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Description of  Egalitarian Strangeness: On Class Disturbance and Levelling in Modern and Contemporary French Narrative (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 75)

1800348428 pdf The formulation egalitarian strangeness is a direct borrowing from Courts voyages au pays du peuple [Short Voyages to the Land of the People] (1990), a collection of essays by the contemporary French thinker Jacques Rancire. Perhaps best known for his theory of radical equality as set out in Le Matre ignorant [The Ignorant Schoolmaster] (1987), Rancire reflects on ways in which a hierarchical social order based on inequality can come to be unsettled. In the democracy of literature, for example, he argues that words and sentences serve to capture any life and to make it available to any reader. The present book explores embedded forms of social and cultural apportionment in a range of modern and contemporary French texts (including prose fiction, socially engaged commentary, and autobiography), while also identifying scenes of class disturbance and egalitarian encounter. Part One considers the refrain of class audible in works by Claude Simon, Charles Pguy, Marie Ndiaye, Thierry Beinstingel, and Gabriel Gauny and examines how these authors practices of language connect with that refrain. In Part Two, Hughes analyses forms of domination and Read more