Charming and elegant, Jean de La Fontaine's (1621-1695) animal fables depict sly foxes and scheming cats, vain birds and greedy wolves, all of which subtly express his penetrating insights into ...French society and the beasts found in all of us. Norman R. Shapiro has been translating La Fontaine's fables for over twenty years, capturing the original works' lively mix of plain and archaic language. This newly complete collection is destined to set the English standard for the oeuvre of one of the world's greatest fabulists.
The works of Jean de La Fontaine have invited an extraordinary variety of readings in the three centuries since their composition. By engaging selected fables and tales with contemporary notions of ...intertextuality, reader reception theory, and grammatology, Figures of the Text raises questions about what "reading La Fontaine" meant in the 17th century, and what it means today. The study integrates a theory of reading and a theory of textual production by drawing attention to those aspects of the text that figure writing and reading, for instance: scenes of reading; other modes of writing (emblems, hieroglyphics); inscriptions and epitaphs; proper names; and citation (proverbs, maxims, allusions); the relation of represented orality to textuality, of textuality to corporeality, and of textuality to the visual arts (ekphrasis); and the archaeology of textual figures, such as labyrinths, textiles, and veils.
This study provides a detailed account of the "Fables", including humour, the representation of animals, the literary qualities and the "moraliste" core. Dr Slater brings to light veiled satirical ...attacks, allusion to forgotten works and literature, and traces the obscure currents of thought, all this in the service of explicating the "fable" element.
This study provides a detailed account of the "Fables", including humour, the representation of animals, the literary qualities and the "moraliste" core. Dr Slater brings to light veiled satirical ...attacks, allusion to forgotten works and literature, and traces the obscure currents of thought, all this in the service of explicating the "fable" element.
Animal and human displays in Louis XIV’s menagerie at Versailles and the 1931 Colonial Exposition at Vincennes illustrate societal changes and ideological orientations through the evolution of ...“zoological exhibitionism.” Louis XIV’s menagerie at Versailles demonstrates a shift in the spectator experience and breaks away from the king’s first menagerie at Vincennes meant for animal combats, while Madeleine de Scudéry’s and Claude Denis’s literary accounts of the menagerie at Versailles show how animals serve as an allegory for the world of Louis XIV and serve as extensions of the members of Louis XIV’s court. That Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Amours de Psyché et Cupidon reflects a new social code is clear in the broader context of his retelling of the myth of Psyche and Cupid, which helps to understand Psyche as an ecological heroine. The zoological garden and the ethnological exhibitions of the Colonial Exposition of 1931 illustrate how animal and human displays in a colonial context infiltrate the lives of average citizens and serve as propaganda for the organizers’ colonial doctrine, an agenda that is criticized by poet Louis Aragon and other major surrealist figures and sadly normalizes the practice not only of viewing animals in captivity but also of displaying humans in zoo-like settings.
Liaisons dangereuses? Mahler, Andreas
Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik,
06/2015, Letnik:
40, Številka:
1-2
Journal Article
The present article addresses two diametrically opposed types of text-making. Drawing on the French poet Jean de La Fontaine‘s fable of ―The Ant and the Grasshopper‖ as well as on the Irish modernist ...James Joyce‘s corresponding counterfable of ―The Ondt and the Gracehoper‖, hidden somewhere in part III of his interminable ‗Work in Progress‘ Finnegans Wake, the argument first explores the (conventional) text-making strategy of transparently turning linguistic material (verso) into sense-making gratifications (recto), thus centripetally producing the illusion of semantic unity (and unified meaning), before it describes its complementary counterstrategy (or ‗tactics‘) of playfully turning seemingly meaningful elements (recto) back into more and more textual material (verso), centrifugally creating a never-ending proliferation of (textual) diversity and infinity. In other words, it aptly strives to show the grasshopper‘s (gracehoper‘s) revenge on the (useful but boring) dutifulness, diligence, and sobriety of the ant (ondt).
