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Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel In A Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022., Emily Hall

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022. 315 pp.

Elgin's "Native Tongue": A "Me Too" Universe?, Amir Barati

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue (1984) provides a fascinating critique of the ideologies inscribed into patriarchal language and evokes an extremely valuable linguistic and political awareness. This article will examine the liability of the ways the novel revolts against the patriarchal society via the introduction of a gynocentric linguistic intervention. I claim, Elgin’s novel showcases an invaluable instance of how it is possible for women to revolt against the pillars of patriarchy through manipulations at the gestalt and schematic level of language and most specifically, the bodily metaphoric quality of the English. This proposed transformation of the schematic and …

Fatou Diome: Une Création Entre Les Arts, Sada Niang

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

As she began her career in the 1980s, Fatou Diome inherited a rich tradition of literary texts and media productions, African cinema among them. Since she also hailed from a country known as "francophone", it is hardly surprising that her novels resonate with the style and narratives of African, French and other European writers. In this article, we propose to unveil a few of these artistic threads which may have informed and inspired Fatou Diome.

Niodior Ou L'Économie Du Texte Diomien, Mbaye Diouf

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

To a large extent, Niodior may be considered the main biographical and discursive referent of Fatou Diome's entire literary output, to date. In addition to being the birth place of the novelist, Niodior stands as the workshop of the Diomian novel. It is at once the wrestling arena of discourses of the self vs. others, the breeding ground of other "selves" and other possible others. As a consequence, Niodior, in Diome's novels, becomes a textual place which informs the self, the community, immigration and globalization through a semiotic of place. In this article, I argue that an application of geocriticism …

Espaces Topologique Et Phénoménologique Dans Le Mal De Peau Et Le Retour Au Village, Mahamadou Lamine Ouédraogo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Le mal de peau by Monique Ilboudo and Le retour au village by Kollin Noaga are two Burkinabè novels featuring Sibila and Catherine (for the first) and Tinga (for the second). The study questions the part of spatiality in the semantics of indexed texts: how does space mean in these novels? This problem is attacked from two angles. First, it is a matter of identifying the modes of meaning of the topos. Secondly, it is about seeing how the body, as a phenomenological space, can articulate meaning.

Agency And Political Engagement In Gide And Barrault's Post-War Theatrical Adaptation Of Kafka's The Trial, Yevgenya Strakovsky

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Agency and Political Engagement in Gide and Barrault's Post-war Theatrical Adaptation of Kafka's The Trial" Yevgenya Strakovsky considers the political themes of André Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault's Le Procès (The Trial, 1947), the first theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's Der Prozess (The Trial, 1914). Strakovsky demonstrates that Le Procès, written and staged in the immediate aftermath of World War II, levels a critique against the passive complicity of citizens in unjust persecution in both its script and its staging. The paper also considers the elements of Kafka's prose that lend themselves to …

The Green And The Red: A Novel By Armand Chauvel, Jenna Gersie

The Goose

Review of Armand Chauvel's The Green and the Red: A Novel.

Les Lézardes Du Sens Dans Les Romans D’Ahmadou Kourouma, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The text illustrates that Kourouma’s novels act as an exemplary exteriorisation of a singular point of view on the world, while also acting as a space of transformation, touching both the anecdotes told and the process of narration. Through the general nature of their titles, the novels do not so much designate a décor, but rather an image of the human condition in which life governed by destiny fi nds, in the heart of social decay, a metaphor – both sombre and precise – for postcolonial Africa. Thus, the novels do not entirely absorb this philosophy of existence upheld by …

Les Particules Élémentaires: Self–Portrait, Gerald Prince

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Perhaps no French novel in the past fifteen years has received more critical attention than Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires and perhaps none has evoked stronger reactions with regard to the (literary) values it espouses and represents. This (self-)portrait, like any portrait, accents certain features more than others. It concentrates on refuting charges of nihilism, reactionaryism, sexism, and racism; it stresses Houellebecq’s novel’s attention to form and its thematic clarity as well as its determination to say something rather than nothing; and, through a consideration of its references to various media, arts, and texts, of its pet peeves and true …

