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Le Fait Divers Criminel Dans La Littérature Contemporaine Française (1990-2012), Fanny Mahy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Our collective representation of the « fait divers » underwent considerable revision in the early 1980s, as Marine M’Sili points out: « from being universally decried, denounced and censured, [it] sees its status change to the point of taking on a positive value », even among the intellectual elite. At the same time, according to Dominique Viart, literature takes on a new « transitivity »; it is no longer self-sufficient but requires a direct object, the world. These two developments provide a meeting ground where new and more frequent interactions between literature and the « fait divers » can take …

Proust And Eliot: An Intertextual Reading, Inge Crosman Wimmers

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Defining intertextuality as “the reader’s perception of relationships between one work and others, which either preceded or followed it” (Riffaterre), this essay sets out to highlight compelling similarities between Proust’s novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, and the fictional works of George Eliot. The emphasis is on affective memory (involuntary memory and emotional templates), ethical considerations (empathy and compassion), and the kind of self-reflexive reading both writers encourage through a complicit narration that implicates the reader. They show readers how emotional memory constitutes the essence of their personal history, thus anticipating modern research in psychology and the neurosciences. …

The Poetics Of Visual Cubism: Guillaume Apollinaire On Pablo Picasso, Pamela A. Genova

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the most original poets of the early twentieth-century French avant garde, played a crucial role in the enunciation of modernist aesthetics. Through innovative poetic forms, Apollinaire set forth a new aesthetics which underscored the inherent ambiguity of an increasingly turbulent modern context. Apollinaire's interest in the pure dynamism of the contemporary material landscape, and his attraction to the image that explodes with immediate presence, also led him to a natural curiosity in the visual arts. Identifying with the Cubist mosaic style of inclusion, the juxtaposition of reality and imagination, and the simultaneity of spatial and …

Subject To Instability , Karen Bouwer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

For Plantier, language constitutes reality and is male dominated. Readers of texts, she says, are at a disadvantage because the author imposes a logic that we must accept in order to understand the text. The discourses shaping our social reality have the same effect. Plantier has struggled against individual voices, discourses, and the very fabric of language informed by these discourses. "Subject to Instability" examines the impact on her generic evolution of a changing sense of self, of who her interlocutors are, and of those for whom she is speaking. I argue that her increasing attempt to juggle many different …

Identifying Jews: The Legacy Of The 1941 Exhibition, "Le Juif Et La France" , Raymond Bach

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

During the Occupation there was a two-pronged effort to separate the Jews from the rest of the French population...

The Disappearance Of Objects In "Surmodernity": From Object-Images To Meta-Objects, Dominique D. Fisher

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines various modes of disappearance of objects from modernity to the latest stage of postmodernity. From the loss of the aura to the proliferation of fractal images, whether it be in literature, contemporary art, or daily life, objects undergo a series of mutations (object-signs, image-objects, object-images, meta-objects) that lead to a new kind of obscenity in which "jouissance" 'pleasure' is released into the madness of a vision obdurated by pathos and panopticism.

The Writer's Identity As Self-Dismantling Text In Julien Green's Si J'Étais Vous. . ., Robert Ziegler

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Written between 1944 and 1946, Julien Green's novel Si j'étais vous . . . is one of the author's most fantastic and enigmatic texts, having generated interpretations ranging from the Freudian to the theological. Yet certain central features of the text have not yet been addressed and may lead to a different approach, one focusing on the problem of the writer's identity in his works. Despite the fact that his literary efforts are unsuccessful, Fabien is shown as being a writer like Green himself, but more importantly, he is a character in another writer's fiction. As metatext, Green's novel describes …

Introduction, Richard Stamelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Introduction to the special issue

Words, Names, Nature, Earth: On The Poetry Of Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Yves Bonnefoy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

An ambivalence toward language is present throughout the work of Pierre-Albert Jourdan. Words are associated with the closure of a grey world; they are always arriving late, after the fact; they are veils, masks, dreams detached from truth, knowledge, and immediacy. Yet, words and names hold out the possibility of hope; they can designate the presence of beauty in the world; they can mediate the encounter of self and other. The human word signifies itself through the substance of the world and the communion of beings. At the intersection of natural reality—the center of the real for Jourdan—and of language …

Writing The Past: Le Roy Ladurie And The Voice Of The New History, Philippe Carrard

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Just as in fiction, discursive strategies in history can reveal the very nature of a project. The positivist historiography that prevailed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries regarded historical facts as givens. Accordingly, it held as its ideal of writing the objective text, that is. the text from which the historian's mediation would be carefully erased. The New History, on the other hand, considers all research to be grounded in a researcher and seeks to indicate by various means that the text does not generate itself. In Carnival in Romans, for example, Le Roy Ladurie explicitly resorts …

Sensationalism, Jean-Jacques Thomas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Roland Barthes's fascination with discourse is usually considered a glorification of intellectual exchanges, the parade of a virtuoso eager to display his unalloyed dedication to logocentrism. As a consequence, scholars tend to rely on his writings as if they were principally a catalogue for the functional concepts of modernity.

The purpose of this article is to show through a close reading of Barthes's latter-day texts that his exhilarating verbal brio is first and foremost a sensuous relationship between the speaking subject and the verbal substance. In his case, this particular relationship generates a discourse akin to physical heroism, thanks to …

Evembe's Sur La Terre En Passant And The Poetics Of Shame, Richard Bjornson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In Sur ta terre en passant, Evembe fashions a poetics of shame from the ordinary experiences of life in a large African city (Yaounde). He does it in such a way that the hallucinatory qualities and scabrous details of one individual's state of consciousness mirror the malaise which characterizes the larger social reality. The protagonist Iyoni (whose name means «shame» in the dialect of Evembe's native Kribi) experiences both misery and social respectability in an environment where traditional values have been lost, only to be replaced by artificial, dehumanizing hierarchies and an attitude of materialistic acquisitiveness. Despite the mysterious …