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Mort de rire : Roland dans sa Chanson

Author(s): Brînduşa Grigoriu / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

When a sacrificial hero ascends to Heaven in the company of archangels, and yet finds the resources to laugh away the death-sentence launched by his arch-enemy, it is an epic kind of irony, involving divergent instances of narrative encoding. The Song of Roland, in the celebrated version preserved by the Oxford manuscript, proposes a polemic code of wittiness transcending the contemporary paradigms of rhetorical success. Throughout the story, a pacifist kind of relativism irradiates the lances of courtesy and banter, while the spirit of “legerie” (lightness) instills in the protagonists an overwhelming sense of the vanity of human glory and divine imperatives.

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La dimension holistique de l’ironie chez Maupassant

Author(s): Jean-Yves Michel / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

In the literary field, the nineteenth century seems to be the ironic century by excellence. Maupassant's work uses irony as a societal and intimate point of view, as much as a technique. It acquires an holistic dimension and is transformed into philosophy. The novel Bel Ami synthesizes his ironic vision.

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THE FOUNTAIN AS A BIBLICAL SYMBOL IN THE CHIVALRY NOVEL YVAIN – THE KNIGHT WITH THE LION

Author(s): Nicolae Hurduzeu / Language(s): English Publication Year: 0

Theological works were the prevailing literary works during the early Middle Ages. For western Europe at that time, the Catholic Church was the intellectual center of society and was, by far, the most productive source of literary works. The main purpose of these works was to increase the religious influence of the church on people and to guide the behavior of the audience. Literature was also used as a means of propaganda for the values and deeds of a king or a people, as was the case with the chansons de geste. Many medieval literary works, from the chanson de geste and finishing to the chivalry novel, have a high theological symbolism and many details of the text may be used as a support for various reading methods. The central figure of the chivalry novel emphasized was the knight-errant, bringing forth a new set of virtues, different from the warrior’s heroism and fidelity towards the senior. The knight–errant was always on the quest to punish injustice, help the poor, and serve God and one lady of his heart. Spite all obstacles, the real quest of the knight-errant was spiritual perfection. His journey was full of fictional adventures set in the medieval west. Exile and madness, decay and redemption, as well as a perpetual journey are specific features of mythical characters revived in the medieval characters. The novel Yvain- the Knight with the Lion of Chretien de Troyes is full of biblical symbols. The present article aims to emphasize the biblical symbolism of the fountain, considered the source of new perspectives, of a new destiny, as well as a passage towards a new stage in the life of Yvain.

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Franchir le seuil du rêve : espace onirique et espace visionnaire dans les « Journaux » et les « Mémoires » de Vintilă Horia

Author(s): Radu I. Petrescu / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Written in French and Romanian, Vintilă Horia’s autobiographical work dedicates an important amount of space to the recounting of dreams: memorable nocturnal dreams, as well as poignant daytime reveries of the self that tells of itself are transcribed, often commented upon and interpreted. The writer pays extreme attention to signs, that is to say, in baudelairian terms, to the forest of symbols he traverses. On the other hand, the experience of exile and wandering, so painful to the author, have elevated the Home Country, in his view, to the status of an absolute, mythical and heavenly place, and thus have created inside his subconscious a parallel geography of the world. However, sometimes, this particular type of experience, which is situated on the plane of the “imaginal world” (Henri Corbin), increases in intensity with lightning speed: a certain oneirical threshold is crossed without warning; and then we readers find ourselves, in the company of the subject expressing himself but also through him, immersed in the midst of a visionary space. These are some of the most important aspects that we aim to briefly analyse in this paper, browsing through a remarkable autobiographical body of texts, comprising some 1500 pages, that this great exile and Goncourt winner (1960) has left behind.

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« Une femme aimée » – le seuil en verre, l'antichambre du consumérisme et l'univers des solitaires

Author(s): Ana-Maria Roșca / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Usually, two cultures hold the reigns in Andreï Makine’s novels – the Russian matrix and the French catalyst. However, the novel “Une femme aimée” has a slightly different structure, because the Russian catalyst overpowers any other culture. Every time Oleg Erdmann turns a pocket mirror over and over in his hand, he thinks about the hidden alcove of the Empress Catherine the Great – a big, heavy threshold, made of glass, that falls and rises over the years. Meanwhile, Russia, as he knows it, changes and then ceases to exist. On the verge of this new world, the financial censorship tears the humanity apart even more than the pollical one did.

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Le seuil entre le rêve et le réel dans le théâtre baroque. « L'illusion comique » et « La vie est un songe ».

Author(s): Sorina-Crina Ghiață / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Paradoxes and strong contrasts have always been one of the most common ideas of the Baroque movement. However, what seems unusual is the permanent oscillation between life and death, but also the mixture between the illusory and the real. Thereby, eloquent examples could be represented by two of the authors devoted to the literature of the time. As for the two texts belonging to Pierre Corneille and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, the motif of illusion and the theme of dream are, of course, aspects that bring these pieces together. We will see how their playwrights reflect the threshold between the life and dreams of their characters, in “L’Illusion comique and”: “La vida es sueño”.

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Benjamin Fondane – le seuil philosophique et le motif du « juif errant »

Author(s): Ștefana Gabriela Sîrbu / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

Benjamin Fondane is a Romanian author which at the age of 25 left for France, where he became a renown philosopher and expert in aesthetics. This modification of geographical coordinates had a significant impact on the author: the threshold he has to pass is not only linguistical but also creative. His life there isn’t facile and has to face the French language, which he knew but only by means of reading. Fondane’s meeting with Shestov was an important event in his life in France; it is Shestov who insists that he should read philosophy and also encourages him to write philosophy. It is for this reason that Fondane’s French poetry, his philosophical essays and aesthetic studies bear, to a certain extent, the mark of Shestov. Shestov and Fondane are philosophers of mystery and metaphysical anxiety, of the suffering of the individual and of the dialogue between man and God – if Shestov continues on the path of religious thought, Fondane remains more firmly attached to the Jewish spiritual identity and this fact is quite apparent – all of his philosophical and poetic work confirms it.

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Au seuil de la modernité : Paul Verlaine. Au seuil de deux langues : Dimitrie Anghel et Șt. O. Iosif

Author(s): Oana- Gabriela Ichim / Language(s): French Publication Year: 0

The French poet Paul Verlaine belongs to classicism from the point of view of poetic form and to modernity from the point of view of semantic content. His poems question the created artistic universe, just as modern poetry does. His lines are noticed by order, rigor and symmetry. The poets Dimitrie Anghel and Șt. O. Iosif tried to translate them in such a way that their variant has on the Romanian reader the same effect as the original on the French reader.

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