elles apparaissent emblématiques des pratiques interactives les plus sophistiquées et troublantes. Toutefois, leurs propriétés et effets, espérés ou redoutés, restent encore à éclairer, ainsi que toutes ces interactions à distance réalisées par avatars interposés, au cœur des simulations audiovisuelles informatiques contemporaines. Ancré en sciences de l’information et de la communication, ce premier ouvrage collectif francophone sur le thème conceptualise l’avatar. Aussi, il bénéficie des apports conjugués de différentes disciplines (philosophie des techniques, psychologie, psychanalyse, sémiologie, ethnologie, sociologie, sciences de la gestion, arts). Par cette pluralité et grâce à de constants allers-retours entre théories et terrains, descriptions et analyses, hypothèses et témoignages, peuvent être articulées toutes les dimensions en jeu : technologiques, physiologiques, interpersonnelles, identitaires, intimes et/ou culturelles.

Contemporary works of art that remodel the canon not only create complex, hybrid and plural products but also alter our perceptions and understanding of their source texts. This is the dual process, referred to in this volume as “refraction”, that the essays collected here set out to discuss and analyse by focusing on the dialectic rapport between postmodernism and the canon. What is sought in many of the essays is a redefinition of postmodernist art and a re-examination of the canon in the light of contemporary epistemology. Given this dual process, this volume will be of value both to everyone interested in contemporary art—particularly fiction, drama and film—and also to readers whose aim it is to promote a better appreciation of canonical British literature.

Présence et représentation relèvent chacune d'une appréhension différente dont les choses se donnent. Leur relation est dès le départ problématique et c'est autour de ce débat que se sont construits certains des conflits les plus vifs de la période moderne. Cet ouvrage propose plusieurs analyses de la question dans des champs aussi divers que la littérature, le théâtre, la peinture, et la philosophie.

Provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. The bibliography is divided into three major divisions: general studies, author subjects (arranged alphabetically), and cinema. This book is for the study of French literature and culture.

A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.

A philosopher and activist, eager to live according to ideals forged in study and discussion, Daniel Bensaïd was a man deeply entrenched in both the French and the international left. Raised in a staunchly red neighbourhood of Toulouse, where his family owned a bistro, he grew to be France’s leading Marxist public intellectual, much in demand on talk shows and in the press. A lyrical essayist and powerful public speaker, at his best expounding large ideas to crowds of students and workers, he was a founder member of the Ligue Communiste and thrived at the heart of a resurgent far left in the 1960s, which nurtured many of the leading figures of today’s French establishment. The path from the joyous explosion of May 1968, through the painful experience of defeat in Latin America and the world-shaking collapse of the USSR, to the neoliberal world of today, dominated as it is by global finance, is narrated in An Impatient Life with Bensaïd’s characteristic elegance of phrase and clarity of vision. His memoir relates a life of ideological and practical struggle, a never-resting endeavour to comprehend the workings of capitalism in the pursuit of revolution.

A critical reassessment of the neo-avant-garde movement named by Pierre Restany the 'Nouveaux Réalistes' which emerged in Paris around 1960.