French Literature and Thought in Credo: 20th Century

Philosopher of science and of criticism.

French philosopher and author. His works are deliberately not sequential expositions, but are designed (as are many other mystical texts) to assist in disrupting the grip of reason.

French writer, radical, existentialist, and feminist whose works include The Second Sex (1949) and The Coming of Age (1970), a study of how different cultures view old age. Inspired the new “second wave” of feminist thinking and activism.

The leader of the surrealist movement and one of the most influential writers of the French avant-garde.

Originally trained as a philosopher, Foucault subsequently worked in the fields of psychology and psychopathology before returning to philosophy and the history of ideas.

French theoretical anthropologist. He helped to formulate the principles of structuralism by stressing the interdependence of cultural systems and the way they relate to each other, maintaining that social and cultural life can be explained by a postulated unconscious reality concealed behind the reality by which people believe their lives to be ordered.

French Philosopher; he argues that experience is shot through with pre-existent meanings, largely derived from language and experienced in perception. Merleau-Ponty has been presented both as a phenomenologist and as an existentialist, but a study of his thought reveals the limited utility of general labels of this kind.

French philosopher, novelist, dramatist, and critic; chief French exponent of atheistic existentialism. Leading advocate of existentialism during the years following World War II.

His extraordinary influence on subsequent theatre is based largely on his two short-lived attempts at directing and on his volume of essays, The Theatre and Its Double.

French novelist, dramatist, and essayist, noted for his pessimistic portrayal of man's condition of isolation in an absurd world. Active in the French Resistance he became Coeditor (with Sartre) of Combat; breaking with Sartre after the war, Camus devoted himself to writing. Nobel Prize for Literature, 1957.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
French author. Céline wrote grim, scatological, and blackly funny novels.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
French novelist. Colette achieved popularity with numerous novels, characterized by sensitive observations—particularly of women—and an intimate, semiautobiographical style.

French dramatist, novelist, and poet. His turbulent life and early years spent in prison are reflected in his drama, characterized by ritual, role-play, and illusion, in which his characters come to act out their bizarre and violent fantasies.

French novelist. His work is largely autobiographical and concerned with the conflict between desire and conventional morality. Noted for his diaries and novels, such as The Immoralist (1902) and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914), which examine alienation and the drive for individuality in an often disapproving society.

French man of letters and political figure.

French novelist and diarist best known for the seven-volume Journals, which include frank accounts of her sex life.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
French novelist. One of the most innovative French writers of his generation, he wrote novels noted for their verbal ingenuity. The novel La Disparition/The Void 1969, for example, is written without using the letter ‘e’.

French surrealist poet and humorous novelist.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
1922–2008, French novelist and filmmaker; considered the originator of the French nouveau roman.

French novelist; at the age of 18 she wrote, in only two months, the best-selling Bonjour Tristesse.

In 1980 Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman member of the French Academy. The winner of many awards, this scholarly writer was not only a historical novelist but also a poet, essayist, playwright, and translator.

Nonbelief in, or the positive denial of, the existence of a God or gods. A related concept is agnosticism. Like theism, its opposite, atheism cannot be proved or disproved conclusively. A theoretical atheist is one who self-consciously denies the existence of a supreme being, whereas a practical atheist may believe that a supreme being exists but lives as though there were no god.

International nihilistic movement among European artists and writers that lasted from 1916 to 1922. This artistic and literary movement was founded in 1915 in a spirit of rebellion and disillusionment during World War I.

Any of several philosophic systems, all centered on the individual and his relationship to the universe or to God.

Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis and proved to be the most influential writer about the unconscious mind in the twentieth century. In 1900, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, which became a seminal work in the history of psychoanalysis. Not only did it include his ideas about the unconscious and the conscious, it also revealed Freud’s tendency to view many psychological conflicts as rooted in sexuality. Freudianism is the term often used for his theories.

Modernism is based on a concern with form and the exploration of technique as opposed to content and narrative. In the arts, a general term used to describe the 20th century's conscious attempt to break with the artistic traditions of the 19th century. In literature, writers experimented with alternatives to orthodox sequential storytelling.

Term used to designate a multitude of trends—in the arts, philosophy, religion, technology, and many other areas—that come after and deviate from the many 20th-cent. movements that constituted modernism. In general, the postmodern view is cool, ironic, and accepting of the fragmentation of contemporary existence. It tends to concentrate on surfaces rather than depths, to blur the distinctions between high and low culture, and as a whole to challenge a wide variety of traditional cultural values.

Movement in art, literature, and film that developed out of Dada around 1922. Led by André Breton, who produced the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), the surrealists were inspired by the thoughts and visions of the subconscious mind.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Experimental literary form produced in the 1950s by French novelists including Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute.

From The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Paris-based group of writers and mathematicians who explore and extend the field of literature through the practice of "writing under constraint".

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Theory that uses culturally interconnected signs to reconstruct systems of relationships rather than studying isolated, material things in themselves. This method found wide use from the early 20th cent. in a variety of fields, especially linguistics, particularly as formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. Structuralism has been influential in literary criticism and history, as with the work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.

Prominent avant-garde painter and installation artist, most often associated with the manifestations of Dada.

French film director and scriptwriter, b. Paris. Godard is probably the most influential of the French New Wave directors.

Film critic and director, born in Paris, France. His first career, as a critic from 1953, led to his auteur (‘author’) concept of film-making. Leader of French New Wave cinema; films include Jules et Jim (1961) and Baisers volés (1968).

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
French poet; a leader in the restless period of technical innovation and experimentation in the arts during the early 20th cent.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
French poet, playwright, and film director.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather guide
French poet. He expressed the suffering of poverty in his verse, and was a leader of the surrealists.

French poet and critic. A follower of the symbolists, Valéry was one of the greatest French poets of the 20th cent.