Abstract
Natasha Soobramanien’s novel Genie and Paul (2012) creatively appropriates the plot and characteristic language of Bernardin de Saint Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) to give voice to the ...dispossessed and displaced of the Indian Ocean, and to denounce the socio-environmental effects of colonialism and globalization on the island of Mauritius. In the process, the novel stakes out a theoretical position for itself within contemporary debates about the roles of landscape and arboreal imagery in the elaboration of a poetics of identity and place. As Genie and Paul interrogates the roles of trees and roots both literal and figurative in relation to its characters’ individuation efforts, it offers an interesting opportunity to reconsider Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation. This reading of the novel also sheds light on the ecological ramifications of Soobramanien’s poetics of landscape, illustrating how one might effectively denounce the West’s impact on Mauritius without falling back on mythical notions of an Edenic nature.
Bien qu'étant lié à l'ancien polythéisme, l'imaginaire pastoral, à cause de sa valeur esthétique, a pu survivre durant l'ère chrétienne. Aux esprits écartelés entre les exigences contradictoires de ...ce monde et de la religion, il a offert le réconfort rêvé d'un idéal sensible. Ses stéréotypes sont si familiers que l'on tend à sous-évaluer l'influence durable qu'il a eue sur la culture occidentale et sur l'image que celle-ci donne du corps. Les bergers d'Arcadie, vivant en contact avec les dieux, proposent une image attrayante de loisir, de jeunesse, de beauté et d'érotisme. La singularité de ces représentations apparaît manifeste lorsqu'on les confronte à celles des Immortels chinois, ermites âgés et studieux. Comparé à Daphnis et Chloé et à L'Astrée, Paul et Virginie offre un autre contraste révélateur : là où les pastorales païennes n'offraient rien de plus qu'un plaisir esthétique, le récit de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre prétend, en outre, être moralement édifiant : sa pastorale exotique est liée à la version romantique de l'idéal chrétien supra social et puritain. Cependant, à la fin du XIXe siècle, la vision idéalisée de la liberté sexuelle associée à l'imaginaire pastoral triompha et se retourna contre la religion. Although a part of ancient polytheism, the pastoral imagination, due to its aesthetic value, was allowed to survive during the Christian era. Being torn between the contradictory requirements of this world and the religion, one could enjoy the dreamed comfort of a perceptible ideal. So familiar are its stereotypes that one tends to underestimate its lasting influence on the Western culture and its body image. Living in Arcadia, in close relations with divinities, the shepherds convey an attractive image of youth, beauty and sexual love. The specificity of these representations appear by contrast with the Chinese images of the Immortals, who look like old and studious ermits. Compared to Daphnis and Chloe and L'Astrée, Paul et Virginie offers an other revealing contrast : whereas the pagan pastoral is no more than a source of aesthetic pleasure, the story told by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre wants to be also an edifying lesson : his exotic pastoral is linked to a Romantic version of the supra social and anti sexual Christian ideal. However, at the end of the XIXth century, it was the idealised vision of sexual freedom provided by pastoral imagination which was highlighted and turned against religion.
Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) demands to be read through the dual meanings of “character”—the literary persona and the moral sense. Through performances of literary character that work to reveal ...moral character, Edgeworth generates a theory of novelistic character that is shaped by impersonation and interiority. Often considered an unfortunate episode in an otherwise sophisticated novel, Edgeworth’s incorporation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) in Belinda is in fact central to the novel’s consideration of character. Edgeworth’s meditation on character illuminates a number of issues: first, relationships between the genre of the novel and subject-formation; second, fictional representations of surface legibility and psychological interiority; third, the ideological function of the marriage plot. In her consideration of imaginative identification, psychological interiority, and subject-formation through Belinda’s recasting of Bernardin’s novel, Edgeworth presents her theorization of character, which postulates that the moral sense—what we might call a living person’s “character”—depends on an engagement with literary character.
Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s
Paul et Virginie
(1787) ostensibly exalts the wholesome values of a pastoral life style, that is to say, a life lived in harmony with nature, governed by virtue, and ...uncontaminated by the hierarchical divisiveness found in more materialist (European) environments. If one probes beneath the rhetorical surface, however, a vein of materialistic greed, hypocritical posturing, and class-conscious pretentiousness can be detected in the behavior and discourse of the primary protagonists. Indeed, as the novel comes to a close, the primary protagonists’ articulated attachment to rustic primitivism is revealed to be little other than a discursive pose that masks a desire for social distinctiveness, perhaps even cultural dominance. In this reading of the novel, the tragic tone of the narrative is attributed not to the heroine’s untimely death (viewed by the narrator as part of the natural order of things) but to its ultimate irrelevance. Although Virginie was briefly idolized in the immediate aftermath of her death—in a span of just twenty years, the physical trace of her existence and influence has all but disappeared; her legacy can be kept alive only in the oral discourse of an aging recluse. Although there is evidence to suggest that the “petite société” hoped to transform their sector of l’île de France into a parallel society wherein virtue and Christian subservience would serve as exemplary models for the other islanders, the community is destroyed from within by greed, self-interest and vanity, the very values the protagonists rhetorically condemned, but ultimately embraced.
Rousseau’s protégé, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, conceived of his Études de la nature as a complement to Buffon’s Histoire naturelle. Chapter 3 traces the generation of his novel Paul et ...Virginie from his travelogue to its publication as the fourth book of his natural history. Bernard de Lacépède’s Poétique de la musique provides a missing link between Bernardin’s novel and its operatic adaptation by Jean-François Le Sueur. Reading Bernardin’s natural history, full of advice for artists, alongside Le Sueur’s essays on church music, full of tips for composers, reveals that author and composer both sustained and sought to foster mixed emotions in response to the spectacle of nature that led to the “sentiment of divinity.” The chapter concludes with a consideration of French cathedrals, redesigned along lines reminiscent of the opera and the natural history museum in the course of the century.
La présente étude examine les facteurs qui ont favorisé le développement d'un important mouvement de traduction au XIXe siècle, plus précisément, depuis la période de Muhammad ‘Ali Pacha.La langue ...française était, pendant cette période, l’une des principales langues sources à être traduite. Le roman français, envisagé sous l'angle de la traduction littéraire, commençait à devenir un genre répandu, ce qui permet de mieux réfléchir sur la pratique traduisante, ses caractéristiques, sa problématique et son influence sur la langue et la culture arabes.Dans la seconde partie, le présent travail étudie la traduction littéraire et ses problèmes à travers l’examen du roman français traduit au XIXe siècle. On a choisi, dans ce but, d’analyser plusieurs traductions de « Paul et Virginie » qui ont paru à la fin du XIXe siècle. Elles révèlent l'intérêt particulier de nombreux traducteurs de l’époque pour ce roman.La troisième partie se penche sur les aspects culturels résultants et sur le grand bouleversement idéologique, linguistique et littéraire que la traduction de maints ouvrages français, des romans en particulier, a entraîné.Cette thèse s'inscrit dans les recherches qui étudient la traduction en général et plus particulièrement celles liées au monde arabe. Elle vise à enrichir le thème de la découverte de l’autre, à approfondir, à comprendre et à promouvoir les échanges culturels entre les peuples, arabophones et francophones notamment. Par le nouvel éclairage qu'elle apporte, elle contribue également à l’histoire des échanges des idées.
The present study examines the various factors who triggered the development of an important cultural translation current in the XIXth century.French language was then one of the main source languages to be translated. French novel, if we consider literary translation, was growingly spread, so it allows us to think upon the translation practices, its characteristics, its problems and how it influenced arabic language and culture.In the second part, this work studies literary translation and its problems, through the french novels which were translated in the XIXth century. For this, we decided to analyze several translations of « Paul and Virginie » released end of XIXth century. They show how many translators had keen interest for that novel at this time.Third part covers the ensuing cultural aspects and the huge ideological, linguistic and literary upheaval that translation of many french books, particularly novels, brought about.This thesis is part of researches who deal with translation in general and those linked with the arab world in particular. It intends to enrich the discovering of other people thema. It seeks to deepen, understand and promote cultural exchanges between arabic speaking and french speaking people in particular. Through the new vision it brings, it also contributes to the history of ideas.