This dissertation examines Jean Racine’s conception of tragic theater and its relationship to the theory of the sublime developed by his contemporary and friend, Nicolas Boileau. Boileau’s ...translation of Pseudo-Longinus radically upset the traditional definition the sublime as the highest level of classical rhetoric, redefining it instead as an aesthetic notion which communicated transcendent emotion through discourse. While the critical dialogue between the two authors is seminal, and Racine did employ Boileau’s notion of the merveilleux dans le discours in his plays, he did not simply mimic Boileau’s understanding of a discursive sublime. Rather, Racine also boldly experimented with his own distinctively theatrical version of the sublime. Although some of his theatrical choices went against accepted norms, they served to intensify the emotion of a scene through non-verbal means. For instance, he occasionally portrayed purely silent characters onstage or allowed royal characters to sit as they delivered their monologues. Furthermore, Racine’s exploitation of the neoclassical sublime engaged with the related ideals of polite sociability known as honnêteté and the je ne sais quoi, socially captivating concepts that Racine employed in some of his characters in order to astound his audience. Racine’s last two plays, Esther and Athalie experimented with basing his theatrical productions on a religious sublime, and in doing so daringly equated a religious text with a secular aesthetic notion. Racine’s unusual aesthetic success not only informed neoclassical literary theory, but also forged a path for Enlightenment, Romantic, and even Modernist elaborations of this pivotal concept. Thus, by examining Racine’s contribution to the neoclassical sublime, my dissertation uncovers a key critical foundation for the sublime as an aesthetic concept which would later be deployed by Burke, Kant, and others in their development of theories that continue to shape our perceptions of aesthetics today.
La fable en langue creole est sans conteste le genre litteraire qui a connu, et qui continue de connaitre, la plus grande fortune tant aux Antilles que dans l'Ocean Indien. Proche de l'oralite, ...porteur d'une moralite accessible au plus grand nombre, jouant sur tous les registres de l'humour, ce genre, aujourd'hui si decrie dans les grandes litteratures (celles de l'Europe et de l'Amerique du Nord), demeure une etape indispensable sur le chemin qui conduit, depuis une trentaine d'annees, le creole a la souverainete scripturale. Assez paradoxalement, le lien intertextuel qui lie la fable crole aux A uvres du grand fabuliste franais Jean de Lafontaine et, travers lui, aux plus anciens fabulistes de l'humanit (Pilpay en Inde, Esope dans la Grce antique, Abstemius Rome etc.), n'est ni un frein ni un handicap son plein panouissement. En effet, le fabuliste crolophone est contraint de se faire la fois crivain et traducteur, ce qui l'amne largir les potentialits expressives d'une langue qui est reste trop longtemps, diglossie oblige, confine l'expression de ralits immdiates ou locales. Autant l'crivain crolophone peut tout fait restreindre son champ d'action la Plantation ou au quartier populaire urbain et se satisfaire du crole tel qu'il est, autant le fabuliste, de part sa posture traductive, est contraint de confronter son outil linguistique l'vocation de ralits trangres c'est--dire non croles. Traduire / Transposer / adapter Lafontaine l'amne ncessairement dsigner des realia qui n'appartiennent pas l'univers crole, dcrire des vnements propres une autre sphre culturelle, faire sien une psychologie diffrente. Quand on connat le rle qu'a jou la traduction dans le processus de littrarisation des grandes langues du monde (franais, anglais, allemand, finnois, swahili etc.), on ne peut que se rjouir du succs ininterrompu que connat la fable crole depuis Louis Hry (La Runion, 1826). Cependant, le plus intressant demeure la comparaison des divers traitements qu'on fait subir nos fabulistes l'hypotexte lafontainien. Certains, tels le Guadeloupen Paul Baudot (1860) ou le Guyanais Alfred de Saint-Quentin (1874) sont rests trs proches de ce dernier ; d'autres, tels que le Martiniquais Franois Marbot (1846) ou le Hatien Georges Sylvain (1901) s'en sont quelque peu carts et se sont efforcs de croliser leurs textes chaque fois que cela leur semblait possible ; d'autres enfin, tels que les Martiniquais Gilbert Gratiant (1958) ont carrment rompu avec lui et ont tent de forger un modle de fable typiquement crole en s'appuyant la fois sur l'oralit (parole quotidienne) et sur l'oraliture (contes, proverbes, devinettes etc.) croles. Cet assez vaste corpus, non encore inventori en totalit et finalement peu tudi, est l'une des principales richesses de notre culture crole crite.Raphal Confiant
The Arab Spring inTunisia brought with it newrights for women, such as allowing them to wear the hijab for a photo ID, establishing gender parity in political elections, and lifting Tunisia's ...reservations on the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which was signed by the government in August 2011. This has produced a proliferation of groups and viewpoints that are often in conflict with one another and sometimes attack women and women's rights promoted under previous postcolonial authoritarian regimes. The free and democratic elections of October 2011 led to a coalition of Ennahdha, the Islam-oriented majority party, and two secular parties. This opened the way for preachers from the Mashreq and Arab Gulf countries to present their support for practices that had not previously been part of public discussion in Tunisia, such as niqab, female circumcision, early marriage for girls, urfi (customary unregistered) marriages, and polygamy, topics that are now frequently discussed on radio and television.
