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Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire Spring 2006

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire

Spring 2006

DePaul University

Department of Modern Languages

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire Spring 2005

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire

Spring 2005

DePaul University

Department of Modern Languages

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire Spring 2007, Pascale-Anne Brault

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire

Spring 2007

DePaul University

Department of Modern Languages

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire Spring 2008, Pascale-Anne Brault

Mille-Feuille Magazine Littéraire

Spring 2008

DePaul University

Department of Modern Languages

Le Moi Double: Les Inconscients (Post)Coloniaux Chez Césaire Et Breton, Emma A. Krosschell

Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes the poetic works of two French-speaking surrealist poets of the twentieth century, Aimé Césaire and André Breton. Despite their common point of surrealism, Césaire and Breton's poems differ because of their identities in a society afflicted by Western colonization. Using the literary theories of postcolonialism as a perspective for the analysis of Breton and Césaire's poems, I show that both men have a double consciousness based on the complicated influence of a colonizing society. Literary criticism of postcolonialism examines individual identities in colonial societies in relation to their symbolic position as "colonist" or "colonized." Césaire, a Martinican …

Thought And Verse: French Poetry In Conversation With French Existentialist Philosophy, Maxwell E. Edmonds

Senior Honors Projects

Thought and Verse: French Poetry in Conversation with French Existentialist Philosophy

Maxwell Edmonds

Faculty Sponsor: Karen de Bruin, French Language & Literature

What is the meaning of life? Does God exist? How can we live authentically and with purpose? How can we conduct our day to day lives, while faced with our own mortality? These are several of the principle themes focused upon within existentialist philosophy, the philosophy of existing as a mortal human being.

I chose to study existentialist philosophy through the lens of one of my other interests: French poetry. This combination has allowed me to approach both …

Poésie Et Engagement Dans Vous N’Êtes Pas Seul De Gérard Étienne, Simone Grossman

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article addresses the terms of commitment in Vous n’êtes pas seul by Gérard Étienne. For one part, the representation of the poet-and-tramp pertains to a first type of ideological commitment. For the second part, the study of oxymorons and references to Baudelaire will lead to a definition of another commitment of poetry in the novel as a counter-discourse for the victims of social exclusion.

Zachary Richard's "Faire Récolte": A Translation From The French, Michael D. Bierschenk

LSU Master's Theses

In the second half of the twentieth century, the Cajun language, which had been entirely oral for most of its history, began to emerge as a productive literary language. One of the prominent new authors of the period was Zachary Richard, also an important Cajun musician. One of his collections of poetry, Faire récolte (Les Éditions Perce-Neige, 1997), is translated here. This thesis also includes a translator's note that briefly explores the broad themes of the poems and the methods used in translating them.

Inspiration And The Oulipo , Chris Andrews

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the Ion and the Phaedrus Plato establishes an opposition between technique and inspiration in literary composition. He has Socrates argue that true poets are inspired and thereby completely deprived of reason. It is often said that the writers of the French collective known as the Oulipo have inverted the Platonic opposition, substituting a scientific conception of technique—formalization—for inspiration. Some of the group's members aim to do this, but not the best-known writers. Jacques Roubaud and Georges Perec practice traditional imitation alongside formalization. Imitation is a bodily activity with an important non-technical aspect. Raymond Queneau consistently points to an indispensable …

Jean-Marie Gleize, Emmanuel Hocquard, And The Challenge Of Lyricism, Glenn W. Fetzer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Within the past decade, one of the most pressing questions of poetry in France has been the continuing viability of lyricism. Recent models of perceiving the nature of lyricism shift the focus from formal and thematic considerations to pragmatic ones. As Hocquard's Un test de solitude: sonnets (1998) and Gleize's Non (1999) illustrate, the challenge of the lyric today serves to sharpen the sense of alterity and gives evidence of lyricism's capacity for renewal. More specifically, in presenting a reading of sonnets from both writers, this paper shows that the debates on the nature and "recurrence" of lyricism foreground the …

La Critique Et Léopold Sédar Senghor / Léopold Sédar Senghor Et La Critique, Fernando Lambert

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

L. S. Senghor has maintained a double relation with criticism: his poetical work has provoked plentiful critical production and the poet has always been in dialogue with his critical examiners. Furthermore, he has practised literary criticism himself. Criticism relating to Senghor comes from two quite different sources. From 1945 to 1960, the European criticism is outstanding, while the African criticism confines itself more to peripheral questions in the Senghorian poetical work: French language

and "Negritude". The withdrawal of the poet from the political stage in 1980 is a significant date for critical production in Africa. Let us add that the …

