French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Figures Of Radical Absence: Blanks And Voids In Theory, Literature, And The Arts, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

Although post-structuralism highlighted the importance of what is offstage, lost, forgotten, hidden or discarded, silent or silenced, the poetics and politics of absence (much like its ethics and aesthetics) have rarely been discussed across media and disciplines. This book proposes the concept of ‘radical absence’ to describe a certain tradition of resistance to ontology, predication, and representation, contesting their reliance on a metaphysics of presence. Apophatic speech, empty signifiers, and figural voids are some of the figures through which radical absence becomes apparent with unprecedented intensity in twentieth-century theory, literature, film, and the arts. Phantasmatic and outrageous, such figures play …

Spiritual And Material Boundaries In Old French Verse: Contemplating The Walls Of The Earthly Paradise, Jacob Abell

Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

The Earthly Paradise was a vibrant symbol at the heart of medieval Christian geographies of the cosmos. As humanity’s primal home now lost through the sins of Adam of Eve, the Earthly Paradise figured prominently in Old French tales of lands beyond the mundane world. This study proposes a fresh look at the complex roles played by the Earthly Paradise in three medieval French poems: Marie de France’s The Purgatory of St. Patrick, Benedeit’s Voyage of Saint Brendan the Abbot, and Guillaume de Lorris’s The Romance of the Rose. By examining the literary, cultural, and artistic components that informed each …

Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Marriage Stories” analyzes connections between novelistic form, marriage law reform, and portrayals of virtue in texts by, among others, Stéphanie de Genlis, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie Cottin, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Sophie Doin, George Sand, Anne Brontë, and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that the novel was less concerned with abolishing or even critiquing marriage than it was with delineating “good” from “bad” unions, which in turn reflects contemporary discussions about marriage’s role in response to burgeoning social movements. My first chapter considers the epistolary novel in relation to the idea of spouses existing as “one body” culturally …

Beirut On The Seine: Rebuilding Lebanese Identity After The Scourge Of War, Soumaya Al Jarrah

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

The current situation of Lebanon is difficult. The country is sinking into a deep economic, financial, political, and social crisis, which has become worse since 2019 and especially after the explosion of the Beirut port in August 2020. As a result, several Lebanese decided to leave the country. This situation is partly a result of the civil war that took place between 1975 and 1990.

Indeed, the Lebanese war leaves an important mark on the literary works that have Lebanon as a setting. Authors express their desire to explore in their works the traumas, consequences and effect of these conflicts …

Writing As A Mean To Rehabilitate The Traumatized Self In Vivre Vite By Brigitte Giraud, Nadia Naboulsi Iskandarani

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

In her novel Vivre vite, Brigitte Giraud writes the story of a disaster that obsesses her: on June 22, 1999; her companion Claude died in a motorcycle accident in Lyon. This vehicle, a powerful and dangerous Honda, was prohibited on Japanese territory and was reserved for export to Europe. It did not belong to Claude, but to the writer's brother. She was only able to return to the drama that inhabited her in 2022, that is to say twenty-three years after Claude's death. The reader cannot help but wonder about this long silence and why this return to the minutiae …

Exile: Heartbreak, Resilience And Visceral Attachment To Origins In The Novel A Crier Dans Les Ruins By Alexandra Koszelyk, Hanane Abou Nasreddine

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

In the study, we propose to question the pragmatics of exile in the literary work A crier dans les ruines by Alexandra Koszelyk. This novel immerses us in post-disaster Ukraine. It tells the initiatory, poetic and melancholic journey of a young woman who must forge her identity on the history of her country that we are trying to stifle. The novel puts on stage people uprooted by force; some, attached to their roots, remain close to the irradiated zone; while the others, including the heroine Léna, decide to flee the place definitively to rebuild themselves elsewhere. However, despite the exile, …

Memory For Oblivion In Wajdi Mouawad’S Play Mère, Christelle Stephan-Hayek

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

“Keeping the memory of past events would contribute to a better knowledge of hazards and to the prediction of future events. » (Reghezza-Zitt, Benitez & Devès, 2020, p. 1) Remembering is undoubtedly the best of mentors. But forgetting would also be a precious ally in the perpetual and daily struggle that is life. Indeed, “it is essential that the brain forgets the unimportant details to focus on what really matters, in our daily decision-making.” (Richards & Frankland, 2017, p. 1083)

What if we remembered to better accept the tragedy? What if writing helped us to understand it better? What if …

Trauma And Rehabilitation In A Paradoxical Social And Cultural Context, In The African Equation By Yasmina Khadra, Badia Mazboudi

