2024-03-29T15:52:56Z
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/do/oai/
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1000
2006-03-14T17:06:44Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Book Review: Jean de Sponde, Méditations sur les Pseaumes. Édition critique par Sabine Lardon.
Ganim, Russell J
This edition of the Méditations is a noteworthy project that will prove a valuable research tool. Part of Lardon’s suc¬cess stems from the fact that she preserves the integrity of the original 1588 La Rochelle edition by making only the slight¬est and most obvious changes in orthography and punctua¬tion for purposes of enhanced readability. The volume is more remarkable, however, for the ways in which it goes beyond Alan Boase’s 1954 and 1978 editions of the Médita¬tions.
2000-10-01T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/1
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1000/viewcontent/FS_review_1.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1001
2006-03-14T17:12:22Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Book Review: Sabine Lardon. L’Écriture de la méditation chez Jean de Sponde.
Ganim, Russell J
Sabine Lardon’s monograph commands attention for the precision with which it analyses Sponde’s rhetorical tech¬nique in his Méditations sur les Pseaumes. Basing the need for her book on the critics’ preference for writing about Sponde’s lyric offerings rather than his prose, Lardon pro¬duces a study that yields great insight into Sponde’s ad¬ap¬tation of language and form within the context of bibli¬cal exegesis. Lardon’s work makes a valuable contribution to Spondian studies, and will no doubt help renew interest in baroque devotional literature.
2000-10-01T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/2
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1001/viewcontent/FS_review_2.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1002
2006-03-30T20:01:37Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Intercourse as Discourse: The Calculus of Objectification and Desire in the Novel and Film Versions of Les liaisons dangereuses
Ganim, Russell J
The calculus of objectifi cation and desire in both the novel and film versions of Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses is derived in two principal ways. The first derivation, that of the Sadean will to objectify the other for erotic and intellectual satisfaction, precedes the second, that of the overarching wish to produce a written object announcing the conquest of the human object. Limited by the medium, the film adaptations of the Liaisons dangereuses cannot place as great an emphasis on the composition of letters. Nevertheless, they make allusions to it in such a manner that underscores this type of objectification process. This article examines the film adaptations of Letter XLVIII, where Valmont, after sleeping with a mistress, composes a sardonic but unwittingly revealing missive to the Présidente de Tourvel. Specifically, it is this mise à nu of Valmont as a libertine in Letter XLVIII that commands the attention of filmmakers. I contend that Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, 1988), Milos Forman (Valmont, 1989) and Roger Vadim (Liaisons Dangereuses, 1960) choose to adapt this scene not only because of its presumable entertainment value, but because its visual exploitation allows for a quick, cogent means of highlighting, if not simplifying, the complex motif of sexual objectification as it relates to issues of power and libertinage. From the standpoint of film as it relates to the novel, what adaptations of this scene show is that the necessary representational departures from the novel still ingeniously depict the way in which language and sex conspire to create and destroy Valmont and Merteuil’s libertine universe. The scene becomes especially useful when considering questions of cinematic variation because each director’s rendition serves as a microcosm of his version of Laclos’s text. Consequently, viewing what I will call the “writing table scene,” provides a summary of Frears’s, Forman’s and Vadim’s interpretive style. In addition, the scene, as represented in the films, gives a modern commentary on female libertinage. Laclos’s novel suggests that female libertinage has no chance of validation, let alone survival. By contrast, twentieth-century filmmaking seems to compensate by presenting scenarios which intimate that the will, pleasure, and intellect of female libertinage—if they cannot win—can at least live on or manifest themselves in some form beyond that of their creator, Merteuil. All the films emphasize the development of Cécile as a libertine who, with varying degrees of success, will carry on Merteuil’s legacy.
2003-03-30T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/3
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1002/viewcontent/Intercourse2.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1003
2006-04-03T21:55:23Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Anus as Oculus: Satire and Subversion in Eustorg de Beaulieu's Du cul
Ganim, Russell J
This study seeks to rehabilitate Eustorg de Beaulieu's (c. 1495-1552) Du cul (1537) in terms of the poem's satirically subversive nature. I choose the term "rehabilitate" in order to challenge certain aspects of Annette and Edward Tomarken's argument that the poem should be read more in terms of its commentary on the lyric genre of the blason than as a derisive indictment of social norms. I hold that on an implicit level, the poem does support the Tomarkens' contention that Beaulieu "push[es] to its ultimate limits the genre (i.e., the blason) with which he is working" (151). In the opening verses of Du cul, the reader remarks that the poem is indeed aware of itself as a blason, and Beaulieu's work decidedly reflects many of the genre's formal and thematic traits. Yet, apart from these opening verses and occasional allusions to various forms of the blason, the poem's language makes little to no reference to the theory and actual composition of the genre. Arguments about Beaulieu's self-conscious critique of the design and execution of the blason are certainly plausible, but other elements of the poem stand out more forcefully as meriting scholarly inquiry. The Tomarkens' comments are reason enough to revisit the poem, but it should be noted that the depth of Beaulieu's satire, and its relation to contemporary notions of sexuality are such that one could also easily challenge Michael Pegg's dismissal of Du cul as a largely obscene effort to attract attention. From a critical perspective, the topic of scatology offers a richer means of analyzing the poem’s language and purpose. In this essay, “scatology” and the “scatological” will come to mean the prurient references to the excretory and sexual organs and functions of the body. Beaulieu deploys a scatological thématique in order to set forth a derisive vision of 1. the body and sexuality, 2. political structures, and 3. the Catholic Church. Scatology also helps explain the relative absence of the je/poète who normally acts as the mediator between the world and the reader. In the case of Du cul, the eye of the poet is figuratively substituted by the anus, which becomes an oculus in the sense that human activity, in its most sophisticated and base forms, is perceived by its relation to this aperture. Beaulieu’s choice of the anus as a topic for praise is best explained by a rhetorical question he poses near the end of his poem: “Diray je rien de ta grande franchise ?” (v. 103). For Beaulieu, the ass represents a certain kind of sexual, literary, and social freedom. Clearly, Beaulieu would not have been as free if he had chosen a more conformist subject for his blason, and in many respects, the “frankness” of the poem represents its fundamental characteristic. Contact with the sexual other, the nobility, and the Church is “viewed” through the “lens” of the anus in order to illustrate human vanity as well as Beaulieu’s inverted view of the world. In this sense, “inversion” refers to the idea that what is normally hidden and kept inside the body, i.e., the anus, is turned outward and exposed, thereby presenting a satirical mentality that undermines established norms. On a social level, the anus becomes an equalizer in that it commands attention from all classes and persuasions. By reducing human exchange to its primordial anal element, Beaulieu figuratively “lays waste” to social conceit via the poetic conceit of the blason. The fundament has a similarly equalizing effect with respect to the body, as Beaulieu’s cul becomes the principal organ on which all other body parts depend in order to maintain either their beauty or function.
2001-04-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/4
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1003/viewcontent/Anus_Oculus.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1004
2006-04-05T18:42:25Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
CHRIST’S BODY AS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SIGNIFIER: A STUDY OF BLASON IN LA CEPPÈDE'S THÉORÈMES
Ganim, Russell J
Much of the concept of space in La Ceppède's Théorèmes is defined in the portrayal of Christ's body. In this text, space appears as distances or gaps—between God and humankind, grace and damnation, poet and reader—which must be overcome by contemplation of Christ's redemptive act. Within the poet's meditative framework, Christ's body acts as a physical, intermediate space in which the metaphysical principles of celestial will take form. For the meditant, the knowledge gained from reflection on Christ's body allows the transcendence from the external, physical spaces of the material world in which s/he lives, to the internal, spiritual spaces of the divine world to which s/he aspires. Generically, La Ceppède's depiction of Christ's body is often revealed in the poetic form of the blason, a lyric subgenre which itself plays on the dynamics between the external, physical description of the initial image or blason, and the more abstract, metaphysical interpretation of what is ultimately symbolized or blasonné. This paper will explore the relationship between the public spaces of the body and the private spaces of the heart and mind as illustrated in La Ceppède's adaptation of blason. La Ceppède depicts Christ's body as a physical, public text, the reading and contemplation of which enable the dévot to accede to a more intimate, private link with God based on prayer and worship. The study begins with a brief history and definition of blason, then moves to specific textual analysis of sonnets dealing with Christ's eyes and hands.
1994-12-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/5
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1004/viewcontent/Blason_in_La_Ceppede.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1006
2006-04-20T21:51:52Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Pissing Glass and the Body Crass: Adaptations of the Scatological in Théophile
Ganim, Russell J
Examination of scatological motifs in Théophile de Viau’s (1590-1626) libertine, or ‘cabaret’ poetry is important in terms of how the scatological contributes to the depiction of the Early Modern body in the French lyric.1 This essay does not examine Théophile’s portrait of the body strictly in terms of the ‘Baroque’ or the ‘neo-Classical.’ Rather, it argues that the scatological context in which he situates the body (either his, or those of others), reflects a keen sensibility of the body representative of the transition between these two eras. Théophile reinforces what Bernard Beugnot terms the body’s inherent ‘eloquence’ (17), or what Patrick Dandrey describes as an innate ‘textuality’ in what the body ‘writes’ (31), and how it discloses meaning. The poet’s scatological lyric, much of which was published in the Pamasse Satyrique of 1622, projects a different view of the body’s ‘eloquence’ by depicting a certain realism and honesty about the body as well as the pleasure and suffering it experiences. This Baroque realism, which derives from a sense of the grotesque and the salacious, finds itself in conflict with the Classical body which is frequently characterized as elegant, adorned, and ‘domesticated’ (Beugnot 25). Théophile’s private body is completely exposed, and, unlike the public body of the court, does not rely on masking and pretension to define itself. Mitchell Greenberg contends that the body in late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century French literature is often depicted in a chaotic manner because, ‘the French body politic was rent by tumultuous religious and social upheavals’ (62).2 While one could argue that Théophile’s portraits of a syphilis-ridden narrators are more a reflection of his personal agony rather than that of France as a whole, what emerges in Théophile is an emphasis on the movement, if not decomposition of the body.3 Given Théophile’s public persona and the satirical dimension of his work, it is difficult to imagine that the degeneration he portrays is limited only to his individual experience. On a collective level, Théophile reflects what Greenberg calls ‘a continued, if skewed apprehension of the world in both its physical and metaphysical dimensions’(62–3) typical of the era. To a large extent, the body Théophile depicts is a scatological body, one whose deterioration takes the form of waste, disease, and evacuation as represented in both the private and public domain. Of course, one could cast aside any serious reading of Théophile’s libertine verse, and virtually all of scatological literature for that matter, as an immature indulgence in the prurient. Nonetheless, it was for his dissolute behavior and his scatological poetry that Théophile was imprisoned and condemned to death. Consequently, this part of his work merits serious consideration in terms of the personal and poetic (if not occasionally political) statement it represents. With the exception of Claire Gaudiani’s outstanding critical edition of Théophile’s cabaret lyric, there exist no extensive studies of the poet’s libertine œuvre.4 Clearly however, these poems should be taken seriously with respect to their philosophical and aesthetic import. As a consequence, the objective becomes that of enhancing the reader’s understanding of the lyric contexts in which Théophile’s scatological offerings situate themselves. Structurally, the reader sees how the poet’s libertine ceuvre is just that — an integrated work in which the various components correspond to one another to set forth a number of approaches from which the texts are to be read. These points of view are not always consistent, and Théophile cannot be thought of as writing in a sequential manner along the lines of devotional Baroque poets such as Jean de La Ceppède and Jean de Sponde. However, there is a tendency not to read these poems in their vulgar totality, and to overlook the formal and substantive unity in this category of Théophile’s work. The poet’s resistance to poetic and cultural standards takes a profane, if not pornographic form because it seeks to disgust and arouse while denigrating the self, the lyric other, and the reader. Théophile’s pornography makes no distinction between the erotic and scatological. The poet conflates sex and shit because they present a double form of protest to artistic and social decency while titillating and attacking the reader’s sensibilities. Examination of the repugnant gives way to a cathartic experience which yields an understanding of, if not ironic delight in, one’s own filthy nature.
2004-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/7
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1006/viewcontent/Pissing_Glass.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1007
2006-05-05T14:59:26Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
A Kiss Is Not Just a Kiss: The Use of the <i>Baiser</i> in La Ceppède's <i>Théorèmes</i>
Ganim, Russell J
The combination of religious and erotic motifs plays a large role in shaping the artistic experience of the Renaissance. One thinks of paintings such as della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ (1540), as well as Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1545). Lyric poetry also provides numerous examples of this aesthetic bond; among them Petrarch’s “Chiare fresche e dolci acque” and Ronsard’s “Je veux brûler, pour m’envoler aux cieux.” The lyric subgenre which perhaps most distinctly follows the trend of merging sexual and divine experience is the baiser, or kiss. Originally secular in nature, the baiser first appeared in epigram form in the Greek Anthology. Baiser was adapted by Catullus and Ovid, inspiring what later became the style mignard of the Renaissance. Jean de La Ceppède’s version of the baiser in his Théorèmes exemplifies the attempt during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to transform secular lyric types a lo divino. Elsewhere in the Théorèmes, the poet’s method of blending lyric form and technique with a devotional topic finds expression in sonnets modeled after emblem, pastourelle, and blason. Baiser, however, is La Ceppède’s most explicit attempt to fuse the carnal and the spiritual, paradoxically blending a kind of style bas in language and theme with the lofty, if not transcendental goal of moving his reader to receive Christ. Before discussing the poet’s specific appropriation of the form, it will be useful to examine the history of the baiser, as well as the a lo divino tradition to which La Ceppède’s baiser belongs.
1994-05-01T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/8
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1007/viewcontent/A_Kiss.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1008
2006-06-07T20:54:58Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Locus Amoenus vs. Locus Terribilis: The Spatial Dynamics of the Pastoral and the Urban in La Ceppède’s Théorèmes
Ganim, Russell J
The opening sonnets of Jean de La Ceppède’s Théorèmes (1613, 1622) present an urban vs. rural conflict that mirrors the dialectic between sin and salvation running throughout the work. La Ceppède’s focus for this struggle becomes the stark contrast between Jerusalem and the garden at the Mount of Olives. Jerusalem, as the place where Christ is persecuted and eventually tried, represents a Babylon-like enclave of transgression, while the garden is portrayed as a site of purity and tranquil reflection. From a literary standpoint, La Ceppède’s emphasis on the clash between dystopian and utopian settings comprises part of his adaptation of the pastoral, where this particular struggle becomes one of the genre’s principal motifs. In general, the contrast between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives emerges as the point of departure for the poet’s figuration of nature, both human and physical. A human construct, the city of Jerusalem becomes a metaphor for human corruption. In view of humanity’s fall in paradise and the denaturation it symbolizes, the poet’s goal, on both intellectual and affective levels, is to place the reader/dévot in a position to lift her/himself from the depravity of human nature to the grace of divine nature.
1997-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/9
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1008/viewcontent/Locus.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1009
2006-09-18T13:49:05Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Review of <i>Tristan L’Hermite: OEuvres complètes. III: Poésie (II).</i> Volume publié sous la direction de Jean-Pierre Chauveau
Ganim, Russell J
This effort marks the second volume of poetry in a five-set edition of complete works consisting of Tristan’s prose, poetry and tragedies, as well as other plays and the Plaidoyers historiques. The present volume represents the culmination of an extensive undertaking by Champion and by noted Tristan scholars to render the Baroque author’s known works more accessible to researchers, students and the literate public. By any measure, the results are eminently satisfying both in terms of the volume in question and the entire project. This volume centres on texts composed and published mainly in the period afterwards. The principal works constituting this volume include Les Vers Héroïques (1648), L’Office de la Sainte Vierge (1646), Les Hymnes de toutes les Fêtes solennelles (1665) published ten years after Tristan’s death, a number of situational poems appearing between 1624 and 1654 entitled Vers épars, as well as an ‘annexe’ to the Vers épars consisting of thirteen poems in the Glasgow University Library attributed to Tristan and presented as Les Manuscrits de Glasgow. Each of these texts was edited individually and represents, respectively, the efforts of Véronique Adam, Jean-Pierre Chauveau, Marcel Israël, Amédée Carriat and Laurence Grove. In every instance, the introductions, notes, and bibliographies provide useful, original information about the political and artistic climate in which Tristan wrote.
2005-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/10
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1009/viewcontent/FS_2005_Postable.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1010
2006-06-09T20:51:19Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
More than a Reasonable Facsimile: Yvette Quenot's Edition of Jean de La Ceppède's <i>Théorèmes</i>
Ganim, Russell J
Since the rehabilitation of Jean de La Ceppède's Théorèmes, study of the work has been hindered by the lack of an easily readable, critically annotated edition. Though extracts of his meditations appeared in a few poetry anthologies during the twentieth century, it was not until 1966, with the appearance of Jean Rousset's Droz facsimile that full access to the sonnets and the poet's annotations could be gained without consulting the original Toulouse editions of 1613 and 1622. The Droz text, though in many ways quite useful, is not sufficient for serious scholarship. Its archaic typefaces, moreover, make reading difficult for non-specialists, who also require lexical and encyclopedic notes. Seeing the need to reproduce the sonnets in a more authoritative, workable format, Yvette Quenot has arnbitiously undertaken the first critical edition of the Théorèmes, the first part of which has recently appeared.
