Francophone Literature as World Literature

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Francophone Literature as World Literature examines French-language works from a range of global traditions and shows how these literary practices draw individuals, communities, and their cultures and idioms into a planetary web of tension and cross-fertilization. The Francophone corpus under scrutiny here comes about in the evolving, markedly relational context provided by these processes and their developments during and after the French empire. The 15 chapters of this collection delve into key aspects, moments, and sites of the literature flourishing throughout the francosphere after World War II and especially since the 1980s, from the French Hexagon to the Caribbean and India, and from Qubec to the Maghreb and Romania. Understood and practiced as World Literature, Francophone literature claims--with particular force in the wake of the littrature-monde debate--its place in a more democratic world republic of letters, where writers, critics, publishers, and audiences are no longer beholden to traditional centers of cultural authority.

Reviews

An important contribution to the lively and ongoing debate on what constitutes World Literature in French as well as a global mapping of its institutional, spatial and identity positionalities, Francophone Literature as World Literature is an original volume offering diverse approaches that are theoretically rigorous and planetary in scope. * Women in French Studies *
This fascinating and timely book is distinguished not just by the scholarly caliber of its contributors but by the range of its approaches, the breadth of its concerns, and the quality of its writing. * Patrick McGuinness, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of Oxford, UK *
Francophone Literature as World Literature revisits a fruitful paradigm in modern literary criticism in the light of crosspollinations in various francophone areas. This rich collection of essays renews epistemological frameworks by exploring borderlands in four directions: systems and institutions, spatialities, relational identities, and planetary intertexts. It also carries on the discussion about worlding (faire-monde) in a ecological perspective for languages and literatures in the French Caribbean, Subsaharian Africa, India, North America, and Central-Eastern Europe. * Catherine Mazauric, Professor of Contemporary Francophone Literature, Aix Marseille University, France *
In Francophone Literature as World Literature, the editors and contributors reveal in a most compelling way the multi-sited nodes of literary production in the French language around the world, in a context marked by extraordinary creative profusion, ambivalent affiliations, and inescapable global market imperatives. The volume makes a powerful case for the validity and for the singularity of Francophone literature as World Literature, all the while infusing both terms, as they converge, with renewed theoretical poise. * Lydie E. Moudileno, Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, University of Southern California, USA *

Author Bio

Christian Moraru is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. His recent publications include Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011) and Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015). He is co-editor of Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018). Nicole Simek is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Professor of French and Interdisciplinary Studies at Whitman College, USA. Her publications include Hunger and Irony in the French Caribbean: Literature, Theory, and Public Life (2016) and Eating Well, Reading Well: Maryse Cond and the Ethics of Interpretation (2008). Bertrand Westphal is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Limoges, France. His recent publications include Lil de la Mditerrane. Une odysse littraire (2005), Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (trans. 2011), A Plausible World (trans. 2013), and La cage des mridiens. Le roman et lart contemporain face la globalisation (2016).