Henry de Montherlant's Les Garçons, whether it is the expurgated version of 1969 or the complete version of 1973, is known as the second part of La jeunesse d'Alban de Bricoule. This more or less ...autobiographical romantic trilogy includes the first part, Les Bestiaires, which appeared in 1926, and the third part, Le Songe, which debuted in 1922, with the author carrying Les Garçons for more than half a century, while he hesitated on the title. This slow maturation also explains the mass of notes, drafts, typescripts, provisional or final versions, no less than one thousand two hundred and twelve folios, that the modern and contemporary Manuscripts Service of the National Library of France keeps for Les Garçons.
Henry de Montherlant and Jean de La Varende are two 20th-century French authors of noble birth. Montherlant’s predilection for the Mediterranean region and La Varende’s preference for his birth ...province, Normandy – areas typified by a strong connection to their respective pasts – provide these authors with the material for a large number of interwar narratives. Montherlant projects his status as a noble writer onto the Mediterranean sphere, a region characterized by a “distinction,” which is exemplified, for instance, in Spanish “proudness”. Montherlant’s Spain is marked by the nobility and, as such, seems to be similar to the Arabic world: as a whole, the area functions as a guardian of history and of noble customs. La Varende’s noble posture is revealed by his projection onto a Normandy of the past, and by his desire to uphold the image of a Norman province characterized by traditional values linked to its noble inhabitants. In short, both authors constitute their aristocratic
ethos
on the basis of their attraction to a certain region.
"El estadio y la palabra: Deporte y literatura en la Edad de Plata" (The Stadium and the Word: Sports and Literature in Spain's Silver Age) analyzes how in early twentieth-century Spain the ...concurrent modernization of the nation and the professionalization of sports are mirrored in the country's literature (particularly, in essays, fiction and poetry). I conclude that authors understood sports as a social institution that went beyond leisure activity. In their perception, sports fit into larger concepts of social relationships, engaging with history, nationhood and citizens of different classes and genders. My introduction outlines the early history of sports in Spain and summarizes the major subthemes of the thesis—Spain and modernity, the rise of new social classes, nationalistic reactions to foreign influences, the establishment of sports journalism, and the changing position of women in a modernizing society. The first chapter discusses the reaction to the new sports phenomenon on the part of intellectuals such as Miguel de Unamuno, Gregorio Marañón, José Ortega y Gasset, Antonio Machado, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, among others. For example, by the 1920s, soccer grew exponentially and began to rival bullfighting as Spain's most influential form of mass entertainment; thus one of the issues these thinkers debated was the new role of mass spectatorship. As spectator sports moved to the forefront of Spanish consciousness in the early twentieth century, major and minor literary figures turned to sport as a way of comprehending some of the radical changes occurring in Spanish life. These reactions formed part of the dialogue about Spain's prospects as a nation in the modern world that had begun in the latter half of the nineteenth century, spawning works of narrative fiction by Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, Juan Antonio de Zunzunegui, and Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent analyzed in chapter two. Sports journalism, which garnered an increasing role in the periodical press, forms the heart of the third chapter that considers the interaction between the sports chronicle and key novels and stories by José Luis Bugallal, Francisco Ayala, José Díaz Fernández, and Rafael Lopez de Haro. The styles of these fictional works, which ranges from more traditional realism to avant-garde metaphoric prose, reflects the tension between modernity and tradition that Spain as a nation was experiencing. Chapter four recognizes the new public profile that modern Spanish women were assuming and addresses the figure of the sportswoman and the female sports spectator as characters in novels and objects of poetic contemplation, often rendered in vanguard in style, by both men and women. The essay Plenitud by former tennis star Lilí Álvarez introduces the chapter and some of its central themes—sports as means of achieving female emancipation and sports as a leisure activity for people of all ages and genders. The dissertation's epilogue summarizes the historical background and some of the literary and filmic manifestations of sports during the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) and the democratic era (1975–present). The debates over the nature and importance of sports to the Spanish nation reflect the social, political and cultural evolution of the country from 1898 to 1936 and beyond.