Proust’S Innovative Vision Of Literature As Seen Through His Correspondence, Pascal Ifri

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Marcel Proust’s monumental correspondence is filled with information about the man Marcel Proust and his daily life, but reveals very little about his ideas on art and literature or about the novel that consumed his life, A la recherche du temps perdu. Most of his letters paint an extremely polite and even obsequious man overly concerned with pleasing his correspondents or with organizing his social life while others provide information about his personal life. When he mentions his writing, it is usually in connection with practical questions or information he is seeking. Very rarely does he discuss his novel …

Gérard Bessette (1920-2005): A Monstre Sacré In French Canadian Literature, Steven Urquhart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines Gérard Bessette’s relative marginalization in French Canadian literature by means of rereading his first novel, La Bagarre (1958) in terms of its monstrous aesthetic and its rapport with subsequent novels, notably Le Semestre (1979). Bessette’s first novel allows us not only to understand the deviant nature of his aesthetic and its evolution, but also how it relates to his individualistic and transgressive position with the French Canadian literary institution in which he embodies a monstre sacré, an author and a character of sorts, who is at once revered and cursed.

Mémoire Du Duel Dans À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Yan Hamel

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper analyses the duel as a central motive in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu. In the novels cycle, it appears that the occasions the men have to fight or to watch a duel help to understand why that violent practice increased during the last decade before the second World War. The practice seems to be monstrous morally and socially.

L’Irruption De La Violence Dans Saint-Germain Ou La Négociation: L’Esthétique Néoclassique Belge En Question, David Vrydaghs

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This paper analyses the novel Saint-Germain ou la négociation, which appears to hide a controversial discourse under a classic form. a special attention is given to the last chapter to show how this end modifies the novel’s reception. Finally, it is the whole neoclassic aesthetics that seems to be violate.

Writers, Rebels, And Cannibals: Léonora Miano’S Rendering Of Africa In L’Intérieur De La Nuit, Magali Compan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Léonora Miano’s first novel L’Intérieur de la nuit received a laudatory critical reception when it was published by the French publishing house Plon in 2005. The novel’s depiction of an act of cannibalism in a village of a fictional African nation provides the turning point and central event of the narrative. The novel’s cannibalism has also been central to its critical reception in the west. While many Francophone works have employed and developed the metaphor of the act of cannibalism, Miano “cannibalizes” in her novel in unique ways that prove simultaneously problematic and productively revealing.

This article considers the interviews …

« La Femme Qui Pleure » : La Nouvelle D’Assia Djebar Et Le Tableau De Picasso, Farah Aïcha Gharbi

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article is a study of the dialogue that is maintained between the novel « La femme qui pleure » by Assia Djebar and the Picasso painting that bears the same title. This article also aims to show author’s achievement of the liberation of the feminine subject through an aesthetic means, in other words, through an angle that allows for an encounter between that which has been written and the painting, which combined give the women the right to the word and the image portrayed. The form and the structure that are shared between the novel and the painting appear …

Modiano And Sebald: Walking In Another's Footsteps , Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article studies Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997) and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2000) in conjunction with a contemporary literature of diaspora grounded in the extended aftermath of World War II. Both texts straddle fiction and testimonial accounts such as memoirs, letters, and video/audio recordings. In addition, both raise questions with which traditional historians seldom contend, even when they group these questions under the category of memory. What understanding of the recent past might these two narratives promote? What do they imply—individually or as a set—concerning the nature and function of the historical subjectivity that literature can convey? Each in its …

La Traversée Des Savoirs Dans Le Roman Africain, Justin K. Bisanswa

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The African novel refers to a socio-political as well as a literary History, but does so with guile, expressing this History from an angle. Referring constantly to the social and human sciences, to the point of competing with them, the novel vacillates between dependency and autonomy. It thus proposes a specific knowledge of society, its functioning, and the individuals who constitute it. However, its true intention is not to copy the world, nor even to imitate its life, but to provide a miniaturized replica of both, and set itself up as a vast metonymic duplicate of a certain universe.

