Aesthetics of Dislocation in French and Francophone Literature and Art : Strategies of Representation

This work specifically addresses the productive quality of states of dislocation in Francophone literature, cinema and visual culture.

It is the first volume to substantially study dislocation within the French and Francophone cultures.

Contemporary criticism makes extensive use of concepts expressing states of loss and alterity, such as exile, nomadism, homelessness or the uncanny.

However, there have thus far been no substantial studies carried out on dislocation within the French cultural reach.

While dislocation evokes the uprootedness and disorientation associated with many of the former terms, it further suggests a state of hesitation or fluctuation between two or more locations, states, temporalities or categories.

This volume thus seeks both to enrich the existing academic debate in related areas, and to introduce a new and dynamic area of research by raising a variety of questions that have not yet been explored from a multidisciplinary perspective within French studies: how have states of dislocation influenced or been made manifest within French writing, philosophy and visual representation throughout the ages?In what ways might the traumatic experience of dislocation nourish the creative impulse?

To what degree can one view a dislocated state as favoring a more primary or authentic relationship to the real?

To what extent does dislocation always imply a desire for relocation?

Some examples include the volume Identity and alterity in French-language literatures edited by David Murphy and Aedin Ni Loingsigh (London: Grant & Cutler, 2002), David Aberbach's book "Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), or the publication Home and its Dislocations in Nineteenth-Century France, ed.

Suzanne Nash (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993).