Lynn A. Higgins

Rape does not have to happen. The fact that it does--and in the United States a rape is reported every six minutes--indicates that we live in a rape-prone culture where rape or the threat of rape functions as a tool for enforcing sexual difference and hierarchy. Rape and Representation explores how cultural forms construct and reenforce social attitudes and behaviors that perpetuate sexual violence. The essays proceed from the observation that literature not only reflects but also contributes to what a society believes about itself. Fourteen essays by authors in the fields of English, American and African-American, German, African, Brazilian, Classical, and French literatures and film present a wide range of texts from different historical periods and cultures. Contributors demythologize patriarchal representation in literature and art in order to show how it makes rape seem natural and inevitable. Contributors include: the editors, John J. Winkler, Patricia Klindiest Joplin, Susan Winnett, Ellen Rooney, Coppélia Kahn, Eileen Julien, Marta Peixoto, Kathryn Gravdal, Carla Freccero, Nellie V. McKay, Nancy A. Jones, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Their work raises pressing--and often difficult--questions for feminist criticism.

Rape and Representation

Among the most innovative and influential filmmakers of the twentieth century, Alain Resnais (1922–2014) did not originally set out to become a director. He trained as an actor and film editor and, during the sixty-eight years of his working life, delved into virtually every corner of filmmaking, working at one time or another as screenwriter, assistant director, camera operator and cinematographer, special effects coordinator, technical consultant, and even author of source material. From such award-winning documentaries as Van Gogh and Night and Fog to the groundbreaking dramas Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, and Muriel, Resnais’s films experiment with such themes as consciousness, memory, and the imagination. Distinguishing himself from associations with the French New Wave movement, Resnais considered his films to be “anti-illusionist,” never allowing his spectators to forget they were watching a work of art. In Alain Resnais: Interviews, editor Lynn A. Higgins collects twenty-one interviews with the filmmaker, twelve of which are translated into English for the first time. Spanning his entire career from his early short subjects to his final feature film, the volume highlights Resnais’s creative strategies and principles, illuminates his place in world cinema history, and situates his work relative to the New Wave, American film, and experimental filmmaking more broadly. Like his films, the interviews collected here reveal a creator who is at once an intellectual, a philosopher, an entertainer, a craftsman, and an artist.

Interviews

Alain Resnais

Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder

Special Issue: Patrick Modiano's "Dora Bruder"

Richard J. Golsan

Number 133 in Yale French Studies takes a new look at the themes in Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano's work This volume of Yale French Studies offers new perspectives on the work of the 2014 Nobel laureate in literature, Patrick Modiano. Including critical reassessments of themes that have informed, indeed haunted, Modiano's fiction from the outset, this collection of essays places the writer in a variety of new contexts. Topics include explorations of literary and cinematic traditions such as surrealism and film noir, situating Modiano's work among other literatures, the author's fascination with the dark years of the German Occupation, and his troubled relations with his parents.

Lynn A. Higgins

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