Under the title Narrative Hermeneutics, this special issue engages in a dialogue between two notions: narrative and human understanding -- the latter oft en being examined under the heading of ...hermeneutics. Both narrative and hermeneutics stand for independent traditions of study rooted in various humanities, especially philosophy and literary and linguistic disciplines. Over the last few decades, both have attracted new attention by theorists and even scientists, as is reflected by novel multi- and transdisciplinary formations such as the narrative turn and the interpretive turn. It is thus surprising that the manifold links between these two traditions have not received more attention in Anglo- Saxon debates on literature, narrative, and philosophy. This article address a number of questions discussed in this tradition and connect them to present theorizing in narrative studies. Yet they have more in common than an interest in these two traditions and their intersections.
The German Occupation of Paris lies at the core of French novelist Patrick Modiano’s
œuvre
. Yet, Modiano, born in 1945, does not have first-hand experience of the event. His representation of this ...period of French history is foremost a (re)construction. It is also obsessive, as illustrated by the compulsive peregrinations of his narrators through the streets of Paris. Taking at its starting point the ambivalent ‘places of memory’ that pepper Modiano’s novels, this article proposes to examine more closely the symbolism of one recurrent street name: the rue Lauriston, headquarters of the most infamous branch of the ‘French Gestapo’. Rather drab and unpretentious, this street does not stand out in any way from Parisian topography. Yet, the simple uttering of its name makes present a troubled past, both at a collective and personal level. Not only does the textual inscription of the rue Lauriston motif reveal much regarding the author’s relationship to the period of the Occupation, it is also indicative of his ethical preoccupations with the misdeeds of the past and need to resist cultural amnesia. Underpinned by Paul Ricœur’s and Roland Barthes’s reflections on memory and photography respectively, and illustrating the discussion with examples taken from Modiano’s first novel
La Place de l’étoile
, the article argues that Modiano’s rue Lauriston represents a form of partial disclosure/un-concealment typical of this author’s ‘reticence poetics’ (
poétique de la réticence
).
Este artículo se basa en el análisis de las cuatro novelas más recientes de Patrick Modiano: Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue (2007), L'horizon (2010), L'herbe des nuits (2012) y Pour que tu ne te ...perdes pas dans le quartier (2014). En las cuatro obras seleccionadas se desarrolla una compleja exploración de la memoria, lo que nos permitirá reflexionar sobre aspectos de interés como la construcción de la intriga a partir de recuerdos, el ciclo de la memoria y el olvido, la dialéctica entre juventud y vejez, o el papel fundamental que juegan las vivencias del propio novelista.
An Imaginary Man Bouvet-Boisclair, Benjamin
01/2022
Dissertation
Novella about an American expat nicknamed Tintin and his search for intimacy in all the wrong places. While teaching English in South West France, Tintin struggles to confront his mother tongue, the ...deaths of his grandfather and great-grandfather, and the end of his long-distance relationship with Ela. Brushes with violence, French history, and other lonely, wayward men, frame an exploration of masculinity, desire, and loss.
W. G. Sebald and Patrick Modiano are two contemporary authors who share similar themes and literary practices. They are both fastidiously or even obsessively historical in their narrative ...development. And they seem preoccupied with the sins of World War II. Critics have divided feelings about their accomplishments. Skeptics say their trauma narratives induce despair, are complicated for complication’s sake, and overstate trauma’s imperviousness to healing. Advocates say their fictions bring to the present with emotional immediacy historical injustices that have yet to be fully reckoned with. This essay argues that Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) and Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997) do important political work in their fastidious historical narratives. In recreating the suffering of the past, these authors pull their readers into participating in acts of historical reparation, which are critical to social progress.
The present article draws from Henry Rousso'sLa Dernière Catastrophe(2012) and Ivan Jablonka'sL'Histoire est une littérature contemporaine(2014) to analyze a series of novels published recently in ...France, dealing with the twentieth century's greatest tragedies, and to explain what they reveal about contemporary society and current developments in historiography. The “present imperfect” refers not only to the first-person narrative mode prevalent in these works, but also to the “imperfection” stemming from the fact that (a) this past is not yet entirely over or complete (thus “imperfect” in the etymological sense) and (b) the narrator thus becomes irremediably involved in this history.
...the author is obsessed with this period in the history of France at the end of which little Patrick was born, son of a Flemish mother, Luisa Colpeyn, and of a Sephardic Jew father, Albert Modiano. ...(Modiano 2014: 25) says Jean B., narrator of the honeymoon, for whom time is not linear drain, but a circle. ...temporal perception disorder manifests itself in the Modiano's prose through a phenomenon often cited in his texts, pertaining to the art of photography: imprinting; images of the past are much more visible and contoured than the present moment, which leads to confusion not only of ages, but also of identities. Paris: space and memory In his speech to the Swedish Academy, when awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, "pour son art de la mémoire", Patrick Modiano evoked - not without a certain nostalgia - the main stages of his biography and the milestones of a work that made him famous, emphasizing the importance of Paris in the construction of his identity: "Paris, my native city, is linked to my first impressions. ...the double agent leaves Paris, which he calls "Mon terroir.
Disruptive Technology Emery, Elizabeth
French politics, culture and society,
03/2017, Letnik:
35, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this article, Patrick Modiano’s 2014 Nobel Prize acceptance speech serves as a springboard to consider the lieu commun that “disruptive technology” is killing both literature and the contemporary ...press. Modiano’s depiction of himself as part of an “intermediate generation,” trapped between the intense focus of great nineteenth-century novelists and the many distractions of contemporary writers, cleverly invoked millennial anxieties related to new technology in order to establish his own place within literary history.
