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Un arbre pour aimer, un arbre pour mourir

Author(s): Michel Delon / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

For a long time, trees belonged to romantic decorations without being identified or characterized. Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the contrary names and describes precisely the trees that appear in "The New Heloise or in the Confessions". The treatises on landscapes differentiate the species according to the land and the place. In the novels, plants become characters and metaphors for humans. They seem to be in relation with the earth as well as with the sky and the infinite. They embody a memory and bear witness to those who are no more. A privileged relationship is established between the human being and the tree, based on identification and symbolization.

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Lecture géopoétique de "La Quarantaine" de J.-M.G. Le Clézio

Author(s): Natalia Nielipowicz / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Various civilisations and cultures are a breeding ground in the search of a harmonious life in agreement with the natural world, which is a feature of the characters in J.-M.G. Le Clézio’s novels. This is the case with the narrators of La Quarantaine, which will be read here through the prism of the philosophy of Kenneth White, a theoretician of geopoetics. According to geopoetic ideas the return journey, presented in the novel’s central story, for the narrator, is a vivid and sensual experience of new places. However the opening of the surrounding space becomes possible not only thanks to this physical experience but also thanks to the knowledge, both scientific and mythological, which the narrator acquires about the «opening» place. The article is an attempt to answer the question whether this new presence in the world, described by Le Clézio, will allow La Quarantaine to be assigned to the trend of ecologically engaged literature.

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Les réécritures de la figure de Moïse dès le XIXe siècle jusqu’à l’âge post-séculier

Author(s): Piotr Sadkowski / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

The article offers an overview of approaches to the reinterpretations of the figure of Moses in French Francophone literature from the 19th century to the present. It explores the practices of rewriting the Bible, which serve to transgress the fundamentals of the monotheistic tradition, but at the same time to seek for alternative forms of spirituality characteristic of the “post-secular age” (Habermas). The concept of “post-secular literature” has been inspired by John McClure’s concept of “post-secular” fiction. The article throws into relief the aspects which transform the figure of Moses into a symbol of man’s condition in the post-secular era, i.e. the fracture of the self between immanence and transcendence, the struggle with the absurd of human finitude, and the uncertainty of identity exposed to migrations between cultures, religions, and languages.

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Pour le bien-être du numéro matricule: la vision de l’avenir chez Albert Robida et Rachilde

Author(s): Anita Staroń / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Albert Robida and Rachilde, while representing different aesthetics and philosophies, meet in a very pessimistic vision of future society, based on their observation of contemporary life. They denounce the dangers of progress which results in society’s leveling and technological development, leading to the detriment of humanist ideas. Nature disappears from this futuristic universe and the individual becomes a cog in the machine of science and technology, closely controlled by the state. Under the pretext of common happiness, individual freedoms disappear. In the name of security, everyone is forced to follow the same lifestyle. Writers at the end of the 19th century thus arrive at findings surprisingly close to the analyses of disciplinary society and «the gardening state», conducted respectively by Michel Foucault and by Zygmunt Bauman.

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Penser la société d’aujourd’hui: le roman policier de Suisse romande

Author(s): Sylvie Jeanneret / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Contemporary crime fictions (in French: “romans policiers” or, short, “polars”) have proven to be a particularly effective framework for experimenting with the reader’s involvement in literary writings critical of their times. The “polar” makes us think about the injustices of today’s world, its violence and the new forms of human relationships they produce. My argument is based on the work of two Swiss francophone writers – Nicolas Verdan (1971-) and Sébastien Meier (1988-) – with a particular focus on their use of the figure of the anti-hero, their interest in regional specificities of the French-speaking parts of Switzerland and their critical stance on contemporary society. If the close attention the writers pay to mechanisms of social and economic domination is historically a leitmotiv of the genre, the “polar” we are interested in testifies to an almost obsessive desire for justice which takes the form of an ethical posture calling on us to engage with the troubling universe its fictions recreate.

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La «religion universelle» au XIXe siècle et aujourd’hui: au croisement des cultures et des traditions

Author(s): Tomasz Szymański / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Any variant of the idea of universal religion, conceived as a metareligion transcending historical religions and reinterpreting the religious heritage of humanity, presupposes the choice of certain criteria of interpretation and a relation to the plurality of traditions and cultures. The present study focuses on conceptions of universal religion developed in the 19th century France within the liberal, lay and republican current, mainly those of Pierre Leroux and Edgar Quinet. Their belonging to the “spiritual posterity of Joachim of Fiore” makes it possible to build a bridge between them and the work of the contemporary philosopher Gianni Vattimo. His post-secular approach invites us to rethink the religious heritage of the West in the light of modern and postmodern religious and cultural pluralism, which should not be synonymous with boundless relativism.

