FRENCH FORUM最新文献

Résumé:

Dans Le Moulin de Pologne (1952) de Jean Giono, le « destin des Costes », saisis d'un vertige de mort, traduit l'impasse d'une société où la fusion désirée des individus avec le monde, sous l'effet de la « passion » ou instinct de « perte », n'est plus possible car le monde s'est fermé au désir humain sous la pression de l'Histoire récente. C'est pourquoi, dans la petite ville où se déroule l'histoire, au xixe siècle, règne l'« avarice », non seulement d'argent, mais d'abord du désir. Avares, les notables de la ville qui assouvissent indirectement – par victime interposée – le leur en lui offrant en pâture la perte des Costes lesquels, en désespoir de cause, se donnent au néant. Le personnage de M. Joseph, figure de l'écrivain – comme est aussi le narrateur –, bâtit autour de Julie, son épouse, la plus éperdue des Costes, un vaste domaine où elle peut vivre librement sa passion. Ce domaine est la mise en abyme du contre-monde de formes que l'écrivain, l'avare par excellence, avare sublime, élabore dans l'écriture pour qu'on puisse s'y perdre ad libitum, à défaut de pouvoir le faire pour de bon dans le réel. À la mort de M. Joseph, le destin funeste des Costes reprend de plus belle et va à son terme. Il ne reste alors plus à l'écrivain qu'à passer au livre suivant.

Abstract:

Before she became Queen of Navarre in 1527, Marguerite d’Angoulême, Sister of King Francis I, and Guillaume Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, wrote more than one hundred and twenty letters to each other between 1521 and 1524. Several scholars have already shown how Marguerite drew inspiration from the letters of Briçonnet. This article reveals how much Marguerite’s own letters to the bishop nourished her first important poem, the famous Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne, written after the death of her niece Charlotte de France in 1524. After a necessary clarification on the date of composition of this funeral text, the article shows that the letters written by Marguerite guide her in the appropriation of Briçonnet’s theological teachings before they are shaped in the poem. Because Marguerite’s letters constitute a spiritual exercise on the path of poetic writing, they enable the reader of the Dialogue to decode the meanings of the paradoxical expression “pis que morte”, which is to be understood quite differently between the very beginning of the poem and its final line: the spiritual significance of the whole Dialogue is thus revalued.

Abstract:

This article explores the ways in which the built environment—wardrobes, closets, and windows—affords opportunities for intimacy in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. It is also an exploration of a key sixteenth-century word: privé. Not quite yet the modern “private,” privé designates in the Heptaméron intimacy, familiarity, and apartness, and is the cause of some suspicion among the storytellers when it gives the impression of illegitimacy. The article focuses on the spaces and behaviors that are explicitly qualified as “privés” in order to identify its connotations and implications. The material culture of the privé in the Heptaméron is linked to early sixteenth-century architectural developments in palaces and châteaux, court culture, diplomacy, and secrecy. Displays and performances of privé behavior were a valuable way for monarchs and other powerful elites to express favor. Courtly attitudes are echoed by the storytellers and are evidenced in the stories themselves, many of which take place in great Renaissance houses or châteaux. Awareness of the gendered implications of the privé emerges both from the discussions and the stories in which women have more to lose from public displays of intimacy and familiarity. The article offers an investigation of the material culture of the privé and a discussion of its ideological and gendered freight.

Abstract:

“‘Madame, je vous supplie de me conseiller lequel il vault myeulx, ou parler ou mourir’” (75), asks Amadour at a key moment in the Heptaméron’s tenth novella. It is a loaded question, and one that continues a chain of conversations about the relationship between speaking, silence, and death. In the Heptaméron, speech and danger coexist, and modify one another as both restorative and destructive. In this article, I will read four novellas in which speech and/or silence play a central role in the intrigue and outcome of the tale, and in which the stakes of speaking or remaining silent are very high. In each novella, the trope appears with intensity, but the outcome of what I will call the parler/mourir dichotomy is different in each situation, and reflects the complexity of the situations that these novellas represent. Marguerite shows that speech can perpetuate power, can heal and promote justice, or be deadly. In another instance, she demonstrates that silence is the most effective way to gain victory. It is my contention that Marguerite shows an interest in exploring the different manifestations of speech and silence as they pertain to women. As such, the parler/mourir dichotomy can increase our understanding of Marguerite’s project to dialogically expose and discuss the conditions of women in her society and to put women’s experiences front and center.

