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Righteous Realism Versus Postmodern Play: The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in Female-Authored French Fiction

Cairns, Lucille

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Authors

Lucille Cairns



Abstract

This article analyses literary mediations of francophone Jewish attitudes towards Israel, and particularly towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Its primary corpus comprises two female-authored novels published during the Second Intifada: Olivia Rosenthal's Les Fantaisies spéculatives de J.H. le sémite (2005) and Chantal Osterreicher's L'Insouciance d'Adèle (2006). It demonstrates how these two texts represent antithetical stances towards Israel, the former intermittently critical and even censorious, the latter defensive and at least partly valorising. Given the status of both authors as French-born Jews (although Osterreicher now lives in Israel), both of these texts can be seen to mediate heterodox attitudes to the conflict. But the heterodoxy depends upon the context in which the reader places the two authors. In the context of the twenty-first-century France in which it was published, which, like most other countries in the global mediasphere, is heavily critical of Israel, Osterreicher's text is acidly contestatory of default-position anti-Zionism. On the other hand, in the context of the French Jewry to which Rosenthal belongs, which has traditionally evinced unflinching solidarity with Israel, her own critique of that country's dealings with Palestinians is equally contestatory, and, despite its ludicity, is no less impactful than Osterreicher's reverse discourse. A final axis of enquiry is the extent to which there may be some consensus as well as obvious dissensus between these two ostensibly antinomous texts.

Citation

Cairns, L. (2014). Righteous Realism Versus Postmodern Play: The Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in Female-Authored French Fiction. Modern and Contemporary France, 22(1), 71-84. https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2013.867151

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 31, 2013
Online Publication Date Feb 7, 2014
Publication Date Feb 7, 2014
Deposit Date Mar 3, 2014
Publicly Available Date May 16, 2014
Journal Modern and Contemporary France
Print ISSN 0963-9489
Electronic ISSN 1469-9869
Publisher Taylor and Francis Group
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 22
Issue 1
Pages 71-84
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/09639489.2013.867151
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1468420

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Copyright Statement
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Cairns, Lucille (2014) 'Righteous realism versus postmodern play: the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in female-authored French fiction.', Modern and Contemporary France, 22 (1): 71-84. 2014 © Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09639489.2013.867151.






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