French and Francophone Literature Commons^™

Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel In A Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022., Emily Hall

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Timothy Bewes. Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age. Columbia U.P., 2022. 315 pp.

Fatou Diome: Une Création Entre Les Arts, Sada Niang

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

As she began her career in the 1980s, Fatou Diome inherited a rich tradition of literary texts and media productions, African cinema among them. Since she also hailed from a country known as "francophone", it is hardly surprising that her novels resonate with the style and narratives of African, French and other European writers. In this article, we propose to unveil a few of these artistic threads which may have informed and inspired Fatou Diome.

Niodior Ou L'Économie Du Texte Diomien, Mbaye Diouf

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

To a large extent, Niodior may be considered the main biographical and discursive referent of Fatou Diome's entire literary output, to date. In addition to being the birth place of the novelist, Niodior stands as the workshop of the Diomian novel. It is at once the wrestling arena of discourses of the self vs. others, the breeding ground of other "selves" and other possible others. As a consequence, Niodior, in Diome's novels, becomes a textual place which informs the self, the community, immigration and globalization through a semiotic of place. In this article, I argue that an application of geocriticism …

Agency And Political Engagement In Gide And Barrault's Post-War Theatrical Adaptation Of Kafka's The Trial, Yevgenya Strakovsky

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Agency and Political Engagement in Gide and Barrault's Post-war Theatrical Adaptation of Kafka's The Trial" Yevgenya Strakovsky considers the political themes of André Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault's Le Procès (The Trial, 1947), the first theatrical adaptation of Franz Kafka's Der Prozess (The Trial, 1914). Strakovsky demonstrates that Le Procès, written and staged in the immediate aftermath of World War II, levels a critique against the passive complicity of citizens in unjust persecution in both its script and its staging. The paper also considers the elements of Kafka's prose that lend themselves to …

(In)Authenticité: De Brûler À La Manière De La Glace, Elizabeth Jane Israel

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Green And The Red: A Novel By Armand Chauvel, Jenna Gersie

The Goose

Review of Armand Chauvel's The Green and the Red: A Novel.

Melancholic Mirages: Jules Verne's Vision Of A Saharan Sea, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

L’invasion de la mer (The Invasion of the Sea), Verne’s last novel to be published during his lifetime, would appear to be a paradoxical vision of French colonial involvement as it chronicles the attempts of the French army occupying Tunisia and Algeria to capture Tuareg leaders bent on pushing the French out of the Maghreb on the one hand, and thwarting an environmentally disastrous French project on the other. L’Invasion de la mer (The Invasion of the Sea) is a complex, if not melancholic vision of the limits of French expansionism, however. The real-life French army geographer François-Elie Roudaire and …

"I Recognized Myself In Her": Identifying With The Reader In George Eliot’S The Mill On The Floss And Simone De Beauvoir’S Memoirs Of A Dutiful Daughter, Laura Green

Laura Green

No abstract provided.

Les Particules Élémentaires: Self–Portrait, Gerald Prince

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Perhaps no French novel in the past fifteen years has received more critical attention than Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires and perhaps none has evoked stronger reactions with regard to the (literary) values it espouses and represents. This (self-)portrait, like any portrait, accents certain features more than others. It concentrates on refuting charges of nihilism, reactionaryism, sexism, and racism; it stresses Houellebecq’s novel’s attention to form and its thematic clarity as well as its determination to say something rather than nothing; and, through a consideration of its references to various media, arts, and texts, of its pet peeves and true …

Proust’S Innovative Vision Of Literature As Seen Through His Correspondence, Pascal Ifri

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Marcel Proust’s monumental correspondence is filled with information about the man Marcel Proust and his daily life, but reveals very little about his ideas on art and literature or about the novel that consumed his life, A la recherche du temps perdu. Most of his letters paint an extremely polite and even obsequious man overly concerned with pleasing his correspondents or with organizing his social life while others provide information about his personal life. When he mentions his writing, it is usually in connection with practical questions or information he is seeking. Very rarely does he discuss his novel …

Gérard Bessette (1920-2005): A Monstre Sacré In French Canadian Literature, Steven Urquhart

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article examines Gérard Bessette’s relative marginalization in French Canadian literature by means of rereading his first novel, La Bagarre (1958) in terms of its monstrous aesthetic and its rapport with subsequent novels, notably Le Semestre (1979). Bessette’s first novel allows us not only to understand the deviant nature of his aesthetic and its evolution, but also how it relates to his individualistic and transgressive position with the French Canadian literary institution in which he embodies a monstre sacré, an author and a character of sorts, who is at once revered and cursed.

