Books & ideas

Land Ownership: A Western Fiction

Pierre Crétois — 2024-12-12T07:00:00Z

In the Volta region, there is no such thing as land ownership: Land is not traded but shared. Why, then, do our societies consider the right to appropriate land to be perfectly legitimate?

Utopia, Dystopia

Ophélie Siméon — 2021-05-17T07:00:00Z

As literary concepts, “utopia” and “dystopia” have functioned as powerful tools of social and political critique, as they propose alternative visions of the future gone good or wrong. Gregory Claeys explores this dual nature, and its potential for imagining social change, while tracing back the historical roots and uses of utopianism.

From Infamous Men to Men of the Forest

Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod — 2021-01-04T07:00:00Z

What if, after his interest in “infamous men,” Foucault had turned his attention to the history of ecological marginalities, examining hermits, noble savages and other men of the forest? Philippe Artières writes a counter-factual fiction using real archives.

How Fiction Can Help Us Navigate the Pandemic

Chandra Mukerji — 2020-07-02T07:00:00Z

During the Black Plague, Boccaccio's Decameron provided readers ways to laugh through the pandemic. A few centuries later, a new kind of pandemic strikes: with Covid-19, the world as we knew it seems forever changed. Can fiction help us imagine new ways of existing together in times of uncertainty?

The Regime of Opinion

Alain Policar — 2019-05-06T07:00:00Z

The present era tends to blur the line between the true and the false. Democracy, which is based on the conflict of opinions and hence the horizon of a common truth, is consequently compromised. Yet for Myriam Revault d'Allones, this threat also hangs over the imagination.

The Moral of Historical Fiction

Judith Lyon-Caen — 2017-11-27T08:00:00Z

Since Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, cinematographic representations of the extermination of the European Jews have seemed impossible. Son of Saul has challenged this assumption. Nonetheless, the aesthetic and narrative choices this film makes are problematic.

The Legend of Céline

Hélène Baty-Delalande — 2017-03-06T08:00:00Z

A meticulous historical enquiry reveals the liberties taken by the author of Journey to the End of the Night in recounting his war experience. These flattering inventions made it possible for him to disseminate his pamphlets in the 1930s and clear his name in the purge.

Philip Roth's Counterlives

Benjamin Balint — 2014-05-05T07:00:00Z

Just one year after Philip Roth's announcement that he was retiring from fiction making, Claudia Roth Pierpoint's Roth Unbound offers a review of his long and versatile career as a writer of subversive fictions and American counterlives.