1993-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/11
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1010/viewcontent/continuum_OCR.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1011
2006-06-12T19:19:55Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Emblem as Meditative Icon in La Ceppède’s <i>Théorèmes </i>
Ganim, Russell J
While full comprehension of the divine image in La Ceppède’s Théorèmes is at times quite remote, understanding of the human image is often more accessible. I will argue that many of La Ceppède’s sonnets can be read as emblems which, both didactically and aesthetically, reveal the human in the divine through the iconographic portrayal of images, either written or graphic. By icon, I refer to the sacred representation and interpretation of images for the purpose of collective worship. Icons become the artistic means by which a devout subject, either poet or meditant, may identify and envision a religious object. In this vein, I raise the question of emblem in La Ceppède’s sonnets in order to grasp more firmly the role of visual and pictorial image to the poet’s conception of devotional exercise. The presence of engravings in the original 1613 and 1622 editions of the Théorèmes compounds the question of what contribution illustrations, both literal and figurative, play in understanding the work as a whole. While critics have studied the relationship between the Théorèmes and pictorial art, the link to emblem, a genre corresponding to both the artistic and devotional traditions of La Ceppède’s epoch, merits further attention. Emblem’s structure contributes to the systematization of spiritual exercise, giving the meditant a more coherent didactic framework in which to analyze devotional mystery. My aim in discussing emblem is to show why adaptation of this genre is crucial to La Ceppède’s project of deploying literature to redeem souls. I also contend that while not always central to the text’s comprehension, some of the original engravings carry a generic, as well as religious significance. In order to elucidate these ideas, a brief discussion of emblem’s history, purpose and structure is provided.
1994-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/12
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1011/viewcontent/PFSCL_Emblem.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1013
2006-06-14T18:38:56Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Through the Talking Glass: Translucence and Translation in the Condé Museum’s Psyche Gallery
Ganim, Russell J
The forty-four stained-glass windows (dating from 1540–44) that recount the mythological tale of Psyche in Chantilly’s Condé Museum present a unique semeiological challenge to scholars. Accompanied by lyric inscriptions of either four or eight lines, the panels reveal an image/text combination that represents a literal example of the Renaissance notion of ut pictura poesis. These seldom-discussed panels merit inquiry because they reflect certain historic, artistic, and literary trends that illustrate factional and intellectual movements crucial to understanding France of the early to mid-sixteenth century. In its examination of these issues, this essay asks three questions: 1) What is the political significance of the gallery? 2) Why are the panels important in terms of Renaissance aesthetics, and how do they enhance the viewer’s knowledge of image-text interaction? And 3) What examples can be given of how pictura and poesis, as they are uniquely presented in the gallery, enrich the narrative process depicted in these windows? In answering the first question, I will argue that the windows represent a political allegory that alludes to the disgrace and exile of their patron, Anne de Montmorency (1493–1567), Francis I’s “Constable of France.” Montmorency’s choice of Psyche lies in the desire to illustrate his struggle via a character who will elicit sympathy in a profound, but discreet manner. Like Psyche, who incurs the wrath and envy of Venus, the Constable falls prey to a powerful woman, specifically, Francis’s mistress, Madame d’Etampes, whose jealousy forces Montmorency’s departure from the court. With the political statement comes aesthetic commentary as well. Specifically, the Psyche windows illustrate from a structural perspective the Renaissance idea that art deemed “religious” in nature may be considered not merely as a “receptacle of the holy” but as a work of independent, discriminating merit (Belting, Likeness and Presence 458). Within this new mentality, a “religious form” such as stained glass, need not necessarily depict a theme one would traditionally find in a church or cathedral. Changes in aesthetics and religion went hand in hand during this time, as Protestant, especially Calvinist, emphasis on the “Word” of God over His “Image” indirectly gave rise to a heightened presence of the word in art throughout the early to mid-sixteenth century. The presence of the lyric inscriptions in the Chantilly windows can be attributed at least in part to the emergence of the word in artistic expression at this time. To understand the relationship between verba and imago as it exists in the panels themselves, this essay will draw on the literary criticism of W. J. T. Mitchell, the historical analysis of Hans Belting, and the translation theory of George Steiner, Roman Jakobson, and André Lefevere. What these theories have in common is the notion that a certain fluidity exists between sets of signs. In the case of the Psyche gallery, the “hermeneutic motion” (Steiner 296) that exists between word and picture allows for a dynamic exchange between the two principal narrative elements of the panel. Yet, the symmetry between word and image is often only partial, since these modes of discourse sometimes diverge as much as they converge. The poems and windows translate each other, but often only in translucent, semi-transparent ways. Consequently, the meaning word and image convey together is problematic and ambiguous almost as frequently as it is reciprocal. Accordingly, the viewer is required to mediate between pictura and poesis, rendering his/her role more active in determining the significance of the panels, and in shaping the critical debate over the interaction between these means of expression. However, the narrative related by the verba/imago relationship within the panels themselves cannot be fully appreciated without a more global understanding of the historical and critical circumstances in which the windows were created. These general conditions comprise a narrative of their own.
2002-06-14T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/14
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1013/viewcontent/Talking_Glass.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1015
2006-06-15T21:18:49Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Review of Julien Gœury: <i>L 'Autopsie et le théorème: poétique des Théorèmes spirituels (1613-1622) de Jean de La Ceppède.</i>
Ganim, Russell J
Les lecteurs de La Ceppède seront contents de recevoir le livre de Julien Gœury car son étude représente une addition importante aux ouvrages récents sur le poète aixois. Faisant partie de la redécouverte critique des Théorèmes initiée par les travaux de Jean Rousset dans les années 50, L'Autopsie et le théorème jette un nouveau regard sur l'oeuvre laceppédienne en adoptant ce que l'on peut appeler une perspective néo-structuraliste. L'exposé se divise en quatre parties: 1) Morphologie, 2) Anatomie, 3) Physiologie et 4) Psychologie. Une telle répartition suggere le désir de dégager le caractère organique du texte dans le cadre d'une organisation bien schématisée. Concernant la première categorie, Gœury met en exergue la construction générale du texte, signalant au départ “l'architecture extérieure” (23) ainsi que “l'architecture intérieure” (54) dans la composition des livres et des recueils qui édifient l'ouvrage. Ici, le lecteur note l'accent mis sur la signification du frontispice, des pages de titres, et sur d'autres éléments paratextuels. Toujours dans la première partie, Gœury suit l'exemple de plusieurs critiques en examinant l'emploi du sonnet comme mode de discours. L'auteur met en avant des “lois de composition” (141) qui renforcent “l'engagement formel” (151) du texte ainsi que son “architecture phonetique” (157). S'ajoutent à l'examen morphologique des observations sur les différentes formes “d'enjambement” (168) et de “fragmentation” (174) qui se manifestent dans les sonnets.
2002-06-15T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/16
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1015/viewcontent/Review__L_Autopsie_crop.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1014
2006-06-15T19:37:49Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Views of Kingship: <i>Britannicus</i> and Louis XIV’s <i>Mémoires</i>
Ganim, Russell J
This study situates itself within a current trend in Racinian scholarship to accentuate the political dimensions of Racine’s dramaturgy. Recently, Timothy Reiss, Suzanne Gearhart, and Alain Viala, among others, have emphasized the socio-political aspects of Racine’s oeuvre in part to counteract the mid twentieth-century notion that Racine’s classicism, if not his work in general, is based almost exclusively on the psychological representation of plot and character. I will argue that to a significant extent, the nature – «classical» or other – of Racine’s drama is also founded on a keen sense of the historic as it relates to the contemporary.
2002-06-15T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/15
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1014/viewcontent/Kingship.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1017
2006-06-22T18:51:01Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
L’excitation insolite : la perversité amoureuse chez Tristan
Ganim, Russell J
CET EXPOSÉ S’ATTACHE à poser les questions suivantes: En quoi consiste le désir chez Tristan? Et comment le désir s’exprime-t-il? Nous pouvons, dans un premier temps, discerner des parallèles très forts entre Tristan et certains poètes/amants de la Pléiade. En fait, le poète se voit souvent comme un amant maudit dont l’affection ne sera jamais partagée par sa bien-aimée ingrate. Mais au moment même où Tristan choisit ce portrait commun pour se dépeindre, il modifie l’image du poète/amant traditionnel en y ajoutant une dimension sinistre, voire perverse. Par moments, la passion chez Tristan se montre non seulement mélancolique mais violente. Dans certains sonnets, la mort, la maladie et le souhait de s’anéantir semblent attirer le poète autant que la beauté. L’attrait du néfaste signale également un goût de l’interdit. Cette étude examinera des ouvrages qui mettent en avant les questions de race, de bisexualité et d’obscénité. L’intérêt que porte Tristan au tabou mérite notre attention parce qu’il souligne en partie le «baroquisme» des écrits de l’auteur. Cherchant à dépasser les bornes du sujet et du genre lyriques, Tristan s’efforce d’explorer les marges de la poésie et de l’existence humaine. Les poèmes que nous traiterons se révèlent baroques en ce qu’ils exposent l’inconnu et l’insolite. Sur le plan esthétique, il s’agit de déchiffrer ce que Roger Guichemerre appelle «l’éloge des beautés paradoxales» chez Tristan. Comme lecteurs, notre tâche sera d’éclairer la façon dont Tristan remanie des thèmes et des formes lyriques afin de changer nos perceptions de l’amour et de son rapport avec la poésie.
2003-06-22T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/18
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1017/viewcontent/Lexcitation_Tristan.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1019
2006-06-27T15:02:00Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Variations on the Virgin: Anne de Marquets’s Depiction of Mary in the Sonets Spirituels
Ganim, Russell J
This paper explores the manner in which Anne de Marquets’s (1533– 1588) Sonets Spirituels (published posthumously in 1605) reshapes conventional portraits of the Virgin Mary. A Dominican nun at the Royal Priory in Poissy, Marquets, like many Baroque Catholic poets, follows Church tradition in glorifying Mary as a maternal symbol of chastity and faith. Yet, unlike Gabrielle de Coignard (OEuvres chrestiennes, 1594), Jean de La Ceppède (Théorèmes, 1613, 1622), or other of her lyric peers, Marquets depicts the Virgin as a subjective, intellectual near-deity whose role occasionally borders on the messianic. The basic approach of this study is comparative, as I will discuss how Marquets’s characterization of Mary as a foil for Satan and as the typological avatar for several women in the Bible contrasts with Coignard’s and La Ceppède’s adherence to the Stabat Mater tradition which depicts Mary as an afflicted figure who witnesses Christ’s Passion in silent agony. As Terence Cave has shown, Marquets herself does imitate the various motifs of this Medieval Latin hymn (197). But the image of the Mater dolorosa does not dominate Marquets’s lyric. And while her representation of Mary does bear some resemblance to Coignard’s in that the two authors at times draw parallels between themselves and the Virgin, Marquets’s depiction of Mary is, as a whole, less personal and autobiographical than that of Coignard. Similarly, Marquets, like La Ceppède, relies on typological example to underscore how the narrative of Christ’s life is structured according to the progressive revelation that links the Old and New Testaments. Nonetheless, Marquets goes beyond La Ceppède by emphasizing how the example of Mary fulfills and redeems the roles of Biblical figures, both male and female, to illustrate the indispensable nature of her role in God’s redemptive plan for humanity.
2002-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/20
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1019/viewcontent/Variations_on_Virgin.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfacpub-1020
2006-06-28T18:11:48Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Saisons riches et fécondes: Education et identité africaine dans le cinéma d'Euzhan Palcy
Ganim, Russell J
La surprise est la réaction la plus fréquente des critiques lorsqu'ils découvrent que la réalisatrice martiniquaise Euzhan Palcy est la force créatrice derrière des films aussi différents que la Rue Cases-Nègres (1984) et A Dry White Season (Une saison blanche et sèche) (1989). Le ton et le style narratif sont si distincts dans les deux films que les liens existants entre eux restent difficiles à identifier. Pourtant, à l'examen des intrigues respectives des films, on remarque une nette affinité qui suggère que le deuxième film est analogue au premier. Ensemble, ils constituent un projet intégré sur l'éducation et la maturation dans le tumulte de l'oppression politique. Avant d'explorer les différences initiales, ainsi que les ressemblances éventuelles entre les deux, il faut noter que malgré l'attention que les films ont reçue dans les milieux critique et populaire, on a peu écrit sur Euzhan Palcy et son art. Bien que cet article ne se propose pas de fournir des renseignements biographiques sur Palcy, l'un des buts de cet exposé est de faire apprécier son oeuvre à sa juste valeur. Jusqu'à présent, une interprétation de ces deux films en tant qu' “oeuvre" cinématographique n'a pas été tentée. Meme les interviews avec Palcy elle-même mettent l'accent sur le côté distinctif de chaque film, soulignant la variété des sujets qu'elle aborde.
1994-09-01T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfacpub/21
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfacpub/article/1020/viewcontent/Saisons_riches3.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Faculty Publications
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1000
2006-08-31T14:47:02Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Visual Culture: The Later Mallarmé and japonisme
Olds, Marshall C.
Like his painter-contemporaries, Mallarmé’s attention to japonisme was to a visual phenomenon. Like them, he had a strong visual sense, and one could argue that even the early poems that tried to apprehend nothingness did so as if the problem were a visual one even if the results were more the ideas of things seen, rather than the creation of images. His visual orientation did change dramatically, however, by the time of La Dernière Mode in 1874, readying him for the acculturation to be provided first by Manet, and then by others, notably Whistler. The esthetics of japonisme is a strand that runs through this visual education from 1876 onwards and is tied to the poet’s development of a visual materialism that was independent of the image as practiced by his painter-contemporaries, and even independent of (and offering a counter poetics to) his other esthetic, the exalted ‘explication orphique de la Terre’. I submit that le japonisme is one of the threads we can use in following the later Mallarmé; as such, it provides an instance of how a contemporary visual idiom may be brought to the reading of an important development in the practice of literary modernism. The images referenced in the article are available in the "Related files" above; the thumbnails in the ".doc" file are active links to the Dix-Neuf site.
2004-09-01T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/1
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1000/viewcontent/japonismes__DixNeuf3.pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1000/filename/0/type/additional/viewcontent/Images_Japonnaise.doc
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1000/filename/1/type/additional/viewcontent/Images_Japonnaise.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1001
2006-09-28T14:09:11Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Value and Social Mobility in Flaubert
Olds, Marshall C.
L’Education sentimentale may be construed as an historical novel at least insofar as it addresses questions of social change and enduring value as they are related to those of history and individual memory. As in Balzac and later in Proust, what is true for the individual applies to society. There is an especially Flaubertian understanding of movement in society and movement across time that remains tied more to demands of diegetic coherence than to laws of historical necessity, however. Singulative narration as it appears in the novel is a kind of smoke screen hiding a more pervasive iteration whereby the recounting of events and perception of events spring from an identical understanding of time. Yet, there is more to it than purely narratological concerns. Neither historical nor psychological (as that term might be understood, as in Proust, to describe a dynamism), time for Flaubert is an affective by-product of events filtered through conscious memory. To be sure, time as an external agent of change does exist; Mme Arnoux’s hair will turn grey, after all. What matters more than this, though, is the sense of time generated by the accumulation of events. To better understand this relationship, we will focus on Flaubert’s representation of social dynamism that has as its backdrop and point of comparison the social dynamism portrayed in La Comédie humaine and particularly the works of the early to mid-1830s. Flaubert, of course, is explicit in this, and it has often been pointed out that, with Le Père Goriot especially, Balzac provides one of the principal intertexts for L’Education sentimentale. Notwithstanding the excellent critical studies already devoted to the topic of Flaubert and, Balzac, the backdrop remains an instructive one, not only for the purposes of dramatic irony, characterization and narrative voice, but because Balzac’s understanding of value in modern society as tied to social expression does not hold in narrative time, at least not as understood by Flaubert. We will first have a look at Flaubert’s early use of Balzac in a context of parody, and then sketch out how parody develops into the deeper thematic concern of repetition as cliche and its translation into an idiom of time, memory and affect.
1999-09-28T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/2
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1001/viewcontent/Value_Social_Mobility.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1002
2006-09-29T21:52:52Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
MALLARMÉ AND INTERNATIONALISM
Olds, Marshall C.
Bertrand Marchal’s welcome new edition of Mallarmé’s early correspondence will surely invite a fresh look at the often subtle intersections between text and hors-texte. The question is an engaging one not only because of Mallarmé’s own pronouncements questioning the mimetic function of literary language but because the oblique referentiality that does occur, sometimes in spite of the poet's overt intentions, points to unexpected structures of thought. I have shown elsewhere how these are at work in the verse, where Mallarmé’s cherished notions of friendship among poets and ideal readership play upon his use of the muse figure. A somewhat different though equally fruitful place of enquiry are Mallarmé’s essays of the 1880s and ‘90s, what he called his “poèmes critiques,” which have as their subject the necessity of forging a new language. These pieces are written in Mallarmé’s late hermetic prose style and so are examples of that new language. The grand synthesis of Mallarmé’s thinking along these lines is in La Musique et les Lettres, delivered in 1894 as an invited lecture at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, later published in England in a volume of the Taylorian lectures, but appearing in France with some modifications in the Figaro and the Revue Blanche soon after Mallarmé’s return from the tour (O.C. 1607). Mallarmé’s idea, here as elsewhere, is to lay the ground for a universal poetic language, that is to say a supra-national poetics for all language(s). Thus the relationship is only indirect with other, more literal internationalist activity such as the Esperanto movement; while universalism is implied in Mallarmé’s essay, no specific human language (other than French!) is ever mentioned. As will be discussed below, this suggestive expression of 19th century international political utopianism stems in fact from the poet’s own foray into political activism in the early 1870s. Moreover, the surprising mix of politics and poetics informs the inception of the Symbolist movement around 1876, at least as understood by Mallarmé who would become its chef d’école.
1996-09-01T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/3
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1002/viewcontent/Kaleido.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1003
2006-10-13T18:00:27Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:womenstudiespapers
publication:modlangfacpub
publication:womensstudies
Fact or Fable? Female Gender and Sexuality in Villedieu’s <i>Histoires allégoriques</i>
Ganim, Russell J
In many respects, the Fables ou Histoires allégoriques of Marie-Catherine Desjardins, more commonly known as Madame de Villedieu (1640?–1683), can be read in terms of the sexual politics of neo-classical France. Unlike many of her other works, the Fables serve in part as a defense and illustration of female presence and sexuality. A moral that emerges in the nine tales she classifies as “fables” is that the female gender proves as authoritative and as intelligent as the male and that female sexuality should be considered as natural and as legitimate as its masculine equivalent. In her dedication to Louis XIV, Villedieu apologizes for not rendering her Fables an example of “des leçons d’une vertu solide” (90). While her Fables do not always cast the behavior of male or female characters (in most cases insects and animals) in a virtuous light, neither do they portray this behavior as fraught with vice. Females speak less frequently than males in Villedieu’s fables, but the number of female characters and the intriguing ways in which they are presented demonstrate a unique sensibility to women and the conditions under which female identity is constructed in an erotic, social, and personal context.
