Regional French literature
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
Funding from the European Union helped keep alive regional traditions. The Occitan
renaissance organized by the poet Frédéric Mistral in the last quarter of the 19th century and
relaunched several times, most significantly after World War II, by the Institute of Occitan
Studies, is still productive. Fortune de France (1977–85; “The Fortunes of France”), Robert
Merle’s saga of the Wars of Religion (between the Protestants and Catholics in the 16th and 17th
centuries), helped keep the Occitan-speaking region of southern France in the forefront of the
popular imagination. Writing in Breton dwindled significantly for many years but has revived,
and writing in French focused on the Breton landscape remains significant, especially for poetry.
Florence Delay’s novel Etxemendi (1990) set its plot in the Basque independence movement.
Postmodernism
Thought and sensibility at the end of the century were in thrall to postmodernism, which
has been variously described as a radical attack on all authoritarian discourse and a return to
conservatism by the back door. Jean-Franƈois Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne (1979; The
Postmodern Condition) declared the end of the modes and concepts that had fueled 18th-century
scientific rationalism and the industrial and capitalist society to which it gave birth: the “grand
narratives” of historical progress and concepts of universal moral value and absolute worth.
Societies were to be seen instead as collections of games or performances, played within
arbitrary sets of rules. Jean Baudrillard’s critical accounts of the inscription of consumer society
and its discourses into private and public lives had a subversive impact at the moment of their
first production through such works as Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972;
For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign). But from the 1980s his work was perceived
as a product of conservative postmodernism that seemed to assert that history had no more use
and that value judgements were at an end. His La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The
Gulf War Did Not Take Place) was an attack on the posturing of all parties to the Gulf War; this
posturing, Baudrillard argued, had replaced meaningful political thought and action.
As postmodernism became less fashionable, traditions concerned with society, history, and
morality reemerged. The psycho-political critique of Deleuze and Guattari made its way into the
intellectual mainstream. Pierre Bourdieu continued his analytical and empirical studies of
cultural institutions, including broadcasting and television (Sur la télévision [1996; On
Television]). A society traditionally split between elite and mass culture was given a new
positive account of the nature of the ordinary consumer in Michel de Certeau’s L’Invention du
quotidien (1980; The Practice of Everyday Life), which aimed to provide the tools for people to
understand and control the discourses that shaped the ordinary processes of living.
Prose fiction
In the field of prose fiction, Jean Echenoz’s comic pastiches of adventure, detective, and
spy stories pleased both critics and the reading public. New themes emerged in the terrain in
between modes and disciplines. Photography and writing joined to produce the photo-roman,
concerned with exploring the relationship between the image, especially images of the body, and
the narrative work that goes into its construction and interpretation. Good examples of the photo-
roman are Barthes’s La Chambre Claire (1980; Camera Lucida) and Hervé Guibert’s Vice
(1991). Gay writing, already becoming more political and more polemic, found an important
collective focus in the AIDS crisis, most notably in Guibert’s best-selling A l’ami qui ne m’a pas
sauvé la vie (1990; To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life). The quality and variety of
women’s writing was outstanding. Social issues were addressed in the autobiographical fiction of
Annie Ernaux, who, in La Place (1983; Positions, also published as A Man’s Place) and Une
Femme (1988; “A Woman”; A Woman’s Story), looked at the stresses between generations
created by social change and changes of class allegiance. Ernaux’s later writing was more
directly personal: L’Événement (2000; Happening) is her account of an abortion she underwent
in her early 20s. Christiane Rochefort’s novel of child abuse, La Porte au fond (“The Door at the
Back of the Room”), appeared in 1988. Hélène Cixous’s feminist classic, Le Livre de Prométhéa
(1983; The Book of Promethea)—learned, funny, sparkling, and innovative—achieved its
writer’s ambition to make a distinctive model of the desiring feminine subject, within but not
consumed by the inherited forms of writing and culture. Marguerite Duras’s autobiographical
novels L’Amant (1984; The Lover) and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord (1991; The North China
Lover) voiced their author’s own version of the feminine erotic. Monique Wittig stylized lesbian
sadomasochism in her parodic Virgile, Non (1985; “Virgil, No”; Eng. trans. Across the Acheron).
Another generation began publishing in the 1980s. Marie Redonnet’s prose fictions sit at the
edge of popular culture, in a bizarre blend of realism and fantasy, engaging in confident
negotiation with the myths and forms of both maternal and paternal inheritance. Chantal
Chawaf’s sensually charged prose offers a highly original version of the blood rhythms of the
body in Rédemption (1989; Eng. trans. Redemption), a very new kind of vampire novel.
