Comparative Literature Commons^™

Intégration Du Genre Dans La Gestion Des Ressources En Eau Au Maroc (Nord-Ouest D’Afrique), El-Mostafa Mili

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Au Maroc 92% des individus âgés de plus de 5 ans ont un téléphone (2018), alors que 80% de Marocains ont accès à l’eau potable et 38% disposent d’un accès aux installations d’assainissement améliorées (2017) ! Le Maroc a une grande expérience en matière de développement de l’offre des ressources en eau. Malgré cela, les problèmes de pénurie d’eau sont devenus une réalité. Malheureusement, les intérêts particuliers et la corruption généralisée entre les gouvernements et les entrepreneurs privés génèrent trop souvent une situation déséquilibrée. Est-ce que cela a pour cause la mauvaise gestion des ressources en eau ? L’objectif de …

Pour Une Reconstitution De La Mémoire Du Paysage Naturel De La Ville D’Oujda (Maroc Oriental) À Partir De La Perception Des Voyageurs Français De La Fin Du XixÈme Et Du Début Du XxÈme Siècles, Bouchra Benbella

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Objectifs de cette étude-- Oujda: ville à la frontière avec l’Algérie, cité oubliée où le peu d’espaces verts qui reste rétrécit comme peau de chagrin. - Montrer des paysages naturels disparus ou dépéris de la ville d’Oujda, décrits par des voyageurs français avant et après le Protectorat français (1912), parce que préserver et avant tout connaître. - Sensibiliser la génération Z marocaine à son patrimoine national (local) et les exhorter à agir.

Corpus:

BERNARD, A. Les confins Algéro-marocains, Paris : Emile Larose, 1911

CANAL, J. La frontière marocaine. Oudjda 1885, Oran : Paul Perrier, 1886 ;

ELABBASSI, Ali Bey. …

Time And The Bibliographer: A Meditation On The Spirit Of Book Studies, Matt Cohen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

In light of the global return of tribalism, racism, nationalism, and religious hypocrisy to power’s center stage, it is worth returning to the question of the relevance of bibliography. It is a time when, at least at the seats of power in the United States and some other places, books seem to have become almost meaningless. Bibliographic pioneer D.F. McKenzie’s strategy was not to constrain bibliography in self-defense, but to expand it, to go on the offense. What is our course? This essay explores bibliography’s past in order to suggest ways in which it can gain from an engagement with …

Sylvain Tesson : La Consolation De La Forêt, Sylvie Blum-Reid

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Sylvain Tesson est né sous les constellations du blaireau et de la forêt.2 Cet écrivain-voyageur, géographe de formation, a passé six mois dans une cabane en Sibérie, à la suite desquels il a publié son journal Dans les Forêts de Sibérie traduit en anglais par The Consolation of the Forest en 2011 (prix Médicis 2011). En plus de ses écrits, il est l’auteur de plusieurs documentaires filmés Aral: Chronique d’une mer asséchée, 2002 (Aral, the Sea than Ran dry, dir. Nicolas Millet, 42 min. , CNC),3 qui dénonce la catastrophe écologique de la mer d’Aral, asséchée depuis …

Expropriation And Forced Migrations: The Displacement Of Colonial Agricultural Laborers In Mohammed Dib’S Algerian Trilogy, Benjamin Sparks

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Mohammed Dib, in his Algerian trilogy, demonstrates the effects of expropriation and mendicancy on the patterns of migration of agricultural laborers, illustrating the historical context of colonial Algeria through the act of storytelling. Mohammed Dib in 1949 devised the idea to write “un roman aux proportions assez vastes qui devait présenter une sorte de portrait divers de l’Algérie” (Déjeux 145) which would later become what constitutes the Algerian trilogy consisting of La Grande maison published in 1952, L’Incendie in 1954, and finally Le Métier à tisser in 1957. The trilogy tells the story of Omar’s upbringing in colonial Algeria surrounded …