2006-10-13T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/4
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1003/viewcontent/FactorFable.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1007
2006-10-13T21:32:37Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Review of <i>Mannerism and Baroque in Seventeenth-Century French Poetry: The Example of Tristan L’Hermite</i>, by James C. Shepard
Ganim, Russell J
Interest in Tristan L’Hermite has not only been sustained, but has grown considerably since 1955, when Amédée Carriat published Tristan ou L’Eloge d’un poète and his Bibliographie des oeuvres de Tristan L’Hermite. Carriat’s work on the Cahiers Tristan L’Hermite, as well as the scholarship of Claude Abraham, Catherine Grisé, and Jean-Pierre Chauveau among others, has laid the groundwork for a number of new inquiries into Tristan’s oeuvre. Colloquia on Tristan have been organized in France and the U.S. in recent years, and the Tristan “revival” reached an apex of sorts in 1999 with Champion’s publication of his Oeuvres complètes under the direction of Roger Guichemerre. It is against this backdrop that specialists would seemingly welcome James C. Shepard’s Mannerism and Baroque in Seventeenth-Century French Poetry: The Example of Tristan L’Hermite. Nonetheless, while Shepard’s monograph does represent an earnest effort, the book is largely unsuccessful because it reads far too much like the 1997 dissertation on which it is based.
2003-12-13T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/8
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1007/viewcontent/16CJ34_Mannerism.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1006
2006-10-13T21:20:17Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Review of <i>Renaissance Studies: Articles 1966–1994</i>, by Malcolm Smith.
Ganim, Russell J
Malcolm Smith’s untimely death in 1994 left a serious void in French Renaissance scholarship. This loss to the profession has in part been compensated by a remarkable volume that assembles nearly thirty articles written by Professor Smith over a twenty-eight-year period. The volume also includes an extensive bibliography that lists Professor Smith’s books and critical editions. Professor Smith’s essays, published in journals such as Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, Revue de Littérature Comparée, and The Sixteenth Century Journal, reveal a scholar whose meticulousness and originality remain exemplary for those devoted to research in the humanities. What is particularly striking about early articles such as “Ronsard and Queen Elizabeth I” (1966), and later pieces such as “Paul de Foix and Freedom of Conscience” (1993), is Professor Smith’s ability to situate literary and historical texts in their political and religious contexts while maintaining a New Critical attention to detail as well as a New Historical focus on texts as social documents. The consistency of Professor Smith’s approach is reinforced by a clear and sophisticated writing style that fol lows the Aristotelian method of outline, exposition, and summary. While it may seem rather curious to highlight a scheme so fundamental to academic work, its mention is important because this type of format is often overlooked today. The order and precision with which Professor Smiths arguments unfold is a most refreshing reminder of the advantages classical training brings to literary criticism.
2000-10-13T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/7
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1006/viewcontent/16CJ31_Renaissance_Studies.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1004
2006-10-13T18:56:52Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Prévert Reads Shakespeare: Lacenaire as Iago in Les Enfants du Paradis
Ganim, Russell J
First impressions seem to suggest little more than a casual link between Othello and the film Les Enfants du Paradis despite multiple references to Shakespeare’s tragedy in Jacques Prévert’s screenplay. Many glaring differences present themselves with respect to both works. The Elizabethan drama appears to have little in common with a film made and released in France during the Occupation that focuses on a troupe of actors, a petty criminal, and an aristocrat in early nineteenth-century Paris. Yet, Prévert’s numerous appropriations of Shakespeare are crucial to the film’s meaning. Edward Baron Turk, who mentions the film’s allusions to Shakespeare, argues that “parallels” between the two narratives are “recognizable,” and briefly outlines these similarities with respect to character. Turk rightly contends that “variants” (230) of Othello are to be found in es Enfants du Paradis, but it is not his aim to analyze them at any great length. By contrast, my goal is to examine why Prévert chose to place such emphasis on Othello, and to probe the ways in which Prévert and director Marcel Carné both imitate and deviate from Shakespeare in order to explore issues such as character motivation, plot adaptation, and the aesthetic and historical contexts in which the film is situated.
2001-01-13T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/5
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1004/viewcontent/Prevert_Reads_Shakespeare_deposit_version.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1005
2006-10-13T20:12:29Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Scientific Verses: Subversion of Cartesian Theory and Practice in the "Discours a Madame de La Sabliere"
Ganim, Russell J
Study of the relationship between science and La Fontaine's Fables has a limited, but thought-provoking past. Beverly Ridgely asserts that while La Fontaine represents himself mainly as an "artist" and "moralist" concerned with depicting the irony and comedy of life, he "also had a genuinely studious and reflective side... [with] a real aspiration to write scientific philosophical verse in emulation of such ancient masters as Lucretius and Virgil" (180). Ridgely analyzes the influence of late seventeenth-century cosmic theory on L'astrologue qui se laisse tomber dans un puits and L'horoscope. The two poems attack the concept of judicial astrology, which claimed to foretell the future through observation of the heavens. La Fontaine's complaint against judicial astrology, according to Ridgely, was that it constituted a "pseudo-science in which... [the poet] saw both an infringement on Divine Providence and an affront to common sense and experience—in short a striking instance of human presumption and folly" (182). My aim is to prove that La Fontaine, in his Discours a Madame de La Sabliere, accuses Descartes of the same presumption, and affront to common sense. In the fables mentioned, La Fontaine bases his critique of both questionable and legitimate scientific theory on the works of Gassendi as summarized in Francois Bernier's Abrege de la philosophic de Gassendi (1678). Gassendi contends that any form of absolute knowledge is impossible. According to Richard Popkin, Gassendi argues that "the world of experience or appearance... [serves] as the sole basis for our natural knowledge" (101). Gassendi's relativism, then, contradicts Descartes's theories of certitude based on scientific reasoning and the existence of God. Ridgely, while discussing the influence of "gassendisme" on the Discours a Madame de La Sabliere, briefly focuses on the central argument in the poem: that animals exercise some measure of thought and will and therefore do not, contrary to Descartes, comprise simple "machines." By mentioning the issue of "l'ame des betes," Ridgely evokes the debate sparked by Rene Jasinski and Henri Busson in the 1930s over the origins of La Fontaine's views of the animal mind and soul. In general, Jasinski argues for the influence of Gassendi and Bernier, while Busson, and later Ferdinand Gohin, assert that La Fontaine's beliefs about animal intelligence stemmed from the Jesuit Gaston Pardies's Discours de la connaissance des Bestes, as well as the writings of J.-B. Du Hamel. Although a valuable source study of one of La Fontaine's most noted poems, the Jasinski-Busson debate raises and answers few questions. The goal of this study is not to uncover additional works that La Fontaine may have consulted while formulating his theory of animal intelligence. Rather, I will examine further the poet's treatment of Cartesianism in the Discours a Madame de La Sabliere. La Fontaine's anti-Cartesianism extends far beyond disagreement over the nature of the animal mind. Specifically, his refutation of Descartes involves style, method, and structure, as much as theme. In effect, the Discours a Madame de La Sabliere can be read as a refutation to the Discours de la methode in which La Fontaine purposely employs Cartesian procedure, language, and narrative point of view to undercut concepts fundamental to the geometer's argument.
1996-10-13T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/6
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1005/viewcontent/Scientific_Verses.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1008
2006-10-19T18:10:50Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Review of <i>Emblems and Alchemy</i>, by Alison Adams & Stanton J. Linden, eds.
Ganim, Russell J
Combining revived interest in both the emblem and alchemy, this volume is the third in a series of works on emblem studies published by the French Department at the University of Glasgow. Its ten essays, divided among three major categories entitled, “A Theoretical Perspectives”, “The English Alchemists”, and “Continental Manifestations”, stress inter disciplinarity as they explore the relationships between text, image, and alchemical practice. Broad in scope but detailed in its analyses, the compendium raises several intriguing questions about the correspondence between literature, art, and pseudo-science. Despite the diversity of its topics, the collection is often surprisingly unified in its discussion of authors, motifs, and themes. With the exception of some gaps in argumentation, Emblems and Alchemy makes a significant contribution not only to the field of emblematics, but to early modern studies.
1998-03-19T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/9
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1008/viewcontent/review_of_Adams_EMBLEMS.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1009
2006-10-20T23:39:25Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Les Abbesses et la Parole au dix-septième siècle: les discours monastiques à la lumière des interdictions pauliniennes
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
One tends to take for granted that in women’s monasteries the only voices raised were those of its masculine directors and preachers. However, while sermons by priests were generally reserved for Sundays and feast days, the abbesses addressed their communities several times a week or even daily. Although the Pauline prohibitions restricted women from speaking on religious topics in public or to mixed groups, within the walls of the convent that was assimilated to the private domain of a household, abbesses exhorted, instructed and rebuked their nuns at chapter meetings or during recreation sessions. Many such talks might have been considered a form of preaching if they had been delivered by abbots in a monastery of men. However, because abbesses of the era generally lacked rhetorical and theological training, they had to content themselves with the informal registers of sacred oratory.
2003-01-20T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/10
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1009/viewcontent/rhetorica21.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1010
2006-10-23T16:45:30Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Consolation and the Work of Mourning in <i>Angéline de Montbrun</i>
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
The dynamics of this foundational text of Canadian literature come from its heroine's drive to resolve her overwhelming sense of loss. Angéline loses her father, her beauty, and the love of her fiance Maurice within the space of three pages against a backdrop formed by memory of the loss suffered at the Conquest. Indeed, reading the novel under the sign of resignation is a commonplace. Critics as diverse as the early Catholic reviewers, more recent biographically-oriented researchers, and Freudian and feminist commentators have underscored Angeline's attempts to resign herself to this succession of losses. To a lesser extent they have also noted the link the novel makes between consolation and resignation. However, most such comments do not do justice to the centrality of mourning and consolation in Angéline.
1998-05-01T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/11
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1010/viewcontent/FR_Consolation.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1011
2017-03-23T15:30:36Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
French History Textbooks as a Tool for Teaching Civilization
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
The recent controversy in France over the new history textbooks based on the reforms promulgated under René Haby in the middle 1970s can serve as a reminder of the many uses such textbooks can have in our civilization classes. In the past ten years the Haby programs have become the symbol for what many observers in France take to be a serious weakening of the teaching of history since the late 1960s. At the primary level, history was joined to geography and the sciences as an activité d'éveil; no longer was it the privileged instrument for fostering national identity as it had been in the schools of the Third Republic where the manuals of Ernest Lavisse ran through edition after edition. Critics charge that the changes at the secondary level have been equally damaging. The number of hours devoted to history has been reduced. Thematic study has weakened the traditional chronological framework punctuated by the dates of battles and political regimes. Finally, French national history has been diluted by situating it in a wider current of international affairs. The debate over these changes has not been confined to educational circles: it is widely reported in the popular press and has been raised at the highest levels of state. In August 1983, President Mitterrand addressed the issue at a cabinet meeting where he professed to be "scandalisé et angoissé devant les carences de l'histoire" that threatened to lead to "la perte de la mémoire collective des nouvelles générations." However, the quarrel over the Haby syllabi is not my subject, even though it is symptomatic of the changing role of tradition in the French value system. My concern is not so much the modalities of initiating French youth to their past as the role this heritage should play in our own civilization classes. Teaching contemporary civilization has made such tremendous progress in the last thirty years that French history has often been taken for granted and left to fend for itself, if not overlooked. To be sure, a consensus exists among instructors that the antecedents of current culture must be invoked, and there is good evidence that students in our civilization courses have a strong interest in history which can serve as a powerful motivating force. Just the same, there is a certain complacency about teaching the past, as if history were an acquis whose main lines are frozen in time and whose pedagogy has been successfully elaborated. Thus most of the attention in our professional literature has been given to courses dealing with present-day France. Nonetheless, the increased emphasis on contemporary civilization has called into question the rationale of history in our classes. The traditional panoramic course composed of a succession of grandes étapes seems less and less appropriate. The alternative of referring to history chiefly as antecedent for some current phenomenon has the disadvantage of ignoring the specificity of the past era. We need a pedagogy that recognizes the unique achievements of every era of French civilization both past and present and that takes into account the subtle interplay between French culture today and its previous manifestations. Ideally this approach for dealing with history will involve the same combination of sociology, anthropology, and semiotics which Francis Debyser has argued constitutes the most suitable method for dealing with contemporary civilization. We can gain insight into one form such approaches might take if we reexamine some of the ways French history textbooks can be used in our classes.
1985-10-23T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/12
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1011/viewcontent/FR_French_history_textbooks.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
European History
Humane Education
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1013
2006-10-23T19:03:44Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Marivaux's Comedy of Loss: <i>La Double Inconstance</i>
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Marivaux's treatment of losing love in one of his favorite plays, La Double Inconstance (1723), is a double tour de force. Not content to show that grieving or offering sympathy for lost love can be intimately tied to the awakening to love that is at the center of his theater, he also turns them to comic advantage. The classic accounts of the role of sensibility in Marivaux, such as Ruth Jamieson's, have pointed out how love strains against pride in his plays as lovers summon amour-propre to resist acknowledging that they are in love (97,105) and noted the comic results of this conflict; yet even commentators who have been especially attentive to the role of sympathy in Marivaux, such as David Marshall, have overlooked the comic potential of this sympathy. My reading of the play proposes that mourning one's own losses and sympathy for the losses of others are not only a considerable factor in the triumph of new loves at the denouement, but figure, along with amour-propre, in the play's troubling brand of comedy where the comic skirts melancholy.
2002-04-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/14
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1013/viewcontent/marivaux.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1012
2006-10-23T17:01:46Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Exploring the Cultural Content of French Feature Films
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Of the many forms of realia at the disposal of the French teacher, the feature film can be the most engaging and rewarding. Nothing holds students' attention quite like a movie or gives them as vivid an experience of France, short of going abroad. Moreover, movies can furnish glimpses of milieus and personalities the average tourist or student rarely encounters. Instructors have been quick to make use of this potential in the classroom. In literature courses the movie version of a play or novel is compared with the original text. In civilization classes films are used along with supplemental readings as historical documents. Recently French departments have added to the traditional literature sequence courses devoted entirely to film. I will concentrate here on the wealth of information about French culture found in many feature movies, defining culture anthropologically as "the total way of life of a people, the social legacy the individual acquires from his group." The range of cultural data which can be implicit in a film, assuming it is set in contemporary times and handled in a more or less realistic fashion, can be divided into at least three levels. Consider first of all the facts about routine features of life which form a kind of background to the action-how people dress, what kind of housing they have, how they greet each other, etc. Secondly, a great deal of information about the functioning of social roles and institutions is equally apparent. Finally, the culture's value system will be brought into play as characters make choices and decide what kinds of behavior and feelings are appropriate in various circumstances.
1980-02-01T08:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/13
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1012/viewcontent/FR_Exploring_the_cultural.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1014
2006-10-24T17:16:13Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Voltaire's Fables of Discretion: The Conte philosophique in <i>Le Taureau blanc</i>
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Le Taureau blanc (1774) offers remarkable insight into Voltaire's use of the conte as persuasive discourse for two reasons. First, as the purest example of the genre among his last contes, it is in many ways the quintessence of his talents as a conteur. This tale does not cover any new ideological territory in its treatment of the Old Testament, a preoccupation found in much of his production of the Ferney period; nor does it introduce any technical innovations. But unlike Voltaire's last tragedies, where his reworking of the themes and dramatic conventions of his dramatic successes of the 1730s and 1740s gives the impression of self-parody, his handling of fantasy, irony, and philosophic commentary in Le Taureau blanc remains fresh. Study of this conte, which has been neglected more because its subject excites little passion today than for any flaws, can help us isolate key components of the conte philosophique in a way more problematic contes like Candide or more experimental ones like L'Ingénu cannot. Second, Le Taureau blanc contains some of the most explicit commentary on persuasive discourse to be found in the corpus of his imaginative works. Moreover, the rhetorical situation of the characters within the tale offers certain parallels to Voltaire's own situation as a persuader. An examination of the various modes of persuasive speech, especially narrative and eloquence, within what might be called his méta-conte, will afford a better understanding of why narrative proved a more effective weapon on behalf of enlightenment in Voltaire's hands than eloquence.
1985-10-24T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/15
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1014/viewcontent/Voltaire_Fables_DEPOSIT.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1016
2006-10-24T19:45:08Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
«L’arbre» de Gabrielle Roy: une hirondelle d’hiver dans un chêne vert de Floride
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
On connaît bien les voyages de Gabrielle Roy au Manitoba pour rendre visite à sa famille et ses séjours à Petite-Rivière-Saint-François dans Charlevoix. C’est seulement depuis la publication de ses lettres à son mari qu’on commence à mieux apprécier ses séjours en Floride dans les années cinquante et soixante. Au moins une nouvelle, écrite semble-t-il en Floride en 1967-1968, s’inspire de ces voyages, mais puisqu’elle n’a été reprise dans aucun recueil, elle reste mal connue. Elle n’a généralement été étudiée que dans le cadre du symbolisme du monde naturel chez Roy (Gagné, 1973; Harvey, 1993). Pourtant, François Ricard a attribué une plus grande importance à «L’arbre»; en jugeant la trajectoire de Roy en 1975, il estime que la nouvelle représente un tournant dans l’oeuvre royenne, la «nouvelle voie que va emprunter désormais la démarche créatrice de Gabrielle Roy» (Ricard, 1975, p. 138).