This study proposes original analyses of an archive of twentieth and twenty-first century French-language texts and films that fall into what I define and articulate as the genre of "homoerotic ...travel literature and cinema." I argue that within each of these works resides a body of questions on the politics, ethics, and erotics of a search for otherness (altérité ). In contemplating the tourist's desire to travel along a route vers le sud, I explore the allure of "Arab" and "Oriental" spaces, and expound on how and why the homoerotic traveler locates various forms of freedom while removed from the pressures of what Joseph Boone refers to as heterosexual priority. Through close and comparative readings of each work under consideration, I describe and analyze what I propose as the concept of homoerotic tourism—and its specific link to the dialectics of desire and melancholy—by identifying traces of the traveler's quest to access alternate forms of self and being. My analysis of over a century's worth of materials documents the narrative and visual strategies that distinguish this body of works. Central to this study is what I delineate throughout as the narrative process of rewriting, and how such procedure links to, displaces, and challenges our understanding of the topos of homoerotic tourism throughout the period under investigation. I begin by considering André Gide's L'immoraliste (1902), and then work my way throughout the twentieth century, reflecting on subsequent "travel" writings by Tony Duvert, Roland Barthes, and Jean Genet. A series of French-language films are also considered as they relate specifically to the literature studied. I conclude this dissertation by elaborating on the thematic of "reverse" homoerotic tourism. In so doing, I contemplate how contemporary Maghrebi writers Abdellah Taïa and Rachid O. point to the Arab tourist's ability to effectively reverse the route south, thereby rewriting and displacing structures of power and desire in a transnational and bi-cultural context.
On the Path to War: Irène Némirovsky's Fiction in Interwar France is a critical literary-historical study of Irène Némirovsky's French-language novels related to the experience of war, exile, and ...anti-Semitism during the interwar period and German occupation of France. Némirovsky was a Russian-Jewish émigré living and writing in France in the interwar years until her arrest by the French police on July 13, 1942. She was deported to Auschwitz where she died shortly after her arrival. Some sixty years later, Némirovsky's last novel, Suite Française, was published posthumously for the first time in 2004 and became an international bestseller. Némirovsky often wrote about controversial subjects, such as Jewish identity and Franco-Jewish society, and consequently her legacy is often contested and interpreted through a biographical lens of author's Jewish identity, her use of Jewish stereotypes in her writing, or her status as a Holocaust victim. This dissertation will focus on Némirovsky's fiction that offers insight into a variety of experiences in the French interwar period such as exile and statelessness of Jewish immigrants, Franco-Jewish society, class conflict, and the status of women in the in interwar years and occupation that tends to be overshadowed by the fate of the author or her representation of Jewish characters. Némirovsky multicultural identity allowed her to draw on a variety of themes in her writing, and she was able to switch focus in her
It is difficult to untangle the puzzle of Henry de Montherlant. He has borne conflicting political and personal labels over the years, from rake to misogynist, from radically patriotic veteran to ...despicable traitor. His writings have known the same fate, falling from the phenomenal popularity of his tetralogy Les jeunes filles in the 1930s into a certain brand of disfavor after the war.
