Two Cities, une revue bilingue et sans frontiere

Appel à communication « Paris, métropole polyphonique : pour une histoire de la presse parisienne en langue étrangère (XIXe-XXIe siècle)» Date: 9-11 mars 2022

What would a history of medieval literature in French that is not focussed on France and Paris look like? Taking as its starting point the key role played in the development of textual culture in French by geographical regions that are either at the periphery of French-speaking areas, or alternatively completely outside them, this article offers three case studies: first of a text composed in mid-twelfthcentury England; then of one from early thirteenth-century Flanders; and finally from late thirteenth-century Italy. What difference does it make if we do not read these texts, and the language in which they are written, in relation to French norms, but rather look at their cultural significance both at their point of production, and then in transmission? A picture emerges of a literary culture in French that is mobile and cosmopolitan, one that cannot be tied to the teleology of an emerging national identity, and one that is a bricolage of a range of influences that are moving towards France as well as being exported from it. French itself functions as a supralocal written language (even when it has specific local features) and therefore may function more like Latin than a local vernacular.

‘Qui fait la France?’ New configurations of Frenchness in contemporary urban fiction, 2018

This essay traces the change in focus from beur literature in the 1980s to urban literature in the 1990s onwards. Whereas beur literature showed characters torn between their original culture and their adopted culture, urban literature presents characters claiming and asserting their belonging to France and refusing to be confined to racist stereotypes. Relying on a collection of short stories entitled Chroniques d’une société annoncée published in 2005 by a group of writers named Qui Fait la France?, Puig shows how the short stories give fresh and different representations of people living in the banlieue.

Session : Scènes littéraires et critiques transcontinentales, XXe Congrès de l’Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée (AILC) Paris- Paris-Sorbonne, du 18 au 24 juillet 2013

Public Books, 2012

An article adapted from my book, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, about the publisher Ravi Dayal and his role in the post-1970s 'boom' in Indian fiction in English. Why is global Indian literature represented by works originally written in English rather than translations from Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, or a host of other languages that are spoken by many more people? I argue that we need to study literary production in order to understand the historical and political dynamics that led to the flourishing of English after the British left India in 1947.

Language Matters: Presse anglophone en France/Presses d'exil et d'immigration aux Etats-Unis

Journal of European Periodical Studies

Thèse de Doctorat, 1995

During the interwar period the Revue des Deux Mondes stands out as a literary institution and reaches the peak of its expansion. This study, based mainly on the archives of the revue, gives in the first place a brief history of the periodical since 1829, only to concentrate afterwards on the evolution of its issue from 1920 to 1940, the network formed by its collaborators, the finances and management as well as its international circulation and the sociological and geographical composition of its readership. The second part deals with the attitudes and reactions of the revue towards the international situation covering both diplomatic and cultural affairs (united kingdom, united states, Poland and the Balkans; Germany and Soviet Union; Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada).

Contemporary European History, 1999

Martyn Cornick, The Nouvelle Revue Française under Jean Paulhan 1925–1940 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), 224 pp., Fl. 65, $40.50, ISBN 9-051-83767-6.Nicholas Hewitt, Literature and the Right in Postwar France: The Story of the ‘Hussards’ (Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg Publishers, 1996), 218 pp. (hb.), £34.95, ISBN 1-859-73029-9.Denis Hollier, Absent Without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 256 pp. (pb.), £18.50, ISBN 0-674-21271-1.Jeffrey Mehlman, Geneologies of the Text: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Politics in Modern France (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 262 pp., hardcover, ISBN 0-521-47213-X.Jennifer E. Milligan, The Forgotten Generation: French Women Writers of the Inter-War Period (New York and Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1996), 236 pp. (pb.), £14.99, ISBN 1-859-73118-X.

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2006