“Traduit De L’Américain” As Text And Paratext, Mort Guiney

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

The online translation forum Wordreference.com contains a thread that began in July of 2005, discussing the use and possible abuse of the expression “traduit de l’américain” as it often, though not always, appears in the front matter of French translations of American literature. The discussion contains 197 posts covering a period of more than eight years; clearly, the use of “américain” in this context elicits strong reactions among literary experts, both Anglophone and Francophone. Does it imply that “Américain” is a different language from “Anglais”? Or that it is an inferior version of English? Why are some American novels published …

Remembering And Experiencing The Land In Exile In Marie-Célie Agnant’S La Dot De Sara And Gisèle Pineau’S L’Exil Selon Julia, Marie Paillard

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

In novels that stage migratory pathways, the exploring characters can perform circulation through different channels and processes, without necessarily operating a physical movement. A geographical and a corporeal process exist, but even when the concrete, physical exploration stops, it is somehow also both lived, experienced, reconstructed and imagined differently through the body and through corporeal exploration. In this paper, I argue that embodied memory can circulate through points of entanglement without any process of movement physically occurring, and these points of entanglement can all be observed interacting in the body of the migrant. For instance, sensations enable the characters to …

Claiming The Land: The Spanish Presence In Colonial Algeria, Lavinia Horner

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Emmanuel Roblès: Both parents – Spanish descent

Albert Camus: Father – French; Mother – Spanish descent

Roblès’ and Camus’ literary as well as epistolary testimonies disrupt the French-Arab/Berber dichotomous colonial narrative, thus expanding pied-noir legacies and unraveling little-known aspects of the mostly forgotten, yet indelible Spanish presence in colonial Algeria.

The theoretical framework follows a multidisciplinary approach drawing from literature, psychology and legal studies to investigate how assertive literary testimonies can switch perspectives on what will be remembered.

If the understanding of history is not finalized, but open, then bringing to light little-known testimonies extant in both Roblès’ and Camus’ …

L’Art Féminin, Un Cri D’Espoir Pour L’Humanité, Zohra Lhioui

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

A travers une étude réalisée au Maroc, dans la Région de Meknès-Tafilalet (Centre-Est du royaume), et qui a été couronnée par la publication d’un ouvrage d’art portant le titre Femmes artistes de Meknès- Tafilalet (voir couverture jointe à cette proposition de communication), il ressort que l’art chez les femmes de cette région n’est pas une simple question de créativité et de passion, il est aussi un moyen esthétique d’exprimer la richesse du patrimoine, la culture de leur société et leur attachement à la nature, à l’environnement, bref à la vie tout court. Que ce soit par la danse, le stylisme, …

Un Regard Écopoétique Sur La Terre: Évolutions Du Paysage Français Dans La Photographie Contemporaine, Anaïs Belchun

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Graphiste, artiste et doctorante en Arts plastiques, Anaïs Belchun prépare une thèse intitulée « Écopoétique paysagère : une pensée de l’écologie à l’oeuvre dans les arts du paysage » sous les directions de Patrick Barrès et Sophie Lécole Solnychkine, au sein du LARA-SEPPIA (Université Toulouse - Jaurès). Elle étudie les pensées et pratiques de l’écologie et du paysage selon une approche transdisciplinaire, avec un objectif pédagogique. Sa démarche associe recherche scientifique et création artistique, autour d’un travail de terrain (enquête paysagère, sentier paysager, ateliers d’écoformation) et hors site (photographie, carnets d’artistes, expositions). Elle a organisé plusieurs manifestations scientifiques et artistiques …

Représentation De La Médina Chez Namouss Dans Le Fond De La Jarre D’Abdellatif Laâbi, Khanssaa Canning

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Le Fond de la jarre d’Abdellatif Laâbi projette la médina de Fès sous une mise en scène totalement différente des anciennes représentations de ce même lieu par l’auteur, qui, depuis son expérience de l’incarcération de 1972 à1980, a pris des allures d’un espace dénaturé et impur. Une angoisse existentielle, une crise du Moi avait désormais habité Laâbi, depuis les années quatre-vingt ; plus spécifiquement, deux ans après sa libération de huit ans et demi d’emprisonnement (1982). Son oeuvre Le chemin des ordalies en dévoile les instances et interroge les contours de l’identité et de l’appartenance par rapport aux discours politique, …

