French Studies - current issue

Representing Place in Corrozet's Antiquitez de Paris

Hodges, E. — 2008-04-04

This article investigates how the French Renaissance guidebook creates a legible sense of place. In part a response to the developing marketplace for printed texts in the capital, the genre was developed by Gilles Corrozet between 1530 and 1550. A hybrid text, part urban history, part folkloric national memoir, the guidebook narrates the history of the city through an examination of its antiquities and origin stories. For Corrozet, place was a means to understand and negotiate relations between history, the self and space at an historical moment when the book, like the map, functioned as a material signifier for the exploration and the representation of the self and the world. While Corrozet's guidebooks locate the experience of given places within an historical trajectory, the portability of these books, produced mostly in handheld format, reveals another of the guidebook's functions as it traces a traveller's itinerary, a journey that provides the book's spatial plan. As a portable ‘lieu de mémoire’, it guides the reader to experience place and landscape as a continuum between the book and its object, and also participates in a larger historical and political demography by aligning writings on cities with an emerging politics of centralization.

La Jouissance de la verite ou le plaisir tragique selon le Chancelier d'Aguesseau

Brillaud, J. — 2008-04-04

Le Chancelier d'Aguesseau, architecte du code civil, était aussi homme de lettres. En réponse à un discours de facture aristotélicienne sur la tragédie prononcé par Valincour, il compose des remarques sur la nature du plaisir tragique qui se situent en marge des théories contemporaines. Nous nous proposons ainsi d'étudier les Remarques sur la tragédie de d'Aguesseau en regard des textes de Fontenelle et de Dubos qui abordent également la question du plaisir tragique. L'originalité du texte de d'Aguesseau se situe dans une nouvelle conception du plaisir tragique entendu comme un accès à la vérité signifiée lors de l'émotion produite par la tragédie. La mise en échec momentanée du jugement lors de l'émotion esthétique autorise le surgissement d'une vérité morale provisionnelle. Le plaisir tragique, selon l'hypothèse de d'Aguesseau, consisterait en une ‘jouissance de la vérité’ ressentie lors de la représentation des tragédies.

'De nouveaux rythmes': The Free Verse of Laforgue's 'Solo de Lune'

Holmes, A. — 2008-04-04

This article considers Laforgue's ‘Solo de lune’ in the light of the Symbolists' claim that their free verse was inspired by music. After referring to the views of two contemporary poets on the subject (that Laforgue's free verse was psychologically rather than musically determined) and outlining Laforgue's position with regard to music and his counter-claim, his practice is examined in two areas: first, ‘Solo de lune’'s double narrative and consequently contrapuntal structure, alternating free verse with an approximate ‘quatrain populaire’; second, the use of other musical features which work against the random nature of free verse (parallelism, modulation, innovative phonetic repetition). The article argues that Laforgue's musical aspirations influence both the structure and the detail of the text. Finally, Laforgue's interest in connecting the three art forms — music, Impressionist painting, and liberated verse — and his awareness of a parallel modernity, are briefly illustrated.

Envisioning Difference in Le Clezio's Onitsha

Yillah, D. — 2008-04-04

Le Clézio's Onitsha was published in 1991 and is to date the most important fictional piece the author has devoted to his childhood experience of colonial black Africa (British-ruled Nigeria of the late 1940s). I approach the work as an instance of postcolonial discursive practice and focus specifically on the nature and function of the cross-cultural perspective it offers. I grant that any attempt to describe a culture other than one's own inevitably involves using one's cultural reference to describe that culture. I further grant that the unavoidable use of one's cultural lens to relate to another culture rules out the possibility of there being a one-to-one relationship between what one writes about the other culture and what that culture is in its complexity. I claim none the less that the attempt at crossing boundaries — even from a culture that has stood in a position of antagonism and domination in relation to another — is not always to be seen as a cultural self-serving and self-aggrandizing venture. The attempt may well be for all its imperfections a necessary exercise in cultural self-questioning and a welcome threshold of engaging with or indeed opening up to difference. This is perhaps particularly so when one considers that Onitsha was written and published some three decades or so after the achievement of independence in black Africa.

La Filiation inversee: Annie Ernaux et le 'corps glorieux'

Fort, P.-L. — 2008-04-04

Cet article s'intéresse à façon dont la filiation est remise en perspective dans l'œuvre d'Annie Ernaux. Plus précisément centré sur Une femme, le texte que l'auteur a consacré à sa mère disparue, il montre comment la filiation s'y trouve inversée, la fille devenant la mère de sa propre mère. L'analyse étudie ainsi cette redistribution des rôles et en dégage les enjeux. Elle insiste sur l'omniprésence corporelle de la mère dans le récit avant de montrer, au moyen d'une lecture précise du texte (que soutient une interrogation du paratexte et une lecture attentive de la Bible) par quels processus Ernaux parvient à créer le ‘corps glorieux’ de sa mère.

