French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …

Opposing Strands: The Mediterranean As Site Of Cultural Conflict Around 1900, Neil F. Mcwilliam

Artl@s Bulletin

From antiquity to the Third Republic, this article follows visual and literary representations that measured space, time and ideological oppositions that spawned an image of the Mediterranean as an area of transmission and cultural tension. It focuses on three theorists: the head of Action Française, Charles Maurras; the novelist Louis Bertrand; and critic and cultural impresario Joachim Gasquet. Each contributed to the formation of an image of the Mediterranean basin as the birthplace of European heritage and a battlefield in a struggle against the forces of democracy and cultural hybridization.

Learning To Eat French, John Westbrook

Faculty Journal Articles

Ferguson’s Accounting for Taste reveals a gap in our understanding: How did French culinary discourse move beyond the bourgeois sphere in which it emerged in the nineteenth century? Picking up on her comparison of the Proustian synthesis of regional and national culinary culture in the Recherche to the project of national identity creation in the Third Republic’s best-selling textbook, Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, this essay argues that the culinary model Ferguson describes was in fact widely disseminated through mass primary education under the Third Republic. Examining an overlooked corpus of primary school readers and textbooks, I …

Pour Une Littérature Critique, Warren Motte

Zea E-Books Collection

Ce livre prend comme objet la littérature critique, c'est-à-dire, des ouvrages conçus dans un esprit critique, qui invitent leurs lectrices et lecteurs—soit de façon ouverte, soit de façon couverte, subtile et nuancée—à s'engager avec la textualité de manière critique. Cette dynamique, suspendue entre production et réception, est hypothétique et fragile; elle est difficile à théoriser de façon satisfaisante; elle est ardue à tracer en se servant d'une stratégie lectorale conventionnelle. Pourtant, c'est précisément ce phénomène articulé et réciproque qui fournit à cette sorte de textualité une mobilité tout à fait rafraîchissante, mobilité qui rend possible la signification littéraire sur un …

Stitching The Fragmented: 360° Videos For Language And Culture Learning, Melanie Peron, Victoria Karasic

Frameless

Emerging technologies present new opportunities for students to bridge the distance of space and time, allowing them to relate to a difficult period in history: the Shoah. Over the last few years, students in a French history and culture course have participated in a series of digital projects ranging in nature from mapping to 3D modeling, with the latest being student-created 360° videos in order to fill in the blanks left by time in memory. These digital humanities projects allow students to walk the footsteps of survivors, vanished victims, and period writers in modern-day Paris by visiting physical places studied …

L’Importance De La Compréhension Du Texte Ecrit En Classe De Français Langue Etrangère, Samer Hamouri

Jerash for Research and Studies Journal مجلة جرش للبحوث والدراسات

La lecture reste toujours une façon de se faire plaisir et de se cultiver mais aussi une compétence nécessaire et fondamentale pour apprendre une langue étrangère. Les textes écrits sont par ailleurs un moyen de communication dans la langue cible.

Nous essayons de définir les notions de base comme la lecture, les principes didactiques de la compréhension des langues et la compréhension écrite. Nous montrons dans notre article les objectifs à atteindre pour enseigner la compréhension des textes; en définir les objectifs linguistiques, formatifs, culturels et interculturels.

Notre article s’articule autour de l’importance de la compréhension des textes écrits dans …

Intolerable Histories And Imperfect Narratives: Nationhood, Identity, And The Integrity Of Law In Post-Vichy France And Beyond, Kaela S. Holmen

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The principal aim of this thesis project is to examine the socio-legal context of the Vichy regime in World War II France, and to provide an understanding of how that context informed, and continues to inform, the integrity of French nationhood. With Ernest Renan’s oubli serving as a framework for the solidification of nationhood, I will demonstrate that the betrayals to French law and custom that were committed in an attempt to right the wrongs of the Vichy resulted in an imperfect forgetting, and ultimately, a more fragmented national sense of self. I contend that this imperfect oubli resulting from …

Translatio Materiae: Spenser, The Humanists, And A Poetics Of Matter, Victoria Florio Pipas

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

In this paper, I propose that sixteenth-century humanist descriptions of Rome’s decay, together with paradigms of translatio imperii and studii, shaped Edmund Spenser’s poetic conceptualization of matter. I identify a new translatio in Spenser’s corpus, translatio materiae—matter’s movement or change—born from Spenser’s contact with Joachim du Bellay’s sonnet sequence, Les Antiquitez de Rome (1553). Translatio materiae runs through Spenser’s corpus as depicted matter’s resurrection from states of decay into material afterlives as narrative object or poetic device. Where early humanists, with recourse to the division between earthly mutability and heavenly permanence, lament Rome, Spenser favors matter’s potential for …

Présentation, Josias Semujanga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Sociopoétique De Littératures Francophones En 3d, Désiré Nyela

