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    Contemporary French-Australian Travel Writing: Transnational Memoirs by Patricia Gotlib and Emmanuelle Ferrieux
    (Liverpool University Press, 2022) Edwards, N.; Hogarth, C.
    This article focuses on the portrayal of Australia by two female French travel writers at the turn of the twenty-first century. Based upon Charles Forsdick’s theory of a set of uncertainties locatable in Francophone travel writing at the fin de siècle, this article analyzes how such uncertainties are played out in an Australian setting. It argues that while these texts ostensibly exoticize Australia in stereotypical manners, they gradually complicate these views, especially through their representation of rural Australia. Both writers find in rural Australia the means of recovery from the trauma that has spurred them to travel, which they locate in fast-paced, urban European life. Yet their texts are not simple celebrations of Australia as a site of return to simpler or “primitive” lifestyles, as they uncover links between supposedly exotic Australia and long-repressed aspects of their home cultures.
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    Flawed Border Crossings in Life Writing by Fabienne Kanor and Gisèle Pineau
    (Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2022) Edwards, N.; Hogarth, A.C.
    In this essay, the authors compares two works of life writing by two French-language writers of Caribbean origin: Gisèle Pineau and Fabienne Kanor. Both writers represent contemporary border crossings in their work and, importantly, contextualize these border crossings in terms of the history of the Caribbean and the legacy of slavery. Their texts are read through the lens of Michael Sheringham’s notion of the “autobiographical turning point”—an event in life writing that defines the life and the life writer, that changes the direction of the narrative, and that performs the acts of remembering and forgetting. The authors argue that these writers’ texts present border crossings as turning points in their narratives that are flawed or failures, and that these major events became spiraling rather than turning points.
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    The Teaching Research Nexus: French-Australian Migrant Literature in the First-Year French Classroom
    (Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations (ISFAR), 2021) Edwards, N.; Hogarth, C.
    This article details the ways in which the authors bring their research into their pedagogical practise. Their research project is entitled ‘Transnational Selves: French Narratives of Migration to Australia’ and aims to discover, analyse and disseminate texts written by migrants in the French language from the nineteenth century to the present day. In this article, they discuss how they incorporate this important French-Australian cultural element into a beginner level language course, reminding students of the history and persistence of French-Australian cultural connections.
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    Resisting Linguistic Rules in French-Australian Writing
    (Liverpool University Press, 2022) Edwards, N.; Hogarth, C.
    Recent scholarship has posited the experience of migration as a source of creative, experimental possibilities that allow writers to contest fixed forms of identity; it has also questioned monolingual, monocultural understandings of national literatures that yoke one language to one nation. Building on such work, this article considers French migrant writing that breaks linguistic rules and challenges the norms of national literatures by analyzing various attitudes testifying to multilingualism and linguistic differences in the works of Paul Wenz, Didier Coste and Catherine Rey—authors who had embarked upon their writing careers before migrating, who have settled in Australia and who write from a position of stability and permanence. While travel writers use English to nuance their texts about journeys through Anglophone regions, they ultimately do not displace the primary importance of French in their texts. By contrast, the texts of the writers considered herein articulate both unique understandings of linguistic identity and resistance to linguistic fixity as well as innovative narrative strategies to communicate both.
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    Making the case for languages in postgraduate study
    (Springer, 2020) Edwards, N.J.; Christopher, H.; Fornasiero, J.; Reed, S.M.A.; Amery, R.; Bouvet, E.; Enomoto, K.; Xu, H.L.
    This chapter discusses recent changes in the philosophy and practice of postgraduate training in Australian universities and explores how language programs can respond to these. It first surveys the changing field of postgraduate education, pointing to the current philosophy of doctoral training that aims to produce independent researchers who are trained in both academic and transferable skills. It then discusses three areas in which language departments can advocate for their importance to postgraduate education. First, it discusses ways to attract students by co-supervising in aligned areas and by contributing to undergraduate courses beyond languages. Second, it explores the contributions language programs can make to students’ transferable skills training. Third, it suggests that language departments are uniquely placed to emphasize the relevance and applicability of their research to a variety of academic and non-academic contexts in a period when the national Engagement and Impact Assessment (EIA) looms large.
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    Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves
    (Routledge, 2020) Edwards, N.
    This volume examines the ways in which multilingual women authors incorporate several languages into their life writing. It compares the work of six contemporary authors who write predominantly in French.
