Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts-automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism-as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses.

In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces- social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France.

Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Ross's delightful and evocative work expands interpretations of French culture and change from the 1950s to the mid-60s. Combining close readings of literature with trenchant observations of cinema, philosophy, politics, popular culture, and social sciences, Ross underscores the dialectic between modernization (Americanization) and decolonization that transformed France (here, especially, as embedded in Parisian discourse). The four loosely interlocking essays use cars, hygiene, the bourgeois couple, and the "new" man as primary organizational foci, but their impact rests less in systematic development of these representations and realities than in the insightful juxtapositions they create: Simone de Beauvoir meets cars speeding across movie screens, Frantz Fanon's visions of a postcolonial world challenge the glossy magazines of a new domesticity, the theoretical engagements of Claude Levi-Strauss and Ferdinand Braudel invert the cinematic delights of Jacques Tati. Although some specialists may object to reliance on such suggestive connections, this book should nonetheless challenge them to rethink connections and implications, while inviting advanced students of France into fresh and exciting questions about cultural history, power, and change. Undergraduates and above. G. W. McDonogh; Bryn Mawr College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of The Emergence of Social Space- Rimbaud and the Paris Commune .