2005-10-24T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/17
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1016/viewcontent/LArbre_de_Roy.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1015
2017-04-12T19:38:08Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Sharing Grief/Initiating Consolation: Voltaire's Letters of Condolence
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
The letter of condolence has generally been neglected by students of epistolary discourse in spite of being located at the intersection of a number of recent critical concerns. Interest among historians of death is shifting from the ars moriendi that prepared the dying for a holy death to the grief of those who mourn the deceased. Second, letters of condolence raise the problem of the representation of grief and the adequacy of language to convey it. Finally, a rhetoric of consolation is implicit in the topoi of condolence selected by the letter writer, and while the consolatory discourse of antiquity has been the subject of much study, only recently has consolation in the early modern period attracted attention. Voltaire's extensive correspondence not only offers varied examples of letters of condolence, but consolation is a theme to which he repeatedly returned both in his letters and in the contes.
1996-10-24T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/16
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1015/viewcontent/Sharing_Grief_DEPOSIT.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1017
2006-10-24T21:32:11Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
FRANÇOIS LAMY AND THE RHETORIC OF ATTENTION OF MALEBRANCHE
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
François Lamy is always mentioned in the lively polemic over rhetoric touched off in 1694 by the attack of Goibaud Dubois against pulpit eloquence. The Benedictine Lamy became the center of the controversy when a 1698 éclaircissement of his De la connaissance de soi-même (5 vols. Paris, 1694-1698) provided the most thorough critique of the ancient art the quarrel produced. Malebranche himself did not participate directly in this dispute, but since he had made similar criticisms in passing in the Recherche de la vérité (1674) his presence was constantly felt in the background. This resemblance is no coincidence. According to Fr. André, an eighteenth-century biographer of Malebranche, Lamy "passoit dans la Républ. des lettres pour un imitateur servile du P.M." Just the same, André notes that Lamy was perfectly capable of taking independent positions. For example, when another 1698 éclaircissement linked Malebranche to certain Quietist doctrines, the Oratorian felt compelled to defend himself in print. Thus we can wonder to what extent Lamy's criticisms of rhetoric reflect Malebranche's stance. A second eighteenth-century biographer, J. F. Adry, points out that while Malebranche was named in the dispute over eloquence, he refused to intervene: "ce qu'on pouvoit lui faire dire pour ou contre la rhetorique le touchoit moins que la question subtile et délicate qui avait brouillé les deux grands prelats de CAMBRAI et de MEAUX." Lamy's position was that eloquence, by its very nature, cannot lead to a knowledge of spiritual entities like God, angels or the soul (v. 436-437) and that it corrupts man's heart and mind (v. 378). Was Malebranche's silence due to agreement with Lamy or to his well known desire to avoid polemics?
1981-01-24T08:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/18
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1017/viewcontent/Published_in_Romance_Notes.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1019
2006-10-26T19:22:56Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
René Descartes (1596–1650)
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Mathematician and founder of modern philosophy, known for his distrust of formal rhetoric. The Cartesian method and effort to achieve philosophic certainty are often cited as a challenge to rhetoric; yet, given Descartes's frequent deployment of rhetorical strategies, it is not surprising that his system makes provision for their provisional use. Furthermore, in spite of Descartes's aspiration toward a philosophy beyond rhetoric, postmodern critics find his system an entirely rhetorical construct.
1996-10-26T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/20
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1019/viewcontent/descartes.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1020
2006-10-26T20:07:05Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Port-Royalists
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Seventeenth-Century French Jansenists, authors of the so-called Port-Royal Logic and Grammar. Of the many textbooks written by the Jansenists with ties to the monastery of Port-Royal near Paris, two have significant rhetorical implications: Antoine Arnauld's and Claude Lancelot's General Grammar (1660) and, especially, Arnauld's and Pierre Nicole's Logic or Art of Thinking (1662). The Logic privileges a spare style in which any recourse to the figures must be justified by the subject matter, a distrust of rhetorical methods of invention, and an ideal of transparent language. This approach is born of a convergence of Cartesian epistemology and an Augustinian stress on fallen human nature; its immediate impetus came from the pedagogical experience of the Little Schools run by the Solitaries, the men associated with the monastery, and from the polemics in defense of Jansenist theology, of which the Provincial Letters of Pascal (whom the Logic praises as having known as much about true rhetoric as anyone has ever known) are the best example.
1996-10-26T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/21
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1020/viewcontent/portroyalists.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1018
2006-10-26T20:19:43Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Separation, Mourning, and Consolation in <i>La Route d'Altamont</i>
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
In discussing Bonheur d'occasion Patrick Coleman has identified Gabrielle Roy's difficulty finding a vehicle to convey convincingly her insight that "an awareness of separation is a necessary condition of any moment of real connection" as one of her chief esthetic problems (77). Her successful negotiation of this tension in La Route d'Altamont owes much to presenting consolation as an antidote to separation. First, rather than deny the reality of separation, consolation mediates between it and union by allowing Roy to portray separation coexisting with communion; even the most stable consolations must be constantly renewed since consolation is more a process than a permanent state achieved once and for all. Consolation is adjusting to loss, not restoration of the lost object. It lessens the pain of separation, but does not heal the wound of absence completely. Second, the dialectic of absence and presence in consolation is enhanced by the retrospective first-person narrative form Roy uses particularly effectively in this novel. While retelling moments of shared joy, the older narrator can signal their transience, and likewise episodes of loss and dejection are retold in a way that reminds readers of the possibility of consolation. Furthermore the fact that the reader gradually realizes that older narrator Christine has become a writer makes the reflective nature of Roy's version of consolation more plausible. The mature writer-narrator intervenes frequently to interpret the experience of her younger self who was only just becoming aware of the sacrifices her emerging vocation would demand.
2001-05-26T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/19
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1018/viewcontent/Quebec_Studies_2001.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1021
2006-10-27T13:04:37Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Rewriting for Redemption: Adapting the Epic in La Ceppède's <i>Théorèmes</i>
Ganim, Russell J
Jean de La Ceppède's Théorèmes ( 1613, 1622), raise intriguing issues concerning the question of generic adaptation. Elsewhere, I have shown that the Théorèmes can be classified under the rubric of the lyric not merely because the text consists of 520 sonnets on Christ's Passion, but because these sonnets, both individually, and within the collective context of the sonnet sequence, often represent appropriations of common Renaissance lyric subgenres such as the blason, the baiser, and the pastoral/pastourelle. La Ceppède's structural adaptation of the lyric is supplemented by the presence of the je/poète who internalizes the narrative as he recounts it. Thematically, La Ceppède illustrates the lyric dimension of the Théorèmes by accentuating the relationship between the lover and the beloved, with the poet often assuming the former role and Christ the latter. Nonetheless, La Ceppède's reliance on lyric form and theme does not preclude him from incorporating key elements of the epic genre into his work. While the substantial length of the Théorèmes in and of itself does not qualify it as an epic text, the scale of the work. which depicts Christ as the hero of a cosmic drama, where humanity's very existence is at stake, clearly lends a sense of urgency and grandeur indicative of epic. In addition, the references La Ceppède makes to Homer, Virgil, and Ovid in his annotations suggest a desire to imitate epic models so as to lend a sense of literary authority to the Théorèmes. Though this study will not include an exhaustive analysis of La Ceppède's allusions to epic poets, it will show how La Ceppède adapts certain structural, stylistic, and thematic elements of classical epic in order to suit his devotional project of representing literature as an instrument of salvation. Structurally, La Ceppède constructs an "epic" narrative composed of codependent episodes which lend unity and coherence to the various incidents that constitute the text's action. In turn, this "action" is recounted by the narrator who follows the Dantesque tradition of establishing a voice that is both impersonal and personal in nature. Like Homer, Virgil, and Milton, the presentation of La Ceppède's narrative is "classical" in the sense that there are several moments when the récit seemingly relates supernatural, absolute truths recounted by a dispassionate narrator. Yet, the contemplative nature of the poet's work projects an internal, almost autobiographical reality that is often relative, unstable, and subjective. The goal of the narrator's internalization is to heighten the identification between Christ, the poet, and the reader. Part of La Ceppède's "rewriting" of the epic lies in his focus on the meditant, be he the poet or the reader. The result is what Lance Donaldson-Evans calls an “Épopée méditative.” La Ceppède thus creates a new kind of epic protagonist, one who experiences the principal hero's ordeal. Donaldson-Evans mentions this idea, but does not develop it to any great length. It is thus my goal to examine in detail the comparisons and contrasts between La Ceppède's "meditative epic" and other versions of the genre.
2002-10-27T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/22
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1021/viewcontent/Rewriting_for_Redemption.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1022
2007-01-10T18:46:55Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
L'identité québécoise en ligne
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Le présent article se composera donc de deux parties. S'organisant autour de plusieurs tensions dans les valeurs québécoises, la première passera en revue le contenu de nombreux sites Internet. Elle mettra ainsi en lumière certains choix culturels des Québécois qui caractérisent leur mode de vie de ceux des Français, des États-Uniens et des Canadiens anglais. On trouvera ensuite, en appendice, une évaluation critique des principaux portails et sites Web généralistes qui traitent du Québec dans les domaines de la langue, de l'histoire, de la culture et de la géographie. L'interprétation de l'identité québécoise dans la première partie est proposée comme hypothèse de travail servant à provoquer la réflexion ; les valeurs et les tendances mentionnées sont souvent citées dans les discussions sur l'identité, mais la manière dont elles sont présentées m'est propre. De même, le répertoire des sites aura un caractère personnel étant donné le nombre à répertorier et la rapidité avec laquelle ils évoluent. Plusieurs des sites énumérés dans l'essai ne seront pas repris dans le répertoire, soit parce que leur centre d'intérêt n'est pas le Québec, soit parce qu'ils représentent un point de vue limité. Inversement, l'adresse des sites qui figurent dans le répertoire ne sera généralement pas donnée dans l'essai.
2003-01-10T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/23
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1022/viewcontent/Carr_Ressources_sur_Quebec_2003_optimized.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1023
2007-03-02T19:50:12Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
FLAUBERT'S DIS/EN CLOSURES
Olds, Marshall C.
The topos of the window and analogous framing devices is one of the recurrent characteristics of Flaubert's work, and, as examples of this discretionary practice, one need recall only some of the many scenes that are framed by windows: the view of Yonville through the carriage window or the stainedglass window that is, very nearly, La Légende de Saint Julien l'hospitalier. But windows are only incidentally our concern, for as the views of Yvetot and Constantinople equally signify something beyond themselves, so does this topos tie into a larger question, which is the evolution of Flaubert's practice of closure. The term evolution is meant as a temporal phenomenon only in referring to the order in which the major works were published or were to be published had not Flaubert's death intervened. Within this order (from Madame Bovary to Bouvard et Pécuchet and Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues) there is an obvious movement towards ever greater abstraction of character, narrative form and sequence, and causal and temporal referentiality. The atemporal aspect of this "evolution” is that one can find Flaubert practicing at the same time, and during the composition of a single work, forms that will be either used or deferred, indeed as he deferred some entire projects in favor of others. Such a "split" practice can be seen in two scenes from Madame Bovary, one kept for publication and the other discarded, which serve as examples of two of the most prominent framing devices that Flaubert will use, with or without the topos of the window. In one case the window is a synchronizing device. In the other it is used to establish a diachronic series of successive views that compose a larger narrative unit. The main point of this essay is to show that the structure of synchronic framing and scenic closure is gradually displaced in importance by the diachronic series of open-ended episodes, each reiterative of the preceding in its failure to be resolved and in its search for a final disclosure that will enclose and close the search. Moreover, this development parallels an increased focalization of narrative point of view as well as the growing intrusion on narrative form of theatrical structures, at least as they were understood and practiced by Flaubert towards the middle of his career.
1988-01-02T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/24
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1023/viewcontent/Flaubert__FF_1988.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1024
2007-03-06T14:35:30Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Review of <i>Mallarmé and the Sublime</i> by Louis Wirth Marvick
Olds, Marshall C.
In this comparative study, it is Louis Marvick's aim to read Mallarmé’s prose writings in light of the historical discussion of the sublime as a category of esthetic experience. Understanding of the sublime comes primarily from Longinus and the English tradition (Burke, Dr. Johnson, Hazlitt, Coleridge), filtered through Kant's "Analytic of the Sublime." Except for a few brief references to French writers other than Mallarmé (Boileau, the seventeenth-century critic René Bary, Baudelaire), Professor Marvick eliminates from his study any discussion of the French literary tradition, preferring to focus on a body of essays specifically on the subject of the sublime. He is thus able to write a semantic history of that word "sublime" through 1820 and then to compare the results with Mallarmk's use of it fifty years later. Mallarmé and the Sublime provides an interesting point of departure for further study in two areas, both suggested by Professor Marvick. The first would be an analysis of the parallels that exist between the English Romantics and Mallarmé, taking into account the French tradition of preciosity and the evolution of esthetics of le beau, particularly as they came to Mallarmé through Baudelaire. The second area (and I believe this is original with Marvick) would see an expansion and a deepening of the Kant- Mallarmé comparison throughout the poems outlined at the conclusion of this study. Such a project might involve a critical dialogue with others who have written on ontological questions in Mallarmé, Blanchot being the indispensable starting point, with critics like Bersani providing some of the more interesting developments since 1980. It could also perhaps complement the work done on Mallarmé and German idealism, particularly with respect to Hegel (Houston's being the best of the recent contributions).
1987-11-06T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/25
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1024/viewcontent/Marvick_review_19CFS.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1025
2007-04-13T16:59:38Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Hallucination and Point of View in <i>La Tentation de saint Antoine</i>
Olds, Marshall C.
Over the past twenty-five years, as readings of Flaubert's texts have become increasingly concerned with the definition of various narrative structures, the study of point of view has been inextricably tied to determining how his narratives generate (or, to some minds, subvert) meaning. Thus it is that almost all hermeneutical approaches have been concerned with point of view in one way or another, the procedure usually being to establish the principal or authoritative narrational axis (or perhaps a pseudo-authoritative one) and then to plot and analyze the departures from it. Point of view is not a new concern, of course, and has occupied readers of Flaubert for as long as there have been studies on style indirect libre and irony. Nor does this question originate in critical debate; Flaubert's manuscripts show him aware of changes in perspective. Despite the excellent and numerous analyses of this topic already in print, we need to take a further look at point of view in La Tentation de saint Antoine. The reason is simply (and perhaps not surprisingly) that the preoccupation in Flaubert studies with structure is with narrative structure and that this has informed the discussion of a work that only partly qualifies as narrative. Given the theatrical origins of this text and the cross-fertilization that occurs in it between theatrical and narrative forms, this approach is too narrow. With respect to point of view particularly, little attempt has been made to look at the work's hybrid nature, at the structures inherited from the theatrical as well as from the novelistic sides of its parentage, in order to describe more clearly some of its fundamental characteristics.
1988-09-06T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/26
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1025/viewcontent/Hallucination_19CFS.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1026
2007-03-22T17:11:53Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Under Mallarmé's Wing
Olds, Marshall C.
The following was presented as a lecture in conjunction with the exhibit of 18th-century European fans, held at the McMullen Art Museum of Boston College, September, 2000. The author is Professor of French at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of books and articles on French literature, and the editor of Nineteenth- Century French Studies. To have 19th-century French poetry breeze into this exhibit of beautifully crafted fans from the 18th century should be viewed as a complementary and friendly action. Indeed, the exhibition title, "Hand-held Delight," is especially apposite for our topic today, for the poet in question, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842- 1898) took particular delight in the marvelous object that is the fan, its characteristic deployment, fold by fold, recalling for him that most cherished of objects, the book, that reveals its meanings page by page. And, since, as the exhibition here beautifully illustrates, a fan is rarely just a fan, its mechanism provided the poet with an elegant metaphor for the gradual emergence of any image, even the lifting fog in the Belgian city of Bruges that slowly exposed the old buildings, "pli selon pli." While rarely "just a fan," a fan often is, however, a fan, and what is most pertinent for us today, is that Mallarmé wrote poems on fans, and I mean that in both senses: poems about fans, and also poems written on that wonderllly suggestive surface. He also decorated them. So, when we speak of Mallarmé's fan poems, we are referring to a rather unique artistic genre comprised of literary, painterly and rather specific cultural elements, associated with an intimate setting or space that was at once feminine and artistic. What I propose we do today is to follow Mallarme along a meandering path through these objects and the topics they evoke (to this reader at least), that we take a kind of visite guidée through the new but temporary Mallarmé Wing of the McMullen Art Museum. Mallarmé's interest in fans was part of a larger network of associations, dating from the 1860s and '70s, that included ladies' apparel and accessories, and collectible curios. It culminated in the 1880s and '90s at the height of the Japanese influence on French sensibilities, both artistic and mundane, known as japonisme. This last topic is familiar to many of us in the context of French painting fiom the mid 1870s onward, but it has been little explored in any detail with respect to the poetry of the same period.
2001-03-22T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/27
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1026/viewcontent/FANA.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangconf-1000
2008-08-21T13:42:41Z
publication:modlangconf
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Métissage et fables de la reconstruction dans les textes sur le génocide rwandais
Kalisa, Marie-Chantal
Le génocide des Tutsis au Rwanda a été exécuté dans le contexte de l’idéologie « génocidaire » mise en place par les gouvernements postcoloniaux qui se sont succédé depuis l’indépendance. Cette idéologie incitait à la haine et à l’extermination d’un groupe entier, les Tutsis, le mot d’ordre de la politique étant de maintenir une nette opposition entre deux identités prétendument ethniques. L’écriture de la période post-génocidaire cherche certes à dénoncer cette idéologie destructrice, mais au-delà de cette analyse du « piège ethnique », elle montre en divers endroits, de la part de l’écrivain, un certain désir, de dépasser ce moment de l’histoire en appelant à la redéfinition des identités et surtout à la reconstruction et à la réconciliation. La citation mise en exergue est tirée d’un des nombreux livres à avoir été publiés depuis 1994 concernant le génocide des Tutsis. Comme le suggère Fergal Keane, l’écriture consacrée au génocide, qu’elle soit littéraire ou non-littéraire, est d’abord une littérature de voyage. Les auteurs, écrivains ou chercheurs, quelle qu’ait été leur intention, se sont rendus au Rwanda et c’est l’expérience du voyage qui a engendré le texte. Ces voyageurs apportaient avec eux des images médiatiques qu’ils tenaient des différents reportages sur le génocide où, comme nous l’indique Fergal et tant d’autres, l’on montrait qu’un groupe « ethnique » s’était mis à tuer l’autre. C’est sous cet angle bipolaire opposant le Hutu au Tutsi qu’avant même de mettre les pieds sur le sol rwandais, les voyageurs voyaient la tragédie.
