Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Teaching French As A Foreign Language In Multilingual And Anglophone Contexts: The Experiences Of Teachers In Nigeria And Ghana, Michael Akinpelu, Stella Afi Makafui Yegblemenawo

Educational Considerations

Nigeria and Ghana are two Anglophone countries in West Africa that have adopted the teaching of the French language in their education systems because of their proximity to francophone countries and the necessity for regional integration. Whereas the language has gained some official status in the national curriculum (National Policy on Education) in Nigeria and made a required subject at some levels of education, French continues to enjoy a privileged status in Ghana but without an official status yet. Using a comparative approach, this paper explores the language policy in favour of the French language and its teaching at the …

Starring Hitler! Adolf Hitler As The Main Character In Twentieth-First Century French Fiction, Marion Duval

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Adolf Hitler has remained a prominent figure in popular culture, often portrayed as either the personification of evil or as an object of comedic ridicule. Although Hitler has never belonged solely to history books, testimonials, or documentaries, he has recently received a great deal of attention in French literary fiction. This article reviews three recent French novels by established authors: La part de l’autre (The Alternate Hypothesis) by Emmanuel Schmitt, Lui (Him) by Patrick Besson and La jeunesse mélancolique et très désabusée d’Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler’s Depressed and Very Disillusioned Youth) by Michel Folco; all of which belong to the …

Ruth Bush. Publishing Africa In French: Literary Institutions And Decolonization, 1945-1967. Liverpool Up, 2016., Madeline Bedecarre

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Ruth Bush. Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization, 1945-1967. Liverpool UP, 2016. 224 pp.

Lucille Cairns. Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel. Liverpool: Liverpool Up, 2015., Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Lucille Cairns. Francophone Jewish Writers: Imagining Israel. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2015. x + 310 pp.

Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots For The Diaspora: Ghosts In The Family Tree. Ann Arbor: U Of Michigan P, 2016., Annie De Saussure

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the family tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 325 pp.

Denis Provencher. Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations. Liverpool: Liverpool Up, 2017., Alvaro Luna

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Denis Provencher. Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2017. 314 pp.

Alternate Facts And Reality Effects In Antoine Bello’S Roman Américain, Jennifer Willging

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Like several of Antoine Bello’s eight other novels to date, Roman américain contains a staggering array of minute details, which includes the names of dozens of fictional characters, businesses, associations, institutions, locations, and publications. These fictional proper nouns are intertwined throughout the novel with dozens of real ones, and this promiscuous intermixing contributes to the careful construction of a fictional world that rivals the real one in all its complexity. In this essay I examine Bello’s masterful production in Roman américain of verisimilitude, which he creates largely but not exclusively though his exploitation of the documentary fiction genre. I then …

The Mother Figure In Contemporary Women’S Theater, Sanda Golopentia

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Five French plays written by women playwrights between the years 1976–88 attest to significant changes in the dramatic presentation of the mother figure. The innovations occur at the general thematic level (with plays centered on the mother–daughter initiating encounter at the moment of giving birth/being born, the reversal of the mother–daughter roles later on in life, trial maternity, willful maternal eclipse, etc.) as well as at the level of the characters’ speech, the setting, and so on. While some of the plays (such as Chantal Chawaf’s Chair chaude, Denise Chalem’s A cinquante ans elle découvrait la mer and Loleh …

Cœur, Temps And Monde In Le Forçat Innocent Of Supervielle: A Poet’S Existential Metaphors Of Prison And Shelter, Franck Dalmas

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Poet Jules Supervielle has a marginal status in twentieth-century French literature as he was not engaged in any prominent movement of his time (Symbolism, Futurism, or Surrealism). In that regard, his poetry is neither nationally colored nor aesthetically connoted. It might well be the reason for his lacking consideration in the literary canon. But these differences must get our special attention. Supervielle was not born in France and he was to live and write his works in a state of existential angst, divided, as he always felt, between his native Uruguay and his French legacy. As such, the poet developed …

The Politics Of Race And Patriarchy In Claire-Solange, Âme Africaine By Suzanne Lacascade , Valérie Orlando

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Racial discrimination, colonialism, marginalization, and imperial politics are the components of Martinican author Suzanne Lacascade's 1924 novel, Claire-Solange, âme africaine. This little-known work is shrouded in mystery. Less information is available about the author or under what circumstances she conceptualized and completed her novel. Lacascade probably contributed to various reviews and journals of the first days of the Négritude movement. The novel offers one of the first discourses on race, racial mixing, hierarchy, and colonialism as construed by blacks and whites. The author defies the power of men over women in French society of the early twentieth century. Racialized …

A Literary Form For Love: Yves Navarre's My Friends Are Gone With The Wind, Richard M. Berrong

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In My Friends Are Gone with the Wind (Ce sont amis que vent emporte, 1991), one of his last and most innovative texts, Yves Navarre (1940-1994), one of the most important contemporary French novelists to deal significantly and regularly with gay themes, returns to his preoccupation with the dangers that the forms inherent in traditional literary narrative pose for the expression of authentic human experience. The narrator, Roch, wants to capture the reality of his love for David, in part to prove to what he sees as a largely hostile heterosexual world that gays are as capable of loving …

Remembrance Of The Lost Guyanese Novel: Atipa, Marc Lony

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In 1885 the Ghio publishing house in Paris brought out Atipa, roman guyanais (Atipa: A Guianese Novel), written in Guianese Creole by an author who signed himself Alfred Parépou…

Marketing Strategies For A New Academic Economy: Can We Sell French Without Selling Out?, Mary Jean Green

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

When I was asked to participate in this discussion, I was told that my comments should reflect in some way the perspective I gained by temporarily crossing the line into academic administration when I became Associate Dean of the Faculty in charge of the Humanities at my home university five years ago, an experience from which I'm still in recovery...