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

In the journey described by Yasmina Khadra in The African equation, the author raises the question of the difficult rehabilitation of two ethnically different groups: on one hand, the main characters of the novel, Westerners (German and French) taken hostage off the coast of Sudan by African mercenaries, and on the other hand, the African populations savagely relocated from their lands to makeshift camps. Faced with this emotional shock and this traumatic act, the reactions of the two groups are not the same: post-traumatic depression, social isolation, pain, whereas the Africans, destitute and wandering from one place to another, seem …

Self-Reconstruction : Between Identity And Interpersonal Relationships, Abdelfettah Nacer Idrissi

BAU Journal - Society, Culture and Human Behavior

We live and go through situations and circumstances that hurt us or bring us joy and happiness. However, moments of crisis seem to be the most important moments in our lives when we question ourselves. We question our personality, our identity, our relationships with ourselves or with others. We carry, as Jacques Salomé said so well, “the scars of our wounds. It is up to us to honor them, because they also say that we have survived and that they have made us stronger and more lucid.

We will rely on this quote to elaborate our problematic on the self-reconstruction …

Discussing Yasmina Khadra’S Novel The Sirens Of Baghdad In The Upper Secondary Classroom To Promote Intercultural Learning, Karl Ågerup

Essays in Education

Based on interviews with four teachers who engaged in discussions about Yasmina Khadra's novel The Sirens of Baghdad with a total of 92 students, this article explores the potential of using fictional narratives to achieve Global Citizenship-related goals in upper secondary education. The novel, which portrays the journey of a young aspiring Al Qaeda terrorist in Iraq, emerged as a response to the increasing need in the Western world to mitigate intercultural tensions following the September 11 attacks. The article addresses the novel's capacity to promote intercultural understanding while acknowledging practical challenges such as intense emotions in the classroom, potential …

The Labé Question: A New Stylometric Analysis, Ryan Schmid

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In 2006, a theory was put forward concerning sixteenth-century poet Louise Labé and her work- both her prose and her poetry. Mireille Huchon, in her 2006 study Louise Labé, une créature de papier, claims that Labé’s work, and indeed a large part of her identity itself, was a fabrication invented by several poets of the 1500s. Huchon describes Labé as a “mystery” and an “enigma,” noting the relatively scant biographical details that we know of Labé’s life (Huchon, pp. 7-11). Perhaps needless to say, this claim stirred up a bit of controversy- many reacted negatively to Huchon’s thesis, not only …

Le Chemin Détourné, Ailie Coffey

University Honors Theses

Le Chemin détourné is an original fairy tale in French about Melisende and Olivier Fournier. One day, Melisende disappears on her way home. Although her disappearance is a mystery, she was taken prisoner by the fairies as revenge against her mother. Her father Jehan and brother Olivier are very distressed, Jehan goes out after her immediately but, worried about Olivier’s safety, asks him not to go out after his sister. On the third night that she is gone, Olivier decides to go out to look for her anyways, and even though he is terrified to leave home, he sets out …

Présence Francophone, Numéro 100

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Sembène Ousmane, Un Cinéaste En Guerre, Léthicia Obono Ngou-Milama

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

If he is mobilized, enlisted in the corps of “Senegalese Riflemen” of the French army during the Second World War, the war inflicts a deep wound to Sembène Ousmane. This shocking and traumatic experience will tirelessly inspire his literary and cinematographic work. With his camera and his acerbic gaze, the Senegalese filmmaker will address the tragic fate of African soldiers and will restore the indelible imprint of war and colonialism on Africa in his films Niaye (1964), Emitaï (1971) and Camp de Thiaroye (1988).

Hybridité Et Ironie Dans Le Mandat D’Ousmane Sembène, Florence Leca Mercier

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Hybridity is the discursive pattern which best expresses the postcolonial experience. Given the interweaving of the aesthetic and the political projects in Sembène’s work, we would like to show that stylistic hybridity in the short story Le mandat emerges in three fields, lexical, enunciative and intertextual, and generates irony, thus connecting aesthetics and politics. In terms of lexicon, hybridity means a combination of idioms or registers; as far as enunciation is concerned, hybridity meets the “discours mixtes” as defined by Laurence Rosier; finally, we can see an intertextual hybridity: Le mandat is built on an underlying folktale structure which relevance …

Éditorial, Jean Ouedraogo

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Les Actes Révolutionnaires De La Gent Féminine Dans Les Bouts De Bois De Dieu D’Ousmane Sembène, Assane Ndiaye

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

As a committed writer, Ousmane Sembène reminds the critical struggles led by women during the railway workers’ strike with the intention of taking part in the establishment of more fair world. The social commitment of the man originated from Ziguinchor is supported by various feminine figures embodying the ideology of the Senegalese novelist about freedom of speech. In order to show that Sembène is a revolutionary, we focused on ten militants in Les bouts de bois de Dieu. Through a sociocritical approach, this article has tried to reveal women’s activism.