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Émile Verhaeren et André Gide, les mondes des écrits de Maria Van Rysselberghe

Author(s): Marc Quaghebeur / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Maria Van Rysselberghe found herself at the heart of literary and artistic circles in the end of the century Belgium, one of the hinges of European modernism, but also of the “Nouvelle Revue Française” circle of the inter-war period. Of these experiences, the one of the first Belgian French-speaking women writers drew several books which are much more than testimonies. "Il y a quarante ans" [Forty years ago], as well as "Strophes pour un rossignol" [Stanzas for a nightingale], recount, in form of a story and then a poem, her passion for Emile Verhaeren. As for "Galerie privée" [Private gallery], it draws up, with an acuity worthy of the Grand Siècle, portraits of writers and major artists of her time. The four posthumous volumes of "Cahiers de la Petite Dame" [Notebooks of the Little Lady] focus on André Gide’s everyday life as much as on the way of living, thinking and writing of the gidian circle.

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L’enfant orphelin à la recherche de l’identité (Romain Gary, Jean-Paul Sartre)

Author(s): Krystyna Modrzejewska / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Childhood memories of R. Gary (Promise of the Morning) and J.-P. Sartre (Words) reflect a traumatic search for the identity of orphan boys. The modest image of the father contrasts in them with the mother’s vision of their future, containing everything that was missing in the lives of mothers. Writing as modus vivendi turned out to be an escape into the world of imagination, which, by protecting them from the real world, allowed them to understand this world.

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Les «paroles suffoquées». L’esthétique de l’indicible et de la réticence dans les récits testimoniaux de l’après-guerre européen

Author(s): Joanna Teklik / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

The survivors of the concentration camps are often heavily working on their words to transcribe the trauma they have lived. As a matter of fact, the complete reconstruction of the events and dramas appears to be impossible; it is a reason why the texts are full of digressions, breakings, a lot of disruptions revealing in background the truth upon the human nature. Taking up again their own experience, witnesses such as Robert Antelme, Jean Cayrol, Charlotte Delbo, Imre Kertész, Primo Levi, Jorge Semprun or Elie Wiesel give a new interpretation of it and split it up. In the same time, they are twice affected by this breaking, through the testimony of their text. The short and scattered form, disrupted in its expression is destined for expressing the quest of the sense appearing in Europe at the end of the Second World War, in a time, as never before, where the human being is in search of strong moral references. The rhetorical ‘reticence’ is a manner to reflect the present world as it appears : split up, wounded in the inner deepness of itself.

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Le langage – patrie immatérielle de Jorge Semprún et reflet d’une identité changeante

Author(s): Beatriz Coca Méndez / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

In Jorge Semprún’s work, the experience of what he has lived through comes from both a personal choice and the vicissitudes of the 20th century history: exile, resistance and deportation. These enforced events have shaped Semprún’s portrait: exile in 1936, deportation to Buchenwald in 1943, secrecy in Spain from 1950 onwards, and the birth for writing in 1964. This journey is indebted to his identity roots: a double French-Spanish cultural affiliation and, especially, his condition as a Holocaust survivor. This characterizes and determines the Semprunian discourse and poetics, since the themes that appear in his narrative are characterized by the setting up of new spaces and, therefore, of new roots that shape the personal mythology of the writer’s memory through linguistic, even multilingual, appropriation.

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Proust invisible? Quelques remarques autour de "Proust, Prix Goncourt. Une émeute littéraire" de Thierry Laget

Author(s): Katarzyna Thiel-Jańczuk / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

The paper discusses the question of the mediatic visibility of Marcel Proust, which is inspired by the Thierry Laget’s biographical essay devoted to controversies around The Prix Goncourt for "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower" in December 1919. In opposition to the myth of Proust’s mediatic invisibility, created by the French Nouvelle Critique and its interpretation of Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve, the author shows the nature and importance of the mediatic image of this writer for his understanding of the autofictional narrative and the biographical discourse concerning Proust.

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De la "Comparaison d’Homère et de Virgile aux Réflexions sur la poétique" de René Rapin: quelle place attribuer à Homère?

Author(s): Maja Pawłowska / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

In his treaties, "Comparaison d’Homère et de Virgile" (1668), and "Réflexions sur la poétique et surles poètes anciens et modernes" (1684), René Rapin invites French writers to imitate the greatness of Latin and Greek literature and, specifically, the art of Homer and Virgil. In "Comparaison", a work written on demand and his first critical essay, Rapin shows the superiority of Virgil, favouring his regularity. But in Réflexions, an independent work of intellectual mature reflexion, Rapin prefers Homer and his irregular but sublime and charming art of writing.

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L’enfant et les vieillards. Une mesure du temps dans les récits d’enfance (Chateaubriand, Gide)

Author(s): Damien Zanone / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Among the frequent scenes in autobiographical childhood stories are those that show the child of old times surrounded by old people (grandparents in particular), whom the author recalls as he himself grows old or even reaches old age. Through these scenes, the story of childhood always rewrites a fable of children and old people whose stakes are multiple: taking the measure of time, thinking about the ages of life, meditating on filiation, taming death. The article looks at two examples: Chateaubriand’s "Mémoires d’outre-tombe" [Memoirs from Beyond the Grave] and Gide’s "Si le grain de meurt" [If I Die. An Autobiography].

