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Full-Text Articles in Modern Languages
Lost In Adaptation:The Silencing Of The French Female Concierge, Mariah Devereux Herbeck
Lost In Adaptation:The Silencing Of The French Female Concierge, Mariah Devereux Herbeck
World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations
Fictional representations of the female concierge frequently underscore her negative attributes, above all her meddlesome discourse. The female concierge character in Georges Simenon's 1933 novel, Les fiançailles de M. Hire, however, provides an exception to the rule as local law authorities give credence to her word and base their investigation on her testimony. However, in two filmic adaptations of the novel—Duvivier's Panique (1946) and Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire (1989)—the female concierge character is practically absent. This article demonstrates how, from page to screen, the concierge's role is dissected, disembodied, and displaced in Duvivier's and Leconte's films, and finally reflects …
History, Humanity, And The Literary Construction Of Haiti In ÉVelyne Trouillot’S Works, Jason Herbeck
History, Humanity, And The Literary Construction Of Haiti In ÉVelyne Trouillot’S Works, Jason Herbeck
World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations
Évelyne Trouillot’s novels, short stories, poetry, children’s stories, and play—not to mention her interviews, op. ed. pieces, and academic articles—introduce us to chapters of Haiti’s history spanning roughly two hundred and fifty years. From a plantation in the former French colony of Saint-Domingue during the 1750s to present-day, postearthquake Haiti, the experiences, trials, and tragically haunting memories of her characters serve to bring into focus countless rifts in the country’s complex and often conflicted past. Despite the turbulent time periods in which we discover these protagonists, and the resulting adversity to which they are prone, their struggles are not waged …
(Re)Casting The Concierge In Muriel Barbery's L' Élégance Du Hérisson, Mariah Devereux Herbeck
(Re)Casting The Concierge In Muriel Barbery's L' Élégance Du Hérisson, Mariah Devereux Herbeck
World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations
«Être maire de Paris, c'est aimer les concierges et les stars, parce que les concierges sont les stars de notre quotidien!" (Greco). Before Anne Hidalgo aligned the commonplace French apartment caretaker with celebrated icons of the stage and screen during her 2014 Paris mayoral campaign, the Parisian concierge had never stood so high upon a pedestal. The closest the French concierge had come to such limelight was perhaps the fictionalized representation of the working-class figure in Muriel Barbery's 2006 novel, L' élégance du hérisson. The newspaper Libération described Barbery' s novel as France's "surprise bestseller of the year" (Lançon) …
Intertexts Of The Ecological: Literary Space Revisited In Yanick Lahens's Bain De Lune, Jason Herbeck
Intertexts Of The Ecological: Literary Space Revisited In Yanick Lahens's Bain De Lune, Jason Herbeck
World Languages Faculty Publications and Presentations
The opening lines of Yanick Lahens’s Bain de lune (2014) find an unidentified narrator lying on a beach not far from the coastal community of Anse Bleue, staring at the worn, muddy boots of the man who has just discovered her lifeless body. As her narrative reveals, a hurricane has devastated the region over the past three days, and, in the wake of the storm, the deceased protagonist tries to piece together the fragmented memories of her life as a means of determining how she has ended up dead on the sand. From the very beginning of Lahens’s novel, however, …