Pub Date : 2025-12-19DOI: 10.1177/09571558251406515
Diana Holmes, Max Silverman
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Pub Date : 2025-12-19DOI: 10.1177/09571558251406505
Debra Kelly
The primary aim of this contribution is to seek the traces of those not foremost in the plethora of texts published during and after the Second World War concerning key figures and political and military events of the period. Its focus is a range of French women living in wartime London. It takes in, therefore, the experiences and writings of female citizens of London's well-established ‘French Colony’, alongside those of some of the women belonging to the Free French Corps des Volontaires Françaises who joined de Gaulle in the city in 1940 and shortly afterwards. By working and thinking beyond established historical subjects and sources the aim is also, following Margaret Atack's own commitments and approaches, to construct other archives and different historical knowledge structures.
这一贡献的主要目的是在第二次世界大战期间和之后出版的关于该时期的关键人物和政治和军事事件的大量文本中寻找那些不重要的人的痕迹。它的焦点是一群生活在战时伦敦的法国女性。因此，这本书收录了伦敦这个著名的“法国殖民地”的女性公民的经历和作品，以及1940年和不久之后加入戴高乐的自由法国志愿军（Free French Corps des Volontaires francalaises）的一些女性的经历和作品。通过超越既定的历史主题和来源的工作和思考，她的目标也是遵循玛格丽特·阿特克自己的承诺和方法，构建其他档案和不同的历史知识结构。
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Pub Date : 2025-12-16DOI: 10.1177/09571558251406517
Hilary Footitt
This article situates Margaret's early doctoral research, resulting in the seminal study ‘Literature and the French Resistance: Cultural Politics and narrative forms, 1940–1950’, within the 1970s/1980s context of Resistance historical scholarship in which she was working, a scholarship dominated by the Comité d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale (the predecessor, 1951–1979, of the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent). The conception, methodology and gendered ownership of the Resistance historiography established by the Comité are reviewed in order to indicate ways in which Margaret's work represented a forceful critique of their notions of Resistance history and historical truth. In doing this, the article reflects on the nature of archives – the first archives on the French Resistance collected immediately after the war when there was little or no official material to hand; oppositional archives like Margaret's developed to contest contemporary historiography, and finally some of the implications of the digitised turn in archives for our understanding of ourselves as researchers.
本文将玛格丽特早期的博士研究置于20世纪70年代/ 80年代她所从事的抵抗运动历史研究的背景下，这一研究产生了开创性的研究“文学与法国抵抗运动：1940-1950年的文化政治和叙事形式”，该研究由法国deuxi Guerre Mondiale历史委员会（1951-1979年，法国革命历史研究所的前身）主导。本文回顾了委员会建立的抵抗运动史学的概念、方法和性别归属，以表明玛格丽特的作品是对他们的抵抗运动历史和历史真相观念的有力批判。在此过程中，本文反思了档案的本质——第一份关于法国抵抗运动的档案是在战争结束后立即收集的，当时很少或根本没有官方资料；像玛格丽特这样的对立档案发展到挑战当代史学，最后是档案的数字化转变对我们作为研究人员对自己的理解的一些影响。
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Pub Date : 2025-12-15DOI: 10.1177/09571558251406746
Michael Kelly
Margaret Atack's work offers a clear insight into the enduring paradoxes of the Occupation and its aftermath. She suggests that novels of Unity written during the Occupation were followed by novels of Ambiguity which reflected the social and moral confusions that haunted France through the post-war period. This is confirmed by the main cultural movements of the 1940s, which struggled to articulate a national spirit that could manage the polarisations of the Occupation. The complex legacy of ambiguities is exemplified by the Catholic personalist movement around Emmanuel Mounier and the review Esprit , whose itinerary is examined from its foundation in 1932. The period of publication under the Vichy Regime in particular posed painful dilemmas which left a legacy of ambiguities when Esprit emerged as a leading literary and philosophical review in the post-war period. The review's trajectory suggests that ambiguity may be the price to be paid for national unity and that unity is always provisional.
