FRENCH FORUM最新文献

Abstract:

In the late 1930s, literary critic Albert Béguin traced the poetics of Symbolism and Surrealism back to German Romanticism, in his influential doctoral dissertation L'Âme romantique et le rêve. Essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poésie française (1937). The understanding of poetry as a genuine means to acquire knowledge, as developed by the German Romantics, proved extremely influential in French poetics from the 19th century onwards. The central thread of this approach is its 'revelationism', i.e. the idea that the artwork does not merely copy exterior reality, but reveals its hidden sense. Due to the popularity of Béguin's work, and because of certain biographical details, it is interesting to examine the influence his doctoral dissertation had on French 1940s-1950s ontological film theory. The way in which, most eminently, the film critic André Bazin, yet also the filmmaker Robert Bresson, understood cinema has much in common with the revelationist poetics of German Romanticism. Furthermore, Béguin's review of Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951) established an influential 'symbolist' reading of the filmmaker's oeuvre. This reading was not only adopted by Bazin, but seems to have left its mark on Bresson, too. The scope of this transfer can be better grasped by situating this movement within the legacy of German Romanticism.

Abstract:

Marie Jeanne Riccoboni (1713-1792), one of the foremost proto-feminist women writers of Enlightenment France, has offered conflicting and enigmatic information about her childhood.

While her desire for privacy regarding her own biography can be understood and respected, when (new) personal details elucidate her published oeuvre, both her fiction and her correspondence, they hold a particular fascination for readers and scholars alike. This essay will shed light on a notoriously blank page of Riccoboni's life, her childhood, through two newly uncovered lettres de cachet pertaining to her mother Marie Marguerite Dujac and her grandfather Jean Baptiste Dujac. An analysis of these documentsas lettres de cachetthrough the lens of royal and paternal authority as well as female agency, will provide new context for Riccoboni's biography regarding her relationship with her mother and her childhood, as well as offer important clues for some essential elements of her fiction, including her proto-feminism.

Abstract:

The Algerian writer Y.B. (Yassir Benmiloud) originally established himself as a satirical journalist and critic of the Algerian regime before publishing his first novel, L'Explication, from exile in Paris in 1999. Although it was met with a relative lack of critical attention, reserved more for his third novel Allah Superstar (2003), which examines the place of Muslims in post 9/11 France, L'Explication is a dynamic reimagining of noir that "others" the classically Western genre. While respecting many of the tropes of detective and noir fiction, including the gradual unveiling of the criminals and their motives for murder, an investigator-focused narrative, temporal doubling, and sassy one-liners, L'Explication deviates from reader expectations with its autobiographical elements, hybridity, and its refusal to provide a rational resolution to the investigation. The novel is imbued with a Sufi mystical structure and ideology that exist uncomfortably alongside, and call into question, French rationalism, the underpinning of a classical detective story. Y.B.'s criminal investigation proceeds along unexpected lines to become an esoteric interpretation of the history of Islam in North Africa and the rise of Algeria's cabinet noir during the 1990s civil war. This article will show that L'Explication is at once a detective novel and a parody of both that genre and of Islamic exegesis. The parodic elements allow Y.B. to circumvent censure, while offering an indirect means of giving voice to national trauma as he endeavors to explain the seemingly inexplicable Algerian civil war.

Abstract:

The French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century coincided with a literary desire to validate French cultural dominance through poetry. As part of this goal, a traditional epic would establish a Virgil for France and a heroic story to equal Rome's. Though the civil wars prevented the composition of such an epic, they opened the path for Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques, an epic account of the Wars themselves. As a Protestant poet on the losing side of national conflict, Aubigné rests upon epic traditions while using them to garner support for his faction and to blame Catholic leadership vehemently for the national crisis. This article examines the epic tradition (seen in Helen, Dido, Bramimonde, and others) by which national trauma and epic conflict are enacted upon female bodies. Aubigné uses this epic motif to specific rhetorical ends: gaining sympathy for the Protestant cause and lamenting Catholic oppression. He adapts the epic tradition to emphasize mothering bodies (pregnant or nursing) to heighten the horror of the war and win the audience to the poet's side. This adaptation of epic tradition takes two forms: the anthropomorphization of France herself and the presentation of victims of civil war. The Misères of the nation, lamented in the poem's first book, resonate in female reproductive bodies to universalize the trauma, thereby aligning the reader with Aubigné's outrage and grief. Though female embodiment of national trauma is traditional to epic, Les Tragiques finds a new angle that serves its rhetorical goals.

Abstract:

The article shows how Flaubert dismantles the notion of romantic love in L'Education sentimentale through a double use of traditional love topoi. Flaubert stages a number of literary scenes where romantic love usually is at large, scenes where authentic or spontaneous feelings of love historically have thrived. At the same time, he inserts unconventional elements into these scenes. In that way Flaubert not only disassembles the notion of romantic love but he also signals how post-romantic love can be reactivated through the idea of prostitution. The article then analyzes what consequences such a substitution has for the very notion of topos. It is argued that Flaubert's reworking of topoi can be theorized by way of a new, not rhetorical, but aesthetic idea of literary topology. The article identifies how Flaubert invents non-typical topoi, which rely on aesthetic meaning and not rhetorical verisimilitude.