Colin Nettelbeck
Colin Nettelbeck is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne, where he held the A.R. Chisholm Chair of French. He taught previously at the University of California (Berkeley) and Monash University. He has written extensively about twentieth-century and contemporary French literature, cinema, and cultural history, with special focus on the French experience of World War II. His most recent book is Dancing with de Beauvoir: Jazz and the French, published by Melbourne University Press in 2004. His essay ‘Kneecapper: a Trip to Happiness’ (published in the Autumn 2011 Meanjin Quarterly) was shortlisted for the 2010 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay. He was awarded second prize in the 2012 Calibre Prize for ‘Now They’ve Gone’.
As Stendhal did with The Red and the Black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), Simon Leys dedicates his With Stendhal to ‘the happy few’. In both cases, humility is the motivation, rather than affectation or coyness. Henri Beyle (1783–1842) – Stendhal’s real name – was committed to his writing, but he really had no idea that his novels would become masterworks of Western liter ... (read more)
In 1978 the French weekly L’Express published an interview that sent a shockwave through the French collective conscience. The subject was Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the wartime Vichy government’s Commissioner for Jewish Affairs. Having escaped at the end of the war to the safe haven of Franco’s Spain, he was now an octogenarian, enjoying some prestige as the official translator of the Cau ... (read more)
The first two numbers of the Australian Journal of French Studies (AJFS) (Vol. XLIV, No. 1, 2007 and Vol. XLIV, No. 2, 2007, edited by Brian Nelson and Françoise Grauby, $25 pb, 83 pp and 99 pp) for 2007 reflect a long-standing policy of mixing miscellaneous collections of essays with numbers focused on a specific theme. In this instance, No. 1 offers six pieces on a variety of subjects, which pr ... (read more)
France’s hypersensitivity about its culture is not infrequently derided, but it produces a salutary vigilance for which we can all be grateful. Such has been the case with the French-led defence of cultural specificities in the various ‘free trade’ meetings (GATT and WTO) of the past two decades. And such is this book by Jean-Noël Jeanneney. Deceptively slight in size – Jeanneney himself ... (read more)
When Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française was first published in France in 2004, it created extraordinary interest for at least three reasons. Firstly, there was the story of the survival of the manuscript, preserved in an unopened suitcase for almost sixty years by Némirovsky’s daughters, Elisabeth and Denise, who had assumed that the papers in their possession were personal notes that woul ... (read more)
The Australian Journal of French Studies special number on Jacques Rivette continues the journal’s tradition of ground-breaking scholarship. Rivette has long been acknowledged as both an important and enigmatic film director – in some respects even more challenging than his New Wave colleague, Jean-Luc Godard. Rivette’s work is notoriously difficult of access. Almost all his films are unconv ... (read more)
It is hard to imagine that any reader of the text of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be unmoved by the nobility of its aspirations. Born of the determination that human beings would never again have to suffer the oppressions and indignities that reached so hideous a climax in the events of World War II, it promises a world in which all people can enjoy a range o ... (read more)
In his lifetime, Alan Rowland Chisholm was widely regarded as an Australian national treasure, and the new biography by Stanley John Scott is compelling evidence that he deserves to remain recognised as one today.
This is a book that might have languished as an unpublished typescript, or indeed simply disappeared. Its author died in 2014, having twice withheld it from publication. The first time ... (read more)
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are both mythical figures. They are also a mythical couple, a symbol of lifelong intellectual and personal commitment to each other and to commonly espoused causes. Of the two, Beauvoir is probably the more widely read today, because of her foundational role in the development of feminism, and the relative accessibility of her writing. In comparison, Sartre ... (read more)