Time on the Brink of Impasse

Historicity, Postmodernity, and the French Seventies

Time on the Brink of Impasse explores a pivotal decade in French cultural history through the lenses of literature, film, and critical theory. The 1970s in France are often dismissed as a period of blocked historical imagination. This book argues that the period’s literature and cinema reflect not disorientation or despair but a decade animated by artistic responses to new experiences of time.

Returning to influential theorists of postmodernity, including Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, Time on the Brink of Impasse investigates how artists represented new experiences of time. Through close readings of writers and filmmakers including by Agnès Varda, Rachid Boudjedra, Chantal Akerman, Georges Perec, Sarah Maldoror, and Carole Roussopoulos, the book examines how aesthetic form registered new temporal imaginaries.

By situating culture within the broader context of work, housing, migration, and gender activism, Murray’s book offers a fresh perspective on how historicity was rethought after the end of the postwar period. Historically grounded and theoretically lucid, Time on the Brink of Impasse reveals a period alive with possibility.

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