  • ItemOpen Access
    “Une force qui va”: Reflections on Gérard Depardieu in Danton
    (Liverpool University Press, 2021) McCann, B.
    Taking as its starting point a 1978 article by film critic Molly Haskell, in which she described Gérard Depardieu as “tactile […] grasping, eating, touching, coming to physical terms with everything in sight”, this article considers a largely overlooked Depardieu role, as the committed revolutionary leader Georges Danton in Andrzej Wajda’s Danton (1983)—a historical role that reflects the actor’s commitment to the relevance of the Revolutionary politician and intellectual. By examining three key scenes, the article scrutinizes Depardieu’s acting style (body language, vocal delivery, movement choices) and demonstrates that he is committed to new ways of engaging with the ideological processes of acting. In Danton, Depardieu pivots between a familiar set of performative registers—physical menace and self-regarding sensitivity, timidity and flamboyance, innocence and cunning—so that the performance ultimately serves as a timely reminder of his enduring mythic status in French cinema.
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    The hyperbolic logic of constraint in the poetic works of Jacques Jouet
    (John Hopkins University Press, 2019) Poiana, P.B.
    The writings of Jacques Jouet mark a shift in the nature of the Oulipian constraint by adding a pragmatic or existential restriction to strict textual rules. As such, the constraint defines when, where and to whom he writes as well as which form it adopts. This raises the question of how it compares with earlier forms of the Oulipian constraint, or of the extent to which the writer controls or is controlled by the constraint. The study proceeds by analysing the changing constraints in his text Du jour, specifically by highlighting the hyperbolic logic that applies in the areas of productivity, pleasure and relevance.
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    Wenz reinvented: The making and remaking of a French-Australian transnational writer
    (The University of Queensland Press, 2021) Edwards, N.; Hogarth, C.
  • ItemOpen Access
    French-Australian writing: Expanding multilingual Australian literature
    (Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2020) Edwards, N.; Hogarth, C.
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    Intersections: A paradigm for languages and cultures?
    (Springer Nature, 2020) Fornasiero, F.J.; Reed, S.; Amery, R.; Bouvet, E.; Enomoto, K.; Xu, H.L.; Fornasiero, J.; Reed, S.; Amery, R.; Bouvet, E.; Enomoto, K.; Xu, H.L.
    “Intersections” constitutes the thematic thread to the essays in this volume, whose aim is to depict the multi-facetted yet cohesive nature of Australian scholarship and practice in Language Studies. Running discreetly through all chapters, featuring prominently in some, this thread connects them all to a lived reality: the field of languages and cultures, as it is practised and reflected upon in Australian universities today, is essentially an interdisciplinary and interconnecting space, one in which linguistic and disciplinary diversities meet and gather forces. Although language scholars are well equipped to navigate that space, the issue that currently confronts them is that their universities do not necessarily recognize or reward what is a positive contribution to their institutional mission. In this volume, they collectively make a compelling case for their inclusion.
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    French migrant writing in Australia: Australianness in two female memoirs from the 2000s
    (Institute for the Study of French-Australian Relations Inc, 2020) Edwards, N.J.; Hogarth, C.
    This article reads the work of Catherine Rey and Marie-Paule Leroux as examples of French-Australian migrant literature. It compares the way these two writers, both of whom moved to Australia from France in mid-life, portray their migration in their literary texts. Reading their work through the lens of recent migration theory, it argues that these texts depart from paradigms that position France as the centre, that place Paris or an alternative urban space as the ultimate destination, or that stage movement between former colony and colonial power. The two writers practise, in different ways, a strategic exoticism that renders their texts attractive to specific audiences within France and Australia.
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    An odyssey through time: Nicolas Baudin’s long haul
    (Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2019) Fornasiero, F.
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    History, truth and (mis)representation in Versailles (2015-2018)
    (Liverpool University Press, 2019) McCann, B.E.
    The TV series Versailles, set during the construction of the Palace of Versailles and the reign of Louis XIV, premiered in 2015 on Canal+ in France and was quickly picked up by television companies around the world. Almost immediately, it was mired in controversy: at €27 million, it was the most expensive television series ever made in France; it used primarily British actors; the opening and closing credits played out to music by French electronic band M83; and British MPs were outraged at the graphic sex scenes. Historians were not impressed either: Louis did not choose Versailles as his principal residence until 1682, even though series one was set between 1667 and 1670. Perhaps most egregiously, the series’ lingua franca was English. Since its release, Versailles has sharply divided critics, with views split between those who praised the series’ creative reimagining of French history and those who flinched at its factual inaccuracies and confusingly telescoped timeframes. This article uses the work of historian Robert Rosenstone to demonstrate how historical television series like Versailles overlap creatively with historical fact to create alternative historiographic practices. It highlights some of the debates surrounding Versailles in terms of its historical fidelity, visual style, and contemporary resonances, and it examines the critical reception of the series in France, Britain and Australia to observe how viewers have responded to the imaginative mingling of fact and fiction.