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

What is a Francophone text? Every scholar of French-language literatures is confronted with this question which involves two issues: legitimization and specification. The reflection of the question of legitimization emerges from the need to come out of the shadow of metropolitan French literature; examining the question of specification is necessary because, although a “Francophone text” may leave its readers curious, bewildered, suspicious or even contemptuous, it must be regarded and valued as a literary work whose cogs and milestones must be correctly assessed. This article aims to lay the foundations for a critical approach to Francophone literatures which considers their …

Index (N° 96/97)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Abstracts (N° 96/97)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Lieux Fictifs, Réelles Critiques : Kaveena De Boubacar Boris Diop, Morgan Faulkner

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article examines the relationship between invention and reality in Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel, Kaveena (2006). The author intertwines the postcolonial story of a fictional African country with that of the real history of the continent. The fictional city of Maren and the region of Nimba are described in relation to Cameroun, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, among other concrete locations. Invented characters and those known by the reader (Patrice Lumumba, Idi Amin, etc.) both occupy space in the text. What narrative practices allow this association of the fictional story and historic details? What are the effects? How does this mix …

Parcours De Lectures D’Hier À Aujourd’Hui : Trois Siècles De Littératures Francophones, Christiane Ndiaye

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Forty years ago, the francophone literatures of Africa and the Caribbean were still taught as “emerging” literatures having allegedly entered the international literary scene with the Negritude movement. Since then, critical perspectives have evolved, considerably modifying this way of presenting the history of francophone literatures of the South. Today it is rather the history of a constant questioning of the various pernicious boundaries drawn since colonial times, a history of constantly renewed inventiveness. I retrace some facts of interest retained from my own continuous discovery of this multifaced territory, starting with the still little-known history of Haitian literature of the …

Qu’Est-Ce Qu’Un Texte Francophone? Reconstruire Une Histoire Oubliée: Bakary Et Lucie... Qui Est Le « Nègre » ?, Eloise A. Brière

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

After World War I, writing by France’s colonial subjects began disrupting the French literary field. Among the first in this early literary series, Force-Bonté (1926) by Bakary Diallo was tainted from the start because it was associated with Lucie Cousturier. It was speculated/surmised she was Diallo’s “godmother” or ghost-writer, since she was known for having taught French to the Senegalese soldiers billeted near her home during the war. Changes within the contexts available to critics since Lebel’s L’Afrique Occidentale dans la littérature française, the first work devoted to African literature, as well as new information studied here, enable a clearer …

La Critique Des Littératures Francophones Et Quelques-Unes De Ses Fictions « Modernes » Et Culturalistes : L’Exemplarité De La Fiction Haïtienne Contemporaine, Yolaine Parisot

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Critics of Francophone literature from the south have long Critics of Francophone literature from the South have long attracted several clichés or fictions around notions of nation, oral tradition, modernity, and culture. For a long time, they reproduced the hierarchies of Western literary genres and the exclusion of pop culture. However, contemporary critical discourses on literary fiction and fictionality in the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian Ocean literatures tend to renew this culturalist perspective. Heir to both the critical discourse of the 19th century and the local genre of Lodyans, ultra-contemporary Haitian fiction offers an epistemic exemplarity that undermines …

Présence Francophone, Numéro 96/97

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Écritures Génésiaques : Violences, Ruptures Et Recommencement Dans Le Roman Africain Francophone, Isaac Bazié

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This study analyzes the writing of crises in African novels and makes following observation: the novels listed do not represent crises and ruptures to obey a need for mimicry and authenticity in the representation through the art of real violence. The main objective of these novels by staging African crises and violence is rather to reflect a tension: that of a charged present situation, a real historical or imaginary crisis, and the equally important situation of a genesis, a new beginning, the terms of which sometimes remain to be defined.

Désexualiser Le Texte Féminin Francophone?, Mbaye Diouf

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This study shows that a recurring criticism of Francophone literatures often borrows from the essentialist theses of colonial anthropology, and that tendency is even stronger when it comes to the novels by Francophone women writers. The overwhelming majority of critical studies devoted to the subject continue to consider their works as the simple feminist discourses or even the naive testimonies. However, this criticism forgets that since the 1990s, Francophone women’s writing has been part of a world literature that articulates deep postcolonial mutations, both generic and discursive, and reassesses the sexual etiology of fictional societies. This is the subject of …

Combat Esthétique Et Mémoire Militante: Le Double Engagement De Boubacar Boris Diop, Serigne Seye

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In this article, I argue that in Boubacar Boris Diop’s work, the articulation between aesthetic experimence and writing from memory confers on his character-narrators the functions of “écrivain-écrivain” and “écrivain porte-parole”. This sheds light on both aspects of the Senegalese’s author commitment through his main characters, as most of them are writers who themselves show the mechanism of creation of the novel. This text is resulting from a writing resolutely writing focused turned towards its own materiality. This article aims to demonstrate that the representation of the memory in Diop’s fiction is doubly militant. It testifies …

