Michelle Beauclair Livres

The Francophone Cultural Issues and Perspectives introduces readers to French-speaking communities across the globe and offers a perspective on the cultures that have developed in the wake of French exploration and colonization. This book explores the French influence in West Africa, the diversity of cultures within the Caribbean, the Francophone communities of North America, and the plight of North African immigrants living in France. Through these interdisciplinary essays and the discussion questions that follow them, readers can examine such wide-ranging topics as the media in Francophone West Africa, the special status of women writers in Senegal, and the mix of cultures in Martinique and French Guiana. This book also highlights the transition into modernity in Burkina Faso, the theater of Aimé Césaire, literature and culture in Québec, and the French presence in the northeastern United States.

This study examines the complexity of mourning in the works of two of the most widely read, yet rarely compared, contemporary authors in France, Albert Camus, born and raised in Algeria, and Marguerite Duras, originally from the former French Indochina. The book studies the figurative and thematic representations of mourning in these authors' works to show how their depictions of grieving extend beyond classic psychoanalytic theories of bereavement to portray a mourning that is unmitigated and interminable. The text completes this examination by exploring the distinction between individual and collective mourning attempts and by underscoring the pervasive tone of melancholy in the post-World War II writings of both authors.