Entre Intertextualité Et Réécriture, Alexie Tcheuyap

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Aesthetic practices have become more and more diversified in contemporary cultures. Although rewritings and adaptations are most common from literature to film, from myth/epic to novels, African filmmakers have recently been inaugurating novelization, that is the literary rewriting of a film. This essay examines the case of the Algerian filmmaker Merzac Allouache, who has written Bab el-Oued City, based on his film Bab el-Oued, in order to escape the technical and practical limitations of cinema. In doing so, he best expresses the challenges of contemporary Algeria, which is permanently threatened by violence and Islamic fundamentalism.

Theorizing The Role Of The Intermediary In Postcolonial (Con)Text: Driss Chraïbi's Une Enquête Au Pays , Anjali Prabhu

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The paper is a study of the role of the "intermediary" as exemplified by Inspector Ali in Driss Chraïbi's novel Une enquête au pays. This reading traces his role as the intermediary through a close reading of the construction of this space — between higher levels of administration, implying the more elite strata in Moroccan society, and the Berber peasants who live isolated in the mountains, struggling to subsist. Ali has claims to both of these locations: to the former through education and his position in the police force and to the latter through ancestry and the culture of …

L'Espace Scriptural Chez Kourouma Ou La Tragicomédie Du Roman, Jean Ouédraogo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Ahmadou Koruouma's fiction transcends the traditional limits of the novelistic genre. This explains, in part, the irritation of both the French and the African establishments following the appearance of his first novel, Les soleils des independances, in which both writing and language enhance the subversive effect. The banning and subsequent disappearance of Kourouma's play, Tougnatigui ou le Diseur de verite and the dramatic adaptations of his first two novels call for an appreciation of his entire work from a dramaturgical perspective. In this study, we shall analyse the constitutive elements of the intergeneric qualities underlying Kourouma's writing. To this end, …

When I Means We: A Reading Of School In French Caribbean Apprenticeship Novels , Pascale De Souza

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While most critics agree that the quest for identity which underlies much of post-colonial literature is illustrated in the thematic approaches adopted by writers, this study further the argument by suggesting that it also conditions writers' selection of narrative strategies. In its representation of subjectivity in process, the apprenticeship novel seems to offer an enticing model of self-completion. This narrative strategy, however, presents particular complexities when used to portray coming of age in a society divided along ethnic lines. Simon Gikandi argues with regards to the Caribbean that the probability of a quest for identity reaching fruition is nil, but …

Christian Oster's Picnic, Warren Motte

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With eight novels published by the Editions de Minuit in the last decade, Christian Oster has established himself as one of the most interesting figures in a cohort of new French writers who are gradually redefining the novel as literary form…

Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot And Chatterton's Poet , Leonard R. Koos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the problematic nature of selfhood in the detective genre as established by Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and most recently reformulated in two metaphysical detective novels, Jean Echenoz's Cherokee (1983) and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987). Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is described as having a "Bi-Part Soul," which permits him to vacate himself in order to construct the narrative solution to a crime. This duality, in the postmodern detective novel, is transformed into an irrevocable dislocation of the subject. Cherokee's onomastic devalorization of the story's characters and simulation of the human subject in the …

From The Sea Wall To The Lover : Prostitution And Exotic Parody, Pascale Bécel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This analysis of the two novels highlights Marguerite Duras' equivocal stance with regard to colonial Indochina where she grew up at the beginning of the century. As The Lover rewrites The Sea Wall in the autobiographical mode, the emphasis shifts from an explicit denunciation of colonialism and an implicit subversion of the Lotilian novel, to a parody of exotic themes and narratives. However, by focusing on the two young protagonists' construction of themselves as femmes fatales and prostitutes, this discussion reveals that the politics of gender and race remain at odds in Duras' fictional autobiographies. The cultural other (qua a …

