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Comments on the Notebooks Tristan Tzara, Miscelanea about avant-garde writers and artists
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Сomptes rendus: Dina Mantcheva. La Dramaturgie symboliste de l’Ouest à l’Esteuropéen. L’Harmattan, 2013. [Дина Манчева. Символистичната драматургия от Запада до Изтока на Европа / Symbolist drama from Western to Eastern Europe]
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A propos de l’ouvrage de : Stoyan Atanassov De la littérature à la vie. Moyen âge, Temps modernes. Sofia, Colibri, 2016. [От литературата към живота. Средновековие, Ново време./ From Literature to Life. Middle Ages, Early Modern Period]
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“The Janissaries”. Entangled Histories in the Ottoman Context of the 19th Century by Nadezhda Alexandrova
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This essay outlines the possibilities for chartering parallels between two collections of prose – “Under the Monastery Vine” by Elin Pelin and “The Well of Saint Clare” by Anatole France. The analogies and juxtapositions presented here stem from the categorical insistence on behalf of some scholars who see the two texts in terms of the following relation: follower (that of Elin Pelin) and prototype, model (that of Anatole France). The in-depth analysis of this relation reveals certain transformations of the model that are indicative of specific narrative decisions on the part of the Bulgarian author.
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The aim of this study is to present the modern interpretations of the first Biblical couple in the interwar European novel. Works from French, Romanian and Bulgarian literature have been taken as examples on whose basis analysis has been made of the possible convergence of ideas in Europe during that period. The figure of the first Biblical family has been attracting writers in their aesthetic quests through the reflection on social models and the fulfillment of Man and Woman. Considering this context, the refusal of posterity becomes a painful theme. There is a dilemma between the desire to preserve the couple in the initial stage of innocence before the Fall and the intent to end the cycle of errors repeated by mankind. Last but not least, the theme raises the question of the newly emerging female identity which breaks away from the traditional roles of mother and wife.
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This article is based on the analysis of semantic, syntactic and stylistic characteristics of synecdoche in Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge on the Drina, in Serbian and its translation into French. This is a lexeme-based study where parts of the body are used to represent the whole through the synecdochic process, sometimes metonymic. The aim of this article is to prove that by using a part of the body (with a precise motivation) the author refers to its whole, which leads to a wider view of reality. The obtained results from the contrastive and descriptive analysis have to demonstrate that synecdoche is an independent figure of speech, that the mechanisms of its formation are similar in these languages, but opposed to the metonymic processes, and that the change of the synecdoche form in the context of translation influences the stylistic effect of the text.
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Book review: Francis Claudon. A l’école de Fauriel. Mélanges de littérature comparée. Editions universitaires européennes, 2018.
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In the present paper, we set our goal to analyze the usage of dialectics in “Glory of the Empire” of Jean D’Ormesson as a weapon against the very idea of Platonic and Hegelian dialectics. Our main thesis is that D’Ormesson projects the dialectics in a formal logical space, which creates artificial contradictions and inconsistencies, which are object to his satire. This is the reason some parts of his critique towards historiography and religion to be inconsistent themselves.
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The article presents an analysis of morals of three fairy tales by Charles Perrault, as translated or adapted by Hanna Januszewska, Barbara Grzegorzewska, and Milena Kusztelska. It attempts to identify and explain the difficulties with the Polish reception of the morals within the context of different linguistic and cultural realities, as well as of varying opinions on the fairy tales’ relation to morality and didacticism in the 17th-century France and present-day Poland.
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The main goal of the article is to inscribe the formation, at the turn of the 18th century, of the melodrama in a broader context in order to show that the creation of this dramatic genre was not a result of one man’s talent or pure coincidence but actually a result of the historical process and numerous social and aesthetic tendencies that had been influencing the French theatre over previous decades. All these transformations that would eventually get compounded into melodrama, appearing throughout the century, have been observed and commented on, demonstrating once again that theatre is a never-ending story of making and becoming.
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In the 1920s and 1930s, the theory of the novel started becoming visible in the texts of novels themselves. This article examines novels with experimental narrative structures, comparing for the first time Bulgarian, Romanian, and French texts that tried new literary ‘cuts’. These writers discussed the role of the narrator throughout the text itself, either in their own name or through the narrator’s voice. They declared a search for authenticity and sought the connection of literature with another ‘fashionable tailor’: Cubism in art. It became apparent that these Modernists displayed a negative attitude towards Paul Bourget, a French writer who had at the time ‘cut out’ an emblematic figure of a successful European novelist. An increased interest in America and the Americans – in a tentative mixture of admiration or rejection – could also be observed in these novels.
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Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s and Sarah Kofman’s conception of writing, Anat Pick’s notion of the ‘creaturely’ and Kári Driscoll’s ‘zoopoetics’, this article discusses the relationship between textuality and animality in Hélène Cixous’s work. Cixous’s writing has been described as inscribing the body in the text, which may be considered an ethical engagement; her embodied poetics can thus be called a creaturely poethics. The analysis focuses mostly on Cixous’s latest texts: Les Sans Arche d’Adel Abdessemed (2018), Animal amour (2021) – which deal openly with animals – and her recent fictions on the Shoah, 1938, nuits (2019) and Ruines bien rangées (2020). In them, animality not only traverses human and non human animals, but also beings considered inanimate, such as Osnabrück’s synagogue. Particularly, Ruines bien rangées gives a voice – and, above all, a ‘cry’ – to all beings reduced to silence, and therefore to death, by the Nazis.
