Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone writing of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whose formal experiments and revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of literary forms. The series publishes studies of individual authors and artists, comparative studies and interdisciplinary projects.

As a concept, transmission is crucial to our understanding of how ideas circulate within and across cultures. It opens up a series of questions that link to key debates concerning the exchange of knowledge. Bringing together research from a broad range of areas in French studies, this volume investigates the workings of transmission in relation to canonical and contemporary figures alike, including Proust, Barthes, Derrida, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claire Denis. The essays collected here offer a lively response to the themes of transmission, considering literature and philosophy from the medieval period onwards, as well as modern cinema and critical theory. The first section traces concepts of malign transmission that have informed medieval, early modern and finally contemporary representations of contagion. The second section addresses the impact of trauma, along with its imperative to testify to, or transmit, painful experiences such as rape and the Holocaust. The final section considers transmission in terms of a signal that carries a message, as well as the media that transport or encode that signal.

Autorentext

The Editors: Isabelle McNeill studied for her first degree in Modern and Medieval Languages at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, before obtaining an M.Phil. in European Literature and then completing a Ph.D. with the Department of French. She is currently Affiliated Lecturer in the department of French and a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. She is working on theories of memory, journeys and the moving image in relation to recent French and Francophone cinema. She has published work on Godard's Éloge de l'amour and on memory and the city in contemporary French film.
Bradley Stephens studied for his first degree in Modern and Medieval Languages at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before obtaining an M.Phil. in European Literature and then completing a Ph.D. with the Department of French. He is currently Lecturer in French at the University of Bristol, working on cultures of engagement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has published work on Victor Hugo and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Inhalt
Contents: Isabelle McNeill/Bradley Stephens: Begin Transmission Catherine Léglu: Nourishing Lineage in Coudrette's Roman de Mélusine ou Histoire de Lusignan (1401) Michael Moriarty: The Transmission of Original Sin: the doctrine of the Fall in seventeenth-century thought Natalie Sheehan: Acknowledging the Intermediary: a look at scapegoats, supplements and the temptation of mimetic contagion in Girard, Derrida, and Agamben Laura McMahon: The Contagious Body of the Film: Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001) Andrew Asibong: Moja Sestra: Marie NDiaye and the transmission of horrific kinship Kathryn Robson: From Beneath the Skin: rape and testimony in Nancy Huston's Histoire d'Omaya (1985) Ferzina Banaji: Alain Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard (1955): memory, time and distance Lucy O'Meara: 'L'affaire Barthes' and Ownership of the Voice Sarah Joseph: Marcel and Albertine: a Proustian psychoanalysis of listening? Stephen Forcer: Ceci n'est pas une transmission : Dada and surrealism in work by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville.