Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France
The Politics of Disengagement

A wide-ranging account of French literature of the 1950s and 1960s showing how politically engaged leading writers were.

Daniel Just (Author)

9781107093881, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 February 2015

225 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.6 cm, 0.47 kg

'Throughout his detailed, meticulous analyses, Daniel Just astutely and persistently argues that disengagement is ethical and political.' Colin Davis, French Studies: A Quarterly Review

Against the background of intellectual and political debates in France during the 1950s and 1960s, Daniel Just examines literary narratives and works of literary criticism arguing that these texts are more politically engaged than they may initially appear. As writings by Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Albert Camus, and Marguerite Duras show, seemingly disengaged literary principles - such as blankness, minimalism, silence, and indeterminateness - can be deployed to a number of potent political and ethical ends. At the time the main focus of this activism was the escalation of violence in colonial Algeria. The poetics formulated by these writers suggests that blankness, weakness, and withdrawal from action are not symptoms of impotence and political escapism in the face of historical events, but deliberate literary strategies aimed to neutralize the drive to dominate others that characterized the colonial project.

1. Introduction: literature and engagement
2. Neutral writing and Roland Barthes's theory of exhausted literature
3. Maurice Blanchot and the politics of narrative genres
4. Literary weakness: Maurice Blanchot, commitment, and decolonization
5. The poverty of history and memory: Albert Camus's Algeria
6. Albert Camus and the politics of shame
7. Marguerite Duras, war traumas, and the dilemmas of literary representation
8. Literary void: ethics and politics in Marguerite Duras's hybrid stories
9. Conclusion: the literature of exhaustion, weakness, and blankness
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: National liberation & independence, post-colonialism [HBTR], Postwar 20th century history, from c 1945 to c 2000 [HBLW3], Literary studies: post-colonial literature [DSBH5], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]