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In L’animal que donc je suis Jacques Derrida suggests that the question of what would be proper to the animal should ‘change tune’. I read this extraordinary passage, in which Derrida calls for us to lend an ear to an ‘unheard-of music’ that neither emancipates the non-human nor condemns it to inarticulate noise, in conjunction with the nexus of animality, telephony and the cri de la littérature that unfolds in Hélène Cixous’s writing, exploring the significant role assumed by the sonorous in these descriptions of non-human life. For Cixous, the telephonic power of near-instantaneous substitution and of prostheticity is inseparable from the sounds produced by the coterie of animals that populate the writings of these two authors. What is intriguing is that this bestiary is almost always said with a certain homonymy or homophony. Hence this article traces what I dub an ‘homofaunie’ echoing Cixous’s series of puns and neologisms such as ‘(t)elefaun’ and ‘(t)elephantasy’ that capture Derrida’s attention. The article asks what is at stake for theorizing non-human life – not just animal but also plant and so-called inanimate life – if the mode of questioning is to be redirected by a specifically aural attunement in which listening itself is retuned under the guidance of untranslatable homophony.
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After recalling the figure of Pantagruel, a grandson of the king of Utopia and king of the Dipsodes - which makes it possible to evoke some of the properties of utopia, and in particular that which consists of searching within utopia itself for filial links it maintains with previous texts - the discussion is narrowed down to the figure of the king in the tradition of utopia, with Sylvain Maréchal's Last Judgement of Kings serving as an example. Next, attention is directed more specifically to the figure of the king of Poland, a figure particularly suited to stimulate the political imagination of Europeans in the 18th century, and then to the person of Stanislas Leszczyński - the only sovereign to have written a utopia. He is the author of the short novel Entretien d’un Européan avec un insulaire du Royaume de Dumocala, which is both faithful to the narrative model it helps to perpetuate and devoid of any revolutionary intentions.
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This article aims to analyze the Abbey of Thélème imagined by François Rabelais to get a clear idea about the initial utopian programme, by means of observing its shapes and limits. It will situate this work at an intersection between humanitarian values, contribution from More, spiritual crisis, and above all a pressing demand for renewal and novelty, resulting from societal and political criticism. It is from this opening statement that we will try to approach the structure, the project and the laws regulating and organizing this particular utopian society, before determining its limits. Attention will be paid to its construction, concrete and theoretical, in a parallel with the architecture of the convent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette designed by Le Corbusier. Thus, we will demonstrate how Rabelais’ linguistic games overstep the ideological project for the benefit of a new type of writing, complex and multifaceted. We will have to understand a lot of paradoxes which allow us to determine the importance of the literature beyond the initial utopian project.
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While included in Garnier’s collection, Azor, a little known work of Aunillon from 1750, does not follow the literary rules of most narrative utopias. However, the complex story presents critical thinking about the development of refined societies. The change which a mute community experiences on an island while learning to speak calls into question the future of this happy society, but no narrator’s commentary elaborates on this turning point in the utopia. In Azor, language becomes an ambiguous object which allows for the critical consideration of the steps necessary to access philosophical sophistication but also implicitly highlights problems associated with too hasty a progress. Through the narrative plot, the judgment on civilization reveals a subtle and skillful examination of hopes and challenges of the Enlightenment, articulated in a narrative utopia as in a laboratory of ideas. Aunillon's work is part of the debates of the mid-century by expressing a nuanced validation of civilization.
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La place et le rôle de Paris et de Berlin en tant que capitales de deux pays importants de l’Europe, mais aussi en tant que capitales des événements culturels dans la première moitié du XXe siècle, et en particulier entre les deux guerres mon- diales, peuvent être étudiés sous différents aspects. Leur énergie créatrice et la forte influence culturelle qu’ils avaient sur le reste du monde sont incontestables, même avant et après cette période. Dans cet article, nous voudrions évoquer les éléments essentiels de leurs activités culturelles, comparer leurs actions culturelles et identi- fier ce qui les a rendus si attrayants pour d’autres pays. Vu les points de départ très différents dans nos relations avec ces pays, le but de cet article est d’analyser leur influence sur la situation culturelle de la Serbie en tant que partie du Royaume de Yougoslavie et plus particulièrement de sa capitale, Belgrade. Alors que la France était un allié traditionnel et un grand ami après la Première Guerre mondiale, l’attitude à l’égard de l’Allemagne a été sensiblement différente et alourdie par les conflits de guerre et les souffrances du peuple serbe. Il est possible de conclure que, dans la période donnée, l’influence culturelle de la France a été dominante, ce pays passant pour un ami à qui certaines omissions pouvaient être pardonnées, tandis que, d’autre part, l’Allemagne a été longtemps considérée avec suspicion, puis une plus grande confiance et une coopération se sont développées, pour être finalement remises en question à la veille d’une nouvelle guerre mondiale.
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