Cardinal's The Words To Say It: The Words To Reproduce Mother, Eilene Hoft-March

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Words to Say it, an autobiographical novel by Algerian-born Frenchwoman Marie Cardinal, earned praise for the accuracy with which it documents a classic psychoanalysis. Quickly sketched, the plot seems to suggest that the separation from an overpowering mother is effected by paternal language and phallic law—the normal, normative psychic itinerary of the human subject. In its reconsideration of the Oedipal, this essay explores Irigaray's idea of the ambiguities of separation from mother and the possibility that the story of (feminine) subjectivity begins with the mother, begins with affiliation and affirmation even as it speaks of separateness. From this …

Border Crossings In Maríe Redonnet's Splendid [Seaside] Hôtel, Elizabeth A. Mazza-Anthony

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maríe Redonnet crosses previously established boundaries in Splendid Hôtel and Seaside. Her writing flows across traditional literary genres as she revisits certain motifs, characters, and situations in her novel and play. In addition to crossing the border between the novel and theater, she echoes the works of other authors—specifically Rimbaud and Duras. Moreover, within a particular text Redonnet erases subject boundaries. That is to say, her characters are not individuals; their uniqueness is washed away by a continual ebb and flow of common characteristics and traits. By creating such fluid personae, Redonnet captures the societal homogeneity that is symptomatic …

The Conspiracy Of The Miscellaneous In Foucault's Pendulum, Ken Kirkpatrick

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Like Name of the Rose, Foucault 's Pendulum grows out of and comments on Umberto Eco's theoretical work. Eco's decision to turn to a conspiracy, rather than a straight detective format for his second novel fits with his recent concern about how interpretative communities function in a period of divisive, diffuse critical theory. Yet Foucault's Pendulum does not merely amplify or dramatize his position; rather, it undermines it by becoming excessively involved in generating conspiracy. It is a satire in which the thing satirized proves more interesting and engaging than the satirical position. Nevertheless, Eco does raise concerns about …

Colonialism, Enlightenment, Castration: Writing, Narration And Legibility In L'Etranger, Larry W. Riggs, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This analysis combines the issue of "narratability" with some psychoanalytic insights, focusing first on the key incident in Meursault's story when he involves himself in writing. Meursault inadvertently inscribes himself in a conflictual drama when he writes a letter for Raymond Sintès. The writing of the letter prefigures both Meursault's later taking up of the gun with which he will kill an Arab and his inexorable evolution toward a situation that makes him capable of narrating and being narrated. It seals him into the colonial world of language. To become capable of narrating is both to become a colonist and …

Politics And The New African Novel: A Study Of The Fiction Of Francis Bebey, W. Curtis Schade

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

From its inception African fiction has been strongly marked by political themes. In the late 1950's the virulent satire of Mongo Béti and Ferdinand Oyono stated the case against the denigration of African values inherent in all aspects of the colonial system. Their style and message subsequently gave way to novels focusing upon the drama of the transition of power at the moment of Independence. Whether optimistic or disillusioned, many of these novels featured real events and people, often thinly disguised, and sought to give an «inside» picture of that historical moment. Other tendencies developed in the late 60's, most …

Sembène Ousmane's Xala: The Use Of Film And Novel As Revolutionary Weapon, Kenneth Harrow

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Sembène Ousmane's Xala was written as a novel and made into a film in 1974. It is a biting attack upon the newly risen bourgeois class that has ascended to power and wealth in Senegal since independence. The ideological framework of Xala rests upon Marxist assumptions adapted to and modified by the circumstances in Africa. The distinctively Senegalese features which mark Sembène's portrayal include Muslim and traditional religious beliefs which form the basis of the class oppression and the sexism depicted in Xala. They also supply the title to the work since xala means impotency in Wolof, and it …