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L’usage de l’épigraphe et de la dédicace chez les fantastiqueurs belges

Author(s): Renata Bizek-Tatara / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

This article deals with the use of the epigraph and the dedication in Belgian French-speaking fantastique. The analysis of these paratext in the work of Jean Ray, Michel de Ghelderode, Jean Muno, Jean-Baptiste Baronian or Bernard Quiriny reveals that they make systematic and strategic use of them in order to seduce the reader with the promise of a strange adventure. They also seek to valorise their scriptural production and to make it a speciality of Belgian literature, namely a school of the bizarre.

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Narration intertextuelle dans "L’OEuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster" d’Éric Chevillard

Author(s): Anna Maziarczyk / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

One of the major representatives of Minuit literature, strongly intertextual in its narrative modes, Éric Chevillard exploits this literary phenomenon in an unusual way, which is not surprising in the case of the writer known for his peculiar novels. Instead of referring to other texts to form a network of literary influences and affiliations, he endeavours to create a romantic plot around them. This article analyzes L’OEuvre posthume de Thomas Pilaster to show how Chevillard turns intertextuality into an original narrative device to replace the conventional form of storytelling.

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L’Inconnue d’Arras d’Armand Salacrou: du «drame-dans-la-vie» au «drame-de-la-vie»

Author(s): Tomasz Kaczmarek / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

The author of the article studies Salacrou’s play in the context of August Strindberg’s pre-expressionist aesthetic. In fact, this play, somewhat forgotten today, has a number of features which, like the works of the Swede, announce the crisis of traditional drama. Salacrou destroys the canonical form of «drama-in-life», which is based on a dramatic progression of the action and on the character as an active agent ensuring this same progression, by proposing a new paradigm of «drama-of-life» which moves away from classic prerogatives to focus on the inner life of the protagonist. Instead of focusing on episodes that inevitably lead to disaster, the French writer attempts to embrace «a lifetime» of the character who killed himself. This is how he passes from «agonistic drama» to «ontological drama».

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«Ceci n’est pas un livre» – "Les Immémoriaux" de Victor Segalen aux confins des genres

Author(s): Agnieszka Kukuryk / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

The first novel by Breton writer Victor Segalen, published in 1907, "Les Immémoriaux" (translated into English as "A Lapse of Memory") is a political, philosophical, ethnographic and poetic text. To the denunciation of the misdeeds of colonization is added a reflection on the Other and our way of looking at it, exposed in an unfinished essay entitled "Notes on the exotic", of which "Les Immémoriaux" appears to be the perfect counterpart to the ethnographic novel. Inspired by the pictorial and literary work of Paul Gauguin, Segalen envisages the possibility of describing foreign cultures «from inside to outside», that is to say in their radical difference, through what he called an «aesthetic of the diverse». Thanks to this, more than a book, the author creates a portrait of the Maori people by addressing the question of «otherness» which has become crucial for the philosophy, anthropology and social sciences of the 20th century.

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Dispositif photo-littéraire et parcours mémoriel dans "Bruges-la-Morte" de Georges Rodenbach (1892), "Nadja" d’André Breton (1928 et 1963) et "Dora Bruder" de Patrick Modiano (1997)

Author(s): Agathe Salha / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

This article examines the association of text and photographic image in three stories celebrating the encounter and disappearance of a woman crossed in an urban setting. All based on the same literary source, Baudelaire’s poem «À une passante», they illustrate the multiple links between image and memory.

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Au croisement de l’écriture (autobiographique) et du cinéma chez Marguerite Duras

Author(s): Anna Ledwina / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

In the work of Duras, a significant role is played by the image. It penetrates and stimulates her writing, refers to the author’s biography. Together with the publication of "Un barrage contre le Pacifique", she begins to write the history of her childhood, which overlaps with the beginnings of cinematography. In turn, "L’Éden cinéma, L’Amant and L’Amant de la Chine du Nord" enable readers to discover the unusually suggestive world of childhood presented through the sequences of the most important events from Duras’s young years. In this way, readers have the opportunity to understand the complexity and multidimensionality of the author’s rich oeuvre, using various means of expression, constantly recalling childhood memories that shaped Duras. The interpenetration of two elements − autobiography and cinematography − reveals the subtleties of the Duras’s writing technique. Therefore, the tenth muse makes it possible to read the work of Duras metaphorically, allowing its intertextual reading.

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Les Français écrivent-ils des reportages?

Author(s): Anna Saignes / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

How to translate into French the Polish term «reportaż», which is indispensable when talking about contemporary Polish literature? If the meaning of this word is obvious in Poland, it is not the same in the French-speaking European area. The strong presence, throughout the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st, in the Polish literary landscape of a writing practice called «reportaż» does not at first glance have an equivalent in the French-speaking European area where “reportage” is more clearly linked to the field of the press and not literature. This article explores three hypotheses that may shed light on these contrasting situations. According to the first, literary reportage has not been written in France since 1939. According to the second, French literary reportage was made invisible throughout the second half of the 20th century. The third invites us to reflect on how literary history is written today.

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