Celia Britton
Biographic Data
| ID | 3672466 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Celia Britton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Celia |
| FAMILY NAME | Britton |
| SIGNATURE | BRITTON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A New Region of the World: Aesthetics I, by Édouard Glissant
“Double Consciousness,” Cultural Identity and Literary Style in the Work of René Ménil
The notion of double consciousness, as a characterization of black subjectivity, is basic to Ménil’s critique of the alienated “mythologies” of Antillean life and its self-exoticizing literature. Double consciousness renders cultural identity deeply problematic. But it has other, more positive, manifestations, closer to a Bakhtinian idea of dialogism. Thus he praises Césaire’s use of irony as a dual voice. Ménil’s valorization of complexity and a…
Treatise on the Whole-World: By Édouard Glissant
Édouard Glissant: L’ identité généreuse, by François Noudelmann
This biography is a massive undertaking.François Noudelmann charts Édouard Glissant's life in detail, emphasizing the enormous number of people who were his friends, acquaintances, and intellectual contacts, and the increasingly nomadic life that he led, moving between Martinique, Paris, and the United States, but also traveling to an astonishing number of places around the world.Noudelmann has clearly done a huge amount of research into Glissant…
Édouard Glissant, philosophe: Héraclite et Hegel dans le Tout-Monde, by Alexandre Leupin
In Praise of Complexity
This essay discusses Éloge de la créolité and Patrick Chamoiseau’s novels and later texts, arguing that créolité, or creoleness, is far more complex and ambiguous than its critics have hitherto assumed. It is not confined to the Creole language but can be expressed in French, as in Chamoiseau’s writing. More important, it is not a straightforward identitarian movement: it both claims a creole identity and simultaneously questions that claim. The …
Identity and Change in the Work of Édouard Glissant
The theme of identity runs throughout Édouard Glissant's work and constitutes one of his most original contributions to postcolonial thought. It is always considered in relation to change, but his formulations of both identity and change themselves change in the course of his career. In this essay, three different versions of the interrelation of identity and change are considered. In Glissant's 1981 Le discours antillais, the emphasis is on the …
Eulogizing Creoleness? Éloge de la créolité and Caribbean Identity, Culture, and Politics
This essay introduces part 1 of a special section on the créolité movement-"Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Éloge de la créolité"-in which a variety of essays explore and assess the impact, twenty-five-plus years on, of the controversial manifesto by Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé. Éloge de la créolité has been much discussed and critiqued in relation to Antillean politics and literature; its claim to replace essentialist…
Marrane et marronne: La co-écriture réversible d' André et de Simone Schwarz-Bart, written by Kathleen Gyssels
Édouard Glissant's Legacy: Transmitting without Universals
Édouard Glissant's Legacy:Transmitting without Universals? François Noudelmann (bio) Translated by Celia Britton (bio) Ideas, as Montaigne remarked, belong to no one, and as soon as someone incorporates them into their thought they become theirs. Universal and shared, they circulate because human beings digest them and embody them in the sites of their own experience. But philosophy comes up against the paradox that it produces concepts which, wh…
Memories of Reading Les Indes for the First Time
Memories of Reading Les Indes for the First Time Maryse Condé (bio) Translated by Celia Britton (bio) I first met Édouard Glissant late on in life. When we were both teaching in the United States. On his arrival in New York from Louisiana, I invited him to Columbia University where I had just set up the Center for Francophone Studies. I gave a paper on his “vision of the landscape” at the conference that CUNY (City University of New York) held in…
In Praise of the Different and of Difference
In Praise of the Different and of Difference Édouard Glissant Translated by Celia Britton (bio) “Beauty is the sign of what, here, is going to change.” All this accumulation of the World and everywhere the hideous ugliness and the indifference, the streaking acts of violence and outrage, and even those who “make art,” who seem to be such liberators, who seem to promise a transition to something different, to something which at least acknowledges …
Philosophy, Poetics, Politics
Philosophy, Poetics, Politics Celia Britton (bio) The aim of this collection of translations and articles is to commemorate the life and work of Édouard Glissant, who died in February 2011. Glissant was one of the greatest writers of the Caribbean, and his work is read and studied throughout the world. The extent of his influence is reflected in the geographical spread of the contributors to this special issue of Callaloo: not only the Caribbean …
American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South
Ethnography as Relation: The Significance of the French Caribbean in the Ethnographic Writing of Michel Leiris
This article considers two kinds of connection between Leiris and the French Caribbean: that between his ideas on ethnography and Martinican Édouard Glissant's concept of Relation; and the impact that his encounter with the French Caribbean had on those ideas. In 1950 Leiris develops a conception of ethnography as a partnership between Western and non-Western societies in which the ethnographer is not only politically involved in the societies sh…
Dual Identities: The Question of ‘Départementalisation’ in Michel Leiris's Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe
In Contocts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe (1955) Leiris's support for ‘départementalisation’ and cultural assimilation contrasts surprisingly with his previous commitment to celebrating cultural difference and to political independence for France's colonies. It can to some extent be explained by the book's being commissioned as part of a UNESCO project to combat racism by promoting integration, and by the support of the French C…
