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…

Perec’s now classic novel brilliantly shows the basic structure of late stage capitalist society remains unchanged today — French writer Georges Perec once declared during an interview that his famous novel Things: A Story of the Sixties (French: Les Choses: Une histoire des années soixantes) should not simply be understood as a critique of consumerism. Going beyond that essential notion while reading the novel, however, is a difficult…

Gide’s first published piece of fiction asks deep queries about life — At first glance, André Gide’s The Immoralist (1902; Fr: L’Immoraliste) is not a remarkable French novel: plenty of French novels revolve around brooding solitary Frenchmen struggling to find the meaning of life (these category includes novels as diverse as Chateaubriand’s René, Huysman’s Against the Grain, Camus’ The Stranger and Sartre’s…

Published almost 40 years ago, Duras’ novel might strike the modern reader as too blunt, even if it simultaneously also resembles the dreamiest poetry. — Something many French-speaking literary giants have in common is the attraction towards confessional autobiographical writing. Ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau released his Confessions in the 18th century, many notable authors have followed suit by revealing to their audience how they came of age and became the celebrities they are now. However…