Documents found
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925.More information
Virginie Despentes, whose first book was published in 1993, is recognized as one of the major representatives of a new orientation of women's literature. This article analyzes two aspects of Despentes's reflections on the figure of the public persona of the writer: on the one hand, I show that both her theoretical texts and her fictions denounce the critical reception of a woman who writes and creates in France. On the other hand, at a time when autofiction dominates French literature, Despentes has a different approach to the self and the subject in her texts. Despentes rethinks the tenor of sociability on the basis of her reflection on the social elaboration of the feminine and of the value given to work, which is not limited to the writer's oeuvre. The diagnosis of social decomposition must not be merely criticized, but put to work otherwise.
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928.More information
What sort of imaginary urban life does Pasolini outline in his films? What are the forms of the cities pictured in his work, first Rome and then other cities, in the “Third World”? This article attempts to answer these questions by starting from two hypotheses: first, that Pasolini approached depiction of the city with the intact urbs in mind, whose pure and almost mythical identity was still maintained within its ancient walls (like the lock which ensures the inviolability of the image of the city in the famous View of Florence “with the Chain”); and second, that he saw any attempt to open this kind of city up to contemporary life as a deep wound. This led him to take up the defence of the entire city, even its most ordinary and least monumental aspects, in the same way that he championed popular literature and poetry in dialect, which in his eyes were as important as the work of Dante or Petrarch.
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929.More information
This essay offers some theological and anthropological reflections around the ritual of the last meal given to criminals about to be executed. The main argument demonstrates that this practice in the American prison system indirectly justifies the death penalty. The opposition between a public discourse that transforms the criminal into a monster and what appears to be the human ritual of the last meal reinforces the idea that the penal system is fair and death penalty necessary. In her conclusion, the author suggests that only the artistic representations of the last meal (and this opens a parallel with the gospel narratives) offers an opportunity for a redemptive vision of it. Paradoxically, these representations focus on the meal itself and fully avoid the portrayal of the condemned. In so doing, they reinstitute the meal as a simple daily act and thus recapture the human and social side of the condemned.