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    Christian Prigent’s Mimological Machine: Le Monde est marrant and La Vie moderne
    (Association des Études Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande, 2017) Poiana, P.B.
    Christian Prigent views his writing as an effort to expose the 'parler faux' of ambient discourses and condemn the impoverishment of language and ideas by the media industry, in particular. Prigent's later texts work on the principle that the acceleration, intensification and gratification that characterize an image-driven society result in the disempowerment of its citizens. Prigent responds with a critical poetics that this study endeavours to describe with reference to two texts: Le Monde est marrant (2008) and La Vie moderne (2012). These texts devise techniques of vocal imitation (which, adopting Gérard Genette's neologism, we call mimological) as a means of addressing those techniques by which the media industry creates credulous and consumption-ready subjects. This critical poetics constitutes a system, it is argued, because it deploys a limited set of combinations as a way of figuring an aberration of an existing system. Prigent's mimetic system demonstrates how poetry offers a means of grasping the harsh realities of the twenty-first century.
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    Matthew Flinders through French eyes: Nicolas Baudin's lessons from Encounter Bay
    (Taylor & Francis, 2017) West-Sooby, J.; Fornasiero, J.
    The encounter between Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders off the south coast of New Holland in April 1802 has attracted considerable attention. For many, it has come to symbolise the triumph of the spirit of international scientific cooperation over national rivalries and personal ambitions. Scholarly analysis of the complexities of the encounter moment itself has, however, served to modify this idealised image. The injustice subsequently done to Flinders by François Péron and Louis de Freycinet, who failed to acknowledge his discoveries on this coast in the published account of the French voyage, has also generated much discussion. The impact of the encounter on Baudin and his men, on the other hand, has not been subjected to the same scrutiny. Through a close examination of the archival documentation, this essay offers the French perspective on Matthew Flinders and highlights the ramifications for the Baudin expedition of this fateful meeting with him.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Framing French Culture
    (University of Adelaide Press, 2015) Edwards, N.J.; McCann, B.; Poiana, P.
    Writers, painters, photographers, illustrators, directors and designers search for the perfect frame to capture, isolate, subvert or aestheticise an image, and may deploy a range of framing devices to tell their stories: the layered photograph, the jumbled timeframe, the flashback, the voice-over, the unreliable narrator, the hybrid assemblage. Throughout this book, the concept of framing is used to look at art, photography, scientific drawings and cinema as visually constituted, spatially bounded productions. The way these genres relate to that which exists beyond the frame, by means of plastic, chemically transposed, pencil-sketched or moving images allows us to decipher the particular language of the visual and at the same time circumscribe the dialectic between presence and absence that is proper to all visual media. Yet, these kinds of re-framing owe their existence to the ruptures and upheavals that marked the demise of certain discursive systems in the past, announcing the emergence of others that were in turn overturned.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Explorations and encounters in French
    (University of Adelaide Press, 2010) Fornasiero, F.J.; Mrowa-Hopkins, C.
    With a title derived literally from the explorations of the French in the Pacific and metaphorically from classroom encounters with another culture—both of which form important subsections to the volume—Explorations and Encounters in French actively seeks to unite those fields of enquiry sometimes seen as separate, namely, culture and language. The essays selected for inclusion in Explorations and Encounters in French bring together many of the current research strands in French Studies today, tapping into current pedagogical trends, analysing contemporary events in France, examining the Franco-Australian past, while reviewing teaching practice and the culture of teaching. Collectively, the essays reflect the common engagement with language, culture and society that characterizes the community of French teachers and scholars in Australia and abroad.
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    25 février 1830. La première d’Hernani
    (Les Arènes, 2016) Fornasiero, F.; Jeanneney, J.; Guérout, J.
  • ItemOpen Access
    An artist in the making: The early drawings of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur during the Baudin expedition to Australia
    (University of Adelaide Press, 2015) West-Sooby, J.; Edwards, N.; McCann, B.; Poiana, P.