2003-11-06T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangconf/1
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangconf/article/1000/viewcontent/metissages_rwanda.pdf
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures: Conferences, Seminars, and Colloquia
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1027
2007-03-27T22:49:04Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Literary Symbolism
Olds, Marshall C.
As a school of literature, Symbolism refers to three phases of a vital part of the development of literary modernism: first to an artistic movement in France and Belgium during the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century; then, retrospectively and most importantly, to its immediate sources in French poetry beginning in the 1850s; and finally to the influence that both of these had on European and American literatures throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The designation then, had its original and official application to the second and, it must be owned, from a literary point of view the least significant of these phases. The perceived failure of the Symbolist movement to generate major works drew attention to the writers from whom it drew inspiration, and so by the 1920s the especially suggestive term Symbolist had come to be associated primarily with the movement’s four great predecessors who remain among the most influential writers of the French tradition, not only with respect to France’s poetry but across national boundaries and genres. While the emphasis in this brief introduction will be predominantly literary, it must be pointed out, too, that the second phase, the Symbolist movement proper, played a vital cultural role and is an area where much original research is currently being conducted. In its primary context, then, Symbolism refers to the four poets who preceded the Symbolist movement: Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Paul Verlaine (1844–96), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91). They are aiso the principal sources of influence on many of the writers outside of France who were drawn to the new aesthetic tendency they helped define. Each in his own way was responsible for powerful innovation, having gathered up the principal threads of the French poetic tradition since the sixteenth century along with German, British, and American contributions to Romanticism. Beyond the simple designation of an aesthetic tendency, Symbolism is a useful term as applied to the works of these poets in that it refers at once to an important feature of poetic content and to an attitude toward the figurative operation of literary language.
2006-03-27T08:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/28
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1027/viewcontent/Olds__Literary_Symbolism.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1029
2007-03-29T15:51:05Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Le palimpseste et le roman africain: le cas des romans<i> Xala</i> de Sembène Ousmane et <i>La Grève Des Bàttu</i> d’Aminata Sow Fall
Kalisa, Marie-Chantal
Les romans Xala de Sembène Ousmane et La grève des Bàttu d’Aminata Sow Fall mettent en scène quelques uns des personnages les plus mémorables de l’Afrique postcoloniale en proie à des crises individuelles mais dont l’impact se fait sentir partout dans la communauté. A la différence des études déjà faites sur ces romans qui se concentrent sur leur thématique, dans cet essai, je propose d’examiner le processus de création littéraire qui unit les deux romans dans un jeu intertextuel. Les relations palimpsestiques entre ces deux romans mettent en valeur la dimension esthétique, souvent mise à l’écart, de la littérature africaine.
2002-03-29T08:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/30
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1029/viewcontent/Kalisa__neo_helicon.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1030
2007-04-03T22:55:43Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
publication:modlangfacpub
Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide
Kalisa, Marie-Chantal
In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of genocide, or more precisely in French, “le théâtre du génocide” (theatre of genocide). Perpetrators and victims played their role while the rest of the world watched the “spectacle” live on television. Perhaps because of its spectacular aspect, the Rwandan genocide has inspired a number of artistic materials. In the last decade, we have indeed witnessed the growth of literary and artistic expression in relation to the Rwandan genocide. Survivors and witnesses have told their stories in books and songs. Journalists, as well as other travelers “to the end of Rwanda,” to use Véronique Tadjo’s words, have borne witness to the genocide. Artists who were not there have also attempted to represent the “African genocide” and have cast themselves as participating in the process of reconciliation. I am referring in particular to the African writers who published their work in the context of “Rwanda: Devoir de mémoire,” (“Rwanda: Duty to Remember”), a project where prominent writers were asked to visit Rwanda and “remain inresidence” with the expectation that they would write to generate creative responses to the genocide.
2006-10-03T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/31
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1030/viewcontent/Kalisa_PR_2006__theatre_DC_version.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1033
2007-10-17T17:35:41Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Dramatic structure and philosophy in <i>Brutus</i>, <i>Alzire</i> and <i>Mahomet</i>
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
An impressive amount of recent critical work has dealt with the philosophic element in Voltaire's tragedies. His plays have been labelled a theatre of involvement and a theatre of ideas; they have been examined from the standpoint of propaganda and as tragedy. However,the focus of such studies has been primarily on Voltaire's message or on the meaning of the plays, rather than on the dramatic structure he created to convey his philosophic concerns. Today, of course, Voltaire does not rank high either as an original thinker or as a dramatist. Nonetheless, his attempt to introduce his philosophic concerns into his tragedies continues to deserve serious attention. For even though his plays seem at times to be only weak imitations of Corneille and Racine, and his chief contribution to philosophy that of a popularizer, the effort he made to bring the two together was a real innovation in the French theatre. His involvement in both areas was intense and lifelong. Voltaire loved every aspect of the theatre--acting, designing scenery and writing. His intellectual activity was equally passionate and wide-ranging for he concerned himself with troublesome metaphysical questions as well as with the more practical problems of social and political reform. Given his love for both the theatre and philosophy, it was inevitable that Voltaire should seek to combine the two. Moreover, one of the most fascinating features of this marriage is the point at which philosophy and the theatre converge--the dramatic structure of these plays. As Robert Niklaus has noted, Voltaire's treatment of philosophical themes in the tragedies is less complex than in his other writings, and it remained fairly constant throughout his long career as a dramatist. How Voltaire turned the theatre into a vehicle for his thought is perhaps as interesting as the message itself.
1975-10-17T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/34
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1033/viewcontent/Brutus__Alzire__and_Mahomet___Carr.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1032
2007-10-17T17:30:53Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Se condouloir ou consoler? Les condoléances dans les manuels épistolaires de l'ancien régime
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Si la lettre de consolation suscite l'intérêt des chercheurs depuis un certain temps, l'expression épistolaire des condoléances est moins étudiée, bien que la lettre de condoléance ait peu à peu supplanté celle de consolation. Le propos de cette enquête sera d'examiner l'interpénétration des deux genres et les tensions qui en résultent, en privilégiant les condoléances, le moins étudié des deux genres. Au fond, ces genres représentent deux façons différentes d'approcher le deuil. Se condauloir, c'est 'participer à la douleur de quelqu'un, témoigner qu'on prend part à son déplaisir'. Consoler, c'est 'soulager, adoucir, diminuer l'affliction, la douleur d'une personne' (Dictionnaire de l'Académie, 1694). Le premier semble anticiper les théories modernes qui tendent à légitimer le sentiment de deuil, tandis que le dernier s'inspire des tendances datant de l'Antiquité qui prétendent simplement modérer le deuil, mais qui en fait visent souvent à l'éliminer.3 Dans un premier temps, on examinera l'imbrication des deux genres l'un dans l'autre et les conventions qui les entourent, puis on étudiera la tension existant au sein des condoléances, entre les bienséances et l'expression d'une amiction personnelle, et on terminera par les présuppositions qui sous-tendent les topoï de la consolation et des condoléances face au deuil.
1997-10-17T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/33
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1032/viewcontent/Se_condouloir___Carr.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1034
2008-03-11T23:06:33Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Aretino's Legacy: <i>L'Ecole des filles</i> and the Pornographic Continuum in Early Modern France
Ganim, Russell J
The problematic reaction that pornography evokes as both a literary and cultural construct stems partially from the fact that it is as antimodern as it is modern. This paradox is implicitly outlined in Lynn Hunt's definition of pornography. The ironically traditional, if not presumably timeless, quality of pornography she describes as "the explicit depiction of sexual organs and sexual practices with the aim of arousing sexual feelings"; at the same time, however, the "modernity" of pornography, especially in the early modern period, stems from the fact that such works, "us[ed] the shock of sex to criticize religious and political authorities' (p. 10). Consequently, the transgressive nature of pornography is rooted in the desire to mock, to upend, and in some cases to reshape the mores of the dominant culture. In Foucaldian fashion, the effort made through pornography to challenge existing authority and to suggest new paradigms of thought, identity, and behavior is what makes it "modern" in the current sense of the term. Within the last fifteen years, Hunt, Joan DeJean, and others have examined the relationship between pornography and modernity, with the work L'Ecole des filles (1655) figuring prominently in the discusion. This paper analyzes L'Ecole in terms of what precedes and follows it in the genre of licentious literature. Specifically, I situate L'Ecole within the context of early modern erotic literature as defined by Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), then compare and contrast it with the Baroque era Cabinet and Parnasse satyrique (1618, 1622) as well as Sade's Justine and Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795).
2007-09-11T07:00:00Z
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/35
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1034/viewcontent/Medieval_and_Early_Modern_French_Studies.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1035
2008-10-20T19:05:22Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Review of Jean-Nicolas Illouz, <i>Le Symbolisme</i>
Olds, Marshall C.
As emphases in literary studies have shifted away from structuralist, semiotic, and other modes of reading informed by theory toward historically-oriented esthetic and cultural analysis, we have needed a new examination of Symbolism that would account for its complexities both as a literary and artistic movement and as a “compound moment” in literary and cultural history. Jean-Nicolas Illouz has provided the foundation for such a reexamination. His study is, to my knowledge, the most complete and nuanced overview of the movement that we have, bringing together in a historically informed and carefully researched reading of Symbolism as both the point de rencontre for a multitude of literary, artistic and cultural currents of the French and Belgian fin-de-siècle and also as a decisive moment in the founding of literary Modernism.
2005-10-20T07:00:00Z
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/36
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1035/viewcontent/Illouz_review__19CFS.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1036
2008-10-20T20:41:23Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Foreword to Gayle A. Levy, <i> Refiguring the Muse</i>
Olds, Marshall C.
In the study that follows, Professor Levy explores the historically grounded topos of the Muse figure as it was developed by poets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a movement of renewal, and one that could occur in large part because of a revolution in thinking-both poetic and social-about issues related to gender and representation. She has asked that I write a brief foreword, which I am happy to do with an observation prompted by reading her book.
1999-10-20T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/37
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1036/viewcontent/Refiguring_1999_Foreword.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1037
2008-10-20T21:33:13Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Review of Jean-Pierre Lecercle, <i>Mallarmé et la mode</i>
Olds, Marshall C.
Mallarmé et la mode is clearly a fundamental contribution to the literature surrounding La Derniére mode. Yet the book's importance goes beyond its stated subject because, quite simply, La Derniére mode is more than an isolated instance of mediocrity. The project was interrupted too early to have acquired a unique character and its editorial devenir has yet to be established. Moreover, following on the heals of “Toast funebre," the magazine helped inaugurate Mallarme's arrival in Paris and the widening of interests that would have a profound effect on his poetry. Under the spell of Mallarme himself in a way that it no longer is with Flaubert or with Proust, our thinking that an understanding of his life has little to do with our understanding of his texts has caused us to neglect the crucial decade of the 1870s from which Mallarmé emerged as an unsurpassed public icon of artistic value. Avoiding the many sacred cows in Mallarmé studies, Mallarmé et la mode will be a key text in the critical reexamination of Mallarmé's public writing.
1991-12-20T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/38
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1037/viewcontent/19CFS_Lecercle_review.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1038
2008-10-20T21:47:44Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Review of Gustave Flaubert, <i>La Première Education sentimentale</i>, ed. Martine Bercot.
Olds, Marshall C.
Martine Bercot's edition of the first Education sentimentale will be of use to Flaubert scholarship, and may well be the best one available for some time to come. As inexpensive as it is, this volume would also be an excellent addition to any graduate course on Flaubert.
1994-10-20T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/39
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1038/viewcontent/19CFS_1994_review_PES.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1040
2008-10-20T22:13:29Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Review of Monic Robillard, <i>Le Désir de la vierge: Hérodiade chez Mallarmé</i>
Olds, Marshall C.
With this insightful though sometimes difficult book Monic Robillard has gone well beyond his earlier work on Stéphane Mallarmé's Hérodiade to offer a reading of the 30-year project where psychoanalytic paradigms and close reading create a lively and suggestive network that moves to the center of Mallarmé's poetics.
1994-09-20T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/41
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1040/viewcontent/FF_1994_Robillard_review.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1039
2008-10-20T22:02:43Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Review of Michael Bishop, <i>Nineteenth-Century French Poetry</i>
Olds, Marshall C.
Michael Bishop has written extensively and well on some of the best of mid and late twentieth-century French poets--Char, Deguy, Jaccottet-and in this volume turns his attention to a thematic consideration of the major practitioners of the last century. The results are somewhat mixed. On the one hand, just about everyone is included whom one would expect to find (Lamartine, Vigny, Baudelaire, Hugo, Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Laforgue; Desbordes-Valmore is present, Musset is not). Moreover, Bishop has read through the oeuvre of each poet, so his perceptive observations pertain not only to familiar poems but also to some that have the merit of being less so. On the other hand, this reader experienced throughout a double sense of frustration with the thematic approach as applied here, and with the failure to establish or identify the audience to whom the book is addressed.
1995-09-20T07:00:00Z
text
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/40
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1039/viewcontent/FF_Bishop_review.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1041
2008-10-20T22:49:06Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Review of Richard E.Goodkin, <i>The Symbolist Home and the Tragic Home: Mallarmé and Oedipus</i>
Olds, Marshall C.
In this comparative study, it is Richard E. Goodkin's subtly argued project to discuss dramatic tragedy and poetic symbolism as two responses to the problem of establishing what is most human in language, what Goodkin calls home. To be sure, Heidegger lies behind part of the author's development of this image. Yet, the principal force of the metaphor comes from a close reading of the texts under study, where the concept of home is tied to human attempts to exceed human limits, leading to self-recognition. Thus, he brings together tragedy and symbolism and shows their common vocabulary and concerns.
1986-01-20T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/42
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1041/viewcontent/FF_1984_Goodkin_review.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1042
2008-10-20T22:47:08Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Review of Mlchal Peled Ginsburg, <i>Flaubert Writing: A Study in Narrative Strategies</i>
Olds, Marshall C.
This study starts from the premise that the young Flaubert had difficulty sustaining his narratives, that once underway, the opposing efforts of both narrator and character to promote their individual interests within the text led to an impasse, a kind of narrational death, which required a particular strategy (presumably on the part of the author) to circumvent the difficulty and keep things going. For Ginsburg this "stammering" (1) was a problem that Flaubert never quite outgrew. Consequently, she invites us to read his development as a novelist in terms of the different solutions the various works bring to the problem of continued narrative and, ultimately, to that of the representation of the self. Barthes's notion of the interchangeability of text and reading is important here, as are certain precepts from Lacan and Derrida, notably that all projections issuing from the self are necessarily of the self and that the self can be said to exist only as it is represented in language. The self in question, however, is not Flaubert's (although Ginsburg is willing to admit this as a marginal hypothesis). It is the spectacle that is projected by the narrator, or by a character turned narrator, that makes Flaubertian narrative possible.
1987-09-20T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/43
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1042/viewcontent/FF_1987_Ginsburg_review.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1043
2008-10-22T20:40:05Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Review of Marthe Robert, <i>En haine du roman</i>
Olds, Marshall C.
En haine du roman is a lively and well-written discussion with the stated objective of wanting to account for the near religious veneration with which Flaubert viewed his activity as a writer. The answer is that Flaubert's exclusive devotion to writing was a retreat from life, indeed a hatred of it and particularly of the drives towards social success and power and, at root, sexual conquest and procreation. Yet the very fact that he wrote, and that he wrote books like Madame Bovary when he (as he sometimes said) preferred writing books like La Tentation de saint Antoine, points to the vestige of such drives and also to something like a struggle within between two contending dimensions of his character.
1987-04-22T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/44
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1043/viewcontent/Olds_19CFS_1987_review_Robert.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1044
2008-10-24T19:17:31Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Future Mallarmé (Present Picasso): Portraiture and Self-portraiture in Poetry and Art
Olds, Marshall C.
Let us turn to what might at first seem the improbable encounter between Stéphane Mallarmé and Pablo Picasso. On the face of it, so much separates them: the one patiently mining a limited set of aesthetic notions, spending years perfecting some of his major works, the other incessantly exploring all possibilities of visual representation, moving through styles sometimes weekly, creating prodigiously in different media, living dozens of careers. In their separate ways, though, they both were extreme examples of creativity. Whether or not for that reason, Picasso turned toward (if not to) Mallarmé at two distinct points in his career: in 1912–16 toward the end of the cubist-collage years, and again 30 years later at the Liberation of Paris.
1998-07-24T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/45
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1044/viewcontent/Future_Mallame__Present_Picasso_.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1046
2008-10-24T20:32:00Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
De didascalie en diégèse: le fantastique moderne et «Un coeur simple»
Olds, Marshall C.