Rosélie Thibaudin Et L’Expérience Picturale Dans Histoire De La Femme Cannibale De Maryse Condé, Kanaté Dahouda

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Maryse Condé is a renowned French Caribbean writer from Guadeloupe. She is the author of numerous novels, including The Story of the Cannibal Woman. This novel follows the life of Rosélie Thibaudin and portrays her obsession with being part of the gallery of famous artists like Modigliani, Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta. As she strives to fulfill her quest for artistic recognition and freedom, Roselie faces social constraints that shape the nature of her relationships with her family and Stephen, as well as with her colleagues and students at the academy of the arts called La América. Through …

Parties Annexes (N° 96/97)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Front Matter And Table Of Contents (N° 96/97)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Présence Ou Absence Africaine, Françoise Naudillon

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Among the institutions created in the post-war years, Présence Africaine (1947) and Le Monde diplomatique (1954) share in many ways the same vision of the contours of the world to come, between decolonization and Christianity. At the heart of debates from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two publications animate at the same time as they organize the intellectual life of four decades in France and in the former colonies. Between ideological fraternities, Third World or Pan-Africanism, anti-imperialism or anti-colonialism, the journalists of Le Monde and the editors of Présence Africaine have pursued a dialogue made up of collaborations, connivance …

Penser La Perte Radicale Dans L’Atlantique Sud, Christian Uwe

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The metaphor of the mangrove captures an aesthetic issue common to works of Glissant and Condé: how to write the geography of a radical loss and an unexpected digenesis. As Drabinski (2019) remarks, the Glissantian mangrove is the paradoxical place of an aesthetic of the abyss, which tries to capture the fragile birth instead of a loss without traces. Condé, for her part, makes the mangrove the symbol of a silent writing (Lachman, 2014) as well as of a land trapped in its own alienated history. As a recurring image in Caribbean literature – to the point of problematizing, most …

Le Mal Politique Dans La Nuit De L’Imoko De Boubacar Boris Diop, Kodjo Attikpoé

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

According to his credo that African literature remains fundamentally inseparable from its initial political goals, Boubacar Boris Diop constantly denounces and criticizes ceaselessly African political issues in his works. His collection of short stories, La nuit de l’Imoko (2013), deals primarily with the question of political evil and thus bears witness to the author’s literary project. This article examines some aspects of this question in La nuit de l’Imoko, in particular the representation of the President and the intervention of political power in the cultural world. Boubacar Boris Diop’s short stories are certainly devoted to tackle so-called African evil, …

L’Humour Didactique Dans Guelwaar D’Ousmane Sembène, Anthère Nzabatsinda

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

In Guelwaar, film and novel by Ousmane Sembène (1923- 2007), humor often makes you smile; and when it is comical, it is ironic and parodic. These aspects highlight unusual or contradictory aspects, even serious situations. The aim of this caustic humor is to correct negative situations, especially to denounce the defects of hypocrisy and intolerance. The humorous strategy in Guelwaar is part of the Senegalese filmmaker-novelist’s perspective of a didactic project aimed at the whole of Africa.

Comme Un Goût De Néo-Polar : Crimes Et État Criminel Dans La Fiction De Théo Ananissoh, Sélom Komlan Gbanou

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The work of Théo Ananissoh is a quest for meaning: the meaning of life, the meaning of political embezzlement and, above all, the meaning of these deep motives which affect social and ontological consciousness. His aesthetic choice orients him towards detective novels with characters explicitly involved in machinery and political machinations, through which he aims to show, with the help of insightful but detached observation and an investigation aimed only at providing information, exactly how the state poaches/interferes in the lives of its citizens. This article deals with detective novels as depictions of criminal intrigue in the postcolonial state in …

Discours Critique Du Polar D’Afrique Francophone : Formes Et Enjeux, Adama Togola

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Since the emergence of detective fiction in African francophone novel in the 1990s, many critical studies have been devoted to it. However, there are a few stereotypes and themes that a certain critique of generic obedience brings to light when it comes to analyzing the aesthetic and epistemological value of the African thriller. Some of these studies are in fact limited to the ways in which many writers adapt general aesthetic conventions of this genre, without looking at the ways these authors innovate in their works. This study questions the foundations of critical discourse on African detective fiction and shows …

Comment Lire Un Texte Francophone? La Traversée De La Mangrove De Maryse Condé, Josias Semujanga

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This study is structed around three components. It begins with a brief reflection on the paradox of the existence in university education of two literary institutions – French literature and Francophone literatures – whose works are nevertheless written in the same language (French). Then the article proposes a transcultural and transnational approach to overcome such dichotomy – France and French-speaking peripheries – by a methodology based on the principle of unity in the diversity of the elements of the texts from three aspects: literary genre, language/speech, and intertextuality. Finally, this reflection is based on the study of the novel Traversée …