Surreal And Canny Selves: Photographic Figures In Claude Cahun , Gayle Zachmann

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her 1975 essay, Le Rire de la méduse, Hélène Cixous enthusiastically announced that it was high time for women to enter into discourse. A full half-century earlier, Claude Cahun (1894-1954), a powerful writer and a haunting photographer and artist, was already inscribing herself, Woman, and a woman's voice in visual and verbal self-portraits, photomontages, prose texts, poetry, and aesthetic and political treatises. Cahun's uncanny interventions in both verbal and visual discourse cannily interrogate conventions of literary and pictorial representation and the constructions of self, gender and culture that they exhibit. Insistently asking readers and spectators, "What's wrong with …

Frise Du Métro Parisien (Poem Of The Paris Subway), Jacques Jouet

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Jacques Jouet has emerged over the past ten years as one of the most consistently intriguing voices in contemporary French literature, and one of the most versatile, as a glance at his bibliography will clearly show…

Andrée Chedid, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, And Martine Broda, Marie-Claire Bancquart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

I would like to present three poets who are very different in age and writing style, Andrée Chedid, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Martine Broda, in order to show the diversity of paths opened up by a women's poetry to which criticism and anthologies still give too small a place in France...

The Fictions Of Surrealism, Walter A. Strauss

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Surrealism is an attitude toward life, even more than a literary and artistic movement. It aspired to no less than the remaking of man and the world by reintroducing "everyday" magic and a new idealization of the Female. In many respects, its goal was spiritual renewal. This enterprise was most prominently successful in the domain of poetry and painting. The major spokesman for the movement, Andre Breton, disliked the novel. Nevertheless, the members of the movement and their associates made numerous ventures into prose fiction, with notable results. Four types of fiction are delineated: the neo-Gothic romance; the adventure diary …

Questioning The Postmodern: Deguy, Jabès And Pleynet, Joan Brandt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Theorists of the postmodern tend to see the postmodernist literary text as that which disrupts modernism's inclusive and coherent structures. As opposed to the modernist text, which is characterized as centered, ordered, self-reflexive and autonomous, the postmodernist text is seen as decentered and indeterminate; it blurs the boundaries separating the text from other cultural spheres and questions radically the metaphysics of presence, of the subject, of identity and coherence. This study questions the tendency to see postmodernism in terms of its opposition to modernism. Through an analysis of three contemporary French poets, Michel Deguy, Edmond Jabès and Marcelin Pleynet, it …

History, Violence And Poetics: Saint-John Perse And René Char, Nathan Bracher

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the parallel yet opposite stances taken both personally and textually by Perse and Char with respect to drama of World War II. While Perse remained disdainfully aloof from public affairs after the defeat and proclaimed in his poetry his solidarity with all humanity, Char explicitly linked his writing to events, yet sought to create a human space removed from history's upheavals. Striving to transcend the vicissitudes of individual existence, Perse celebrates an epic vision of history that overlooks and even condones its violence. Focusing on the inconsistent, fragmentary nature of existence, Char prevents us from having any …

André Frénaud's Plural Voice, Roger Little

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Dramatic self-projection and the use of recurrent or occasional personae are features manifest in André Frénaud's poetry. One also notes a tendency to multiply unique phenomena. Furthermore, the medium of his poetry displays huge variety in form and tone. This study reviews a selection of these interacting characteristics and investigates their relationship to the poet, who represents the unity beneath the diversity, but whose self proves versatile in its exploration of world, word and identity through the revealing ventriloquy of plural voices.

The Notion Of Presence In The Poetics Of Yves Bonnefoy, John T. Naughton

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The notion of presence is the cornerstone of Bonnefoy's entire poetics, the common element linking his earliest pronouncements about poetry to his latest. The insistence on presence emerges as the animating principle of a selfconsciously anti-Mallarmean concept of poetry that seeks to align itself with hopefulness and with an affirmation of this life. The term is never defined once and for all, however, and the great range of evocations and applications of the idea in Bonnefoy's work has triggered a significant critical debate about its significance and validity.

