Yale French Studies, Number 133

Yale French Studies, Number 133 PDF Author: Richard J. Golsan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300228899
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
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.

Yale French Studies, Number 133

Yale French Studies, Number 133 PDF Author: Richard J. Golsan
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300228899
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

"Detecting" Patrick Modiano

Author: Richard Joseph Golsan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300228892
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
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.

The Night Watch

The Night Watch PDF Author: Patrick Modiano
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408867923
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for LIterature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. The Night Watch is his second novel and tells the story of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo informing on the Resistance, and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu of nightclubs, prostitutes and spivs he shares. Under pressure from both sides to inform and bring things to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the only way to escape an impossible situation and the question that haunts him – how to be a traitor without being a traitor. In this astonishing, cruel and tender book, Modiano attempts to exorcise the past by leading his characters out on a fantasmagoric patrol during one fatal night of the Occupation.

Detecting Texts

Detecting Texts PDF Author: Patricia Merivale
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812205456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story—the history of which encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King—that ends with a question rather than an answer. The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity. As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the "metaphysical detective story," in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world. Detecting Texts includes an introduction by the editors that defines the metaphysical detective story and traces its history from Poe's classic tales to today's postmodernist experiments. In addition to the editors, contributors include Stephen Bernstein, Joel Black, John T. Irwin, Jeffrey T. Nealon, and others.

A Trace of Malice

A Trace of Malice PDF Author: Patrick Modiano
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Crime Scenes

Crime Scenes PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900448633X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
The essays in this collection are based on papers given at a conference on detective fiction in European culture, held at the University of Exeter in September 1997. The range of topics covered is designed to show not only the presence and variety of narratives of detection across different European countries and their different media (although there is a predictable emphasis on the novel). It also illustrates the fertility of the genre, its openness to a spectrum of readings with different emphases, formal as well as thematic. Approaches to detective fiction have often tended to confine them-selves to ‘symptomatic’ interpretation, where details of the fictional world represented are used to diagnose a specific set of social preoccupations and priorities operative at the time of writing. Such approaches can yield valuable insights. Nonetheless there is a risk of limiting the value of the genre as a whole solely to its role as a mirror held up to society. In this perspective, issues of structure and style are sidelined, or, if addressed, are praised to the extent that they approach invisibility — concision, spareness, realism are the qualities singled out for praise. The genre also gives much scope for formal innovation — and indeed has often attracted already established ‘mainstream’ writers and filmmakers for just this reason. The eclectic diversity of the detective narratives considered in this volume reveal the malleability of the traditional constraints of the genre. The essays bear rich testimony to the value of considering the interplay of thematic and structural issues, even in the most apparently unselfconscious and popular (or populist) forms of narrative. The patterns of reassurance, the triumph of intellect and the ordered, rational world ‘of old’ are now challenged by the need to foreground the problems, ambiguities and uncertainties of the self and of society. The plurality of meanings and the antithetical imperatives explored in these detective narratives confirm that the most recent forms of the genre are not mere palimpsests of their ‘golden age’ precursors. The subversion of traditional expectations and the implementation of diverse stylistic devices take the genre beyond mere homage and pastiche. The role of the reader/spectator and critic in conferring meaning is a crucial one.

The Black Notebook

The Black Notebook PDF Author: Patrick Modiano
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0857054902
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
A writer discovers a set of notes in his notebook and sets off on a journey through the Paris of his past, in search of the woman he loved forty years previously. Set in the Montparnasse district of Paris, the author, Jean, retraces his nocturnal footsteps around the left bank during France's period of decolonisation during the 1960's. He tries to remember what brought him into contact with a gang that frequented the hotel Unic in the area. His quest through seedy cafés and cheap hotels becomes an enquiry into a woman, Dannie, whom Jean loved and who once tried to admit to a terrible crime. Over the course of several voyages between past and present, we meet various shady characters, and discover that Dannie may have killed "someone". As his memories overlap with the discovery of an old vice squad dossier, Jean reinvestigates the closed case of a crime where he could well be the last remaining witness. Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti

The Book of Nights

The Book of Nights PDF Author: Sylvie Germain
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9780879239756
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
The patriarch of the Peniel family, with his own daughter, fathers a son, Victor-Flandrin, who goes on to sire fifteen children of his own. "Their stories, in turn, are driven by eccentricity and surges of inexplicable events, but no amount of magic or love can keep the Peniels safe from the murderous engines of the world wars."--Booklist review.

Suspended Sentences

Suspended Sentences PDF Author: Patrick Modiano
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300213379
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume--Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin—represents a sterling example of the author’s originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti’s superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano’s distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose. Although originally published separately, Modiano’s three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers—each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists. Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano’s fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person’s confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano’s trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.

Invisible Ink

Invisible Ink PDF Author: Patrick Modiano
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252587
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 174

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Book Description
Patrick Modiano explores the boundaries of recollection in a "mesmerizing, enigmatic novel" (Publishers Weekly) "Nobel Prize winner Modiano's title smartly ties together the theme, plot, and ambience of his latest book . . . The past overlaps and memories half-emerge in classic Modiano fashion, just as a message in invisible ink tentatively reveals itself in the right light."--Library Journal "An enchanting read."--Ploughshares The latest work from Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, Invisible Ink is a spellbinding tale of memory and its illusions. Private detective Jean Eyben receives an assignment to locate a missing woman, the mysterious Noëlle Lefebvre. While the case proves fruitless, the clues Jean discovers along the way continue to haunt him. Three decades later, he resumes the investigation for himself, revisiting old sites and tracking down witnesses, compelled by reasons he can't explain to follow the cold trail and discover the shocking truth once and for all. A number one best seller in France, hailed by critics as "breathtakingly beautiful" (Les Inrockuptibles) and "refined and dazzling" (Le Journal du Dimanche), Invisible Ink is Modiano's most thrilling and revelatory work to date.