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Articles 1 - 22 of 22
Full-Text Articles in French and Francophone Literature
Ari J. Blatt And Edward Welch, Editors. France In Flux: Space, Territory, And Contemporary Culture. Liverpool Up, 2019., Suzanne Black
Ari J. Blatt And Edward Welch, Editors. France In Flux: Space, Territory, And Contemporary Culture. Liverpool Up, 2019., Suzanne Black
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Review of Ari J. Blatt and Edward Welch, editors. France in Flux: Space, Territory, and Contemporary Culture. Liverpool UP, 2019. xiii + 221 pp.
L'Imaginaire À L'Épreuve Du Carcéral : Le Pouvoir Des Mots Dans Cette Fille-Là De Marssa Bey Et La Voyeuse Interdite De Nina Bouraoui, Chedli Jedidi
L'Imaginaire À L'Épreuve Du Carcéral : Le Pouvoir Des Mots Dans Cette Fille-Là De Marssa Bey Et La Voyeuse Interdite De Nina Bouraoui, Chedli Jedidi
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
The article analyzes the (re)configuration of space towards female resistance in Cette fille-là by Marssa Bey and La voyeuse interdite by Nina Bouraoui. The two authors portray deviant female characters who refuse to be caught up in the social enclave governed by patriarchal law. In these works, the assertion of identity is interdependent on the unfolding of space which opts for denouncing or liberating the voice, the body and the feminine individuality. By convening the imagination along with the female memory, these marginal identities engage in bending the confinement and freeing the speech. Clothed in presumed fragility and weakness, this …
« Une Maison Abandonné, C'Est Comme Une Histoire Inachevée ». Espace, Corps Et Recit Dans La Nuit Sacrée De Tahar Ben Jelloun, Clarisse Barbier
« Une Maison Abandonné, C'Est Comme Une Histoire Inachevée ». Espace, Corps Et Recit Dans La Nuit Sacrée De Tahar Ben Jelloun, Clarisse Barbier
Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature
We will analyze the relationship between body, space, and narration, three major concepts of La nuit sacrée that are intertwined in their value of potential means of alienation but also of liberation and of power. We will first examine the main closed spaces and their influence on Zahra's body and narration. Then we will analyze the occurrences of bodies to determine to which extent they inform of Zahra's progression - or regression - in her quest. Finally, Zahra's psychological evolution will be studied: Zahra finally finds her liberation through the somatization of her past, not its rejection, and through speech.
In And Out Of Place: Geographies Of Revolt In Camus's La Peste, Erin Tremblay Ponnou-Delaffon
In And Out Of Place: Geographies Of Revolt In Camus's La Peste, Erin Tremblay Ponnou-Delaffon
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
From Roland Barthes to Shoshana Felman, some of the most insightful readings of Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague) have focused on its historical dimension. In contrast, this article attends to less studied spatial representations, bringing recent insights from human geography to bear on depictions of Oran and exile in the novel. From its start, The Plague insistently connects plot, spatial setting, and notions of normativity and transgression. Understandings of place—and in particular, who or what is out of place—catalyze contestation and shape Camus’s universalized ethics of revolt, one that views evil and suffering as always out of …
The Lesbian And The Room: Proust’S Invention Of Difference, Christina L. Stevenson
The Lesbian And The Room: Proust’S Invention Of Difference, Christina L. Stevenson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
More than a conflict between external activity and internal sanctuary, the room in Proust's writing is a figure that weaves a complex fabric of narrative perception. If, in his youth, Proust's narrator believed the room to be a refuge for containing an eroticized feminine Other, the wiser narrative voice reveals the room as offering the disruption rather than the fulfillment of desire. The perspective of childhood is interwoven with the retrospective voice of the adult narrator who dispels the naïve fantasies of the desiring youth. This paper illustrates that confronting the failure of desire becomes imperative for the Proustian narrator …
Proustian Metaphor And The Automobile , Shawn Gorman
Proustian Metaphor And The Automobile , Shawn Gorman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In Marcel Proust's Sodome et Gomorrhe, the automobile produces a transformation in the relationship between space and time and, by analogy, a parallel transformation in art. In Proust's famous notion of involuntary memory, the similarity of a past sense impression to a present one leads to transcendence of time and space, and ultimately to metaphor. The metonymical speed of the automobile endlessly chases the sort of metaphorical "simultaneity" at work in involuntary memory. Structurally, the automobile offers the possibility of bringing together two terms by eliminating the middle term (time, space) that separated them; yet the automobile is never …
The Public Becomes Personal: From Ernaux's Passion Simple To Journal Du Dehors, Michelle Scatton-Tessier
The Public Becomes Personal: From Ernaux's Passion Simple To Journal Du Dehors, Michelle Scatton-Tessier
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Drawing on an interview in April 1997 with contemporary French writer Annie Ernaux, this article analyzes the interplay between female narrators and quotidian spaces in Passion simple (1991) and Journal du dehors (1993). Ernaux's writing career, spanning nearly thirty years, develops continually from depictions of physical spaces and the gestures or attitudes these spaces prescribe. Ernaux's spaces are not neutral; each bears the strong markings of a specific social class and gender. As this study illustrates, a radical shift exists between the author's 1991 and 1993 texts. Here, she distances herself from the traditional domestic space, as depicted in Passion …
L'Espace Du Célibataire Fantastique: Le Secret De Wilhelm Storitz, Peter Schulman
L'Espace Du Célibataire Fantastique: Le Secret De Wilhelm Storitz, Peter Schulman
World Languages and Cultures Faculty Publications
No abstract provided.