Bloody sacrifice is perhaps the most disconcerting expression of that sacred violence that attracted twentieth-century ethnographers, historians of religion, and writers. Fictional and non-fictional ...descriptions of contact with the blood of sacrificial animals range from the aestheticism of Henry de Montherlant's Bestiaires to Michel Leiris' and Hubert Fichte's ethnological encounters with African and Afro-American religion. The reactions of these authors oscillate between fascination and desire of participation on the one hand, and delusion, uneasiness, or pure disgust on the other. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Divided into two main sections, this work examines the role of the female adolescent in Henry de Montherlant's theater. Part I focuses on all of Montherlant's female adolescent characters and ...examines how they go beyond the ordinary in their ability to transcend biology and the natural family and offer safety, salvation, or solace to other (mostly older) characters through the act of elected/spiritual kinship. In this way, they allow those characters to transcend their own existence by offering them a chance to attain what Mircea Eliade referred to as "superhuman ontological status more or less divine." Part II narrows the focus to four of Montherlant's adolescent characters: the Infante (La Reine morte), Mariana (Le Maître de Santiago), Françoise (Port-Royal), and Christine (Celles qu'on prend dans ses bras). Each of the chapters in this section examines how these young women embody qualities which were often extolled in French and Italian theater of the early to mid-twentieth century: female virility; renunciation of terrestrial and romantic interests; pride; putting duty before happiness; and purity. Studying this group of characters through the prism of Mary Ann Frese Witt's work on aesthetic fascism, I observe a correlation between the qualities mentioned above and the literary/aesthetic trend which influenced certain playwrights of that period. In analyzing Montherlant's theater, it becomes evident that for him the young person embodies these positive and desired qualities, which countered what he, and many others, perceived as the decadence of the modern era and liberalism. Moreover, the Infante, Mariana, Françoise, and Christine, unlike the other adolescents in Part I, are each set against an older female character, even if only briefly. The older female characters appear to serve as foils to highlight and underscore the superior nature of these young women. This allows the younger characters to serve a didactic purpose—for the other characters in the play, as well as for the reader/spectator.
This dissertation examines the reactions and responses of key French intellectuals to the cataclysm of the Great War of 1914-1918. In general, literary critics and historians have not yet devoted ...sufficient attention and study to the reactions and attitudes of these intellectuals to the unprecedented destruction and violence of the first modern war. This thesis represents a contribution to a better understanding of the positions of French intellectuals with respect to World War I. The study first outlines the political, social and philosophical climate in France that existed in the late 19th century through the beginning of the conflict in August 1914. This portion of the dissertation focuses on the impact of the nationalist and patriotic French intellectuals on the prevailing thinking of the period immediately preceding the start of World War I. These intellectuals include the writers Ernest Psichari and Maurice Barrès as well as the poet Charles Péguy. Their ideas reflected a desire to renew traditional Western society, which they perceived as being decadent and in need of renewal and regeneration. They believed, in part, that war would offer the opportunity to effect significant changes within society. Further, they viewed military values such as discipline, duty and honor as positive components of a new belief system in contrast to the perceived imperfections of traditional Western values. In addition, this section of the study discusses the miscalculations of military theorists and strategists prior to the outbreak of the Great War; they predicted a war of very short duration and grossly underestimated the lethality of new modern weapons such as the machine gun, improved artillery, accurate, long-range rifles and toxic chemicals that dominated the battlefield during the conflict. The second part of the study examines those French intellectuals and writers who served in the French military during the war. They attempted to describe realistically the violence and destruction that characterized trench warfare during the four years of fighting. This group of intellectuals includes Henri Barbusse, Roland Dorgelès, Georges Duhamel, Adrien Bertrand, Gabriel-Tristan Franconi and the philosopher Alain. The thesis then examines the observations and commentaries of selected French intellectuals who did not participate in the fighting. These intellectuals included Paul Valéry, Romain Rolland and key women writers such as Colette. The study concludes with an analysis of the intellectual reaction following the armistice of 11 November 1918 during the 1920s and 1930s. Key intellectuals discussed in this part include André Malraux, Jean Giono, Henry de Montherlant, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Georges Bernanos. The intellectual reactions during the 1920s emphasized the crisis within Western civilization in the aftermath of the massive destruction and loss of life during the conflict. The surrealist movement, the successor to the Dada movement, condemned the unprecedented violence and destructive nature of the first industrial and technological war. In the 1930s, the intellectual reaction as reflected in the war writings emphasized a complete condemnation of the war and its inconclusive outcome. The French intellectuals sensed the collapse of the traditional Western system of values following the Great War and struggled to define a new belief system in a period of uncertainty, disillusion and moral confusion. Further, the war sharpened the sense of philosophical and metaphysical uncertainty with respect to the meaning of Man following a war that resulted in enormous loss of life among the principal combatants. The war eroded the confidence in traditional Western beliefs and moral values and it ushered in a post-war period of intellectual confusion, uncertainty, anxiety and disillusion that would dominate the intellectual debate during the remainder of the twentieth century.
