French Studies - recent issues

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

Le Cycle de Renart: From the Enfances to the Jugement in a Cyclical Roman de Renart Manuscript

Sunderland, L. — 2008-02-01

This article is a reading of a Roman de Renart manuscript from the often neglected gamma family, which subsumes the narrative to a broadly biographical (or cyclical) framework. The manuscript studied here therefore opens with an Enfances text, which lays the ground for seeing the fox as a radically evil creation, and his crimes as inevitable repetitions of his evil propensities. Whereas the alpha and beta families open with the famous trial (Le Jugement de Renart), the gamma family locates it later, after a series of misdeeds by the fox, meaning that this episode now serves less as an attempt to punish Renart for a single sexual crime than to mark the impossibility of holding him to justice for anything he has done. Using an approach to repetition deriving from Lacanian theory, the author argues that the Jugement, itself now a rerun of a previous trial, represents the community's failure to confront the Renardian trauma that haunts it, and, by extension, its inability to function effectively. Thwarting the ideological closure of justice allows Renart to become an emblem of the fiction itself.

Death and the Aesthetic of Continuity: Reading Victor Hugo's Contemplations

Lunn-Rockliffe, K. — 2008-02-01

This article addresses the importance of continuity in Victor Hugo's poetry, understood both as connection between author and reader and as sheer length. Arguing that his very prolixity merits analysis, it investigates the relationship between his connective readability and his ability to sustain long verse paragraphs. It uses examples from the long visionary poems in book VI of Les Contemplations, which represent death both as a rupture and as a continuity. The first part considers the connection between poet and reader, focusing on Hugo's use of solitude as an experience shared by the dead, the poet and the reader. He plays on the concrete reality that the printed book is read in isolation to draw the reader close to the visionary experience of death. The second part examines how the reader is made to go through this solitary experience line by line, a process that unfolds in time. It shows how Hugo builds verse lines into a continuum and plays on turning points, particularly line-endings, to sustain his long verse paragraphs. Far from being monolithic blocks, these sequences are articulated by a series of transitions which constantly oblige the reader to reconsider the relationship between breaks and joinings, separation and continuity.

The Legacy of the Beast: Patrilinearity and Rupture in Zola's La Bete humaine and Freud's Totem and Taboo

Counter, A. — 2008-02-01

This article explores the legacy of primitive violence evoked by Zola and Freud in La Bête humaine (1890) and Totem and Taboo (1913) respectively, and attempts to show how Zola's and Freud's use of a paradigm of primitive aggression might be ideologically complicit with a violent inclination in their contemporaneous societies. This issue will be considered in its relations with the notions of patrilinearity and rupture, concepts which are integral to both texts, and which, it shall be argued, constitute in some sense the essence of patriarchy. Reading both writers through the prism of Deleuze's theory, patrilinearity itself will begin to appear as a series of ruptures rather than a continuous genealogy, a history of struggle which both perpetuates and conceals the dominance of violence. The ambivalence of Freud's and Zola's rendering of that violence will ultimately appear as an ethical challenge to the reader.

Cavemen Among Us: Genealogies of Atavism from Zola's La Bete humaine to Chabrol's Le Boucher

Bell, D. — 2008-02-01

Although critics have rightly linked Claude Chabrol's film Le Boucher (1969) to Zola's novel La Bête humaine (1890), the two have yet to be considered in the context of the century-long tradition of thought about atavism that informs them both. This article reconstructs that tradition, examining how Le Boucher's modern-day caveman suggests twentieth-century cultural continuities with nineteenth-century notions of man's relation to his evolutionary forebears. Noting Le Boucher's debt to a Freudian conception of atavism — a conception heavily influenced by the very same scientific paradigm that shaped Zola's fascination with man's prehistoric self — I argue that Chabrol's film revives a nineteenth-century European anxiety of proximity whereby technological and scientific advances prompted unease about ever closer contact with the distant reaches of humanity. Chabrol achieves this by building on Zola's proto-cinematic vision, refracting it through a Freudian lens in which atavism and the cinema occupy common psychological space, and updating the thematics of atavism for a twentieth century chastised by the colonial experiment.

(In)visibility: Dislocation in French and the Voice of the Translator

McLaughlin, M. — 2008-02-01

This article presents the results of the investigation of a corpus consisting of translated and original French taken from contemporary prize-winning fiction. The focus of the inquiry is the difference between original and translated French and the consequences for the voice of the translator. The differences between the two language types are examined through a case study of the syntactic structure known as dislocation. Through careful analysis of the form, function and usage of this construction in the two language types, I arrive at several conclusions. First, the very existence of formal, functional and usage variation highlights the differences between translated and original language, and this may in future play a greater role in governing the composition of corpora in linguistic research. Second, the way in which this variation manifests itself has consequences for the status that translation holds in a specific culture and the effects that translation can have on the target language. Finally, variation between the two language types is shown to be relevant to the debate regarding the voice of the translator: Lawrence Venuti's invisibility theory is reworked to include three types of invisibility.