Partant du principe qu'une machine ne sait pas qu'elle est une machine et du présupposé selon lequel un robot n'a pas de conscience, ce travail étudie le parallèle entre la fabrication des créatures ...de roman et la fabrication des machines. Parmi ces figures, Madame Bovary est un archétype. Comme tout autre machine, Emma Bovary ne sait pas qu'elle en est une. Emma est une machine à texte, elle est faite de livres. Pourtant, elle ne peut pas avoir lu Madame Bovary. Parce qu'Emma n'est pas consciente qu’elle est l'appareil de Flaubert, nous l'avons rapproché des fonctionnements et des disfonctionnements du Monstre de Frankenstein, encore écervelé avant l'épiphanie des livres qu'il découvre au creux d'un chemin. Après avoir défini les enjeux stratégiques de ses lectures, Emma est présentée comme une machine homéostatique, d'une part du point de vue de la thermodynamique, et d'autre part, du point de vue de l'entropie, une résultante du bovarysme, causée par les distorsions entre la vie et la lecture. Dans un premier temps Emma perçoit, puis ressent, par les feedbacks de ses lectures. Elle se transforme alors en une mécanique à émotions, gouvernée par son bovarysme. Ce sentiment renvoie à toutes ses perceptions et ses appétits. Par ses désirs, Emma démontre une capacité à comparer et à se projeter, formulant les prémices d'une conscience autobiographique. De la même manière qu'il représente l'inconscient social à partir d'automates déambulatoires, tels la figure du pied-bot ou de l'aveugle, Flaubert réussit à induire une idée de conscience dans sa créature machine
According to the fact that a machine does not know that it is a machine, and to the supposition that a robot has no conscience, this work explores parallels between the creation of the characters of a novel and the fabrication of machines. Among these figures, Madame Bovary is an archetype. Like any other machine, Emma Bovary does not know that she is one. Emma is machine created from text. She is made from the stuff of books. However, she could not have read the book Madame Bovary. Because Emma is not aware that she is a device of Flaubert, there are some similarities between her and the functions and malfunctions of the Monster of Frankenstein that didn't have a conscience until the moment of epiphany with the books he discovered in the woods. After the definition of the strategic challenges of her readings, Emma is presented as a homeostatic machine, first from the viewpoint of thermodynamics, and secondly from the viewpoint of entropy, a result of the bovarysme caused by distortions between life and reading. Emma's perceptions and feelings depend of the feedback of her readings. She becomes an emotional device, governed by her bovarysme. This feeling is present in all her perceptions and her appetites. Through her desires, Emma demonstrates an ability to compare and project herself, formulating the beginnings of an autobiographical conscience. In the same way as he represents social unconsciousness with ambulatory automatons such as the figure of the club-footed Hippolyte or the blind man, Flaubert is able to induce an idea of consciousness in his machine-creature
Sephardic literature in the Ottoman Empire was born soon after the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. It went through various stages and died in the 20th century with the emergence of ...nation-states. The Holocaust dealt it the last blow. But before this literature perished, it had a last period of bloom. The last third of the 19th century witnessed the birth of secular mass literature in the vernacular, where the leading role belonged to the novel. The very genres in which Ladino secular literature was written had no counterpart in previous epochs, deriving instead from European literary experience. Thus, the majority of Ladino novels, without being translations proper, were to a varying degree dependent on foreign-language sources, which became an important factor in the formation of the genre. In this paper, I explore the function of translated literature in the development of the Ladino novel. After a description of the study's historical and theoretical framework, I go on to analyze two sample texts. One of them has an obvious foreign original, while the other is believed to be an original Ladino creation. I argue that both texts were produced by means of amalgamation of domestic and imported elements, where foreign sources serve as catalysts.
PDF
