I picked up a copy of Constance Debré’s Nom recently, after having heard that independent press Semiotext(e) had recently translated some of her earlier works. Semiotext(e) has a reputation for introducing Anglophone readers to intellectually stimulating theoretical texts from Europe and Latin America, so I assumed that Debré’s work would…

A self-described intersectional feminist, Daas writes to offer a glimpse of her reality and how it connects to larger struggles of anti-racism, sexism, and homophobia. — In the year of 2023, the French far-right believes that le wokisme — a vague term that appears to describe advocacy for minorities like people of color and LGBTQ+ people — is an American export corroding French institutions. France, they say, with its traditions of deep color-blind republicanism and fervent…

Judging an animal may seem anthropocentric and absurd to us, but to some Europeans before the Enlightenment it seemed like the right thing to do. — Thomas Coop-Phane’s Le Procès du cochon (2019) is a brief novel that resembles a Roman myth or a medieval allegorical play more than the latest avant-garde or page-turner bestseller. Despite a form that evokes old literary forms, however, the book’s subject could not be less relevant. As the title hints…

Despentes’ now canonical collection of essays has made feminist theory accessible to a wide readership — Out of all the humanities fields, women’s, gender and sexuality studies may be the one which searches for renewal the most. Works written merely a decade ago may seem obsolete to people, as terms and attitudes towards gender and sexuality continue to change. Because of this, I came into Virginie…

The classic postcolonial novel by Kourouma does far more than criticize colonialism and political instability in his native Ivory Coast — Francophone Africa has had a vibrant literary scene for decades now, one composed of authors writing about issues specific to the region and drawing inspiration from literary traditions from different parts of the world. Among the ever-growing Francophone African literary canon, Ivorian writer Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence (FR…

Bachelard helps us think of space and objects in new ways — If one goes to any university’s website for recent dissertations in literary studies, one can expect to find all kinds of interesting scholarship. People still write about Shakespeare and Proust using narratology and psychoanalysis, but newer, recent analyses in cultural studies complicate and enrich our knowledge of already complex works…

There is something bittersweet about the fact that Annie Ernaux’s most popular book remains A Man’s Place (Fr: La place). On one hand, La place is a brief, austere but still rich account of the life of a man whose life would not be seen as worthy of literary writing…

In her novel A Season In The Life of Emmanuel Québecoise writer Marie-Claire Blais uses a rural family to show the transformation her country was going through — Due to its relatively small size and its origins as an agrarian settler colony, Quebec (along with the rest of French-speaking Canada) took much longer to develop a strong secular national literary tradition, but the seeds for it stem as far back as the 16th century accounts of Jesuit missionaries…

Every so often a person on Twitter asks to the masses what are some books they hate that they were assigned to read in their high school English classes. Harold Boom would cry if he saw the results of these polls: people appear to really, really hate canonical texts. People…