In Memory of Edouard Glissant
Always Changing, while Still Remaining: A Tribute to Edouard Glissant
In this personal tribute to Glissant Britton describes some of the most resonant themes of his novels (the idea of changing while still remaining, the significance of place, and his exploration of madness) and the “opaque” poetic characteristics of his style, which extend from the novels and poetry into his theoretical discourse. Glissant's essays display not a linear evolution of thought but the same structure of “changing-remaining.” Also, all …
How to be Primitive: Tropiques, Surrealism and Ethnography
The review Tropiques, founded in Martinique by Aimé Césaire and colleagues in 1941, was heavily influenced by French surrealism, both for its emphasis on political liberation and its investment in primitivism and the revalorization of non-European cultures. But Tropiques's attitude to primitivism was far more ambivalent and contradictory than is usually assumed. While the editors and contributors sometimes do indeed claim to have, as Martinican i…
Common Being? and Organic Community in Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la ros e
The representation of community in Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosee is analysed in relation to Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of being, or organic community. The circular time-scale and spatial closure, the theme of martyrdom, and the narrative movement towards the elimination of difference and conflict through the revelation of an underlying homogeneity can all be seen as attributes of common being. Nancy's argument that communism and Christianity ar…
Breaking the Rules: Irrelevance/Irreverence in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove
Maryse Condé’s ironic treatment of stereotypes is a major feature of her novels. It has been much discussed in relation to plot and characterization; this article focuses instead on the small-scale discursive structures of Traversée de la mangrove, analysing them via Barthes’s concept of semiological codes and rules. Traversée de la mangrove transgresses the ‘rules’ of literary style through deliberately inelegant digressive sentences and paragra…
The (De)Construction of Subjectivity in Daniel Maximin's L'lle et une nuit
The Representation of Popular Culture in the nouveau roman
Opacity and Transparence: Conceptions of History and Cultural Difference in the Work of Michel Butor and Édouard Glissant
Journal Article OPACITY AND TRANSPARENCE: CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE IN THE WORK OF MICHEL BUTOR AND ÉDOUARD GLISSANT Get access CELIA BRITTON CELIA BRITTON UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLIX, Issue 3, July 1995, Pages 308–320, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLIX.3.308 Published: 01 July 1995
Discours and histoire, magical and political discourse in Édouard Glissant's Le Quatrième Siècle
How to be Primitive: Tropiques, Surrealism and Ethnography
The review Tropiques, founded in Martinique by Aimé Césaire and colleagues in 1941, was heavily influenced by French surrealism, both for its emphasis on political liberation and its investment in primitivism and the revalorization of non-European cultures. But Tropiques's attitude to primitivism was far more ambivalent and contradictory than is usually assumed. While the editors and contributors sometimes do indeed claim to have, as Martinican i…
Ethnography as Relation: The Significance of the French Caribbean in the Ethnographic Writing of Michel Leiris
This article considers two kinds of connection between Leiris and the French Caribbean: that between his ideas on ethnography and Martinican Édouard Glissant's concept of Relation; and the impact that his encounter with the French Caribbean had on those ideas. In 1950 Leiris develops a conception of ethnography as a partnership between Western and non-Western societies in which the ethnographer is not only politically involved in the societies sh…
Édouard Glissant's Legacy: Transmitting without Universals
Édouard Glissant's Legacy:Transmitting without Universals? François Noudelmann (bio) Translated by Celia Britton (bio) Ideas, as Montaigne remarked, belong to no one, and as soon as someone incorporates them into their thought they become theirs. Universal and shared, they circulate because human beings digest them and embody them in the sites of their own experience. But philosophy comes up against the paradox that it produces concepts which, wh…
In Praise of the Different and of Difference
In Praise of the Different and of Difference Édouard Glissant Translated by Celia Britton (bio) “Beauty is the sign of what, here, is going to change.” All this accumulation of the World and everywhere the hideous ugliness and the indifference, the streaking acts of violence and outrage, and even those who “make art,” who seem to be such liberators, who seem to promise a transition to something different, to something which at least acknowledges …
The (De)Construction of Subjectivity in Daniel Maximin's L'lle et une nuit
Opacity and Transparence: Conceptions of History and Cultural Difference in the Work of Michel Butor and Édouard Glissant
Journal Article OPACITY AND TRANSPARENCE: CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE IN THE WORK OF MICHEL BUTOR AND ÉDOUARD GLISSANT Get access CELIA BRITTON CELIA BRITTON UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLIX, Issue 3, July 1995, Pages 308–320, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLIX.3.308 Published: 01 July 1995
Metaphor/Metonymy, or the Imaginary Referent∗
Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier
Voices, Absence and Presence in the Novels of Claude Simon
Journal Article VOICES, ABSENCE AND PRESENCE IN THE NOVELS OF CLAUDE SIMON Get access CELIA BRITTON CELIA BRITTON READING Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XXXVI, Issue 4, October 1982, Pages 445–454, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XXXVI.4.445 Published: 01 October 1982
A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, Especially of the Fantastic
The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema
Diversity of Discourse in Claude Simon's Les Géorgiques
Visual effects by Claude Simon
Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature
The Nouveau Roman and Tel Quel Marxism