Poetics Of Acculturation: Early Pure Land Buddhism And The Topography Of The Periphery In Orikuchi Shinobu’S The Book Of The Dead, Ikuho Amano

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications

Known as the exponent practitioner of kokubungaku (national literature), modernist ethnologist Orikuchi Shinobu (1887–1953) readily utilized archaic Japanese experiences as viable resources for his literary imagination. As the leading disciple of Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), who is known as the founding father of modern folkloric ethnology in Japan, Orikuchi is often considered a nativist ethnologist whose works tend to be construed as a probing into the origin of the nation. He considered the essence of national literature as “the origins of art itself,” and such a critical vision arguably linked him to interwar fascism.1 Nevertheless, his nativist effort as a literatus …

Really, Warren Motte

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

The contemporary French novel is striking in its diversity, its complexity, and its resistance to easy classification. This is not an utterly new phenomenon (one recalls both Gide and Queneau, in the 1920s and 1930s respectively, describing the novel as a fundamentally lawless genre), but it is legitimate to say that the novel's horizon of possibility has broadened during our time, allowing for new kinds of expression. Those latter may be based in formalist experimentation (I'm thinking of writers like Jacques Roubaud, or Paul Fournel, or Stéphane Vanderhaeghe), or personal confession (Édouard Louis, Camille Laurens, Philippe Forest, for instance), or …

Narrateur, Narration Et Roman À Thèse Dans Sérotonine, Gerald Prince

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Le narrateur autodiégétique de Sérotonine, on l'a déjà souvent remarqué, fait le portrait d'une dépression (la sienne) et oppose tradition et modernité, agriculture et industrie, campagne et ville, amour ou sexe (c'est, semble-t-il, un peu la même chose) et solitude ou séparation. Il souligne également les multiples formatages dont nous somme victimes, les nombreux mécanismes qui nous emprisonnent, tout en admettant que nous ne sommes pas entièrement déterminés et tout en détaillant une imposante série d'occasions perdues (qu'il s'agisse de proposer le mariage à la femme qu'on aime, de lui expliquer une infidélité ou de se tuer dans un …

Terre Brûlée : Une Éco-Poétique Du Vide, Pierre Taminiaux

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Au XXIe siècle, les sociétés occidentales sont confrontées à de nouvelles formes de chaos. Celui-ci comporte plusieurs dimensions, à la fois sociales, culturelles et écologiques. L’art doit dès lors prendre en considération cette situation d’une manière ou d’une autre. C’est ce qui m’autorise à parler ici de mes images photographiques rassemblées sous le titre de Terre brûlée.

Celles-ci ont été prises à l’automne 2017, au Portugal, près de la ville de Leiria, dans une forêt de bord de mer (une pinède, plus exactement) qui fut longtemps considérée dans l’histoire de ce pays comme un domaine royal. Cette saison fut …

20th & 21st Century French And Francophone Studies International Colloquium, University Of Nebraska, March 26-28, 2020: Call For Papers, Program, And Plenary Speakers

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Call for Papers

Program

Plenary Speakers: Scholastique Mukasonga, Nicolas Kurtovitch, Marie-Célie Agnant, Stephanie Posthumus

History of the Colloquium

Research Prize

Sponsors

Organizing Committee

« Ceindre La Terre » : Sur Quelques Tours Du Monde, Jean-François Duclos

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

« La vie est ronde », écrit Joë Bousquet en 1946. Le constat, cela va sans dire, est le même s’agissant de la Terre et nourrit l’imaginaire depuis qu’on tient le fait pour acquis. « Métaphore du cercle » de Robert Poulet, « phénoménologie du rond » de Gaston Bachelard, et depuis quelque temps l’idée de « planétarité » : chaque époque offre le moyen de spéculer sur ce que, dans leur essai intitulé « The Planetary Condition », Elias et Moraru décrivent comme « a structure of awareness1 ». Se soumettre à l’évidence de cette géométrie constitue une manière …

Ce Que Le Mirage Doit À L’Oasis De Yasmina Khadra: Comment Devient-On Enfant Du Sahara ?, Brigitte Tsobgny

