Depicts the relationship between Gilles de Rais, later know as Bluebeard, and Joan of Arc, and suggests the effect of her condemnation and martyrdom on him

Each number includes the section "Reviews."

Tournier treats pairs both lowly and exalted - moving from fork and spoon, horse and bull, cat and dog, to fear and anguish, poetry and prose, body and soul, being and nothingness. Hardly an exhaustive inventory of traditional pairs, his selection nonetheless opens the door to patterns deeply embedded in culture and civilization, speech and writing, memory and habit.

The Year's Work in Medievalism:2005-2006 is based upon but not restricted to the proceedings of the International Conference on Medievalism for those years. The International Conference on Medievalism is organized by Gwendolyn Morgan for the International Society for the Study of Medievalism and, for the subject volume, Karl Fugelso of Towson University (2005) and Claire Simmons of Ohio State University (2006). This first volume of this double issue focuses on medievalism as a means of exploring gender issues and identity,while the second examines the juxtaposition of modern to medieval society as a means of curing present ills.

Michel Tournier defines the supreme mission of a writer to be the creation of a mythology which allows for interaction with his readers, who seem to be losing their critical faculties in our contemporary, postmodern world dominated by consumption and dizzying technological advances. Our contemporary society has changed due to the end of the modern era with its reigning ideologies. Collapsing after the atrocities of the Second World War, Modernity and the artistic and literary reactions referred to as modernism, have likewise been transformed. Myth continues to represent the collectivity of human existence, yet, in the short stories and novels of Michel Tournier, myth represents the collapse of the all-encompassing ideologies inherent to the Modern era. The grand narratives of Modernity such as Christianity and Man’s reason have been deconstructed in the postmodern era. The mythology of Michel Tournier expresses these trends towards the dissolution of Modernity and creates individual, mini narratives which emphasize the particularity of individual existence. Tournier takes established mythical models rooted in Christianity, fables and legends of Western Civilization and re-contextualizes them. Through a semiotic reworking of core binary pairs of a myth, Tournier creates a third-order level of representation which modifies the mythical model. The works of le Roi des Aulnes, Gilles et Jeanne, and Vendredi are illustrious of this third-order level of signification. According to Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structural make-up of myth transforms established meanings according to the dominant cultural code. Barthes’ semiological study of myth reveals the levels of representation through which myth creates meaning. Myth builds upon the denotative first-order level of language and through a connotative process, creates a second-order level. This connotative process does not end on this second-order, for in the writings of Tournier, this semiological process is continued to a third-order which re-contextualizes the myth again. Tournier adapts myth to the unique traits of the postmodern era including deconstruction and playfulness by allowing the reader to provide the context of the story. As such we, the reader, take the place as author of our own individual mythology.

French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari worked together extensively from the 1960s into the 1990s, and the resulting "intersections" of their different sensibilities and modes of knowing fueled powerful alternatives to Marxian and psychoanalytic orthodoxies. Yet readers approaching Deleuze and Guattari's works are often frustrated by the paucity or unfamiliarity of specific examples that might clarify their complex arguments. This timely volume "animates" key concepts and terminology by applying them to provocative readings of literary texts, films, and cultural phenomena--from Apocalypse Now to Cajun music and dance. Drawing extensively from primary and critical sources to elucidate Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical contributions, Stivale reinvigorates their "two-fold thought" for use as an analytical tool in the humanities and social sciences. The book also offers a clear introduction to the precollaborative phase of each thinker's work, an interview Stivale conducted with Guattari, and the first-time English translation of a 1967 essay by Deleuze. Winner--Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award, Wayne State University