Notwithstanding enormous differences between Homer's Odyssey and Patrick Modiano's postmodern La place de l'Etoile (Star Square), his Holocaust-haunted novel of 1968, this comparative study shows the ...two to have surprisingly numerous substantial parallels in themes, moral reference, and narrative structure. The sharing of moral reference in spite of extensive dissimilarities is echoed in Emmanuel Lévinas's ethics: he grounded his philosophy in a fusion of Greek and Jewish thought much like the interpretive fusion at work in this comparison. Moreover, Lévinas's face of the stranger, his ethic's central image, harmonizes both with the kaleidoscopic face, central image of La place de l'Etoile, and with the protean persona of Odysseus the stranger. The tension between the similarities and the differences reflects the realist-constructivist debate about the nature of literary interpretation, as found in the tension between the article's playful, personal interpretation and Classical Reception Studies portraying the Odyssey as an overriding, impersonal intertext. These tensions allow the inference that Paul Ricoeur rightly posited semantically tense metaphor as a paradigm of literary criticism. The article also leads to an understanding both of Modiano's novel as a Holocaust-inflected updating of the Odyssey, and of both texts as interpretation-bound visions of what it means to be human.
Conceived as a second edition to Kawakami's acclaimed A Self-Conscious Art, which was the first full-length study in English of Patrick Modiano’s work, this book has been comprehensively updated with ...two new chapters, notably discussing the author's recent work and his Nobel Prize win. Kawakami shows how by parodying precursors such as Proust or the nouveau romanciers, Modiano's 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 welcome update on the work of one of the most successful modern French novelists will be essential reading for scholars working on contemporary French writing.
Dans les romans - tout comme dans la vie - un personnage peut être amené à « faire les présentations » ou à être présenté à d'autres. Ces présentations interpersonnelles revêtent généralement la ...forme d'une séquence préfabriquée, avec des formules toutes faites. Leur caractère banal ne doit pas masquer les enjeux qu'elles revêtent : elles jouent souvent un rôle dans la dynamique narrative, tout en inscrivant le rituel social dans la mimesis romanesque. A partir d'un double corpus constitué de romans de Georges Simenon et Patrick Modiano, l'étude cherche à identifier, lors de ces séquences à travers lesquelles un personnage se présente ou est présenté à d'autres, quelques-uns des motifs - de statut lexico-syntaxique, mais aussi littéraire - comme celui de la 'fausse identité', liés à la scène de présentation en s'intéressant à leur rôle dans l'économie narrative.
Thomas examines the works of Patrick Modiano. Some of Modiano's novels have been compared to detective fiction, especially Rue des boutiques obscures (1978), whose narrator, a private detective ...himself, tries to recover his own lost identity, but the mysteries Modiano addresses are mysteries that cannot be solved--and something like menace pervades any attempt to find solutions.
According to Jean Starobinski: "la parole cherche souvent à s'effacer pour laisser la voie libre à une pure vision, à une intuition parfaitement oublieuse du bruit des mots" (1999 : 12-13). The ...tensions then unite into a malleable paste and not in hard rock. ...this voice, far from being restricted to Stioppa's voice, is also echoing that of the narrator: it expresses inability and paralysis that are finally outspread through the entire novel: "Je restais immobile... et j'étais sûr à ce moment là qu'il me disait encore quelque chose mais que le brouillard étouffait le son de sa voix". ...we can note the many expressions of hesitation, formulations granting the story the meaning of a gesture: we hear, as in an uncontrollable chorus, the repeated words: "Je ne sais rien" (Modiano, 1997: 32) et "je ne sais pas" (28, 89, 96, 125), "on ne savait pas si" (141) "on ne saura jamais" (110) "je savais vaguement", (102 ) "Je me demande" (39, 75, 111, 125) "on se demande" (94) "je me demandais si" (63) "Je suppose" (39, 57, 85) "Cela suppose" (109) "Qui sait?" (61) "Longtemps je n'ai rien su de Dora Bruder" (62), "je doute" (43) "j'en doute" (104) "j'ignore si" (75, 85, 129), "j'ignorerai toujours" (147). ...there is no theory, no recipe, no solution at all, only a quest, a march against the current, sometimes guaranteed, sometimes stumbling and staggering, where the narration regresses while moving forward, looking into the depths of memory for an unlikely truth.
