Patrick Modiano's novels, appreciated for over forty years by a vast and loyal readership, are currently inspiring a marked increase in critical activity. Since 2008, critical work and conferences on ...Modiano have rapidly multiplied, most notably in a French academic context that increasingly acknowledges the critical, historical, and literary interest of this long-popular body of work. ...how do we maintain sufficient flexibility within our analysis to accommodate future works? While the first part of Blanckeman's analysis, "Contexte et enjeux" (Context and Issues) evokes the formal and theoretical preoccupations of previous literary critics who have treated his work (e.g., surrealism, autofiction), the second, "Territoires et trajets" (Territories and Trajectories) examines the historical and geographical obsessions of an author whose fragmented memories correspond roughly to a much-wandered and half-imagined map of Paris. ...in the third segment of his study, "Dialogues et résonances" (Dialogues and Resonances), Blanckeman explains the interdisciplinarity of Modiano's work, most notably with respect to the fields of literature, psychoanalysis, history, and phenomenology.
The further people go back into their past, the less they can be sure that their memories are really theirs. They all know this uncertainty. Is there anything the author know about the first two or ...three years of his life that he was not told later by others? Is there anything he know about the world at large into which he was born that he did not later learn from others? He remember a quarrel between Grandma and Uncle Fred about who had the right story about me when he got lost in a park after he just learned to ride a bike and escaped along the busy road. The escape stories followed him for a long time. There was a photograph of him on his bike, perhaps when he was four, on the wall of his room. It hung there for years and eternalized this early vision of his.
The collection includes personal papers, books on the Spanish Civil War and lists of stock from the Dolphin Bookshop, a shop Gili opened in London which focused on sources about Spain and Latin ...America. The artefacts in the exhibition encompass the international, multilingual and aesthetically diverse themes of the IMLR conference, and serve as a reminder of the world-wide repercussions of the Spanish Civil War as well as the breadth and wealth of the materials held in Senate House Library.
Ce mémoire, qui s’inscrit dans le champ des recherches sur la narrativité contemporaine, vise l’étude de la représentation de l’action, de la manière d’être des personnages et de la construction ...narrative dans trois récits contemporains: L’Appareil-photo de Jean-Philippe Toussaint, La notaire de Patrick Nicol et Promenade de Régis Jauffret. Pour chacune de ces oeuvres, on montre que l’action n’est plus au centre des préoccupations de ces personnages particuliers, créant ainsi une poétique narrative qui s’éloigne du paradigme mis en évidence par Ricoeur. Chacun des trois chapitres est consacré à l’étude de l’une des oeuvres et est divisé de la même manière: d’abord, on s’intéresse au personnage principal, à son identité et à ses relations interpersonnelles; ensuite, on analyse son rapport particulier à l’agir; finalement, on voit les conséquences de la manière d’être du personnage et de l’action sur l’organisation du récit. Le premier chapitre, qui concerne L’Appareil-photo de Jean-Philippe Toussaint, montre que le personnage principal, à l’identité mal définie, se pose comme un observateur plutôt que comme un acteur, le récit étant alors fondé sur les pensées et déplacements hasardeux et déambulatoires du protagoniste. Le deuxième chapitre, consacré à l’étude de La notaire de Patrick Nicol, analyse un protagoniste qui fait preuve d’une totale indétermination à agir, ce qui complique ses relations interpersonnelles et en fait un personnage sans volonté, qui se contente de s’imaginer être quelqu’un. La dimension mémorielle prend ici une place importante, le personnage étant poussé à plonger dans un passé flou, voire parfois totalement réinventé. Enfin, le troisième chapitre, qui étudie Promenade de Régis Jauffret, décrit une femme instable mentalement qui erre à travers les rues, qui n’agit qu’en imagination ou presque. Dans ce roman, on distingue le rêve de la réalité avec l’usage du conditionnel présent, ce qui, finalement, fait que toutes les actions du personnage principal ne sont que des possibilités qui ne se concrétisent jamais.
My doctoral dissertation entitled The Borders of Exile: Figures and Territories of Foreignness, reinterprets the notion of the border as an expanding territory of estrangement and seclusion in the ...aftermath of colonialism and the Shoah, in an era characterized by global market economies. While allegedly situated beyond racial and sexual hegemonic claims, I show how this globalized economy in fact recreates or intensifies a concept of “zone(s)” --as defined by Frantz Fanon in Les damnés de la terre, 1961--that draws centers and margins, and establishes sites of domination structured by a historical and political unconscious. At the core of this unconscious lies the figure of the enemy or the adversary. The latter is an essential biopolitical and theological representation of otherness and foreignness through which a specific border definition can be established as limit rather than hyphen. Thus, in my project, I scrutinize a multidimensional literary corpus comprised of works by figures such as Jean Genet (1910-1986), Patrick Modiano (1945), Bernard-Marie Koltès (1948-1989), Koffi Kwahulé (1956), Marie NDiaye (1967), Wajdi Mouawad (1968), and Léonora Miano (1973), each of whose works investigate a certain definition and practice of power and sovereignty as part of an ethical and moral reflection on “evil,” or as Rüdiger Safranski defined it, as the moral and ethical burden that accompanies the practice of freedom (Evil, or the Drama of Freedom, 1997).