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Être un enfant du Sahara, est-ce seulement être capable d’escalader pieds nus les barkhanes brûlantes ? Dans Ce que le mirage doit à l’oasis, Yasmina Khadra invite le lecteur à découvrir son Sahara natal à travers différents personnages. Pour les uns, le Sahara c’est l’ennui, le silence, l’immobilité. Pour d’autres, c’est un lieu d’inspiration, de méditation, de prières ou d’apaisement. Pour d’autres encore, c’est un terrain vague juste bon pour les courses automobiles ou des essais nucléaires. Les narcissiques y voient une terre de conquête, les jihadistes ont fait de ses grottes des repaires d’assassins. La culture ou l’époque peuvent-elle …

The Returns Of The Roman De La Terre : Défricheurs And Their Migrant Others In The Canadien Imaginary, Alvin Y. Chuan

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

The theme “parler la terre” presents an opportunity to reconsider Québec’s romans de la terre—farm novels from the turn of the Nineteenth Century into the Twentieth that are often considered to be the inaugural works of the province’s literary canon. Variously known as the “roman du territoire” or the “roman paysan”, this genre, with its idealized depictions of colonization and rural life, helped articulate what literary historian Dorothee Scholl would call the mythe du terroir—or in her own words, “the mythologizing of the soil as the site of French-Canadian national identity (103).” At the height of their popularity, these …

Reading Antelme With Levinas: Recreational Activities In Concentration Camps, Arwa Reda

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Whether humanities humanize or not has always been a question that gathered both its proponents and opponents. Between those who confirm the statement and those who adamantly repudiate it, history has provided instances that simultaneously bear out both positions. Rather than attempting to prove or to deny the humanizing aspect of language and literature, this article looks at the matter from a different angle. Instead of the either-or argument, I propose the how as a bedrock of understanding the way humanities can humanize. Many camp survivors extolled what could be qualified as a redemptive force of language and literature. A …

La Terre Natale : À La Source De L’Écriture, Chez Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, Michèle Druon

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

"Mais le pays natal est moins une étendue qu’une matière ; c’est un granit ou une terre, un vent ou une sécheresse, une eau ou une lumière ; c’est par lui que notre rêve prend sa juste substance ; c’est à lui que nous demandons notre couleur fondamentale." --Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les Rêves.

Tout au long de son oeuvre, Colette a cherché à ressusciter dans ses textes le « paradis terrestre » de son pays natal, la Bourgogne, et le rêve profond qui lui est attaché. Déjà évoquée dans les scènes campagnardes du premier Claudine (Claudine à l’Ecole, …

“What Do I Think Of Glory?”: On Middlemarch By George Eliot, Beverley Park Rilett

Department of English: Faculty Publications

What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?”1 This is the famous reply Emily Dickinson wrote to her bookish cousins in 1873 after her first reading of George Eliot’s novel. Dickinson’s sentiments were also my own when I completed my first reading of Middlemarch (1871–1872), about thirty-five years ago. Middlemarch is the book that made me realize literature could be more than a source of entertainment, that it could be Art with a capital A. Here was a text with fascinating and seemingly limitless possibilities for interpretation that would continue to reward scrutiny. Of course, …

Book Reviews- Joanna Wharton, Material Enlightenment: Women Writers And The Science Of Mind, 1770–1830, Stephen C. Behrendt

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Joanna Wharton’s Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770–1830 is a recent addition to the interdisciplinary series Studies in the Eighteenth Century that Boydell Press (Boydell & Brewer Publishers) is publishing in association with the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. It is a welcome addition to the growing body of work that addresses the contributions of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British women writers to areas of scientific, philosophical, and otherwise “learned” discourse that have historically been associated primarily—and in many cases exclusively—with male thinkers and writers. Wharton’s study therefore helps to flesh out the picture …

Review Of Early Women Filmmakers 1911–1940, Wheeler Winston Dixon

Department of English: Faculty Publications

After more than a half century of neglect, pioneering women filmmakers are finally getting some of the attention they deserve. Foremost among these women is the figure of Alice Guy Blaché—also known simply as Alice Guy, before she married Herbert Blaché in 1907—who was responsible for numerous “firsts” in cinema history: the first film with narrative La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Patch Fairy; 1896), as well as early experiments with color dye processes, synchronized sound recording, multi-reel films, and other cinematic advances. Gaumont put out a set of her French films for that company—she was the …