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Pub Date : 2025-12-10DOI: 10.1177/09571558251406512
David Philip Platten
Although Camus's La Chute (1956) is not a popular choice, even among some Camus specialists, Margaret Atack considered it to be one of the finest works of modern French literature. This complex novella is the story of a man purporting to evaluate his own life. As such, it privileges modes of cognition, yet readers are often frustrated as they wrestle with a text in which the usual modalities through which a human life is given substance are undermined. Recent developments in neuroscience allow for a more precise understanding of how individuals make sense of the past and of what determines their choices and actions. This article will draw on Gazzaniga's notion of ‘the interpreter of experience’ (2018) and Smith Churchland's work on altruism genes (2011) to shed new light on the presentation of self, and on the legacy of trauma, in La Chute .
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Pub Date : 2025-10-17DOI: 10.1177/09571558251381551
John Edward Marks
This article considers Sophie Bruneau's documentary Rêver sous le capitalisme (2017) as a significant and distinctive contribution to the field of social dreaming. It shows how Bruneau was inspired by Charlotte Beradt's foundational work The Third Reich of Dreams (1985) to collect and present a series of dreams about the contemporary experience of the neoliberal workplace. These dreams have a manifestly social content and exhibit recurrent themes, which means that they can be interpreted as a collective matrix that provides insight into the effect of work on the psyche. The dreams also have a latent content that provides access to a social unconscious. They register otherwise unarticulated and invisible dynamics, and in doing so they suggest new ways of thinking and resisting in what Hannah Arendt calls ‘dark times’. The article will also explore the ways in which Bruneau's striking use of cinematic composition adds an important aesthetic dimension to the field of social dreaming, constructing an allusive and resonant dreamscape within which affects of exhaustion, trauma and ultimately resistance can circulate.
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Pub Date : 2025-10-15DOI: 10.1177/09571558251379328
Mohamed Semlali
In his trilogy of novels, Abderrahim Kamal revisits the final years of King Hassan II's reign – a period marked by the revelation of the Tazmamart prison, a clandestine facility that became a symbol of state violence, swallowing dozens of lives in anonymity and oblivion. While most of the detainees perished under inhumane conditions, a handful of miraculous survivors emerged after two decades of torture and deprivation, their broken bodies serving as living archives of barbarity. The protagonists of Kamal's trilogy – mostly committed visual artists, painters or sculptors – strive to give form to the unspeakable and to sublimate horror. Through their artistic creations, they probe wounded flesh, recover a scarred memory inscribed on the body itself, and work to rehabilitate the victims by restoring to them a name, a dignity, a story. The artist, depicted as a quasi-Christ-like figure, appears to bear the burden of collective redemption, but this mission comes at the cost of devastating personal sacrifice, leading him to the edge of madness or into the depths of despair. Yet, like other Moroccan prison narratives that confront evil by giving it shape and voice, Kamal's trilogy contributes to a slow but necessary process of reconciliation between Moroccans and their history. It opens a space for memory, recognition, and healing.
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Pub Date : 2025-07-14DOI: 10.1177/09571558251358691
Thomas Sutherland
Examining the work of French writer, philosopher, and ‘technocritic’ Éric Sadin, with a particular focus on his fears regarding artificial intelligence systems’ infiltration into numerous facets of human affairs, their imposition of a ‘universal technical principle’ upon all aspects of our lives, and their anthropomorphic and alētheic characteristics, this article argues that whilst Sadin's polemical writings provide a useful corrective to more celebratory accounts of such technological developments, his reliance on an uncritical and largely unexamined humanism detracts from their efficacy. Extolling the virtues of a European tradition of thought centred on an ideal of human agency, mastery, and finitude – in short, self-determination – Sadin posits a benchmark against which any manifestation of the technical ( la technique ) can only appear as an impediment to the full flourishing of our autonomy.