Writers offered radically different versions of life in the contemporary world. Sylvie
Germain’s magic realism works on landscapes steeped in history, where the past painfully but
also productively encloses the present. Her novel La Pleurante des rues de Prague (1992; The
Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague) is a dreamlike, surreal evocation of a city haunted by
its sorrowful history. Tobie des marais (1998; The Book of Tobias) reworks the apocryphal tale
in a France that is simultaneously, and pleasingly, medieval and modern. Michel Houellebecq
appears less pleased with the burden imposed on his present by the past, especially by the liberal
generation of the 1960s, which he holds responsible for everything noxious in the modern world.
The narrative personae of his highly successful novels Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994;
Whatever) and Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also published as
Atomised) are splenetic victims of their own failure of nerve, attacking a society in their own
image, narcissistic and world-weary. Marie Darrieussecq’s Truismes (1996; Pig Tales: A Novel
of Lust and Transformation) is a more dynamic novel; it is an imaginative political and moral
satire depicting the blackly comic world of a young working woman with a highly materialistic
lifestyle who begins to turn into a pig—and finds her transformation both appropriate and
satisfying.
Poetry
Christian Prigent asked in his essay of 1996 what poets were good for in the modern world
(“A quoi bon encore les poètes”). His work and that of such well-established figures as Philippe
Jaccottet (La Seconde Semaison [1996; “The Second Sowing”]) were well-recognized at the turn
of the century, and Michel Houellebecq published his collected poems (Poésies) in 2000. Martin
Sorrell’s bilingual anthology, Elles (1995; “They [the women]”), has shown the flourishing state
of women’s poetry. In it, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Andrée Chedid, and Jeanne Hyvrard offer
their own insights into the problematic of gender roles and the challenge of finding a female
poetic voice. Hyvrard inscribes a special preoccupation with the political condition of women
across the world.
Drama
Most interesting of all, perhaps, was the revival of scripted drama at the end of the 20th
century. The directors’ theatre that held sway in the 1970s and early 1980s (inspiring spectacular
and innovative staging developments in nontraditional venues that took theatre to new audiences
in Paris and the provinces and gave great scope to actors for developing their own stagecraft and
improvisatory skills) had marginalized new writing. Ministry of Culture subsidies supported the
work of Michel Vinaver and Bernard-Marie Koltès, whose plays are concerned with individuals
struggling with the institutional discourses—family, law, politics—of which contemporary
consumer society and their own identities are woven. The quick exchanges of Vinaver’s play
L’Émission de télévision (1990; The Television Programme, published in Plays) express the
anxieties of a world in which realities are constantly shifting. Koltès’s work is especially
concerned with the marginalized individuals and groups—immigrants, poor, criminals, or simply
disaffected—who carry the weight of the postcolonial world. His Dans la solitude des champs de
coton (1986; “In the Solitude of Cotton Fields”), written two years before his death from AIDS
and now translated and performed across the world, is a brilliant two-actor play that embodies
the central theme of his drama. Modern life, for Koltès, is focused in the deal—in confrontations
and negotiations between unequal individuals, client and dealer, in struggles for power, which
are also struggles for survival. Dealing is done in language, and what is acted out on the
Koltesian stage are the rhetorical performances by which people live—on the edge of darkness,
at the frontiers of disorder. Close to the surface of the language of the deal and constantly
piercing its skin is the violence that, in Koltès’s view, constitutes the postcolonial world.
It is perhaps in the theatre that the value of current insights into the ludic and performative
nature of the human condition can most easily be tested. At the close of the century, the most
modern of creative writers in this respect remained Irish-born Samuel Beckett, standing at the
intersection of Irish and French cultural traditions. Although Beckett died in 1989, more than a
decade before the close of the 20th century, his importance, influence, and presence had never
been greater. Shifting in its latter stages to an increasingly minimalist but always materialist
mode, variously exploiting and offsetting the rhythms of language, vision, and movement in
order to explore the limits and the potential of form, Beckett’s drama enshrines the serious nature
of play. In so doing, it brings into focus what have always been the best parts of the French
contribution to the Western cultural tradition: the analytic vision that penetrates the patterns and
structures of the historical moment, the synthetic imagination that clarifies those patterns for
others to see, in all their force and intensity—and the driving desire to see them otherwise.
