Madame Bovary of the Suburbs

Madame Bovary of the Suburbs PDF Author: Sophie Divry
Publisher: MacLehose Press
ISBN: 0857054694
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
The story of a woman's life, from childhood to death, somewhere in provincial France, from the 1950s to just shy of 2025. She has doting parents, does well at school, finds a loving husband after one abortive attempt at passion, buys a big house with a moonlit terrace, makes decent money, has children, changes jobs, retires, grows old and dies. All in the comfort that the middle-classes have grown accustomed to. But she's bored. She takes up all sorts of outlets to try to make something happen in her life: adultery, charity work, esotericism, manic house-cleaning, motherhood and various hobbies - each one abandoned faster than the last. But no matter what she does, her life remains unfocussed and unfulfilled. Nothing truly satisfies her, because deep down - just like the town where she lives - the landscape is non-descript, flat, horizontal. Sophie Divry dramatises the philosophical conflict between freedom and comfort that marks women's lives in a materialistic world. Our heroine is an endearing, contemporary Emma Bovary, and Divry's prose will remind readers of the best of Houellebecq, the cold, implacable historian who paints a precise portrait of an era and those who inhabit it and in doing so renders existence indelibly absurd. Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Madame Bovary of the Suburbs

Madame Bovary of the Suburbs PDF Author: Sophie Divry
Publisher: MacLehose Press
ISBN: 0857054694
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
The story of a woman's life, from childhood to death, somewhere in provincial France, from the 1950s to just shy of 2025. She has doting parents, does well at school, finds a loving husband after one abortive attempt at passion, buys a big house with a moonlit terrace, makes decent money, has children, changes jobs, retires, grows old and dies. All in the comfort that the middle-classes have grown accustomed to. But she's bored. She takes up all sorts of outlets to try to make something happen in her life: adultery, charity work, esotericism, manic house-cleaning, motherhood and various hobbies - each one abandoned faster than the last. But no matter what she does, her life remains unfocussed and unfulfilled. Nothing truly satisfies her, because deep down - just like the town where she lives - the landscape is non-descript, flat, horizontal. Sophie Divry dramatises the philosophical conflict between freedom and comfort that marks women's lives in a materialistic world. Our heroine is an endearing, contemporary Emma Bovary, and Divry's prose will remind readers of the best of Houellebecq, the cold, implacable historian who paints a precise portrait of an era and those who inhabit it and in doing so renders existence indelibly absurd. Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

Falling Upwards

Falling Upwards PDF Author: Lee Siegel
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786735511
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
Sex and the City, Saul Bellow, Eyes Wide Shut, Dante and the American self, Barbara Kingsolver, acting in Hollywood, Soviet painting in Soho, Angels in America, Jane Austen in the present, J.K. Rowling -- nothing escapes Lee Siegel's incandescent eye. Siegel possesses an intellectual range and independent perspective unmatched by his peers, and Falling Upwards brings together the best of his essays, all of them rich with the trades mark wit and intelligence that have won him many friends and a few enemies. In these essential writings, Siegel deftly uses the occasion of a book, film, painting, or television show not merely to appraise it, but to make sense of life in a way that is more defiant of impoverished cultural "norms" than most contemporary artistic expression. Guided by the belief that a calculating self-interest in art-making diminishes the prospects for the imagination in life, Siegel celebrates authentic sensibilities and lambasts manufactured sentiments. With uncanny insight, yet also with incomparable logic and analytical rigor, he has invented a new idiom in which the language of criticism embodies the playful, creative, synthesizing power that has been largely abdicated by the arts in our time. In writing about works of culture, Siegel has created a standard by which to judge them.

The Promise of the Suburbs

The Promise of the Suburbs PDF Author: Sarah Bilston
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300179332
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
A study of the fast-growing Victorian suburbs as places of connection, creativity, and professional advance, especially for women Literature has, from the start of the nineteenth century, cast the suburbs as dull, vulgar, and unimaginative margins where, by definition, nothing important takes place. Sarah Bilston argues that such attitudes were forged to undermine the cultural authority of the emerging middle class and to reinforce patriarchy by trivializing women's work. Resisting these stereotypes, Bilston reveals that suburban life offered ambitious women, especially writers, access to supportive communities and opportunities for literary and artistic experimentation as well as professional advancement. Bilston interprets both familiar figures (sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon) and less well-known writers (including interior design journalist Jane Ellen Panton and garden writer Jane Loudon) to reveal how women and society at large navigated a fast-growing, rapidly changing landscape. Far from being a cultural dead end, the new suburbs promised women access to the exciting opportunities of modernity.

