Patrick Modiano has written many novels whose main theme is memory. These memories are often incomplete and fragmented, being constantly threatened by oblivion. This thesis pays special attention to ...the mechanisms of Modiano's memory involved in a general context and in the hollow of a particular personal consciousness.
While his preoccupation with the period of the Occupation remains a permanent theme, Patrick Modiano is increasingly interested in the exploration of time and memory, and the attendant problem of ...reconstituting the past. This volume explores all these features. It casts new light on Modiano's earliest novels, examines afresh his more recent work including his stories for children, situates it in the context of contemporary writing and unravels the intricacies and subtleties of his style. It underlines Modiano's position as one of France's major writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and will be of interest to all who are interested in the modern French novel and the complex interactions between fiction and history.
Family Record Modiano, Patrick; Polizzotti, Mark
09/2019
eBook
An enthralling reflection on the ways that family history influences identity, from the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature A mix of autobiography and lucid invention, this highly personal work offers ...a deeply affecting exploration of the meaning of identity and pedigree. With his signature blend of candor, mystery, and bewitching elusiveness, Patrick Modiano weaves together a series of interlocking stories from his family history: his parents' courtship in occupied Paris; a sinister hunting trip with his father; a chance friendship with the deposed King Farouk; a wistful affair with the daughter of a nightclub singer; and the author's life as a new parent. Modiano's riveting vignettes, filled with a coterie of dubious characters-Nazi informants, collaborationist refugees, and black-market hustlers-capture the drama that consumed Paris during World War II and its aftermath. Written in tones ranging from tender nostalgia to the blunt cruelty of youth, this is a personal and revealing book that brings the enduring significance of a complicated past to life.
The portrayal of modern Paris that Modiano delineates in his novels continuously preserves the filthy residues of History, in an imagined urban geography saturated with figurative modalities of the ...earth-whether it be decaying soils, quicksand, or muddy swamps which threaten to immerse the narrators. Exploiting a geological terminology, Modiano approaches Paris as a land covered with several deposits of oblivion. The city has a corrupt, immoral, fraudulent deepness that his protagonists seek to excavate and delve into, with a sense of malaise and alienation that topographical scrupulousness appears to momentarily alleviate. Modiano develops a terrestrial relationship with the past: time has a telluric depth, and the present and past collapse into a single hermeneutic entity. A hidden cartography, based on the Paris of the Occupation, remains unperceptively dormant under the geography of the present-day city. It will be shown that in Modiano's narrative universe, such an obscure episode of History left palpable remnants on the surface of the everyday, in the manner of a haunting sediment that lingers as an essential foundation of the present time.
María Teresa Gallego Urrutia nació en Madrid en el año 1943. Realizó sus estudios en el Liceo francés de Madrid y fue allí donde se licenció en Filología Moderna Francesa años más tarde por la ...Universidad Complutense. Su andadura por la traducción literaria comenzó en 1961 y, desde entonces y hasta el momento, ha traducido alrededor de 200 obras de los autores franceses y francófonos más destacados. Encontramos entre ellos a Albert Camus, Honoré de Balzac, Víctor Hugo o Marcel Proust. En el año 1974, obtuvo la cátedra de francés del Instituto Gregorio Marañón de Madrid. Por su trayectoria como traductora ha recibido numerosos reconocimientos, entre los que podemos nombrar el Premio Nacional de Traducción de Lenguas Románicas por El diario de un ladrón de Jean Genet en 1977 y el premio Stendhal por Impresiones de África de Raymond Roussel, ambos compartidos con Isabel Reverte Cejudo. Además ha recibido la condecoración Ordre des Arts et des Lettres por el Gobierno francés en el año 2003 y, cinco años más tarde, recibió el Premio Nacional a la obra de un traductor. En el año 2011 recibió el premio Mots Passants que concede el Departamento de francés de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona por su traducción de El horizonte de Patrick Modiano. Finalmente, en 2003 recibió el premio Esther Benítez por su traducción de La señora Bovary de Gustave Flaubert.
Aunque dio sus primeros pasos en el mundo de la traducción jurídica, María Teresa Gallego Urrutia es una traductora literaria de referencia que nunca ha descuidado su faceta docente. Desde 2008 hasta 2013, impartió clases sobre derecho de propiedad intelectual del traductor en el Instituto de traductores de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Colabora activamente con publicaciones como el Trujamán, del Instituto Cervantes, la revista Turia y Letra Internacional, entre otros.
This article is an attempt at deciphering the enigmatic title of Patrick Modiano's 2012 novel: why did he choose to call it L'Herbe des nuits, despite the book's apparent lack of engagement with ...plants? In Jardins de papier, Evelyne Bloch-Dano understands the references to nature in the rest of Modiano's œuvre as metaphors for the author's poetics of memory and childhood. I want to argue that another interpretation is possible if we fully consider the plant physiology of grass: unlike trees, it grows from the middle and in between other crops. My article builds on this singularity to flesh out the forms of "middleness" in Modiano's plots, writing style, and social "milieu." Such an attention to the specific process of plant germination provides a new entry point into his works and their numerous allusions to vegetation, such as the metaphor of Occupied Paris as a soil, a manure, or an "artificial flower." Like the narrator of Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, Modiano should be viewed as a "Buffon of trees and flowers," notably because of the various connections between flora and fauna throughout his texts. To sustain these hypotheses, the article engages with botanical and ecocritical writings on plants, meadows, grass, and class (Rachel Bouvet, Alain Corbin, Gilles Deleuze, Francis Hallé, Denise Le Dantec, Stephanie Posthumus).
'Doesn't a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well?' Walter Benjamin asks in 'On the Concept of History'. 'In the voices we hear, isn't there an echo of now silent ones? ... If ...so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one'. What does it mean to be in secret agreement with people that came before? To recognise that coming after involves the taking on of certain obligations - for example, to pay tribute, to make amends. This paper examines the role played by the cinema in Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder. Part history, part memoir, Modiano's book investigates the events leading to the deportation of a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl during the Nazi Occupation of France. The author's examination of these events commemorates the lives lost during the Occupation and alerts us to what remains still to be said about these lives. The issue that I address concerns cinema's role in the author's evocation of Dora's afterlife, in other words, its facilitation of a type of writing in which the experience of the present is shaped by the unfinished business of people and events that demand something of us.
A self-conscious art Kawakami, Akane
2000., 20001201, 2000, 2000-12-01, Letnik:
5
eBook
A Self-Conscious Art is the first full-length study in English to attempt to deal with the formal complexities of Modiano’s work, by reading ‘against the grain’ of his self-professed ingenuousness. A ...detailed examination of his narratives shows the deeply postmodern nature of his writing. Parodying precursors such as Proust or the nouveau romanciers, his narratives are built around a profound lack of faith in the ability of writing to retrieve the past through memory, and this failure is acknowledged in the discreet playfulness that characterises his novels. This book is a timely introduction to the work of one of the most successful modern French novelists.
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