Rattachée à l'étude des genres chez Flaubert, une question qui reste à approfondir concerne le soin qu'a mis le romancier à éviter l'anachronisme dans ses images diégétiques ainsi que dans ses diverses formulations de la causalité, les deux réseaux appartenant souvent à un même ensemble de données culturelles. On voit dans cette attention de Flaubert un souci d'exactitude historique, certes, mais qui va de paire avec le statut générique de son ouvrage. Déjà dans le conte oriental de sa jeunesse, Flaubert savait que c'était le cas pour le merveilleux: certains genres admettent volontiers l'intervention du surnaturel et se définissent même en fonction d'de. D'autres l'acceptent moins faulement, là par exemple où les attitudes et le parler d'une culture positive gouverneraient la diégèse. Ces distinctions peuvent s'obscurcir cependant, et nous rappellerons que de nos jours Todorov a élaboré une taxonomie pour le fantastique qui serait la modalité de l'indécision-chez le lecteur ou chez un personnage-entre l'étrange et le merveilleux, entre ce qui peut ou ne peut pas s'expliquer selon les lois quotidiennes. Or cent ans plus tôt, Flaubert fut préoccupé par un enchevêtrement de modalités bien similaire, et l'on peut s'étonner que ses catégories ressemblent à peu près à celles de Todorov. Bien qu'il n'y ait pas chez Flaubert de modalité proprement dite qui correspondrait au fantastique de Todorov, l'indécision qui marquera certaines de ses oeuvres résulte de la confusion entre deux explications, l'une psychologique et l'autre externe et d'ordre «fantastique» (les visions d'Antoine, ou des parents de Julien, par exemple), du mélange des genres.
1996-10-24T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/47
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1046/viewcontent/Olds_R_E_1996_De_didascalie.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1045
2008-10-24T19:41:25Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Desire Seeking Expression: Mallarmé's "Prose Pour Des Esseintes"
Olds, Marshall C.
Over the past sixty-five years of Mallarméan criticism, few poems have come to occupy as central a place in the discussion of the poet's work as "Prose pour des Esseintes." While it is generally agreed that, beginning around 1862, the development of Mallarmé's principal conceits and images, of his syntax and his directing ideas, culminates in "Un Coup de dés," "Prose" is often held to be not only Mallarmé's most hermetic poem but also the one that deals most directly with the nature of poetic composition. Commentators have variously called it Mallarmé's ars poetica, a conviction piece, a taking stock prior to beginning the Grand Oeuvre, a repudiation of the earlier verse in favor of a new vision and procedure. All of these views are tenable and have the merit of pointing out a number of ways to consider, through "Prose," the development of Mallarmé's ideas about poetry. Equally important, of course, is the aspect they have in common: namely, that "Prose" is somehow at the center of Mallarmé's poetic thought and practice. Yet, there is no evidence that Mallarmé attached any special importance to "Prose" in this regard, nor for that matter to any other poem. From the time of his earliest mature compositions, Mallarmé tended to project his work in terms of groups of poems, somewhat like the constellations of which he was so fond. Such arrangements suggest a center instead of specifically pinpointing one and we should also keep in mind that so many of his poems, by raising questions about the nature of poetry, show individual facets of a much larger ars poetica. It might be more to the point, then, to say that of the dozen or so poems that explicitly deal with poetry or the poet "Prose pour des Esseintes" exposes more fully than do the others a concern which runs throughout, or just behind, the entire oeuvre. It is my view that the concern which Mallarmé has developed in "Prose" is made up of two closely related considerations. One of these is the relationship between language and thought. Unique in all of Mallarmé's poetry is the invocation to hyperbole which opens the poem: "Hyperbole! de ma mémoire / Triomphalement ne sais-tu / Te lever ...." To identify hyperbole with poetry in some general sense, as is often done, is to miss what is at stake in this opening question. Poetry as description and synthesis is already present in the "oeuvre de patience," and the poet clearly would like to complement these qualities with something else. True, poetry is ultimately the matter and, with hyperbole, poetry in the fullest sense will be attained; but the vehicle for that attainment is what is called for, and that vehicle is language. This insistence carries with it a specificity not found in the other poems, where the emphasis is also on poetry, but not on poetry seen specifically as language. With his opening question, the poet is asking whether language is capable of an expressiveness which might go beyond the mere description (however metaphorical) of the objects of experience and thus carry thought to a radically new and different understanding of those objects and of that experience. "Les choses existent," wrote Mallarmé, "nous n'avons qu'à en saisir les rapports." Language, poetical language to be sure, does not reorder experience. Rather, it orders our comprehension of it, and without this expressiveness which is language there would be no comprehension in any meaningful sense, but only the unrealized thought of the "grimoire." Thought and language do not exist apart. In conjunction with this first consideration and informing it is a second, which also is present in terms of a relationship. It is the relationship between desire and thought. Most of Mallarmé's poetry beginning with "Les Fenêtres" in 1862 evinces the desire for a spiritual regeneration that would free the poet from the contingencies of everyday experience. This is of course a modified Christian theme inherited from the Romantic poets and Baudelaire, who saw the poetic imagination as the way to this new freedom. The peculiar problem which Mallarmé encountered in this respect is not in any difference in the extent of his desire, which is infinite. Rather, this problem, the barrier which is present in so many of his poems, is in the limits imposed on the movement towards the absolute, which are the limits of thought itself. As Baudelaire had seen, Mallarmé saw as an imperative the need to account for thought and emotions as complementary and mutually influencing facets of human experience, and recognized in poetry the means most likely to do this. However, he also discovered relatively early on that thought, even poetic thought, cannot extend infinitely. Of necessity tied to the image, to the language of wordly experience, thought can be abstracted only so far before it breaks this bond and encounters the void of thoughtlessness. Thus, desire and thought are not entirely coextensive, and the task for their difficult joining falls squarely upon language. For the question is really that of desire seeking an expressiveness that will allow thought to reach its very limits and yet without ceasing to gesture beyond those limits to the absolute which is the object of desire. The present study outlines and explores these two relationships as they are found in "Prose pour des Esseintes" and throughout Mallarmé's writing. The first section is a detailed exegesis of the poem, in which I have tried to keep the discussion as free as possible from any anecdotal presuppositions in order that meaning within the poem may emerge unobstructed. It is my conviction that Mallarmé was as much a thinker as he was a poet or, more properly, a thinker poetically in relation with the language he used. Unfortunately, it has often been the case in commentaries on "Prose" that resorting to anecdote, doubtless in an attempt to simplify seemingly insurmountable difficulties, mitigates the poem's complexity and impoverishes thought. In this chapter, I rely heavily on interpretation based on etymologies, and also bring to the discussion an examination of the variants. I do turn to other writings at times, as in the extended digression concerning the sense in which Mallarmé refers to memory and time, in order to ground certain fundamental observations. The second section broadens the context of the relationships between desire, thought and language. Focusing on poems, prose and correspondence, it traces Mallarmé's recognition of these relationships and his deepening understanding of them, primarily over the period from 1862 to 1875. I have placed an important part of this discussion within an ontological framework because it appears to me that Mallarmé's concern with the relationship between thought and desire brings to light a preoccupation with contingent and absolute being and with how both are manifest in language. In order to enhance our appreciation of Mallarmé's thinking in this regard, I have indicated how his ideas fall within the traditional confrontation of Idealism and Nominalism and have drawn what I hope is a useful parallel between "Prose pour des Esseintes" and Anselm of Canterbury's Fides quaerens intellectum: Proslogion, which deals in a strikingly similar way with the relationship between thought and desire for the absolute. Quite aside from my personal work on "Prose pour des Esseintes," it is my hope that the third and final section of this study may be of help to other scholars. I have included a critical bibliography of the work done on the poem since 1954. This date is not at all arbitrary, since it was then that Lloyd James Austin published in conjunction with his well-known study a critical discussion of most of the exegetical commentary up to that time. His contribution has been of immeasurable value not only because it brought together many readings of the poem, but also because it offered a convenient cross-section of Mallarméan criticism, and it is to continue his work that I present this bibliography. I have also included several items which may have escaped Austin's notice and, following the critical entries, have supplied the complete bibliography. Also offered as a convenience, the append ices bring together the earlier versions of the poem as well as other pertinent documents.
1983-10-24T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/46
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1045/viewcontent/Desire_Seeking_Expression__OPTIMUS.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1047
2008-11-07T20:35:03Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Globalisation and 'la pièce de cent sous': Balzac's nation-state
Olds, Marshall C.
Seen from an Olympian perspective, globalisation in today's world denotes the use of a standard model to establish relationships economic, cultural, and moral—across peoples in the absence of national boundaries capable of restraining the formation of such ties. From the national, or local, perspective, it is the invasive imposition of foreign influence in the form of a single model. From either vantage point, change and adaptation are the order of the day. Take-overs of one culture by another, whether hostile or friendly, are not historical novelties; what seems to distinguish globalisation is its planetary scope and impetus to take over aIl cultures with a single model. There is evidence of such a dynamic in La Comédie humaine, where French political and social instability of the post-revolutionary period was but an example, albeit the most important one, of a world-wide condition of developing capitalism. This dynamic was not leading to a world without borders, however, but to a changed cultural identity within the old confines; Balzac could not have known it, of course, but he was describing the formation of the modem nation-state. Of the many factors contributing to Balzac's social dynamism, I have chosen to focus on an aspect of the economic interplay between local currencies and the global monetary value represented by gold, specifically the embodiment of this interplay in the type of character who is able to move seamlessly between the two. That character-type is a transitional figure in Balzac's universe, ushering in new social and economic values that are not only foreign but also global in significance. Shunning the traditional stereotype of the Jew as such a figure, referring as it does to a now lost cultural past, Balzac privileges the figure of the partially assimilated Jew and its variants to mark specifically a society in transition.
2005-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/49
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1047/viewcontent/Globalisation_and__la_pi_ce_de_cent_sous__Balzac_s_nation_state___marshall_c._olds.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
French and Francophone Literature
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1048
2008-11-07T20:43:38Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Théâtre et Théâtralité chez Flaubert
Olds, Marshall C.
De tous les écrits dits secondaires de Gustave Flaubert, c'est incontestablement son théâtre qui a été le dernier à susciter un examen critique sérieux. Dans l'immense bibliographie consacrée au romancier et à son oeuvre, les études sur le théâtre ont, jusqu'à très récemment, occupé peu de place : quelques pages, lues ça et là dans les analyses des romans ou dans les biographies, un nombre infime d'articles consacrés aux caractéristiques théâtrales de l'oeuvre romanesque, la publication très irrégulière d'inédits de projets de théâtre ou de notes de lecture théâtrale dont les manuscrits font surface de temps en temps dans le domaine public. On ne relève qu'un seul livre au cours des cents années qui ont suivi la mort du romancier: Flaubert et le théâtre de Jean Canu, publié en 1946. Or le vent semble avoir tourné, et pour la décennie 1993-2003 les études consacrées à Gustave Flaubert et le théâtre méritent plus qu'une note en bas de page dans les histoires littéraires : au moins huit articles sur des sujets assez divers (le double de la production de la décennie précédente) et trois livres.
2005-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/48
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1048/viewcontent/Th__tre_et_th__tralit__chez_flaubert___marshall_c._olds.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
French and Francophone Literature
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1049
2010-03-30T21:38:32Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
From the Cloister to the World: Mainstreaming Early Modern French Convent Writing: An état présent
Carr, Thomas M.
The article is an overview on recent scholarship dealing Ancien Régime convent writing. Although nuns constitute a large percentage of the seventeenth-century women authors whose writings were published, except for a few figures like Marie de l’Incarnation Guyart or the Port-Royal nuns, their texts have been largely ignored, even by scholars engaged in the retrieval of women’s writing during the period. This is in contrast to Italian and Hispanic studies, where the contribution of convent writing is acknowledged as central. The état present discusses reasons for this neglect, the methodological challenges and perspectives for further research, along with a 120 item bibliography of recent scholarship.
2007-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/50
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1049/viewcontent/Carr_EMF_2007_From_Cloister_to_world__OPTIMUS.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
convent writing
writing by nuns
early modern France
Ancien Régime France
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
French and Francophone Literature
History of Gender
Modern Languages
Religion
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1050
2010-03-31T18:36:05Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
A Checklist of Published Writings in French by Early Modern Nuns
Carr, Thomas M.
The great amount of writing by early modern nuns that was published during the Ancien Régime is underexploited because no master list of it exists. For example, at least ninety books by some sixty different nuns were published between 1600 and 1700, and many more that have been published since. The Checklist of over 300 items is an effort to fill this gap. Besides books authored by nuns, it includes many biographies that contain samples of their writings. Short occasional texts, such as death notices, lettres circulaires, and legal factums have generally been excluded, however. Unless another location is noted, the works can be found in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
2007-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/52
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1050/viewcontent/Carr_EMF_2007_Checklist_of_works__OPTIMUS.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
convent writing
writing by nuns
Ancien Régime France
Early Modern France
European History
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
French and Francophone Literature
History of Religion
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1051
2010-03-31T00:03:24Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Introduction to <i>EMF 11: The Cloister and the World</i>
Carr, Thomas M.
Early modern nuns seem poles apart from women in the West today. They strove after an ideal of perfection that stressed humility, intellectual simplicity, asceticism, and submission that is the opposite of the autonomy and empowerment the contemporary feminist movement proposes for women. Even during the Ancien Régime nuns were isolated from their own society by the Council of Trent's revitalization of clausura. To modern eyes, the cloistered nun epitomizes a hierarchical church that cut a woman off from her own society, leaving her little initiative or voice. However, a burgeoning number of books and articles published in the last fifteen years have shown that such a view-one that marginalizes nuns from their society-reflects the Enlightenment's bias against monasticism more than it does the realities of early modern life. Recent scholarship stresses how convents were intimately linked to the social, economic, political, and intellectual realities of their day, and points to the fact that, while most nuns had internalized what Bert Roest calls the "dominant narratives of submission" ("Female Preaching," 140),* many nuns managed just the same to manoeuvre within these gendered ideals of perfection and to stretch their limits.
2007-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/51
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1051/viewcontent/Carr_EMF_2007_Introduction.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1052
2013-10-14T15:41:05Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
COMPETING CODES AND INVOLUNTARY
CONFESSIONS OF THE FLESH IN <i>LA PRINCESSE
DE CLÈVES</i>
Peterson, Nora Martin
In the Princesse de Clèves, confession, embedded this time in the courtly context, plays an undeniable, and yet complex, role in the unfolding of the main character's development. What I call involuntary confessions of the flesh—signs of the interior that slip out, unbidden, onto the exterior of the body—might appear to contradict the restraints of a century marked by René Descartes's privileging of the rational and by an increasingly strict imperative to rein in unruly signs of the flesh. In a court obsessed with appearance and dissimulation, how could involuntary confessions of the flesh possibly contribute to the development of the modern Western subject? I argue that such confessions strike to the very core of the early modern self. In the initial moment of their appearance, they cannot be performed, dissimulated, or falsified.
2012-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/53
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1052/viewcontent/Peterson_RR_2012_Competing_codes.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1053
2013-10-14T15:52:53Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
“The Truth Will Out”: Blushing, Involuntary Confession
and Self-knowledge in the <i>Heptaméron</i>
Peterson, Nora Martin
Dans un texte envahi par les allusions aux confessions et aux désirs charnels, est-il possible de réconcilier le corps pris en fl agrant délit de sensualité avec le désir de contrôle et de spiritualité? Cet article explore la signifi cation du rougissement en tant que confession involontiare de la chair dans l’Heptaméron (1559) de Marguerite de Navarre. On explore d’une part l’idée du corps commett ant un lapsus à l’aide des écrits augustiniens impliquant les tensions entre le spirituel et le charnel. On utilise d’autre part, en tant qu’outil herméneutique, les lectures de Foucault sur la confession. À travers un processus de confession en trois étapes — sacramentelles et involontaires — on met en lumière et analyse att entivement la problématique des diff érentes conséquences du rougissement dans cett e oeuvre; certaines conduisant à une meilleure connaissance de soi-même, et d’autres conduisant à la catastrophe.
This paper will enhance current readings of the nascent interior and exterior boundaries of the early modern body, a discourse which reflects sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discursive production. Drawing on, problematizing, and extending on Michel Foucault’s work on confession, the paper posits a three-step system that situates the blush within a closed system of self-knowledge. Moreover, I will contend that the relationship between the interior self and its manifestation on the body stems back to theological and philosophical discussions of original sin, commentaries which can be traced all the way back to Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Scholars have oft en slighted the carnal and hermeneutic implications of such signs as blushing, instead preferring to make the link between bodily signs and the dissimulative early modern court culture. Courtly dissimulation is indeed an important context in which to place involuntary confessions. However, a profound study of somatic self-control must extend beyond the limits of a specific context, such as the early modern court, to the more elusive realm of truth-seeking from theological, social, and literary perspectives.
2009-04-01T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/54
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1053/viewcontent/Peterson_RR_2009_Truth_will_out.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1054
2013-10-25T20:50:58Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Review of <i>The French Balades. John Gower</i>, ed. R. F. Yeager
Peterson, Nora Martin
The English poet John Gower's (d. 1408) greatest boon seems also to have been the reason for his fall into relative obscurity and his lamentable omission from syllabi. His writings include a substantial body of Middle English, Latin, and Anglo-French, and his trilingual approach reflects the culture in which he lived. In his 2005 article in the Chaucer Review, prominent Gower scholar R. F. Yeager draws attention to the lack of critical scholarship—either in French or English—on the English poet's Cinkante Balades and the Traitié Selonc les Auctour pour Essampler Les Amantz Marietz. It is a state of affairs Yeager hopes—and works—to change with his careful work in this volume, which makes these texts accessible to a much wider audience. Yeager's edition includes the full texts, in their original Anglo-Norman French as well as his own English translation, of the Traitié Selonc les Auctour pour Essampler Les Amantz Marietz and the Cinkante Balades. It also includes a general introduction, an introduction to each text, explanatory and textual notes, two appendixes, and a bibliography. Yeager's translations of both texts show his familiarity and years of expertise as a scholar of Gower. His words are clear and precise, and they do not take away from the directness of the AngloNorman. Yeager takes care not to add or subtract anything from Gower's language, nor does he change the structure of the English (except when it would result in extreme clumsiness). In short, it is a clean, literal translation that allows readers to see Gower as Anglo-Norman writer in a trilingual world.
