A roman à clef, where the presence of fictional and nonfictional elements is obvious, is a powerful framework for literary portraits of the author’s contemporaries. The degree of deformation, be it ...glamorizing or devaluing, depends on several factors, among which the pleasure of playing hide and seek is not the least. Each reference, even a demeaning one, brings out of the shadow of the past both prominent and background characters, as well as important events, all from the author’s point of view. Through this display, an image of a very complex environment emerges, where the worst rubs shoulders with the best, and where the constraints of daily life or loyalty to ideals impose difficult choices with very serious consequences. The author observes the sociological phenomena that affect her environment and, while making sharp criticisms, seeks to find a remedy for the wound that destroys Art and the Artist.
We will examine the largely ethical vocation of Romain Gary's memorial writing project, which leads it to metamorphose itself into a literary tomb of the forgotten dead. We will then discuss, from a ...more narratological point of view, how this memory emerges untimely in the narrative and sometimes frees itself from it to signify the transcendent character of the name and the face. Finally, we will show that Gary goes beyond the somewhat naive vision of the memory as a mere recorder of events or images by associating it with the imagination to give it a poetic and counter-historical use.
The present paper analyses Carnets du voyage en Égypte by a French painter and writer, Eugène Fromentin (1820-1876), using the concept of autobiogeography. The concept allows to examine how the ...author of a geographical description may be seen throughout this description and how s/he is influenced by the space. The paper argues that the personality of Fromentin emerges from his travel notes even though they are focused mainly on the description of the Egyptian space and the forms “I” or “we” appear there rarely. Three aspects of Fromentin’s personality may be seen through the analyses of his geographical descriptions of Egypt: the Orientalist painter enthusiastic towards the space; the traveler marked by his previous travels to Algeria who in Egyptian spaces sees Algerian ones; and the man who feels old and tired, refuses to discover the Egyptian space and who just wants to come back home.
The paper focuses on the passage on the burial of the banker Dambreuse in chapter IV of the third part of Sentimental Education (L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869) where there is a portrayal of the path ...from the final illness to the agony and, above all, to the tomb of a rich Parisian. The funerary scenography that Gustave Flaubert sets in this scene radicalises the break with the intimate code of death. It deprives the deceased of the role of protagonist of the drama to make room for the public management of death: the gestures and parades that regulate the ritual, beyond the collective and spiritual investment in death.
This book considers the differing emotional investments in Israel of, on the one hand, Jews physically domiciled in Israel and, on the other hand, diasporic Jews living outside Israel for whom the ...country nonetheless forms a central point of affect. The book’s purpose is to trace how these two types of investment are represented by francophone Jewish writers. Israel is at once a problematic geopolitical reality in international politics and a salient topos within Jewish cultural imaginaries that transcend national boundaries. However, it has often been claimed that Israel has a “special” relationship with France, which until 1967 was its greatest ally. Israel has a large francophone community (some 800,000), while France has the largest Jewish community in Europe (some 600,000). But Franco-Israeli relations have undergone radical, largely negative transformations under the Fifth Republic (1958- ). The scope of the book is wide, addressing the following questions. How do francophone Jewish writers represent Israel in their literary works? What responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do they express both in these works and in non-literary discourse (interviews and journalistic articles)? What is the role in those responses of emotion, affect, cognition, and ethics? To answer these questions, the book examines 44 different autobiographies, memoirs and novels published between 1965 and 2012 by 27 different authors, both male and female, covering the full cultural spectrum of Jews: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Mizrahi. The approach of the book is interdisciplinary, combining literary analysis with insights from the domains of history, journalism, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and sociology.
L'Affaire Furtif (2010) by Sylvain Prudhomme and L'Empreinte à Crusoé (2012) by Patrick Chamoiseau invest the ‘robinsonade’ genre with a renewed thought on memory and forgetfulness. These stories ...have the particularity of enriching the thematic and philosophical treatment of forgetfulness with a literary approach, in the light of the mythical legacy in which they are involved. Forgetfulness constitutes an initiatory threshold, desired in Prudhomme's case or endured in Chamoiseau's, thanks to which the main characters discover or rediscover themselves. Above all, the two stories have a strong specular dimension used to think on the weight of literary legacy in scriptural work.
The aim of this paper is to highlight the use of some expressionist motifs and patterns in The Madwoman of Chaillot La Folle de Chaillot by Giraudoux. In the analysed drama we can see realisation of ...such expressionist process as antinaturalistic desobjectivization of the world, developed monologism, social middle-class revolt, rehabilitation of a marginal protagonist, abstraction, antinaturalism, or subjectivism inducing the “irradiation” of the author’s I.
Clothing was used in the Middle Ages to mark religious, military, and chivalric orders, lepers, and prostitutes. The ostentatious display of luxury dress more specifically served as a means of ...self-definition for members of the ruling elite and the courtly lovers among them. InCourtly Love Undressed, E. Jane Burns unfolds the rich display of costly garments worn by amorous partners in literary texts and other cultural documents in the French High Middle Ages.
Burns "reads through clothes" in lyric, romance, and didactic literary works, vernacular sermons, and sumptuary laws to show how courtly attire is used to negotiate desire, sexuality, and symbolic space as well as social class. Reading through clothes reveals that the expression of female desire, so often effaced in courtly lyric and romance, can be registered in the poetic deployment of fabric and adornment, and that gender is often configured along a sartorial continuum, rather than in terms of naturally derived categories of woman and man. The symbolic identification of the court itself as a hybrid crossing place between Europe and the East also emerges through Burns's reading of literary allusions to the trade, travel, and pilgrimage that brought luxury cloth to France.
Artaud’s work includes a large volume of correspondence, which should be given a special status. Neither a work of art, nor an appendix to the work, the letter becomes an object and a body that makes ...it possible to read Artaud’s corpus, insofar as it provides us with interpretative keys and forces the reader to go back and forth between letters and other writings. It is a sign of the author’s real presence, and demonstrate the idea of a suffering, dispersed and fragmented body. Paradoxically, it symbolizes the very project of the author: collecting the traces of oneself, inscribing oneself in the pure duration, and supplanting the pain of the spatial environment. The letter is the very movement of writing, conceived then as sheer speed.
According to Paul Ricœur, « The text is the medium through which one understands oneself ». Claude Vigée (1921-2020), as a Jewish writer, tries to receive, embrace and perpetuate the identity ...conveyed by the Holy Scriptures into his own writing, while also relating it to his life. Asserting oneself as part of a vaster destiny or History; developing a better self-knowledge in the light of a shared relation to the world; finding one’s reflection in Biblical figures, but also relinquishing one’s Self for a better understanding of one’s belonging: these are the paths taken by Vigée for this identity quest which implies the pursuit of the father – or, rather, of the Biblical Fathers – in a fully assumed filiation.