Index (N° 100)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Front Matter And Table Of Contents (N° 100)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

De Marseille À Moscou : Retour Sur Le Contexte Politique Des Années De Formation D’Ousmane Sembène (1946-1962), Gabrielle Chomentowsky

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article seeks to reconsider through some archival documents and testimonies the first years of political and artistic formation of the writer-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, from his years in Marseille to his first trips to the Soviet Union in 1958 and 1962.

Écritures Dans Les Films D’Ousmane Sembène : Enjeux Linguistiques Et Réception Cinématographique, Louis Ndong

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The article deals with the written elements in Ousmane Sembène’s films. I point out all aspects relating to the written canal in Sembène’s cinematographic productions (opening and end titles, signs, mentions on cars, etc.). The interest of the study lies in the functions assigned to the written canal in interplay with the dialogues and sounds, but also in the use of languages in writings and the challenges that are linked to it. Through the analysis, we can observe written elements in Wolof as well as in French, two languages which play an important role in Sembène’s cinematographic aesthetics.

La Diffusion En France Des Longs Métrages D’Ousmane Sembène, Claude Forest

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Ousmane Sembène is one of the French-speaking South Saharan African directors who has been the most prolific, but also, with Idrissa Ouédraogo, the one who has been the most broadcast in French cinemas during his lifetime. Although many of his films were favorably received by critics, they met with very little enthusiasm among French viewers, its recognition by certain cinematic circles and its aesthetic aura being thus incomparable with its commercial success. The analysis points to Ousmane Sembène’s real strategy, which adopted a strategy of international recognition by festivals, not by foreign audiences.

Logique Mathématique Dans Le Docker Noir D’Ousmane Sembène, Pierre Ndemby Mamfoumby

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

The present article examines Le docker noir taking into account the narrative trajectory of Diaw Falla as well as the triangular relationship between Diaw-Catherine-Ginette which inscribes the novel in what we call a "double negative narrative". The narrative, through intertextual contamination with the story of Sirius, the slave trader, not only translates the separation/loss of Senegalese symbols and identity on the other side of the Atlantic, but also allows us to look at the novel as an indication of inequality, a place of sometimes impossible transmission and reconciliation with African historical memory through slavery. Studying the narrative from a mathematical …

Du Dialogue Au Dialogisme : Enjeux Du Style Dans Le Mandat, Fortuné Nkonene-Benha

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This article takes an analytical look at the Ousmane Sembène’s novelistic prose: precisely he proposes a poetic and stylizing reading of Le mandat. First grasping the textual structure of this classical work from dialogue, we show its characteristics (psittacism of the characters, polemical exchanges under apparent dialectical interactions, presence of epistolary exchanges). In a second movement, the enunciative heterogeneity laid bare enables us to confirm a cultural hypotext that deeply works on the Sembenian literary language, putting it on a popular invoice. Finally, the analysis succeeds in identifying the “literal novel” as an aesthetic category and scriptural parade that …

Chronologie D’Ousmane Sembène : Trajectoire, Oeuvres Et Contextes, Edoardo Cagnan

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

This chronology is based on several research works, as well as on several other chronologies. Conceived as a pedagogical tool, its aim is to show Sembène’s trajectory in the literary and cinematographic fields. The novelist-filmmaker’s life and work are linked to other political and cultural events that have marked Senegal, sub-Saharan Africa, the black world, and the French-speaking world.

Livres Reçus (N° 100)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Abstracts (N° 100)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Parties Annexes (N° 100)

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

Présentation, Mbaye Diouf, Edoardo Cagnan

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

No abstract provided.

"Oiez Mon Aventure": Cuer D'Acier's Nonbinary Gender In Perceforest, Brooke Heidenreich Findley

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The character of Cuer d’Acier, or Heart of Steel, in the 15^th century French romance Perceforest, has a complex gender identity that does not fit easily into a gender binary. First appearing as the courtly maiden Neronés, the character later lives and is read as a man. The romance uses both “he” and “she” pronouns to refer to Heart of Steel, often using both in the space of a single paragraph or even a single sentence. While Heart of Steel is again dressed as a woman at the end of the romance, the character’s own actions and statements …