In Patrick Modiano's inquiry on Dora Bruder, photographical images--mostly portraits of Dora and her parents--play an important role. But in the original edition, these photographs are not ...reproduced, they are only described. We thus have to do with prose images, with an ekphrasis from existing photographs. In later editions--especially the American and Japanese translations--we find reproductions of these photographs. Their addition to the text modifies the status of it, making it into a biography or document. But our analysis concentrates on the prose images themselves: how do they work out within the narrative? How do they affect the experience of the reader, who «sees» them without really seeing them? What is their relation to postmemory? How do they include the viewpoint of the narrator, who is describing the photographs? We will see that the prose image is a deliberate choice of Modiano's, and that it perfectly fits the narrative formula of Dora Bruder, which is halfway between a memorial and an autobiography. Moreover, it is in harmony with Modiano's mode of narration.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores jazz as a means of resistance in twentieth- and twenty-first century French and francophone novels. It focuses on Christian Gailly's Un Soir au club (2001), Tanguy Viel's ...Le Black note (1998), Pascal Quignard's L'Occupation américaine (1994), and Daniel Maximin's L'Isolé soleil (1981). Written after jazz music became a respected genre, these works each illustrate a different interpretation of jazz, what it entails, and the communities and contexts in which it plays a part. Each of these novels portrays jazz as resistance in a distinctive way, spanning cultural, social, and political resistance. Drawing on intermediality and narratological close readings, I analyze how these authors transform jazz into literature. Technical and conceptual jazz elements inform the content and style of these works, and in the process, jazz influence reveals and emphasizes instances of resistance as well as the obstacles and shortcomings this resistance faces. These four novels show both the potential and the limitations of jazz as a form of resistance. In their quest for freedom, characters become alienated from family and society. At the same time, jazz gives characters a means of self-expression, and it enables the building of communities and relationships. Studying jazz in this context leads us to consider how we view music and literature as self-expression – alone or in groups, in harmony and in resistance.
Summer Reads
World literature today,
05/2016, Letnik:
90, Številka:
3/4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Christina MacSweeney Coffee House Press, June With two novels and one book of literary miscellany, WLT managing editor Michelle Johnson's summer reading list is taking shape. Olafur Eliasson Studio ...Olafur Eliasson: The Kitchen Phaidon, 2016 This cookbook by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, who brings his studio together daily for lunch, features a foreword by Alice Waters and a recipe and poem by dear friend and WLT contributor Pireeni Sundaralingam, making it irresistible.\n Forrest Gander Copper Canyon Press, 2016 A devotee of Neruda's love poems in particular, I'm eager to see these "lost" poems, recently found in Neruda's archive.
In the textualized universe of Modiano, the creative impulse is inextricably linked to the unstable framework in which such matter is cast. Utterances of language translate the power of ...transgression. The text is birthed as an object of inquiry, ultimately to be dismantled: the work is no less elliptical than it is auto-reflexive. As a self-fixed interrogator focused upon the residual matter that it is and which it only can be, it is no longer subservient to the references it struggles to invoke, much less to signify. Writing, then, is an unending auto-reflexive process of annihilation and reification, and subsists, as such, to the sole extent that it disassociates from all conventional voices of articulation. More obtusely, to "poeticize" is to re-transcribe--otherly and with abruptness--the withered sputtering(s) of the artistic imperative. Writing, like photography, aims and frames, slices the world into sequences and images--partial, scattered, at once undone so as to be resuscitated, briefly, again. The extant is eschewed. At stake and at center-stage: a propelled form of motivity, speed, accelerations and dead-stops, an aleatory array of unremitting shifts, "instantanées"--obstinately un-emblematic. Raging or controlled, the poem or the photo can only be a non-representational sliver, the transitory residue of an infinite combinatorics of possibles. Hence, arbitrary breaches, clamoring interruptions, ludic contortions of incompleteness. A curious dynamic.PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
My doctoral thesis examines the theme of wandering in contemporary French and Francophone literature as that theme is exemplified in the works of five authors: Marie Redonnet, Marie NDiaye, Tahar Ben ...Jelloun, Antoine Volodine, and Patrick Deville. My hypothesis is that each of these writers uses the figure of the wanderer to look critically at traditional paradigms of space, identity and history. My study frames and interprets wandering in new ways by connecting it to the contemporary issues these authors address, such as mass illegal immigration and exile, the rise of racism and xenophobia, the lasting consequences of the wars and revolutions of the past century, and the painful process of colonization and decolonization through the present. Specifically, my thesis argues that wandering in these authors’ works is an uncertain and risky path of escape and experimentation, rather than a resolution or redemption, as other critics have previously suggested. I would suggest that paradoxically wandering often doesn’t bring changes for the characters in the works I am studying. Rather, wandering in many cases leads to new types of discriminations, violence, and oppression that cannot be overcome. Nevertheless, the new failures brought on by wandering should not be seen as devoid of value, but rather as a means of resistance.
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