2013-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/55
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1054/viewcontent/Peterson_16CJ_2013__Review_of_Yeager.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1055
2014-05-20T16:58:29Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
The Impossible Striptease: Nudity in Jean Calvin and Michel de Montaigne
Peterson, Nora Martin
This essay examines the writings of Jean Calvin and Michel de Montaigne, two figures not commonly considered together. The article seeks to highlight a certain fascination with nudity, not only in these texts, but in sixteenth-century culture as a whole. Though it is a bodily phenomenon, I argue, representations of nudity are more than skin-deep; they go beyond the capacity of what the body is able to express. Writings about nudity, whether religious or secular, reflect a widespread anxiety about the relationship between truth and representation in early modern discourse. The preoccupation with surfaces in the texts of both writers highlights the continued epistemological crisis in sixteenth- century religion, culture, and writing.
Cet essai examine les oeuvres de Jean Calvin et de Michel de Montaigne, deux auteurs rarement étudiés dans leur rapport. Cet article cherche à souligner une certaine fascination pour la nudité, non seulement dans ces textes mais dans l’ensemble de la culture du seizième siècle. Bien que la nudité soit observable au niveau corporel, je soutiens que les représentations de la nudité sont bien plus profondes : elles vont au-delà de ce que le corps est capable d’exprimer. Les écrits sur la nudité reflètent une angoisse collective quant à la relation entre vérité et représentation dans le discours des débuts des temps modernes. Le souci lié aux surfaces, présent dans les textes de ces deux auteurs, souligne une crise épistémologique prolongée dans la religion, la culture et la littérature du seizième siècle.
2014-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/56
https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/renref/article/view/21282/17349
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Arts and Humanities
Comparative Literature
French and Francophone Language and Literature
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1056
2014-07-25T19:55:36Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Tracing the Origins of Success: Implications for Successful Aging
Peterson, Nora M.
Martin, Peter
Purpose of the Study: This paper addresses the debate about the use of the term “successful aging” from a humanistic, rather than behavioral, perspective. It attempts to uncover what success, a term frequently associated with aging, is: how can it be defined and when did it first come into use? In this paper, we draw from a number of humanistic perspectives, including the historical and linguistic, in order to explore the evolution of the term “success.” We believe that words and concepts have deep implications for how concepts (such as aging) are culturally and historically perceived.
Design and Methods: We take a comparative approach, turning to the etymological roots of this term in British, French, and German literature. According to the earliest entries of the term in the Oxford English Dictionary, events can have good or bad success. Another definition marks success as outcome oriented.
Results: Often used in the context of war, religion, and medicine, the neutral, but often negative, use of “success” in literature of the Renaissance demonstrates the tensions that surround the word, and suggests that success is something to be approached carefully.
Implications: Ignoring the ambiguous origins of success erases the fact that aging in earlier centuries echoes much of the same ambivalence with which many people discuss it today. Attending to the origins of success can help gerontologists understand the humanistic tradition behind their inquiry into what successful aging means today.
2014-07-01T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/57
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1056/viewcontent/Peterson_GERONTOLOGIST_2014_Tracing_the_Origins_of_Success__DC_VERSION.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Successful aging
longevity
literature
Demography, Population, and Ecology
European Languages and Societies
Family, Life Course, and Society
French and Francophone Language and Literature
Gerontology
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1057
2015-05-04T16:25:40Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Colonial Violence and Trauma in the Works of Michèle Lacrosil and Ken Bugul
Kalisa, Marie-Chantal
To what extent can we say that both Lacrosil and Bugul rewrite Fanon? Through the study of Cajou and Ken, respectively the Guadeloupean and the Senegalese female protagonists, this article proposes a way to derive a specifically female perspective on colonial violence. The essay focuses on the two novels, Cajou and Le baobab fou, and examines the effect of colonial epistemological violence and its specific impact on the black female’s subjectivity. The protagonists Ken and Cajou revisit their initial trauma in a quest for knowledge of their historical heritage and engage in a dialogue with Frantz Fanon, representative of black male intellectuals. Cajou and Ken are young women living in Europe during the late 50s and 60s. Although they find themselves in Europe under different circumstances, the women’s stay in Europe takes a tragic turn as the result of traumatic disillusionment and alienation, both physical and psychological.
2000-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/58
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1057/viewcontent/Kalisa_IJFS_Colonial_violence__DC_VERSION.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
African literature
Caribbean literature
Women writers
Colonialisrn
Violence
Lacrosil
Bugul
Cajou
Le baobab fou
African Languages and Societies
Arts and Humanities
European Languages and Societies
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
French and Francophone Language and Literature
French and Francophone Literature
Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1060
2017-03-23T16:28:05Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
The Rhetorical Theories of Malebranche: Persuasion through Imitation or Attention?
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
France's most prominent philosopher of the second half of the seventeenth century is reputed to be no friend of rhetoric. Bernard Tocanne declares, "C'est chez Malebranche que se mettent en place tous les arguments mis en oeuvre par les adversaires de la rhétorique à la fin du siècle," and Peter France calls him "a philosopher who had no love for rhetoric." The basis of such judgments is the Oratorian's attacks in the Recherche de la vérité (1674) against the use of the imagination and passions in the eloquence of Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. Malebranche's critique is symptomatic of the legacy of Descartes' hostility toward rhetoric. The author of the Discours de la méthode had little use for the ancient discipline, scorning the degrees of probability accepted by rhetoricians as proof in favor of the évidence of clear and distinct ideas. Likewise, in theory at least, he saw no need for the rhetorician's concern for adapting his message to his audience: as Peter France has put it, Descartes' "first and constant notion of persuasion" is that "he will state the truth firmly and clearly and everyone will agree."
However, it is an injustice to limit Malebranche's views on rhetoric to an amplification of the Cartesian stance. His other intellectual guide was Augustine, whose abandonment of his role as a professional rhetorician upon his conversion, in no way signaled a lack of interest in rhetoric. To be sure, Malebranche condemns what I will call a "rhetoric of imitation," which appeals to the body, and which is illustrated in its most potent form by "la communication contagieuse des imaginations fortes" (I. 320). Yet he also describes a second, more authentic model of persuasion, a "rhetoric of attention" which directs the mind to the Divine Reason in whom men see all truth. He depicts this method in action in dialogues like the Conversations chrétiennes (1677), the Entretiens sur la metaphysique et sur la religion (1688), and the Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques (1683). These works, which envisage persuasion taking place under ideal conditions, contain both theoretical discussions of the communication process and practical advice on how to convert the obdurate.
Readers familiar with other major thinkers of the period such as Pascal and Arnauld will recognize points of similarity. I believe they will also sense that, although Malebranche never attempted a comprehensive assessment of the art, his views on rhetoric and persuasion have a unique depth and subtlety due to his success in grounding his rhetorical principles in a coherent analysis of the operation of the mind and its relation to the body. My goal in bringing together his scattered comments on rhetoric is not so much to study the sources of his views as to examine the epistemological and linguistic foundation of the two modes of persuasion he describes. We will see that while Cartesian psycho-physiology furnished much of the rationale for his attacks against "fausse éloquence" (II. 259) of the rhetoric of imitation, his own theory of attention, reinforced by his concept of the Incarnation and the mind's union with God, made possible the more positive view illustrated in the dialogues.
1983-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/59
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1060/viewcontent/Carr_1983_ZFSL_Rhetorical_Theories_of_Malebranche.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
French and Francophone Literature
Modern Languages
Rhetoric
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1061
2017-05-05T14:52:56Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Marivaux's <i>Jeu de L'amour et "De La Raison"</i>
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
At a crucial point in the third act of Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard, Silvia declares that she requires a battle in Dorante between love and reason: "je veux un combat entre I'amour et la raison," a struggle her brother Mario suggests will be to the death. In fact, the work's entire action, not just the last act, can playfully be renamed Le Jeu de l'amour et "de la raison," and while it is possible to read Dorante's eventual proposal of marriage as the defeat of reason, In a very real sense such an evaluation must be nuanced, if not reversed.
Both as a moralist and a comic writer - two sides of Marivaux's talent which converge in Le Jeu - reason serves as a foundation of his enterprise, and although critics of his theatre have touched on the role of reason in his comedies, their primary emphasis has usually been his treatment of love. Approaching Le Jeu from the opposite direction by focusing attention of Marivaux's complex notion of reason can serve to highlight his moral preoccupations underlying the play, while elucidating elements of its comic structure common to all his theatre. I will begin by examining how raison is treated in his journals and La Vie de Marianne and then go on to show how its ethical and social implications underpin Le Jeu.
1984-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/60
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1061/viewcontent/Carr_1984_AJFS_Marivaux__DC_VERSION.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
French and Francophone Literature
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1062
2017-04-17T21:57:15Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Eloquence in the Defense of Deism: Voltaire’s <i>Histoire de Jenni</i>
Carr, Thomas M.
In the Histoire de Jenni (1775), his last major conte, Voltaire returns to a pattern similar in many ways to the one he had used in his first important tale, Micromégas. In both, as Vivienne Mylne has pointed out, two discussion scenes—the first near the beginning of the tale and a second more substantial one—are set in a narrative frame involving a voyage. Critics have generally attributed this return to a structure relying heavily on debate to convey his message to Voltaire’s increasing use of the philosophical dialogue in his later years. Perhaps a more fruitful approach, however, is to emphasize Voltaire’s reliance in Jenni on eloquence. To be sure, Freind’s debates with the Bachelor of Salamanca and the atheist Birton have much in common with dialogues like L’ABC or Le Dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers. But unlike these rather intimate discussions, the dialogues in Jenni are public events in which the opponents attempt to influence a large audience. And precisely because of this a more expansive, highly charged style is appropriate. In fact, both traditional aspects of eloquence are pressed into service—l’art de persuader and l’art de bien dire. In addition, Jenni contains numerous minor displays of eloquence, making its use the distinctive feature of the conte’s construction. So pervasive is eloquence that characterization and, to some extent, plot are shaped by its needs. I also hope to show that eloquence is especially suited to the defense of Voltaire’s deistic credo.
1978-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/61
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1062/viewcontent/Carr_1978_KRQ_Eloquence_in_defense__DC_VERSION.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
French and Francophone Literature
Philosophy
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1063
2017-05-04T14:15:18Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Voltaire’s Concept of Enlightened Eloquence
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Near the beginning and end of his Lettres philosophiques (1734), his first major text promoting the principles of enlightenment, Voltaire gave examples of two very different kinds of eloquence. In the third letter on the Quakers, he pictured George Fox converting his jailers with his inspired preaching. In the last letter, he praised the eloquence of Pascal before he attempted a refutation of the Pensées, calling Pascal’s projected apology for Christianity “un livre plein de paralogismes éloquents et de faussetés admirablement déduites.” Each is representative of a brand of eloquence Voltaire found objectionable. The first kind, appealing chiefly to the lower classes, thrives on enthusiasm—a contagious disease in Voltaire’s eyes; it breeds fanaticism, factions, and sects. Pascal’s eloquence, designed for a more sophisticated audience, makes use of formal argumentation and elegant style and is thus all the more insidious.
1980-05-01T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/62
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1063/viewcontent/Carr_1980_NFS_Voltaire__DC_VERSION.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
French and Francophone Literature
Philosophy
Rhetoric
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1064
2017-05-05T19:35:28Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
The Role of Language in the Theory of Communication of Nicolas Malebranche
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) is perhaps the most important French philosopher between Descartes and the Revolution of 1789. His synthesis of Cartesian elements and Augustinianism in the last quarter of the seventeenth century had great influence on several generations of thinkers before the rationalism he represented was replaced by the new Lockian sensualism. There has been a European revival of interest in Malebranche in the last twenty years, centering around the first critical edition of his complete works, a task headed by the Belgian historian of philosophy André Robinet, and there are signs that American interest is growing as well with the recent publication of translations of two of his works, and another monograph on his philosophy.
Malebranche has not received much attention from historians of linguistics, although his only extended comments on language, dealing with how meaning is attached to words, have been treated in some detail in Robinet’s 1978 excellent survey of language theory in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Literary critics, on the other hand, often refer to his attack against rhetoric but seldom analyze it at length. My own interest in Malebranche began from just such references to his ideas on communication. As I looked into them further I realized that the literary historians had emphasized such psychological elements as the imagination and emotions in his theory of rhetoric at the expense of language as language; conversely, his ideas on language took on broader interest when situated in the larger perspective of his views on various forms of communication.
1981-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/63
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1064/viewcontent/Carr_1981_PMALC_The_role_of_language__DC_VERSION.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Discourse and Text Linguistics
French and Francophone Language and Literature
Linguistics
Philosophy of Language
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1065
2017-05-10T22:21:53Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Writing the Convent in New France: The Colonialist Rhetoric of Canadian Nuns
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Most writing by women that has survived from before the fall of New France—perhaps most writing by women during that period—was done by nuns in the seven communities founded before 1763: the Ursulines, the Hôtel-Dieu, and the Hôpital-Général in Québec; the Ursulines of Trois-Rivières; the Hôtel-Dieu and two uncloistered institutes, the Congrégation de Notre-Dame and Sisters of Charity of Marguerite d’Youville in Montreal.
While the nuns wrote above all to promote the spiritual vitality of their communities, they also provide a unique female perspective on the colonial milieu. Marie Guyart, Catherine Simon de Longpré, and Marguerite Bourgeoys are the best known women religious from the era that began with the arrival of the French foundresses in 1639 and lasted into the 1670s when they were replaced by Canadian-born nuns; but, as we will see, numerous other nuns in this first group wrote about their efforts to establish a beachhead of the Gallican Church in Canada. The second period from about 1680 to 1725 was dominated by the first generation born in the New World—Marie Morin of the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal or Jeanne-Françoise Juchereau of the Québec Hôtel-Dieu—who sought to consolidate the work of the foundresses by writing annals of communities that had become thoroughly Canadian. The third period, exemplified by Marie-André Regnard Duplessis of the Hôtel-Dieu of Québec, had to cope with the discouraging realization that Canada was on the periphery of France’s colonial interests.
Thus, instead of examining Canadian convent writing as spiritual discourse, this article focuses on how it embodied the rhetoric of colonization by which the settlers explicitly or implicitly justified France’s enterprise in the New World. The intersection of convent writing and this colonialist rhetoric is particularly revealing because the two share multiple features. First, both subordinate the individual entity, whether a nun or a colony, to some larger whole. When a nun writes she invariably promotes the vitality, present and future, of her monastery and order. The rhetoric of the colonizers justifies the introduction of metropolitan culture into the colonized territory. Second, the most famous of these texts, such as those of Marie Guyart or Samuel de Champlain, gain from being read in light of more routine examples. Thus the need for the kind of extensive inventory of published convent writing attempted in the bibliography. Finally, just as Canadian nuns accepted their subordinate position in the Church, while simultaneously extending the frontiers of what was permitted to women, so the settlers seldom called into question their dependency on France, even though they constantly maneuvered to make a system designed for the benefit of the mother country work for them.
2009-04-01T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/64
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1065/viewcontent/Carr_2009_QS_Writing_the_convent__DC_VERSION.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Canadian History
Catholic Studies
French and Francophone Language and Literature
Missions and World Christianity
Modern Languages
Women's History
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1066
2017-05-12T16:31:58Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
The Visual Arts in the Civilization Classroom
Carr, Thomas M., Jr.
Although the visual arts have long been a feature of civilization courses, instructors do not always exploit their full potential. This paper presents a checklist to help teachers identify the relevant aspects of the arts for study. Its goal is to facilitate comprehensive treatment of works of art by focusing on three areas: the aesthetic dimension, the social context, and the artist’s own experience. The checklist is followed by a series of activities which encourage students to integrate the various aspects of the arts while practicing their language skills.
1983-02-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/65
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1066/viewcontent/Carr_1983_FLA_The_visual_arts__DC_VERSION.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Architectural History and Criticism
Art and Design
Art Education
Cultural History
Curriculum and Social Inquiry
Educational Methods
Modern Languages
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1067
2019-07-03T20:11:30Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Anticipatory Testimonies: Environmental Disaster in Claudine Jacques's Fictional Prophecies
Frengs, Julia L.
In Caledonian author Claudine Jacques's 2002 novel L'Âge du perroquet-banane, Parabole païenne, a tribal elder warns a man "from elsewhere": "in our country, if you remove a taboo bone, you disrupt the sea, if you touch it without respect you invite a cyclone, if you toss the bones of our elders you provoke a...tidal wave" (54). Although this work is set in a futuristic world after an ambiguous "Great Disaster" on an unnamed Oceanic island, the author manages to allegorically recount the history of the environmental atrocities attributed to the earth's human occupants that have transformed the present reality of the Oceanic region.
This essay considers Claudine Jacques's L'Âge du perroquet-banane, Parabole païenne, as well as her novel Nouméa Mangrove (2010), as anticipatory testimonies. Both works of fiction call into question the very real violations of environmental human rights facing the diverse ethnic communities of the sui generis collectivity of New Caledonia: nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean, pollution from the nickel mining industry, and the depletion of natural resources. This essay demonstrates how Jacques's works engage in environmentalism by bearing witness to and challenging environmental injustices in New Caledonia in particular, and on a broader scale, in the French-speaking Oceanic region.
