This study defines and analyzes the sense of marginality experienced by the heroes in Patrick Modiano's novels. It explores the heroes' realization and response to their condition as parenthetical ...beings and attributes such a condition to both internal and external factors. The study examines Modiano's novels from the authorial perspective and is founded on textual analysis. The hero's sense of marginality is traceable to his Jewish origins. He searches through the past for a viable identity, yet he defines and judges himself through the eyes of others. His anguish becomes self-perpetuating when he attempts to assume the multiple and contradictory roles imposed upon him. A large part of the hero's anguish proceeds from his uncertain identity. Born just after the Nazi Occupation of France, his true identity remains hidden beneath the disguises that his parents assumed in order to survive. Oftentimes, the only traces remaining of the hero's former nationality, family name and identity occur in his imagination or in sensations that are produced by a memory that precedes his own birth. This "pre-natal" memory features scenes and experiences associated with the Nazi Occupation. The absence of strong family ties, roots, stability and established traditions reinforces the hero's sense of vulnerability, of living in a social void. He is painfully aware that, just as he has seemingly come from nowhere, he also belongs nowhere in particular. The retrospective accounts that constitute the heroes' narratives entail a search through the past in the quest for identity, stability, and something positive to embrace. The sense of emptiness that plagues the hero is most clearly manifested in his search for the father. The father, as a traditional figure of authority, is almost exclusively absent from Modiano's work. His absence symbolizes the lack of role models that contemporary society might be expected to offer its children. As the author perceives it, there is not only a dissolution of values in today's society, but a resignation to moral and ideological bankruptcy.
This study examines the thematic roles of children in Michel Tournier's novels that together constitute a myth of childhood positing children as essential to man's salvation. The myth delineates ...ideal behavior between adults and children, based on nurturing and non-violence. The redemptive role of children evolves from one defining the child as a receiver of a culture in Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique to one in which the child actively influences adults through free and equal exchange in Le Roi des aulnes, and finally to become a sacred example for adults in Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar. The positive, nurturing relationship of man to child and child to man is developed against a background of negative behaviors constituting three categories of violence against children: ignorant violence in Le Roi des aulnes, compulsive violence in Gilles et Jeanne, and cynical violence in Les meteores. Tournier has also rewritten two of his novels in order to address them to children, and claims children to be his ideal audience. Using Wolfgang Iser's theory of aesthetic response, I compare narrative strategies in the works for adults and the versions revised for children and determine difference in ideal response. My comparison reveals that the nurturing role of man to child defining the main message of the myth of childhood also determines the role offered to the young reader by the author. In Tournier's first revision for children, Vendredi ou la vie sauvage, that role is passive and receives a culture. In subsequent fictional works the role evolves to an active participation in determining the text. Ideal response parallels the evolution of the child's role in Tournier's myth. The evolution of narrative strategies in works addressed to children reveals the pedagogical intent of those works. These strategies serve to train young readers in the kinds of response required by Tournier's works addressed to adults. My study examines particular strategies that train young readers in intertextual reading and initiation that, for readers who continue to read Tournier's novels as adults, posit childhood reading as an essential foundation for the further appreciation of literature.
Gr 7 Up-The narrator takes a nostalgic look back at three years of her childhood in Paris when she and her father lived together before reuniting with her mother in America. In that time Catherine ...took ballet lessons, puzzled over how her father earned his living, and laughed with him at his stuffy, self-- important partner.
Mixing memory & desire Green, Dominic
The New Criterion,
06/2016, Letnik:
34, Številka:
10
Magazine Article, Trade Publication Article
Dominic Green discusses the politics and follies attending the selection process of the Nobel Prize for Literature over the last several decades, touching upon the stories of several winning writers, ...including Patrick Modiano, 2014 winner with the mystery, "Voyages des noces." Green traces Modiano's influences by tracing the story of Patrick's father, Albert, who survived World War 2 as a Jew in France by living under several false names, trading in the black market, and acting as a collaborator for the French resistance. Albert's convoluted and colorful history had a lasting impact upon the literary output of his son, who says he still recites the names, nicknames, glamorous assoications and murderous alliances his father participated in so that they not be "lost in the cold night of oblivion." But they are not lost at all. They are all there in the history books and visible on the internet, making the workings of Modiano's novels even more mysterious. OA
Nobel prize winner Modiano Hoffert, Barbara
Library Journal,
09/2015, Letnik:
140, Številka:
14
Book Review
Many books are reviewed, including: 1. After the Circus, by Patrick Modiano. 2. Paris Nocturne, by Patrick Modiano. 3. So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, by Patrick Modiano.
World Literature Fall 2018/Spring 2019 Fifteen Border-crossing Titles For A Range Of Readers Review by Catherine Coyne This stellar story collection from prolific Mozambican author Couto, a 2015 Man ...Booker International Prize finalist, initially appeared shortly after the 1992 end of his country's civil war. F Review by staff Debut In this first novel, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, a young man travels to a boarding house outside of Warsaw where he used to visit his grandmother. The narrative cuts quickly from Gesine's everyday life to the build-up in Europe toward war and Holocaust to contemporary world events: comments like "shooting has resumed on the Israeli-Jordanian front" and "The Vietcong are continuing their attacks in the South" sit without preamble next to accounts of Gesine's dates, Marie's schooling, and the reserved, upright Gesine's scolding any sign of racial prejudice in Marie, who wears an antiwar button. The result is a layered sense of human interconnectedness, and propelled forward by the core mystery--what is Gesine doing in New York?--we come to see her as a citizen of the world ripped from home and compelled to wander, making the book resonant reading today.