Abstract:

In the Définition de vrai amour par dizains, Marguerite de Navarre explores the nature of love. This cycle of twenty-six poems has received little attention from scholars, as for a long time the poems were only available in a fragmentary edition. It is only since Richard Cooper’s 2007 edition that there is a basic text with which researchers can work. Nevertheless, the poems raise questions, for the writing style is sometimes so hermetic that the texts appear incomprehensible. According to our hypothesis, three factors are responsible for this. Firstly, the structure, which presents a dialogue between a lady and her lover, but which leaves the distribution of roles unclear, so that the reader often does not know which of the two interlocutors is speaking. Secondly, the nature of love itself, which is differentiated in the dialogue between eros and agape, but terminologically is always expressed by the word amour, so that the reader is often left confused. Thirdly, the writing style is particularly condensed and plays with ambiguities. Our thesis is that the poems are intentionally ambiguous in order to confuse the readers and show them the limits of their own intellect. Only “amitié naifve” allows the lover at the end of the dialogue to understand that the divine love of agape is true love; similarly, it is only at the end of the cycle that the reader realizes that religious themes are central to the poems. This paper analyses this technique of confusion as a “poetics of naivety.”

Abstract:

The world of the court, with its values and practices, underpins the world Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, without being the main subject of the short stories. The objective of this article is to analyze how the court and its courtiers were described by one of its founders. It is indeed possible to see not only that Marguerite does not share the vision of the court transmitted in anti-aulic writings, which were very popular in the sixteenth century, but that, in fact, she proposes an idealized vision of the court. It is even possible to observe a certain promotion of courtly culture and its values without the collection of nouvelles becoming an apology of the court. Observations concerning the inscription of La Coche in courtly practices precede the thematic analysis of the frame narrative and of some of the short stories.

Abstract:

The Miroir de Jesus Christ crucifié, written by Marguerite de Navarre shortly before her death (1549), is a devotional text, i.e. associated with the practice of prayer and spiritual exercises. It aims at arousing the experience of an inner transformation both in its author and in its reader. In this poem, the body of the Crucified, contemplated part by part, acts as an accusing mirror in which the worshipper sees her/his own “darkness”, and at the same time as an illuminating mirror through which the soul gradually perceives the “clarity” of divine charity until it reaches the threshold of annihilation as a prelude to mystical union. The poem is therefore a meditation on the Passion and belongs to a long and dense tradition of texts, from the Bible to contemporary spiritual literature, which work on the same motifs.

This study adopts the point of view of the editor of the poem, anxious to identify its sources correctly. It shows how the devotional character of the text and its belonging to a particularly rich and uninterrupted meditative tradition modify the constraints and difficulties of this work. Getting lost in a labyrinth of motifs reflected as far as the eye can see in countless texts is an indispensable step, but the search for models allowing to clarify certain choices of composition of the poem is the means to deepen the reflection on its mode of operation, even if it does not deliver the keys for its understanding.

Abstract:

This article proposes an in-depth analysis of the character of Nomerfide, one of the devisants in L’Heptaméron, by examining her from the perspective of facetiousness. She is shown at the heart of the narrative device of conversion of tears into laughter, specific to this book, which gives this character a very special place even though she is the youngest and the most playful of the devisants. Nomerfide is analyzed first of all as a storyteller whose stories are distinguished by their brevity and their playful dimension, which must be interpreted in the light of the awareness of the ephemeral character of all things. Endowed with great talents as a storyteller, Nomerfide deploys a vast palette of narrative strategies and comic effects because she wants to fight melancholy and make the good company gathered in Sarrance laugh. On the other hand, Nomerfide does not hesitate to quarrel with the male devisants or to make her voice heard on male violence and on hypocrisy in relationships between men and women. She also openly endorses female desire and pleasure and defends marriages based on love matches. The article shows that Nomerfide, although facetious because she embodies spontaneity, sincerity and naturalness, is also capable of profound words, including religious ones, thus embodying the liberating power of speech.