Scenes from the Suburbs

Scenes from the Suburbs PDF Author: Vermeulen Timotheus Vermeulen
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748691685
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Suburbia. Say the word and a stream of images pass before your eyes: white picket fence, neatly mowed lawns, winding roads nicely lined with trees, pastel-tinted bungalows, bored housewives, conspicuous consumption. We all know what the suburbs are about. Or do we?This book looks again at the filmic and televised spaces we think we know so well. How are these spaces built up? What is it that makes us recognize them as suburbs? How do they function? By exploring in detail the hometowns of Desperate Housewives, The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Happiness, Pleasantville, Brick and Chumscrubber, Scenes from the Suburbs examines what it means to be suburban today.An essential read for academics concerned with the ways in which our understandings of space and place change, this book will be particularly relevant for students and researchers in Suburban Studies, Film and Television Studies and Urban Geography.

Suburban Dreams

Suburban Dreams PDF Author: Greg Dickinson
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817318631
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Explores how the suburban imaginary, composed of the built environment and imaginative texts, functions as a resource for living out the "good life"

Little Children

Little Children PDF Author: Tom Perrotta
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429907827
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Unexpectedly suspenseful, but written with all the fluency and dark humor of Tom Perrotta's The Wishbones and Joe College, Little Children exposes the adult dramas unfolding amidst the swingsets and slides of an ordinary American playground. Tom Perrotta's thirty-ish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms of the playground; Sarah, a lapsed feminist with a bisexual past, who seems to have stumbled into a traditional marriage; Richard, Sarah's husband, who has found himself more and more involved with a fantasy life on the internet than with the flesh and blood in his own house; and Mary Ann, who thinks she has it all figured out, down to scheduling a weekly roll in the hay with her husband, every Tuesday at 9pm. They all raise their kids in the kind of sleepy American suburb where nothing ever seems to happen--at least until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two restless parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could have imagined. Perrotta received Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for best screenplay for the film adaptation of Little Children, which was directed by Todd Field and starred Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly.

On Both Sides of the Tracks

On Both Sides of the Tracks PDF Author: Morgane Cadieu
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226830357
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
An analysis of social mobility in contemporary French literature that offers a new perspective on figures who move between social classes. Social climbers have often been the core characters of novels. Their position between traditional tiers in society makes them touchstones for any political and literary moment, including our own. Morgane Cadieu’s study looks at a certain kind of social climber in contemporary French literature whom she calls the parvenant. Taken from the French term parvenu, which refers to one who is newly arrived, a parvenant is a character who shuttles between social groups. A parvenant may become part of a new social class but devises literary ways to come back, constantly undoing any fixed idea of social affiliation. Focusing on recent French novels and autobiographies, On Both Sides of the Tracks speaks powerfully to issues of emancipation and class. Cadieu offers a fresh critical look at tales of social mobility in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kaoutar Harchi, Michel Houellebecq, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye, among others, shedding fascinating light on upward mobility today as a formal, literary problem.

Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture

Making Sense of Suburbia Through Popular Culture PDF Author: Rupa Huq
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1780932243
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book explores how notions of suburbia have developed in our collective imagination, examining novels, cinema, popular music and television in the US and UK.

The Ethnographic Optic

The Ethnographic Optic PDF Author: Laure Astourian
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253069602
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The Ethnographic Optic traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the final years of the French colonial empire. Focusing on prominent French filmmakers Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, author Laure Astourian elucidates their striking pivot from centering their work on distant lands to scrutinizing their own French urban culture. As awareness of the ramifications of the shrinking empire grew within metropolitan France, these filmmakers turned inward what their similarly white, urban, bourgeois predecessors had long turned outward toward the colonies: the ethnographic gaze. Featuring some of the most canonical and best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Moi, un Noir, La jetée, and Muriel, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema.

Madame Bovary's Ovaries

Madame Bovary's Ovaries PDF Author: David P. Barash
Publisher: Dell
ISBN: 0440241847
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Draws on the principles of evolutionary biology to provide fresh insights into the world of literature to explain why certain literary works have had a profound influence on human life, arguing that the behavior of icons of literature reveals a universal human nature that has evolved over millions of years of natural selection. Reprint.