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Pub Date : 2025-06-23DOI: 10.1177/09571558251338011
Lucy Whelan
In 1934, the painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, 1908–2001) opened his first one-man show in Paris, comprising five erotic and sexually violent scenes involving adolescents and younger children. Over the following decades, he continued to depict girls in ways that art historians and critics have widely discussed as morally problematic. There is no shortage of art historical writing on Balthus, but his work raises a relatively overlooked question for the cultural history of twentieth-century France: how to explain the extraordinary success of an artist whose works depict, in a stylized realism, sexualised scenes involving children? To respond to this question, this article first sketches the limits of interwar French society's toleration when it comes to sexual innocence and adolescence, with a focus on Balthus’s Surrealist milieu. It then interrogates how in 1934 and after, Balthus's work pushed up against those limits and yet largely avoided condemnation. It does so by setting his earlier work against the popularity of the genre of news known as faits divers, and then by examining, in relation to his later work, how his painterly style and approach to depicting adolescents continued to discourage moral questioning. As such, it seeks to approach Balthus anew in an era that demands a more direct scrutiny of any idealisation of sexual exploitation.
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Pub Date : 2025-06-06DOI: 10.1177/09571558251347038
Murielle El Hajj
This study explores the concept of literary voyeurism as a complex phenomenon, involving the dynamics of observation, power, and ethical responsibility within literary narratives. Drawing on psychoanalytic frameworks from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Bellemin-Noël, this study examines voyeurism not only as an act of observing but as a legitimate and illegitimate mechanism. This article distinguishes the ethical boundaries between the voyeurism of characters—marked by transgression and power imbalance—and that of the reader, positioned as legitimate observer who actively engages in the cocreation of the text. To illustrate these complexities, the study analyzes Marguerite Duras's The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein , a novel where voyeurism functions as both a narrative and thematic centerpiece. Through Lol's compulsive gaze at others and Jack Hold's controlling, voyeuristic narration, the text reveals layered interactions of observation, desire, and identity. Lol's voyeurism, driven by trauma, is contrasted with Jack Hold's manipulative gaze, which objectifies and redefines her within his narrative. Simultaneously, the reader is implicated in a layered voyeuristic act, observing not only the characters but also their acts of voyeurism. The discussion highlights the dual role of voyeurism in literature: as a means of exploring human desire and as a narrative tool that challenges the reader to reflect on his/her ethical engagement with fictional texts. By addressing these dynamics, the article provides insights into the broader implications of voyeurism in literature and its resonance with psychoanalytic and ethical discourse.
本研究探讨文学偷窥作为一种复杂现象的概念，涉及文学叙事中观察、权力和伦理责任的动态。借鉴西格蒙德·弗洛伊德、雅克·拉康、朱莉娅·克里斯蒂娃和让·Bellemin-Noël的精神分析框架，本研究不仅将窥阴癖视为一种观察行为，还将其视为一种合法和非法的机制。本文区分了以越轨和权力不平衡为标志的人物偷窥和作为积极参与文本共同创造的合法观察者的读者偷窥的道德界限。为了说明这些复杂性，该研究分析了玛格丽特·杜拉斯（Marguerite Duras）的《迷人的Lol V. Stein》（the Ravishing of Lol V. Stein），在这部小说中，窥淫癖既是叙事的中心，也是主题的中心。通过《英雄联盟》对他人的强迫性凝视和Jack Hold的控制、偷窥性叙述，文本揭示了观察、欲望和身份的多层次互动。在创伤的驱使下，Lol的偷窥癖与Jack Hold的操纵性凝视形成对比，后者在他的叙述中物化并重新定义了她。与此同时，读者被卷入一种分层的窥阴行为，不仅观察人物，而且观察他们的窥阴行为。讨论强调了偷窥在文学中的双重作用：作为一种探索人类欲望的手段，作为一种叙事工具，挑战读者反思他/她对虚构文本的道德参与。通过解决这些动态，文章提供了对文学中窥阴癖的更广泛含义及其与精神分析和伦理话语的共鸣的见解。
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