Discours and histoire, magical and political discourse in Édouard Glissant's Le Quatrième Siècle
Opacity and Transparence: Conceptions of History and Cultural Difference in the Work of Michel Butor and Édouard Glissant
Journal Article OPACITY AND TRANSPARENCE: CONCEPTIONS OF HISTORY AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE IN THE WORK OF MICHEL BUTOR AND ÉDOUARD GLISSANT Get access CELIA BRITTON CELIA BRITTON UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume XLIX, Issue 3, July 1995, Pages 308–320, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/XLIX.3.308 Published: 01 July 1995
The Representation of Popular Culture in the nouveau roman
The (De)Construction of Subjectivity in Daniel Maximin's L'lle et une nuit
Breaking the Rules: Irrelevance/Irreverence in Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la Mangrove
Maryse Condé’s ironic treatment of stereotypes is a major feature of her novels. It has been much discussed in relation to plot and characterization; this article focuses instead on the small-scale discursive structures of Traversée de la mangrove, analysing them via Barthes’s concept of semiological codes and rules. Traversée de la mangrove transgresses the ‘rules’ of literary style through deliberately inelegant digressive sentences and paragra…
Common Being? and Organic Community in Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la ros e
The representation of community in Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosee is analysed in relation to Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of being, or organic community. The circular time-scale and spatial closure, the theme of martyrdom, and the narrative movement towards the elimination of difference and conflict through the revelation of an underlying homogeneity can all be seen as attributes of common being. Nancy's argument that communism and Christianity ar…
How to be Primitive: Tropiques, Surrealism and Ethnography
The review Tropiques, founded in Martinique by Aimé Césaire and colleagues in 1941, was heavily influenced by French surrealism, both for its emphasis on political liberation and its investment in primitivism and the revalorization of non-European cultures. But Tropiques's attitude to primitivism was far more ambivalent and contradictory than is usually assumed. While the editors and contributors sometimes do indeed claim to have, as Martinican i…
Dual Identities: The Question of ‘Départementalisation’ in Michel Leiris's Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe
In Contocts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe (1955) Leiris's support for ‘départementalisation’ and cultural assimilation contrasts surprisingly with his previous commitment to celebrating cultural difference and to political independence for France's colonies. It can to some extent be explained by the book's being commissioned as part of a UNESCO project to combat racism by promoting integration, and by the support of the French C…
In Memory of Edouard Glissant
Always Changing, while Still Remaining: A Tribute to Edouard Glissant
In this personal tribute to Glissant Britton describes some of the most resonant themes of his novels (the idea of changing while still remaining, the significance of place, and his exploration of madness) and the “opaque” poetic characteristics of his style, which extend from the novels and poetry into his theoretical discourse. Glissant's essays display not a linear evolution of thought but the same structure of “changing-remaining.” Also, all …
American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South
Ethnography as Relation: The Significance of the French Caribbean in the Ethnographic Writing of Michel Leiris
This article considers two kinds of connection between Leiris and the French Caribbean: that between his ideas on ethnography and Martinican Édouard Glissant's concept of Relation; and the impact that his encounter with the French Caribbean had on those ideas. In 1950 Leiris develops a conception of ethnography as a partnership between Western and non-Western societies in which the ethnographer is not only politically involved in the societies sh…
Édouard Glissant's Legacy: Transmitting without Universals
Édouard Glissant's Legacy:Transmitting without Universals? François Noudelmann (bio) Translated by Celia Britton (bio) Ideas, as Montaigne remarked, belong to no one, and as soon as someone incorporates them into their thought they become theirs. Universal and shared, they circulate because human beings digest them and embody them in the sites of their own experience. But philosophy comes up against the paradox that it produces concepts which, wh…
Memories of Reading Les Indes for the First Time
Memories of Reading Les Indes for the First Time Maryse Condé (bio) Translated by Celia Britton (bio) I first met Édouard Glissant late on in life. When we were both teaching in the United States. On his arrival in New York from Louisiana, I invited him to Columbia University where I had just set up the Center for Francophone Studies. I gave a paper on his “vision of the landscape” at the conference that CUNY (City University of New York) held in…
In Praise of the Different and of Difference
In Praise of the Different and of Difference Édouard Glissant Translated by Celia Britton (bio) “Beauty is the sign of what, here, is going to change.” All this accumulation of the World and everywhere the hideous ugliness and the indifference, the streaking acts of violence and outrage, and even those who “make art,” who seem to be such liberators, who seem to promise a transition to something different, to something which at least acknowledges …
Philosophy, Poetics, Politics
Philosophy, Poetics, Politics Celia Britton (bio) The aim of this collection of translations and articles is to commemorate the life and work of Édouard Glissant, who died in February 2011. Glissant was one of the greatest writers of the Caribbean, and his work is read and studied throughout the world. The extent of his influence is reflected in the geographical spread of the contributors to this special issue of Callaloo: not only the Caribbean …
Art (27 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Literature (18 works) · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture (17 works) · History (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · Humanities (9 works)