French literature  

Canon: Georges Bataille, Charles Baudelaire, Maurice Blanchot, Céline, Denis Diderot, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Houellebecq, Georges Perec, Pauline Réage, Marquis de Sade

French literary criticism: Sainte-Beuve, Charles Baudelaire

Subgenres: The "frenetic" school of the 1820s/1830s, French pulp fiction, libertine novel, naturalism, nouveau roman, Oulipo (movement)

Publishing houses: Obelisk, Olympia, Eric Losfeld, Série Noire

"During the 20th century, France has been more permissive than other countries in terms of censorship, and many important foreign language novels were originally published in France while being banned in America: Joyce's Ulysses (published by Sylvia Beach in Paris, 1922), Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (both published by Olympia Press), and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (published by Obelisk Press). Additionally, Paris has been the home-in-exile to two American literary movements: the lost generation and the beat generation." Sholem Stein, Apr 2006

In his 1913 essay The Serious Artist, Pound discusses two types of art; The "cult of beauty" and the "cult of ugliness". He compares the former with medical cure and the latter with medical diagnosis, and goes on to write "Villon, Baudelaire, Corbière, Beardsley are diagnosis." - "beauty is difficult": Cantos LXXIV, LXXX

Titles: Princess of Cleves, Le Sopha, conte moral, Thérèse Philosophe, Bijoux Indiscrets, The 120 Days of Sodom, La Religieuse, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, L'Histoire de Juliette, Les Fleurs du mal, Madame Bovary, À rebours, Dom Bougre, The Crimes Of Love, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Le Rouge et le Noir, Gamiani, Artificial Paradises, Salammbô, Le Spleen de Paris, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, Les Diaboliques, La Bête Humaine, The She Devils, Torture Garden, Hell, In Search of Lost Time

French Sadean tradition '... the French tradition represented by Sade, Lautreamont, Bataille, and the authors of Story of O and The Image... suggests that "the obscene" is a primal notion of human consciousness, something much more profound than the backwash of a sick society's aversion to the body. Human sexuality is, quite apart from Christian repressions, a highly questionable phenomenon, and belongs, at least potentially, among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity. Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness - pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one's consciousness, for death itself." --Susan Sontag, The Pornographic Imagination (1967)

For Americans in the 1920s and 1930s For Americans in the 1920s and 1930s (including the so-called "Lost Generation"), part of the fascination with France was also linked to freedom from Prohibition. For African-Americans in the twentieth century (such as James Baldwin), France was also more accepting of race and permitted greater freedom (in a similar way, jazz was embraced by the French faster than in some areas in America). A similar sense of freedom from political oppression or from intolerance (such as anti-homosexual discrimination) has drawn other authors and writers to France. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_literature_of_the_20th_century [May 2006]

The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur in the Latin Quarter of Paris. It gained fame through the extended 'family' of beat writers and artists who stayed there from the late 1950s to the early 1960s in a ferment of creativity.

Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky first stayed there in 1957 and were soon joined by William Burroughs and Gregory Corso. It was here that Burroughs completed the text of Naked Lunch and began his lifelong collaboration with Brion Gysin. It was also where Ian Sommerville became Burroughs' 'systems advisor' and lover. Gysin introduced Burroughs to the Cut-up technique and with Sommerville they experimented with a 'dream machine' and audio tape cut-ups. Ginsberg wrote his moving and mature poem Kaddish at the hotel and Corso wrote the Mushroom cloud shaped poem Bomb. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_Hotel [Jan 2006]