Living Transcription: The Poetry Of Jean Tortel, Suzanne Nash

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With the publication of six new books of poetry since 1979, Jean Tortel has joined his contemporaries, Francis Ponge and Guillevic, as one of France's leading materialist poets. His writing, recounting the process of its own unfolding with voluptuous precision, is meant to bear witness through its figurations to the forces of chance and mutability governing the natural order. As such it constitutes a place of passage or verbal garden, both sumptuous and ordinary, where reading and formulation merge.

Shall We Escape Analogy, Rosmarie Waldrop

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Claude Royet-Journoud's and Anne-Marie Albiach's work can be read as manifestos against metaphor (relation by similarity, the vertical selection axis of the speech act) with which poetry has long been identified. Whereas Royet-Joumoud takes as his theme metaphor in the largest sense (including, finally, all representation that is based on analogy), Albiach's "Enigme" dramatizes the loss of the vertical dimension through, ironically, a metaphor: the fall of a body. Formally, both stress as alternative the horizontal axis of combination (especially the spatial articulation on the page) and the implied view that the world is constructed by language, that it does …

Thought And Perception: Bernard Noël And The Mind's Eye, Laurie Edson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Bernard Noël has investigated the relationship between the conceptual and the visual in many of his prose and poetic texts. From the earlier "body" poetry of Extraits du corps, where the image of the inward-looking eye makes its appearance, to his book on Magritte's "visible thought" and the prose text Le 19 octobre 1977, where he thematizes the functioning of perception, Noël explores the complex interplay between seeing and thought, language and thought, and seeing and writing. This study analyzes these and other major issues driving Noel's poetics.

Anamnesis: Paul Celan's Translations Of Poetry, Leonard Olschner

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Paul Celan's significance as a poet has long been undisputed, and increasingly outside German-speaking countries, but his translations of poetry have remained at the periphery of critical attention and are only gradually becoming recognized as an integral and indeed major part of his poetry and poetics. The present essay attempts to elucidate specific aspects of the biographical, linguistic, literary and historical background at work in Celan's translating and offers analytic interpretations of texts by Mandel'stam, Apollinaire and Shakespeare in Celan's translation.

The Dialogue Of Absence, Richard Stamelman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Dialogue of Absence

Towards A Poetry Of Silence: Stéphane Mallarmé And Juan Ramón Jiménez, Mervyn Coke-Enguídanos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In an era of apparent dissolution, "la Obra" of Juan Ramón Jiménez, like "l'Oeuvre" of Stéphane Mallarmé, has for its goal the attainment of timelessness. In both poets, the concept of absolute Time—the timelessness of eternal Time—is yoked with the ideal of silence. But this is no ordinary silence, and certainly not the kind that results from inadequacy of expression. It is the silence of perfection, the expression of the ineffable: pure Poetry. Since the poetic language is the silent language of thought, both Mallarmé and Juan Ramón seek to convey the pure idea. In so doing, both must stringently …

Orphism In The Poetry Of Blaise Cendrars, Howard Nitzberg

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The story of Orpheus has undergone numerous changes in religion and poetry throughout the ages. My essay on Blaise Cendrars is the first study of him in an orphie context. He does not transpose the Orpheus myth directly. Rather, Cendrars contributes to the story of modern orphie poetry by the personal expression he gives to certain orphie concepts and themes. His poetic vision consists of the exploration of his being, the primacy of subjectivity, and the autonomy of the thought processes. Although Cendrars is usually considered an avant-garde poet of the early twentieth century, this article demonstrates that he can …

Cendrars's Variegated Poetic Persona: Seduction And Authenticity In Prose Of The Transsiberian And Nineteen Elastic Poems, Everett F. Jacobus Jr.

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since Cendrars recognizes the protean nature of his personal and public self, it is not surprising that the persona of his poetry escapes easy definition. My essay studies the consequences of this fact on the relationship between the poetic persona and his reader. Seduction, set against a Freudian and transactional-analysis conceptual background, provides a methodological metaphor for my analysis. In the same way that for Freud the real event of seduction only becomes psychologically effective as a fantasy and eventually as a structural pattern for the male-female relationship, our use of the seduction metaphor takes an initial naïve event between …

Marie-Jeanne Laurendeau's Book Of Poetry - Grade 5, Marie-Jeanne Laurendeau

Marie-Jeanne Laurendeau

September 12, 1947, A composition book of poetry written by Marie-Jeanne Laurendeau in the 5th grade at the Ave Maria Academy in French.