Reconceptualizing Time, Space And Social Relationships: Queer Acts Of Resistance By An Aids Patient In Hervė Guibert’S To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Salvador Lopez-Rivera

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Although Hervé Guibert’s poignant account of his life as an AIDS patient in his 1990 novel with autobiographical elements To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (original French title: À l’ami qui n’a pas sauvé ma vie ) earned him staggering critical and commercial success in his native France, the novel’s highly personal depiction of the AIDS crisis did not please French AIDS crisis activists, who criticized that it favored the author’s individual experiences with AIDS rather than documenting the sociopolitical processes that led to its development as a public health crisis disproportionately affecting sex and gender minorities …

Feeling It: Toward Style As Culturally Structured Intuition, Keith Rhodes

Department of English: Faculty Publications

I have been moved to write a serious article about teaching style not because I have great and earth-shaking method to impart, but in some sense because I do not, even after years of study—including the small bit of empirical research at the core of this article. Style, as it turns out, remains as difficult, complex, and ultimately intuitive as most of the rest of writing. I hope, ultimately, to encourage writing teachers to focus more attention on style, basing approaches on what we already know rather than waiting and hoping for some flawless system to materialize. Indeed, by the …

Walt Whitman At The Aurora: A Model For Journalistic Attribution, Kevin Mcmullen, Stefan Schöberlein

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Relatively little manuscript material exists to definitively tie Walt Whitman to the bulk of the journalistic writing attributed to him, particularly the writing in the early years of his career. Because the vast majority of his early journalistic work was unsigned, attribution is most often based on the knowledge of Whitman’s involvement with a given paper, coupled with the identification of some sort of Whit- manic voice or tone in a given piece of writing. However, a writer’s style and tone are often affected by the form and context in which they are writing, meaning that Whitman’s journalistic voice is …

“This Damned Act”: Walt Whitman And The Fugitive Slave Law Of 1850, Kevin Mcmullen

Department of English: Faculty Publications

“THERE IS A SIN OF OMISSION often laid at [Walt] Whitman’s door by ardent humanitarians,” Clifton Furness wrote in 1928; “‘How is it,’ they say, ‘that a poet of democracy and humanitarianism did not express himself on the subjects of abolition, ill-treatment of slaves, the Missouri Compromise, and the national issues leading up to the Civil War?’”1 For all his expansiveness of both form and content, Whitman was indeed, on certain key matters, a poet of omission. As Kenneth M. Price, Martin Klammer, Ed Folsom, and others have demonstrated, the poet repeatedly grappled with issues of slavery and race in …

Bridging The Divide Through Graphic Novels: Teaching Non-Jews’ Holocaust Narratives To Jewish Students, Matt Reingold

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The following paper considers how integrating Holocaust graphic novels that prominently feature non-Jewish characters can be effective in introducing Jewish students to new perspectives on contemporary understandings of the Holocaust. Drawing on the results of recent studies about rising anti-Semitism and Jews' concerns for their safety, feelings of insularity are understandably becoming more pervasive within the Jewish community. The author argues that in order to combat the negative aspects of this entrenchment, Jewish students need to be introduced to thoughtful and complex narratives that relate to historical anti-Semitic incidents which also model ways of building relationships between the disparate communities …

"The Tyrant Father": Leslie Stephen And Masculine Influences On Virginia Woolf And Her Novel, To The Lighthouse, Anya Graubard

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

This paper examines the volatile yet nurturing relationship between Virginia Woolf and her father, Leslie Stephen. It specifically considers the effects of three male “tyrants” in Woolf’s childhood, including not only her father but also her two half-brothers, who abused her sexually. Analysis of the dynamics of these relationships provides insight into Woolf’s lifelong battle with mental illness and helps us to understand the complicated relationships she had as an adult with men and women.

In her letters, diaries, and memoir essays, Woolf reveals how she drew from her own experiences of childhood to write her most famous novel, To …