Le Chronotope de la mémoire dans le conte Zulma de Madame de Staël
The chronotope of memoire illustrated in Madame de Staël’s short story Zulma

Summary/Abstract: The theme of the study is the time-space of an infliction. The literary corpus: Zulma by Madame de Staël, a romantic tale from the first stage of Madame de Staël’s literary creation. Zulma is an episode of love that should have opened the essay The Influence of Passions on the Happiness of Individuals and Nations and served as an illustration. From an aesthetic point of view, this is early romantic writing. The working hypothesis: the writer intends to construct an affective literary geography and traces the temporal and spatial narrative axes that define later romanticism. Methodology: applying interpretative analysis of endogenous and exogenous chronotope to the short story text; psychoanalytic and thematic approaches with comparative ramifications. The critical benchmarks for our work: the emphasis falls on writing as a catharsis to heal the immense suffering caused by soul pain; the configuration of the female character Zulma according to the traits of early romanticism; the love-passion that gives life and death; the narrative pattern common to early staëlian writing: wilderness, a female character in love in spite of himself, love- passion, the male character’s departure for battle, meeting another woman, return without love, suicide (her) and death (him) (or vice-versa); the close relationship between narrative (basic literary gender) and theatre (hybridization).

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