Documents found
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771.More information
This article explores the relationship that the individual maintains with society in the contemporary novel. Michel Houellebecq's novels suggest that the contemporary character no longer define himself his struggle in a world opposed to his desires, as was the case in the Realist tradition. The contemporary individual faces a struggle of another kind, where he is constantly falling back into himself and sinking in his own sterile lucidity. But how can this sad and depressive individual become a hero in the novel ? Houellebecq asks this exact question and proposes to enlarge the domain of the struggle to all domains of human life by describing the most insignificant emotional relationships on the model of vast social competition. But in this way, the only possible combat is the erasure of oneself. Each of Houellebecq's characters ends up disappearing without a trace, in the middle of the night and close to nothingness, like a last protest against the emptiness of existence.
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772.More information
The last issue of the communist cultural weekly Les Lettres françaises was released in October 1972. Louis Aragon, its editor for the preceding 20 years, chose to publish a short story entitled “La valse des adieux” as the last editorial. This short story was issued again eight years later in Aragon's Le mentir-vrai. Its first-person narrator uses his personal failure to express a strong condemnation of ideological self-delusion. Last but not least, this self-criticism rhetoric is supported by a surrealist wandering in Paris and its outskirts, where the narrative melds memory and history. Based on Aragon's intertextuality approach, this paper aims to show that “La valse des adieux” expresses first and foremost a critical view on history, in line with the author's last novels.
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774.More information
This study addresses aspects of local identity in the music of Theodore Antoniou and other Greek contemporary composers. It highlights misapprehensions and obsolete conceptions of historiography and aesthetics embedded in the use of terms such as centre and periphery or high- and low-brow styles of music, respectively. An overview of the history of art music in Greece is attempted, for a better understanding of these issues in that context. The parallel reference to significant Western contemporary composers such as György Ligeti, Luigi Nono, and Mauricio Kagel supports the primary argument of the essay, which seeks fair treatment for all places that find themselves peripheral to a given centre. The case of Greece—one of the cradles of Western culture—is a unique example of a problematic approach typical of Western historiographies with regard “centres” and “peripheries” that needs to be corrected.
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The article discusses key issues and theoretical debates about small nations and minority nations in comparative politics. Its more specific objective is to evaluate the role Quebec plays in those debates. Three questions motivate the authors' inquiry. First, it addresses the main questions and analytical perspectives that characterize the comparative study of small nations. For instance, it examines the key role normative debates have played in our understanding of the nationalism of small nations such as Catalonia, Flanders, Scotland and Quebec as well as more empirical analyses on territorial governance. Secondly, it evaluates the theoretical contributions of studies about Quebec to the field. It discusses the literature in two specific areas, that of paradiplomacy and public policies. Thirdly, the authors ask whether the comparison of Quebec with other small nations and national minorities is the most appropriate in order to understand its own political dynamics. They suggest that Quebec should also be compared with other small societies or small sovereign states such as Ireland, Israel or the Scandinavian countries in order to better understand its actions. In conclusion, the article also serves to underline the limits of such comparison.
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AbstractThe aim of this article is to re-evaluate the possible applications of the notion of cultural representation from the perspective of the sociology of the intellectual. First, we cast a critical regard over the theoretical and methodological tools developed over the years by the sociology of the intellectual with the implicit aim of promoting a group of intellectuals who would assume the collective function as representatives of culture. Second, after an analysis of a text of Michel Foucault, we propose a decollectivisation of the role of the intellectual and the function of a cultural representative in order to better comprehend how the intellectual can come concretely to enter into the system of truth/power in postmodern societies. Last of all, we attempt to apply this analytical framework to the case of a collective of three Québécois intellectuals who are currently the object of a judicial prosecution by two Canadian mining companies for having accused them, in a work published in 2008, of crimes and embezzlement in Africa.