Cocteau Au Cirque: The Poetics Of Parade And "Le Numéro Barbette" , Jennifer Forrest
Cocteau Au Cirque: The Poetics Of Parade And "Le Numéro Barbette" , Jennifer Forrest
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Parade (1917) was a joint effort production with libretto by Jean Cocteau music by Erik Satie, decor, costumes, and curtain by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. It was not only Cocteau's first truly original work, but, as Pierre Gobin contends, Parade is central to an understanding of the structures that would inform all of his subsequent work. Equally central, proposes Lydia Crowson, is Cocteau's July 1926 Nouvelle Revue Française article on "Le Numéro Barbette." The essay on the transvestite striptease trapezist Barbette offers a poetics of the theater that will have changed little by the time of his …
Theorizing The Role Of The Intermediary In Postcolonial (Con)Text: Driss Chraïbi's Une Enquête Au Pays , Anjali Prabhu
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 …
Proust, Bakhtin, And The Dialogic Albertine: Voice And Fragmentation In The Captive , Jesse Kavadlo
Proust, Bakhtin, And The Dialogic Albertine: Voice And Fragmentation In The Captive , Jesse Kavadlo
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article provides a Bakhtinian reading of Proust's The Captive, the fourth novel of In Search of Lost Time, while at the same time it demonstrates how several of Bakhtin's key terms come to life in Proust's modern, self-conscious novel in a striking way. In particular, the character of Albertine is a fully Bakhtinian figure in the novel: she is at once intertextual (tied to photography and film), chronotopic (scattered through time and space as a living embodiment of narrative), and dialogic (many Albertines in a series). Proust's narrator's fragmentation of consciousness, particularly with regard to Albertine, as …
Missing Persons: Cherokee's Parrot And Chatterton's Poet , Leonard R. Koos
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 …
The Dialogic Self: Language And Identity In Annie Ernaux , Warren Johnson
The Dialogic Self: Language And Identity In Annie Ernaux , Warren Johnson
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The nine largely autobiographical texts that Annie Ernaux (1940- ) has published to date, which range stylistically from early strident outpourings to the willed transparency of an "écriture plate," all reveal the narrator as a patchwork subjectivity comprised of the discourses surrounding the child, adolescent, and adult against which she reacts, frequently without comprehending her own motivations. I try to unravel the strands that make up Ernaux's language and explore how the self that emerges is an aggregate of the discursive spaces she has inhabited. I trace as well how her gender identity impacts her capacity and willingness to struggle …
The Perilous Journey From Melancholy To Love: A Kristevan Reading Of Le Médianoche Amoureux, Karen D. Levy
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 …
The Lessons Of The Living Dead: Marcel's Journey From Balbec To Douville-Féterne In Proust's Cities Of The Plain: Part Two, Jonathan Warren
The Lessons Of The Living Dead: Marcel's Journey From Balbec To Douville-Féterne In Proust's Cities Of The Plain: Part Two, Jonathan Warren
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
By analyzing the narrative of Marcel's journey by the "little train" from Balbec to Douville-Féterne the essay engages with the Proust criticism of Georges Poulet, Paul de Man, and Julia Kristeva to support Hayden White's claim that "it is legitimate to read Proust's narrative as an allegory of figuration itself." Like the Madeleine episode, this one serves as a point from which retrospection and prospection radiate. Central to the discussion is the description of Verdurins' dinner party guests as they stand ready to board the train on the platform at Graincourt: their vivacity, compared to a sort of extinction, suggests …
Street-Signs: The City As Context And As Code In The Novels Of Claire Etcherelli, Sara Poole
Street-Signs: The City As Context And As Code In The Novels Of Claire Etcherelli, Sara Poole
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The piece aims to consider the novels of Claire Etcherelli as examples of le roman parisien, and to examine the different roles the city is made to play in them. It looks briefly at Etcherelli's debt to the literature of the nineteenth century; at the significance of using real place names in such realist fiction; at Paris as political fulcrum; at why most of Etcherelli's characters live on the fringes of the city. The second half concentrates on Elise ou la vraie vie and attempts to illustrate how in this novel Paris becomes an extended and elaborate metaphor for …
History, Violence And Poetics: Saint-John Perse And René Char, Nathan Bracher