Poor Old Horse: Tragicomedy And The Good Soldier, Matthew Christian

Senior Projects Spring 2011

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Writers, Rebels, And Cannibals: Léonora Miano’S Rendering Of Africa In L’Intérieur De La Nuit, Magali Compan

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Léonora Miano’s first novel L’Intérieur de la nuit received a laudatory critical reception when it was published by the French publishing house Plon in 2005. The novel’s depiction of an act of cannibalism in a village of a fictional African nation provides the turning point and central event of the narrative. The novel’s cannibalism has also been central to its critical reception in the west. While many Francophone works have employed and developed the metaphor of the act of cannibalism, Miano “cannibalizes” in her novel in unique ways that prove simultaneously problematic and productively revealing.

This article considers the interviews …

Représentations De La Mort Dans La Chine De Claudel Et De Verne, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Modiano And Sebald: Walking In Another's Footsteps , Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article studies Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997) and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz (2000) in conjunction with a contemporary literature of diaspora grounded in the extended aftermath of World War II. Both texts straddle fiction and testimonial accounts such as memoirs, letters, and video/audio recordings. In addition, both raise questions with which traditional historians seldom contend, even when they group these questions under the category of memory. What understanding of the recent past might these two narratives promote? What do they imply—individually or as a set—concerning the nature and function of the historical subjectivity that literature can convey? Each in its …

Agustín Gómez-Arcos, Eyes Open, Sharon G. Feldman

Latin American, Latino and Iberian Studies Faculty Publications

The last time I saw Agustin Gómez-Arcos was July of 1997. He was in the midst of an extended summer sojourn at the home of his friends Miguel and Pilar in Tarragona. I remember wandering with him through the streets of this Catalan coastal city, accompanied by Miguel and Pilar's young sons. With Agustín as our guide we toured the city's Roman ruins, and he showed us his favorite mosaics at the local archeological museum. Agustín, as I remember him, was filled with vitality, delighting in the everyday activities of summer, buying fresh strawberries and tomatoes at an outdoor market …

Jules Verne's Very Far West: America As Testing Ground In Les 500 Millions De La Bégum, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

[First Paragraph] In his famous interview with the American journalist Robert H. Sherard in 1894, Jules Verne, nearing the end of his life, regretted not being able to see America one last time. "I should have liked to have gone to Chicago this year," he lamented, "but in the state of my health [...] it was quite impossible. I do so love America and the American," he continued, "As you are writing for America, be sure to tell them that if they love me- as I know they do, for I receive thousands of letters every year from the States- …

Le Célibataire Invisible: Solitude Et Fantastique Dans Le Secret De Wilhelm Storitz, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

Anne Macvicar Grant, poétesse écossaise vivant à New York à la fin du dix-huitième siècle, concevait les célibataires en termes d’êtres « qui passaient à travers la société comme des fantômes silencieux, et qui, de toute évidence, se considéraient assez supérieurs aux autres » (“passing in and out [of society] like silent ghosts and seeming to feel themselves superior to the world.”¹ De même, Jean Borie identifie le célibataire par rapport à son invisibilité aux yeux d’un monde qui ne cesse de le rejeter : « Le célibataire, » conclut Borie, «quoique gris muraille et presque invisible …

L'Espace Du Célibataire Fantastique: Le Secret De Wilhelm Storitz, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Theorizing The Role Of The Intermediary In Postcolonial (Con)Text: Driss Chraïbi's Une Enquête Au Pays , Anjali Prabhu

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The paper is a study of the role of the "intermediary" as exemplified by Inspector Ali in Driss Chraïbi's novel Une enquête au pays. This reading traces his role as the intermediary through a close reading of the construction of this space — between higher levels of administration, implying the more elite strata in Moroccan society, and the Berber peasants who live isolated in the mountains, struggling to subsist. Ali has claims to both of these locations: to the former through education and his position in the police force and to the latter through ancestry and the culture of …

When I Means We: A Reading Of School In French Caribbean Apprenticeship Novels , Pascale De Souza

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While most critics agree that the quest for identity which underlies much of post-colonial literature is illustrated in the thematic approaches adopted by writers, this study further the argument by suggesting that it also conditions writers' selection of narrative strategies. In its representation of subjectivity in process, the apprenticeship novel seems to offer an enticing model of self-completion. This narrative strategy, however, presents particular complexities when used to portray coming of age in a society divided along ethnic lines. Simon Gikandi argues with regards to the Caribbean that the probability of a quest for identity reaching fruition is nil, but …

Christian Oster's Picnic, Warren Motte

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

With eight novels published by the Editions de Minuit in the last decade, Christian Oster has established himself as one of the most interesting figures in a cohort of new French writers who are gradually redefining the novel as literary form…

He Said, She Said: A Feminist Approach To Teaching The Twentieth-Century Novel In The Twenty-First Century, Elizabeth Richardson Viti