Simone de Beauvoir Studies

Tidd, U. — 2008-04-04

Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly Literature: Martyrs to Love

Leglu, C. — 2008-04-04

Abraham sacrifiant. Tragedie Francoise

Harris, J. — 2008-04-04

Controlling Readers: Guillaume de Machaut and his Late Medieval Audience

Huot, S. — 2008-04-04

La Justice de Dieu: 'Les Tragiques' d'Agrippa d'Aubigne et la Reforme protestante en France au XVIe siecle

Bromilow, P. — 2008-04-04

Thuanus: The Making of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617)

Kenny, N. — 2008-04-04

Pausanias, tragedie (1668)

Howe, A. — 2008-04-04

Theatre

Harris, J. — 2008-04-04

Medievalism and 'maniere gothique' in Enlightenment France

Hanrahan, J. — 2008-04-04

Conscience et realite: Etudes sur la philosophie francaise au XVIIIe siecle

Thomson, A. — 2008-04-04

The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution

Whatmore, R. — 2008-04-04

Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era

Carney, J. — 2008-04-04

Balzac dans le texte: Etudes de genetique et de sociocritique

Gleize, J. — 2008-04-04

Dictionnaire Nerval

Marchal, B. — 2008-04-04

New Approaches to Zola

Lethbridge, R. — 2008-04-04

La Fabrique des 'Rougon-Macquart': Edition des dossiers preparatoires

Lethbridge, R. — 2008-04-04

The First Generation Reception of the Novels of Emile Zola in Britain and America: An Annotated Bibliography of English Language Responses to his Work, 1877-1902

Cummins, A. — 2008-04-04

Tristan Corbiere and the Poetics of Irony

Scott, C. — 2008-04-04

Librairie de jeunesse et litterature industrielle au XIXeme Siecle

Jeannerod, D. — 2008-04-04

Le Roman a table: Nourritures et repas imaginaires dans le roman francais 1850-1900

Counter, A. — 2008-04-04

Proust's Deadline

Larkin, A. — 2008-04-04

Evil by Design. The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale

Moran, C. — 2008-04-04

Proust ou le bonheur du petit personnage qui compare

Topping, M. — 2008-04-04

Marcel Proust: La Fabrique de Combray

Cano, C. M. — 2008-04-04

Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor

Cardinal, R. — 2008-04-04

Francois Mauriac: The Making of an Intellectual

Bracher, N. — 2008-04-04

Artaud et les avant-gardes theatrales

Andreo, B. — 2008-04-04

Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency

Hill, L. — 2008-04-04

Rene Char 1. Le 'pays' dans la poesie de Char de 1946 a 1970

Marty, E. — 2008-04-04

Espace et recit de fiction: Le 'cycle indien' de Marguerite Duras

Williams, J. S. — 2008-04-04

Ernaux: La Place and La Honte

McIlvanney, S. — 2008-04-04

Dialogues avec Jeanne Hyvrard

Dow, S. — 2008-04-04

Patrick Chamoiseau: Espaces d'une ecriture antillaise

Williams, J. S. — 2008-04-04

Provisionality and the Poem: Transition in the Works of du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noel

Winspur, S. — 2008-04-04

Jacques Derrida: Live Theory

Maclachlan, I. — 2008-04-04

Le Nouveau Roman en questions 5. Une 'nouvelle autobiographie'?

Jefferson, A. — 2008-04-04

Romance and Readership in Twentieth-Century France: Love Stories

Cairns, L. — 2008-04-04

Love and Sexuality: New Approaches in French Studies

McNeill, I. — 2008-04-04

Imperialism and the Corruption of Democracies

Murphy, D. — 2008-04-04

Voix/es libres: Maternite et identite dans la litterature antillaise

Munro, M. — 2008-04-04

Theatre

Finburgh, C. — 2008-04-04

The Idea of the Literary

Crowley, P. — 2008-04-04

Histoires d'historiennes

Worth-Stylianou, V. — 2008-04-04

Pantheon de la Guerre: Reconfiguring a Panorama of the Great War

O'Flaherty, A. — 2008-04-04

The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation

Kelly, D. — 2008-04-04

Surprised in Translation

Scott, C. — 2008-04-04

Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2004. Selected papers from 'Going Romance', Leiden 9-11 December 2004

Paoli, S. — 2008-04-04

Le Discours en interaction

Nerlich, B. — 2008-04-04

Studying and Working in France: a Student Guide

Hare, G. — 2008-04-04

Books Received

2008-04-04

Forthcoming articles

2008-04-04