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…

Unforgettable: History, Memory, And The Vichy Syndrome , Rosemarie Scullion

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In 1987, the French historian Henry Rousso formulated an interpretive model that has decisively influenced the directions and forms of inquiry scholars have pursued in relation to les années noires, the period between 1940 and 1944 during which France endured a catastrophic military defeat and four years of occupation by a neighboring fascist state...

"Atmosphère, Atmosphère": On The Study Of France Between The Wars, Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Street Noises: Parisian Pleasure, 1900-1940 by Adrian Rifkin and Shanghai on the Métro: Spies, Espionage, and the French Between the Wars by Michael B. Miller are test cases for issues of historiography related to period and duration in the study of France between 1919 and 1940. Of added relevance to these issues is the fact that Rifkin and Miller both question distinctions between elite literary cultures linked to book publishing and new forms of mass reproduction enhanced by technologies of sound reproduction and illustration. A concluding excursus explores recent theories of urban space symbolized by the street as a site …

The Perilous Journey From Melancholy To Love: A Kristevan Reading Of Le Médianoche Amoureux, Karen D. Levy

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Since the publication of Michel Tournier's first novel Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique in 1967, in which his protagonist Robinson makes fruitful the very earth of his desert island and eventually accedes to the cosmic transcendence embodied in his mentor and companion Vendredi, this contemporary French writer has boldly explored alternative forms of sexual expression that challenge traditional biological definitions of identity as well as norms of accepted behavior. The basis of his investigations is the anguish-ridden separation from the maternal, as experienced under diverse manifestations usually by male characters, and the irremediable solitude which then stretches over that …

Private Life And Collective Experience In Quebec: The Autobiographical Project Of France Théoret, Mary Jean Green

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her study of women's autobiographical writing, Carolyn Heilbrun contends that women's authorship has been most hindered by the lack of narrative structures adequate to the telling of women's experience. She further suggests that female narrative will be found as women talk together, exchange stories, and move toward a collective understanding of self. In recent years, the interplay of women's voices has assumed new importance in women's writing, and specifically in women's life/writing in French. Perhaps beginning with Simone de Beauvoir's feminist classic, The Second Sex, where the words of hundreds of other women are woven into the text …

Reflections On Linguistic And Literary Colonization And Decolonization In Africa, Eric Sellin

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the cultural diversity found in Africa and the complexity ofthe psychology of the colonizer and the colonized, several fundamental facts emerge regarding the function of language and literature in recent African history. The colonizer sought to instill a sense of inferiority in the colonized as part of the dynamics of conquest, placing special emphasis on education and language. These notions, lucidly discussed by such social thinkers as O. Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, have analogues in the defense of language everywhere where lingua-political oppression occurs, be it in colonial Africa or on an Arapaho reservation in the American …

Autobiographical Authority And The Politics Of Narrative, Renée Larrier

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Autobiographical narratives, which include autobiography, autobiographical novel, memoir, and chronicle, constitute a major genre in African francophone literature. Informed by history, they do not celebrate personal accomplishment, but rather accentuate the group experience. These self-stories rely on realistic representation in order to document events for future generations and function to correct stereotypical misconceptions—therein lies their political consciousness.

Writing Double: Politics And The African Narrative Of French Expression, John D. Erickson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay studies two African narratives of French expression (Le Temps de Tamango of Boubacar Diop and L'Enfant de sable of Tahar ben Jelloun) to see how they create a discourse of difference that challenges and deconstructs the conventions of the discursive system of French, its signifying practices, and its ideological underpinnings. The tactics of these narratives, which mark them as post-colonial in a strict sense (as opposed to neo-colonial), are productive of a radical other-meaning, a new meaning that "speaks" to the concerns of and problems confronting the non-Western writer.

The Dialectics Of The Archaic And The Post-Modern In Maghrebian Literature Written In French, Hédi Abdel-Jaouad

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maghrebian literature written in French has been since its inception a literature of and about the abyss. For the Maghrebian the abyss is esentially the space of modernity, that forbidden citadel of art, science and technology from which s/he was excluded and marginalized. Recently, writing of/in French has become the site/scene of a polemos between the archaic (identity) and the post-modern (difference).

Our study of the archaic focuses on cultural, literary and critical knowledge and centers around two main themes: that of a beginning, that is a search for events in the past that explain the abyss (or retardation vis-à-vis …

Anti-Structuralist Structures: The Avant-Garde Struggles Of French Fiction, Roland A. Champagne

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

A reassessment of French literary "structuralism" is timely in order to understand the development of avant-garde fiction. Piaget's parameters of wholeness, self-regulation, and transformation for a "structure" are useful critical tools in appreciating the relationships of avant-garde writers, texts, and readers to one another during the 1950's and 1960's in France. However, the writers and texts of that literary avant-garde refused to be congealed into a specific movement called "structuralism." Instead, they continually realized new forms to lead their readers away from the static artistic labels or "myths" which the representatives of French society consistently sought to impose. Those new …