History, Violence And Poetics: Saint-John Perse And René Char, Nathan Bracher
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay explores the parallel yet opposite stances taken both personally and textually by Perse and Char with respect to drama of World War II. While Perse remained disdainfully aloof from public affairs after the defeat and proclaimed in his poetry his solidarity with all humanity, Char explicitly linked his writing to events, yet sought to create a human space removed from history's upheavals. Striving to transcend the vicissitudes of individual existence, Perse celebrates an epic vision of history that overlooks and even condones its violence. Focusing on the inconsistent, fragmentary nature of existence, Char prevents us from having any …
The Unseizable Landscape Of The Real: The Poetry And Poetics Of Philippe Jaccottet, Richard Stamelman
The Unseizable Landscape Of The Real: The Poetry And Poetics Of Philippe Jaccottet, Richard Stamelman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
For Philippe Jaccottet the real is the force of life itself. It is also a rapid, fleeting perception made all the more ephemeral by the mimetic imprecision of language. The essence of the real, since it is always other than what is said about it, can never be fully represented. This alterity of the real and the fundamental lack it announces provoke poetic language. By means of a poetics of passage, of passing through, of a travers, Jaccottet confronts the otherness of the unseizable landscape and of the elusive language in which he dwells. In the meditative, prose poem …
Shall We Escape Analogy, Rosmarie Waldrop
Shall We Escape Analogy, Rosmarie Waldrop
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Claude Royet-Journoud's and Anne-Marie Albiach's work can be read as manifestos against metaphor (relation by similarity, the vertical selection axis of the speech act) with which poetry has long been identified. Whereas Royet-Joumoud takes as his theme metaphor in the largest sense (including, finally, all representation that is based on analogy), Albiach's "Enigme" dramatizes the loss of the vertical dimension through, ironically, a metaphor: the fall of a body. Formally, both stress as alternative the horizontal axis of combination (especially the spatial articulation on the page) and the implied view that the world is constructed by language, that it does …
The Relevance Of The Carnivalesque In The Québec Novel, Maroussia Ahmed
The Relevance Of The Carnivalesque In The Québec Novel, Maroussia Ahmed
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The Bakhtinian concept of space is topological rather than topographic, and encompasses the cosmic, the social and the corporeal; its function in the Québec novel consists in debasing the hierarchical verticality of Lent and of the "official feast." As Carnival is an anti-law,"law" in the Québec novel will be defined as the chronotope of the sacred space (the land or "terre" of Québec) in the genre known as the "novel of the land" ("le roman de Ia terre"). Until the Second World War, this chronotope transforms an Augustinian political view of the civitas dei into literary proselytism, via the ideology …
Space And Salvation In Colette's Chéri And La Fin De Chéri, Ann Leone Philbrick
Space And Salvation In Colette's Chéri And La Fin De Chéri, Ann Leone Philbrick
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Colette's critics often seem to dismiss all but her autobiographical creatures as whimsical and inarticulate. Her characters are frequently less eloquent than the spaces they create and inhabit; this observation offers an approach to Chéri and La Fin de Chéri that invites us to read them as two of Colette's most ambitious and authentic works. Here are stories of compromises with the containers of one's life and identity: streets, salons, boudoirs, and, ultimately, the body. Indeed, the self and its containers function symbiotically. Chéri makes no effort to direct this relationship, and kills himself when the world finally seems inscrutable …
Käfka's Influence On Camara Laye's Le Regard Du Roi , Patricia A. Deduck
Käfka's Influence On Camara Laye's Le Regard Du Roi , Patricia A. Deduck
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
In Le regard du roi, Camara Laye attempted to assimilate into his own fictional world the structure, techniques, and themes which he found in the works of Kafka. A close analysis of the novel reveals not only significant influence, but direct imitation of Kafka. Although certain Kafkaesque techniques—for example, the limited perspective, and the dispensation with time and space as measurable quantities—are often used effectively in the novel, they lose much of their intricate complexity in a fictional world allowing, as Laye's does, for positive resolution. Such techniques become integral and meaningful elements only when Laye uses them within …