French Faculty Publications

The question of women's relationship to the literary canon is still pertinent today and is particularly significant for those of us who are both guided by feminist pedagogy and constrained by departmental limitations. How do we give an overview of the novel without either diminishing the importance of certain male novelists or eliminating female writers altogether? The author suggest that a thematic approach in which pairs of texts make explicit two different gender perspectives is useful. This approach underscores the notion that gender informs writing as well as reading and, equally significant, introduces feminist theory as a tool for literary …

Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot And Chatterton's Poet , Leonard R. Koos

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores the problematic nature of selfhood in the detective genre as established by Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) and most recently reformulated in two metaphysical detective novels, Jean Echenoz's Cherokee (1983) and Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton (1987). Poe's detective Auguste Dupin is described as having a "Bi-Part Soul," which permits him to vacate himself in order to construct the narrative solution to a crime. This duality, in the postmodern detective novel, is transformed into an irrevocable dislocation of the subject. Cherokee's onomastic devalorization of the story's characters and simulation of the human subject in the …

Cardinal's The Words To Say It: The Words To Reproduce Mother, Eilene Hoft-March

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Words to Say it, an autobiographical novel by Algerian-born Frenchwoman Marie Cardinal, earned praise for the accuracy with which it documents a classic psychoanalysis. Quickly sketched, the plot seems to suggest that the separation from an overpowering mother is effected by paternal language and phallic law—the normal, normative psychic itinerary of the human subject. In its reconsideration of the Oedipal, this essay explores Irigaray's idea of the ambiguities of separation from mother and the possibility that the story of (feminine) subjectivity begins with the mother, begins with affiliation and affirmation even as it speaks of separateness. From this …

From The Sea Wall To The Lover : Prostitution And Exotic Parody, Pascale Bécel

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This analysis of the two novels highlights Marguerite Duras' equivocal stance with regard to colonial Indochina where she grew up at the beginning of the century. As The Lover rewrites The Sea Wall in the autobiographical mode, the emphasis shifts from an explicit denunciation of colonialism and an implicit subversion of the Lotilian novel, to a parody of exotic themes and narratives. However, by focusing on the two young protagonists' construction of themselves as femmes fatales and prostitutes, this discussion reveals that the politics of gender and race remain at odds in Duras' fictional autobiographies. The cultural other (qua a …

Autor De L'Excentricité De Phileas Fogg Et Du Captaine Nemo, Peter Schulman

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications

[Premier paragraphe] Pour l'excentrique "décadent" du XIX siècle, le mariage de la modernité avec la technique aboutissait à une crise de névrose et de caprice emblématique de la retraite (Des Esseintes à Fontenay-les-Roses dans Á rebours de Huysmans) ou, comme c'était le cas d'Anatole Baju, le fondateur de la revue Le Décadent, à l'avant-garde de son temps, Phileas Fogg et le capitaine Nemo sont plutôt représantatifs d'une synergie des notions d'innocence et de fantaisie de l'excentricité anglaise avec les inventions et les appropriations de territoire de la France au XIXe siècle.

Border Crossings In Maríe Redonnet's Splendid [Seaside] Hôtel, Elizabeth A. Mazza-Anthony

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maríe Redonnet crosses previously established boundaries in Splendid Hôtel and Seaside. Her writing flows across traditional literary genres as she revisits certain motifs, characters, and situations in her novel and play. In addition to crossing the border between the novel and theater, she echoes the works of other authors—specifically Rimbaud and Duras. Moreover, within a particular text Redonnet erases subject boundaries. That is to say, her characters are not individuals; their uniqueness is washed away by a continual ebb and flow of common characteristics and traits. By creating such fluid personae, Redonnet captures the societal homogeneity that is symptomatic …

The Conspiracy Of The Miscellaneous In Foucault's Pendulum, Ken Kirkpatrick

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Like Name of the Rose, Foucault 's Pendulum grows out of and comments on Umberto Eco's theoretical work. Eco's decision to turn to a conspiracy, rather than a straight detective format for his second novel fits with his recent concern about how interpretative communities function in a period of divisive, diffuse critical theory. Yet Foucault's Pendulum does not merely amplify or dramatize his position; rather, it undermines it by becoming excessively involved in generating conspiracy. It is a satire in which the thing satirized proves more interesting and engaging than the satirical position. Nevertheless, Eco does raise concerns about …

Colonialism, Enlightenment, Castration: Writing, Narration And Legibility In L'Etranger, Larry W. Riggs, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This analysis combines the issue of "narratability" with some psychoanalytic insights, focusing first on the key incident in Meursault's story when he involves himself in writing. Meursault inadvertently inscribes himself in a conflictual drama when he writes a letter for Raymond Sintès. The writing of the letter prefigures both Meursault's later taking up of the gun with which he will kill an Arab and his inexorable evolution toward a situation that makes him capable of narrating and being narrated. It seals him into the colonial world of language. To become capable of narrating is both to become a colonist and …