Mythocracy examines the narrative mechanisms that script our lives through the stories we tell one another. Digging beneath common anxieties about fake news, Yves Citton looks at the attention economy, which organises our political perceptions around affective attractors. These are much more powerful than the truth value of any given narrative. The time has come for the left to reclaim the power of myth from reactionary populism.

Through a variety of studies in the emerging field of attentional studies, this book examines and seeks alternatives to the current attention economy. Bringing together the work of leading scholars of ‘critical attention studies’ to reflect on issues such as techno-politics, socio-politics, and the politics of distraction, it offers a new and multi-disciplinary conceptualization of attention that emphasizes the connections between attention and curiosity, distraction, decoloniality and car...

Theory, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Francophone World: Filiations Past and Future offers a critical reflection on some of the leading figures of twentieth-century French and Francophone literature, cinema, and philosophy. Specialists re-evaluate the historical, political, and artistic legacies of twentieth-century France and the French-speaking world, proposing new formulations of the relationships between fiction, aesthetics, and politics. This collection combines interdisciplinary sc...

The most famous name in French literary circles from the late 1950s till his death in 1981, Roland Barthes maintained a contradictory rapport with the cinema. As a cultural critic, he warned of its surreptitious ability to lead the enthralled spectator toward an acceptance of a pre-given world. As a leftist, he understood that spectacle could be turned against itself and provoke deep questioning of that pre-given world. And as an extraordinarily sensitive human being, he relished the beaut...

Linda Hutcheon, in this original study, examines the modes, forms and techniques of narcissistic fiction, that is, fiction which includes within itself some sort of commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic nature. Her analysis is further extended to discuss the implications of such a development for both the theory of the novel and reading theory.Having placed this phenomenon in its historical context Linda Hutcheon uses the insights of various reader-response theories to ...

Three decades after its first publication, The New Wave is still considered one of the fundamental texts on the French film movement of the same name. Led by filmmakers as influential as Truffaut and Godard, the New Wave was a seminal moment in cinematic history, and The New Wave has been hailed as the most complete book ever written about it.The New Wave tells the story of the New Wave through examinations of five of the most important directors of the era: Truffaut, Godard, Chabr...

The increasing popularity of bande dessinee, or French-language comic strip, means that it is being established on university syllabuses worldwide. Reading Bande Dessinee provides a thorough introduction to the medium and in-depth critical analysis with focus on contemporary examples of the art form, historical context, key artists, and themes such as gender, autobiography and postcolonial culture. Miller's groundbreaking book demonstrates exactly why bande dessinee is considered to be a v...

André Bazin, often dubbed the father of the French New Wave, has had an immense impact on film art. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit. The journal that he founded in 1951, Cahiers du Cinéma, remains the most influential archive of cinema criticism. He remains one of the most read, most studied, and most engaging figures ever to have written about film. The last few years have witnessed a massive resurgence of inter...

This book is the follow-up to Thierry Groensteen's groundbreaking The System of Comics, in which the leading French-language comics theorist set out to investigate how the medium functions, introducing the principle of iconic solidarity, and showing the systems that underlie the articulation between panels at three levels: page layout, linear sequence, and nonsequential links woven through the comic book as a whole. He now develops that analysis further, using examples from a very...

Will Higbee is a senior lecturer in film studies and co-director of the Centre for Research in Film Studies at University of Exeter. He is the author of Matthieu Kassovitz.Sarah Leahy is a senior lecturer in French and film at Newcastle University. She is the author of Casque d'or.Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy are associate editors of Studies in French Cinema.

Why have certain kinds of documentary and non-narrative films emerged as the most interesting, exciting, and provocative movies made in the last twenty years? Ranging from the films of Ross McElwee (Bright Leaves) and Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I) to those of Abbas Kiarostami (Close Up) and Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir), such films have intrigued viewers who at the same time have struggled to categorize them. Sometimes described as personal documenta...

The flashback is a crucial moment in a film narrative, one that captures the cinematic expression of memory, and history. This author’s wide-ranging account of this single device reveals it to be an important way of creating cinematic meaning.Taking as her subject all of film history, the author traces out the history of the flashback, illuminating that history through structuralist narrative theory, psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, and theories of ideology.From the...