Li Romans d'Athis et Procelias

Kelly, D. — 2008-02-01

Le Garcon et l'aveugle: jeu du XIIIe siecle

Burrows, D. — 2008-02-01

Le Livre de Boece de Consolacion

Kay, S. — 2008-02-01

Debate and Dialogue: Alain Chartier in his Cultural Context

Blumenfeld-Kosinski, R. — 2008-02-01

Poesies du non-sens. XIIIe-XIVe-XVe siecles

Roberts, H. — 2008-02-01

Le Conte du Papegau: Roman arthurien du XVe siecle

Devereaux, R. — 2008-02-01

The Fortunes of King Arthur

Burch, S. L. — 2008-02-01

Les Entrees royales a Paris de Marie d'Angleterre (1514) et Claude de France (1517)

Hindley, A. — 2008-02-01

Theodore de Beze: Poete et Theologien

Higman, F. — 2008-02-01

Louise Labe, une creature de papier

Cameron, K. — 2008-02-01

Montaigne and the Ethics of Skepticism

Butterworth, E. — 2008-02-01

Le Pathetique dans le theatre de Robert Garnier

Mazouer, C. — 2008-02-01

Autour de l'Histoire universelle d'Agrippa d'Aubigne. Melanges a la memoire d'Andre Thierry

Higman, F. — 2008-02-01

Pierre Gassendi's Philosophy and Science: Atomism for Empiricists

James, E. — 2008-02-01

Book Illustration, Taxes and Propaganda: the Fermiers-Generaux edition of La Fontaine's Contes et nouvelles en vers of 1762

Williams, D. — 2008-02-01

L'Invention d'un mythe: Psyche. Allegorie et fiction, du siecle de Platon au temps de La Fontaine

White, P. — 2008-02-01

Jean Racine, Life and Legend

Harris, J. — 2008-02-01

Correspondance. Tome X. 26 avril 1749-2 juillet 1750. Lettres 1391-1569

Howells, R. — 2008-02-01

Emilie du Chatelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science

Warman, C. — 2008-02-01

Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

Kerr, G. — 2008-02-01

Oeuvres poetiques. Tome I. Imitations et Preludes, Art d'Aimer, Elegies

Burt, E. S. — 2008-02-01

Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy, and the French Revolution

Wynn, T. — 2008-02-01

Print and Power in France and England, 1500-1800

Brown, C. J. — 2008-02-01

Jules Lefevre-Deumier, Un Poete romantique contre la peine de mort. Quatre poemes

Stephens, B. — 2008-02-01

Ce Fatal exces du desir -- Poetique du corps romantique

Stephens, B. — 2008-02-01

The Simplest of Signs: Victor Hugo and the Language of Images in France 1850-1950

Cox, F. — 2008-02-01

Champfleury ecrivain chercheur

Crossley, C. — 2008-02-01

Le Musee imaginaire de George Sand: l'ouverture et la mediation

Ione Crummy, M. — 2008-02-01

The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form

Fayard, N. — 2008-02-01

Lettres a Auguste Poulet-Malassis

Lloyd, R. — 2008-02-01

Jules Verne, la science et l'espace : travail de la reverie

Cogman, P. — 2008-02-01

De la lettre a l'esprit. Pour lire 'Illuminations'

Bonenfant, L. — 2008-02-01

The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust

Hughes, E. — 2008-02-01

Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870-1920

Orr, M. — 2008-02-01

Proust et ses contemporains

Baldwin, T. — 2008-02-01

The Power of Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power: Jean Paulhan's Fiction, Criticism, and Editorial Activity

Hill, L. — 2008-02-01

Le Grand Meaulnes: Un roman initiatique

Herzfeld, C. — 2008-02-01

Henri Bosco et le romantisme nocturne: actes du colloque international de Strasbourg (25-26 octobre 2002)

Garfitt, T. — 2008-02-01

Antonin Artaud's Writing Bodies

Noonan, M. — 2008-02-01

Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign

Mathews, T. — 2008-02-01

Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration

O'Donohoe, B. — 2008-02-01

Sartre's 'Nausea': Text, Context, Intertext

Leak, A. — 2008-02-01

Patrice de la Tour du Pin: 'La Quete de joie' au c{oelig}ur d''Une somme de poesie' -- Actes du colloque au College de France, 25-26 septembre 2003

Evans, D. — 2008-02-01

From Surrealism to Less-Exquisite Cadavers: Leo Malet and the Evolution of the French Roman Noir

Gorrara, C. — 2008-02-01

Claude Simon, OEuvres

Britton, C. — 2008-02-01

Georges Brassens and Jacques Brel: Personal and Social Narratives in Post-War French Chanson

Hawkins, P. — 2008-02-01

Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria

Donadey, A. — 2008-02-01

Le Monde de Houellebecq

Tribout-Joseph, S. — 2008-02-01

Maurice Pialat

Reader, K. — 2008-02-01

Marianne and the Puritan: Transformations of the Couple in French and American Films

Handyside, F. — 2008-02-01

Theatre de l'Opera-Comique Paris: Repertoire 1762-1972

Darlow, M. — 2008-02-01

The Performance of Shakespeare in France since the Second World War

Bradby, D. — 2008-02-01

Francophone Writing in Transition: 1900-1945

Hughes, E. — 2008-02-01

French Colonialism Unmasked: The Vichy Years in French West Africa

Murphy, D. — 2008-02-01

La Question du lieu en poesie du surrealisme jusqu'a nos jours

Brophy, M. — 2008-02-01

Le Journal: aux frontieres de l'art

Read, P. — 2008-02-01

La Chronique litteraire: 1920-1970

Tame, P. — 2008-02-01

Reiseberichte und mythische Struktur. Romanistische Aufsatze 1983-2003

Boenisch, H. — 2008-02-01

Art et litterature: Le Voyage entre texte et image

Aubert, N. — 2008-02-01