2015-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/66
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1067/viewcontent/FrengsSTTCL2015Anticipatory_Testimonies.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Claudine Jacques
New Caledonia
Oceania
Kanak
nickel
prophecy
testimony
environmentalism
Arts and Humanities
French and Francophone Language and Literature
French and Francophone Literature
Other French and Francophone Language and Literature
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1068
2020-07-01T19:28:34Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Presénces polyvalentes: Protean Polynesian Voices In the Works of Rai Chaze and Titaua Peu
Frengs, Julia
IN AN INTERVIEW conducted in May 2013, the same month in which French Polynesia was inscribed on the United Nations list of countries to be decolonized, the archipelago's best-known writer, Chantal Spitz, declared:
L'Océanie est une et multiple. Une parce qu'habitée par un méme peuple originel venue d'Asie du Sud-Est, notamment Taiwan, qui s'est installé au fil de voyages océaniques a bord de pirogues à double coque et en suivant les étoiles, sur les îles du Pacifique. Multiple par la variété des adaptations imposées à ce peuple par des environnements géographiques souvent très différents et des colonisations européennes diverses. (19)
Spitz evokes the complicated histories that both connect and separate the peoples of Oceania, histories also characterized as "multiple 'translocal' and contested Pacific worlds, sometimes overlapping and often intersecting but always plural" (Armitage and Bashford 9). Simultaneously one and multiple, Oceania, comprised of New Zealand, French Polynesia, the islands of Micronesia and Melanesia, Hawaii, and Easter Island, is a complex, multivalent region, united by a common ancestry yet "separated" by hundreds of indigenous languages (as well as the colonially imposed languages, English, French, and Spanish) and different experiences of colonialism and globalization. The region has recently been producing an equally complex., rich, yet understudied body of literature. In "The Oceanic Imaginary," Fijian scholar Subramani suggests that this literature is a critical site for "the construction of a body of knowledge encompassing the kaleidoscope of Oceanic cultures and tracing diverse and complex forms of knowledge-philosophies, cartographies, languages, genealogies, and repressed knowledges" (151). He envisions a literature that would provide a space for Oceanian voices to question "imagined givens" such as the binary tensions between small and large, indigeneity and introduced, and the notions of space and insularity that he contends are tensions seen in western critical traditions as dialectical, while in Oceania they coalesce. Subramani proposes that this aspiration to reimagine Oceania through its own literature-a literature produced by its own people-would, rather than establish any ideological stance, grand narratives, or complete theories, "avoid dreams of completion; it would allow impurities and accommodate important flaws" (151). I suggest that two contemporary Tahitian women writers, Rai Chaze and Titaua Peu, establish a French Polynesian literary presence in taking up Subramani's call to reimagine Oceania in two novels that illustrate it as simultaneously one and multiple. Integrating complex forms of indigenous epistemologies such as genealogy-based histories and cartographies with intricate narrative constructions, these authors have created works that are representative of their contemporary social, political, and cultural situations in both form and content.
2019-10-01T07:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/67
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1068/viewcontent/Frengs_FR_2019_Presences_polyvalentes.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Arts and Humanities
French and Francophone Language and Literature
Pacific Islands Languages and Societies
Polynesian Studies
Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1069
2020-09-19T20:50:41Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Theater and the Rwandan Genocide
Kalisa, Chantal
In 1994 Rwanda was the scene of genocide, or, more precisely in French, it was Ie theatre dugenocide (theater of genocide). Perpetrators and victims played their role while the rest of the world watched the "spectacle" live on television. Perhaps because of its spectacular aspect, the Rwandan genocide has inspired a number of artistic materials. In the last decade we have indeed witnessed the growth of literary and artistic expression in relation to the Rwandan genocide. Survivors and witnesses have told their stories in books and songs. Journalists, as well as other travelers "to the end of Rwanda," to use Veronique Tadjo's words, have borne witness to the genocide. Artists who were not there have also attempted to represent the "African genocide" and have cast themselves as participating in the process of reconciliation. I am referring in particular to the African writers who published their work in the context of Rwanda: Devoir de memoire (Rwanda: Duty to Remember), a project in which prominent writers were asked to visit Rwanda and "remain in-residence" with the expectation that they would write to generate creative responses to the genocide. At most, however, participants acknowledged these written texts had a limited audience in Rwanda. Rwanda is a primarily oral society. As a result, most people traditionally do not seek or receive written information. After publication of the texts, several excerpts were adapted to the stage in Rwanda by Koulsy Lamko, a Chadian dramatist. Is there a body of artistic work we can refer to as theater of the Rwandan genocide? If so, what would be its role?
2019-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/68
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1069/viewcontent/Kalisa_2019_Theater_Rwanda.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Africana Studies
Arts and Humanities
Political Science
Theatre and Performance Studies
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1071
2021-04-19T19:10:37Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
Une conversation avec Lydie Salvayre
Salvayre, Lydie
Motte, Warren
WM : Tout d’abord, puisqu’il s’agit ici d’une conversation, j’aimerais vous demander ce que vous pensez du principe. Beaucoup de vos livres, surtout au début de votre carrière (je pense par exemple à La Déclaration, à La Vie commune, à La Puissance des mouches, à La Compagnie des spectres) sont monologiques. Dans La Conférence de Cintegabelle, livre strictement monologique, le conférencier prône les vertus de la conversation— et cependant il fait tout pour tuer dans l’oeuf toute possibilité de dialogue. Comment voyez-vous la chose ?
LS : Aussi loin que remontent mes souvenirs, j’ai toujours eu des difficultés à prendre la parole. Comme vous le savez, mes parents qui étaient arrivés en France en 1939 pour fuir le franquisme parlaient une langue mixte et transpyrénéenne où le français était régulièrement piétiné, bousculé, estropié, bref mis à très rude épreuve. Le problème c’est que je reproduisais, enfant, leurs fantaisies et écarts langagiers, et que j’éprouvais une honte affreuse chaque fois que j’étais prise en défaut de mal dire. Ce n’est que plus tard, bien plus tard, que j’ai trouvé à ce mal dire transmis par mes parents, une puissance poétique, une drôlerie, une forme d’impertinence et une façon joyeuse de résister à la langue majoritaire dont j’ai tenté de rendre compte dans mon roman Pas pleurer.
2021-01-01T08:00:00Z
text
application/pdf
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/modlangfrench/78
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1071/viewcontent/Salvayre_Motte_Une_conversation.pdf
French Language and Literature Papers
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
French and Francophone Language and Literature
oai:digitalcommons.unl.edu:modlangfrench-1070
2021-04-19T19:08:16Z
publication:modlangfrench
publication:modernlanguages
[Lydie Salvayre,] Dans le vif du vivant
Motte, Warren
Les livres de Lydie Salvayre sont implacables, obsessionnels, insistants. Ils débordent de gens qui hurlent, qui fustigent, qui accusent, des gens qui estiment qu’il y a quelque chose qui ne va pas dans l’ordre accepté des choses, et qui ne relâcheront pas. Salvayre dit « Non ! » de manière superbement éloquente ; elle refuse d’approuver la sagesse reçue ; elle pense que tout mérite d’être interrogé. À notre époque si houleuse et incertaine, ces livres sont vivifiants, des vaccins puissants contre les foutaises outrageuses qui nous bombardent de façon quotidienne, constante. Son écriture se situe dans le vif du vivant, pour emprunter une phrase de Salvayre elle-même, phrase dont elle se sert pour décrire la façon d’être de Pablo Picasso. Vif comme vital, le site où tous les sens sont activés, où rien ne passe inaperçu, où notre attention se focalise et où le jeu de la vie se déroule de manière débridée. Vif comme rapide, ardent, sensible, intense, réactif, aigu. Vif comme listo aussi, ce mot espagnol qui désigne l’empressement, mais qui connote également l’alacrité intellectuelle, l’habilité, la volonté d’agir immédiatement. Ce mot de la langue maternelle de Salvayre lui va comme un gant, parce qu’elle est surtout lista : rapide à réagir, rapide à comprendre, rapide à s’engager avec nous, rapide à demander notre engagement avec elle.
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1070/viewcontent/Motte_Dans_le_vif.pdf
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2021-04-19T19:14:24Z
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Projet en cours: [Ces deux textes sont extraits de Marcher jusqu’au soir.]
Salvayre, Lydie
Je détestais depuis longtemps tous les dévots de l’art. Je les détestais pour avoir vérifié trois cent fois que le prurit culturel qui leur démangeait l’âme ne les rendait pas meilleurs que les autres, ni plus humains, ni plus dignes, ni plus justes, ni plus éclairés, ni plus intelligents, ni plus rien, que parfois même ils étaient de gros cons, de gros cons confits en connerie, de gros cons d’une connerie insolente, de gros cons émerveillés d’eux-mêmes qui paradaient aux vernissages et se pâmaient devant le dernier artiste à la mode, lorsque c’était le tour d’Armand Étienne, ils n’en avaient que pour Armand Étienne, qu’il était ci qu’il était ça qu’il faisait fureur qu’il était tout simplement génial, puis du jour au lendemain ils n’en causaient plus du tout, à la trappe !, et ils passaient au suivant avec le même enthousiasme, de gros cons présents à toutes les manifestations officielles de la culture où ils distribuaient des poignées de mains, ânonnaient pieusement leur haute conception de l’art, et faisaient leurs importants avec des phrases culturelles, des regards culturels, une voix culturelle et, plaqué sur leur face un air discrètement supérieur de gros cons, de gros cons encore plus cons que ces cons de kangourous, de gros cons dont il fallait se tenir à distance prudente sous peine d’être éclaboussé par leurs très culturels et très élégiaques postillons, de gros cons après le passage desquels il était recommandé de procéder à une rapide désinfection par la Bétadine alcoolique à 5% pour les parties du corps exposées et par le Percarbonate de soude pour la contamination des lieux.
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1073/viewcontent/Salvayre_Projet_en_cours.pdf
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2021-04-19T19:17:09Z
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Quatre photos
Salvayre, Lydie
« Au fond je suis un sportif, le sportif au lit. » — Henri Michaux
Chambre avec vue
Lydie Salvayre – Paris – Mai 2013
Lydie Salvayre – Le Pin – Juin 2018
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1074/viewcontent/Salvayre_4_photos.pdf
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2021-04-19T19:12:23Z
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Deux artistes
Salvayre, Lydie
1) Sur Alberto Giacometti : Walking Je nourrissais depuis longtemps une passion pour l’Homme qui marche de Giacometti. L’Homme qui marche, que je n’avais jamais vu que reproduit sur du papier glacé, me semblait constituer l’oeuvre au monde qui disait le plus justement et de la façon la plus poignante ce qu’il en était de notre condition humaine: notre infinie solitude et notre infinie vulnérabilité, mais, en dépit de celles-ci, notre entêtement à persévérer dans le vivre, notre entêtement à persévérer contre toute raison dans le vivre.
2) Sur Thomas Bernhard : Contre Aller dans le sens opposé, c’est ce que ne cesse de se répéter le narrateur de La Cave. Aller dans le sens opposé au chemin qui le conduit au lycée bourgeois, fréquenté par des enfants bourgeois, situé dans un quartier bourgeois avec ses maisons bourgeoises, ses commerces bourgeois et ses jardins bourgeois.
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1072/viewcontent/Salvayre_Deux_artistes.pdf
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2021-04-19T19:18:35Z
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Lydie Salvayre, écrivain baroque’n’roll
Wallet, Bernard
Dès sa petite enfance, Lydie Salvayre parle deux langues. À la maison, elle parle l’espagnol qui est la langue de ses parents, réfugiés politiques dans le sud de la France suite à la prise de pouvoir de Franco. À l’extérieur, elle parle le français. L’espagnol va devenir la langue du dedans, la langue de l’intime, des ripostes intérieures, la langue qui prend en charge tout ce que ne peut porter la langue du dehors, tout ce qui par elle est laissé de côté, tout ce qui est excessif, tout ce qui déborde, tout ce qui ne peut se rendre public, tout ce qui n’a pas d’existence légale.
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1075/viewcontent/Wallet.pdf
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2021-04-19T20:07:08Z
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Almuerz
Lopez, David
Elle m’a laissé le choix. Salsa amarilla o roja, avec les albondigues. J’ai dit amarille, abuela, c’est ce que je dis à chaque fois qu’elle me pose la question. Bueno elle a répondu, le sourire dans la voix, satisfaite à l’idée de satisfaire, et puis elle a ajouté que nunca elle s’accorde de ce que moi je préfère, parce que mi hermano también il a ça qu’il aime, et puis il vient plus souvent alors parfois elle se confond. Mais c’est vrai qu’on la laisse cociner, comme elle dit, et qu’elle connaît nos préférences, sachant qu’en général on aime bien quand ça se mange à la cuillère. Mais pour les albóndigas, l’exception n’a rien d’une gageure. Quand je lui demande si elle a besoin d’aide je sais déjà qu’au final je ne vais rien faire du tout, puisque je n’ai pas fini ma phrase que déjà elle me dit no no no, siéntate, si toi tú m’aides c’est cuando se termine, pa rebañar, et elle rit en retirant son tablier à toutes petites fleurs. D’accord, abuela.
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1076/viewcontent/David_Lopez.pdf
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2021-04-19T19:21:34Z
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À propos de Lydie Salvayre
Guven, Mahir
Cher Professeur Notte-- Vous noterez que je continue à buter sur votre patronyme. Allez savoir pourquoi ma mémoire n’a pas enregistré Motte. Allez comprendre le fonctionne du cerveau. Vous en savez quelque chose vous ? Moi non ? Il faudrait demander à Lydie Salvayre. Vous ne pensez pas ? La fille a exercé comme psychiatre. La tronche, la caboche, elle connaît, pendant plus de trente ans, elle a nagé dans les délires et les névroses. Et ? Donc ? De quoi je parle ? J’y viens, cher Professeur. Patience. Faisons à la Française. D’abord, les politesses.
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1077/viewcontent/Mahir_Guven.pdf
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2021-04-19T19:26:13Z
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Éloge de la fuite
Bikialo, Stéphane
[Ce texte a paru dans Lydie Salvayre, éd. Stéphane Bikialo, Classiques Garnier, 2020.]
« Si on y allait ? »
(fin de BW )
Je pars.
Toujours il dit Je pars, je me tire.
Il aime le mouvement de partir. Il se fout de l’endroit à atteindre, ce qu’il aime c’est partir, c’est déclarer qu’il part. Il dit qu’il va écrire, un jour, l’éloge de la fuite. (BW )
C’est BW qui le dit, et c’est Lydie Salvayre qui l’écrit, inaugurant avec cet ouvrage, paru en 2009, une série qu’elle décrira ainsi dans Hymne (2011) : « le temps presse et […] il me faut aller désormais vers ce qui, entre tout, m’émeut et m’affermit, vers tout ce qui m’augmente ». Ce sera les 7 femmes en 2013, et sa mère et Bernanos en 2014 avec Pas pleurer, roman dont j’emprunterai le dispositif énonciatif d’ouverture (« C’est Bernanos qui le dit ») afin de suivre cet « éloge de la fuite » qui s’écrit dans l’oeuvre de Lydie Salvayre, d’un roman à l’autre, d’une fuite à l’autre. Et cet éloge de la fuite, j’ai eu envie de l’écrire avec les personnages de ses livres, avec BW en particulier car tout le livre est une variation sur le fait de partir, mais aussi avec Montaigne, « toujours botté et prêt à partir ». Souvent, chez Lydie Salvayre, il faut non seulement être prêt à partir, mais savoir partir, « car il faut des forces immenses pour s’élancer, contrairement à ce que postulent les assis qui assimilent la fuite à je ne sais quelle veulerie de l’âme » (BW ). Si en effet on peut partir pour le geste ou le mouvement même de partir, on peut aussi partir pour fuir, partir pour refuser, partir pour « disparaître de soi » . . .
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1079/viewcontent/St_phane_Bikialo.pdf
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2021-04-19T19:23:45Z
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Diamant brut
Cosnay, Marie
Ce coup de fil, au petit matin. Le coup de fil porte les ingrédients d’une histoire. Au coeur de l’histoire racontée au téléphone, une enfant. D’Irun, Poitiers et Bruxelles, chacun dans sa chambre ou cuisine du petit déjeuner, nous sommes projetés, par ondes électromagnétiques, au coeur de l’histoire dans laquelle il y a, comme protagoniste principale, une enfant, 15 ans, venue de Conakry. D’Irun on nous dit, au téléphone : un ange, une perle, un diamant, on ajoute : brut. Un diamant brut.
Le diamant brut avait quitté son pays pour en remonter d’autres, territoires après territoires, territoires sans nom et sans spécificité sinon du point de vue des plus ou moins grands dangers qu’on y rencontrerait, ici le viol, ici le feu du soleil, là les policiers jetant des pierres, la noyade, les centres, puis le vide total parce qu’il n’y a plus de route. La route, c’est fini, Espagne France Belgique Allemagne et demi-tour. Europe est une terre avant une autre terre, mais il n’y a pas d’autre terre, Europe n’est qu’une étape avant un but mais il n’y a pas d’autre but. On est arrivé à la fin et on tourne dans la fin comme dans une cage.
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1078/viewcontent/Marie_Cosnay.pdf
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2021-04-19T19:27:47Z
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Ouvrages de Lydie Salvayre
Motte, Warren
La Déclaration. Paris: Julliard, 1990. Paris: Verticales, 1997.
La Vie commune. Paris: Julliard, 1991. Paris: Verticales, 1999.
La Médaille. Paris: Seuil, 1993.
La Puissance des mouches. Paris: Seuil, 1995.
La Compagnie des spectres. Paris: Seuil, 1997.
Quelques Conseils utiles aux élèves huissiers. Paris: Verticales, 1997.
La Conférence de Cintegabelle. Paris: Seuil/Verticales, 1999.
Les Belles Âmes. Paris: Seuil, 2000.
Le Vif du vivant. Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art, 2001.
Contre. Paris: Seuil/Verticales, 2002.
Et que les vers mangent le boeuf mort. Paris: Seuil/Verticales, 2002.
Passage à l’ennemie. Paris: Seuil, 2003.
La Méthode Mila. Paris Seuil, 2005.
Dis pas ça. Paris: Seuil/Verticales, 2006.
Portrait de l’écrivain en animal domestique. Paris: Seuil, 2007.
Petit Traité de l’éducation lubrique. Portiragnes: Cadex, 2008.
BW. Paris: Seuil, 2009.
Hymne. Paris: Seuil, 2011.
7 Femmes. Paris: Perrin, 2013.
Pas pleurer. Paris: Seuil, 2014.
Tout Homme est une nuit. Paris: Seuil, 2017.
Marcher jusqu’au soir. Paris: Stock, 2019.
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https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/modlangfrench/article/1080/viewcontent/Ouvrages_de_Lydie_Salvayre.pdf
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