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L’hybridité de la lettre galante, ou la transgression innovante

Author(s): Astrid Van Assche / Language(s): French Issue: 6/2016

This essay concentrates on early modern expressions of literary hybridity in the 17th-century gallant letters of Vincent Voiture (1597-1648), Charles Cotin (1604-1681) and Antoine Godeau (1605 -1672), circulating in the Parisian salon L’Hôtel de Rambouillet. Firstly, we look at the hybridity of the letter form an sich, within the context of salon sociability and early gallantry. Secondly, we study the multiplicity of both the authorial voice and the audience of the gallant letter. Thirdly, we highlight the intriguing exchange between genres within the gallant letter, as well as their confrontation and, finally, cross-fertilisation. This tripartite case study substantiates our conviction that literary hybridity functions as an intriguing indicator and catalyst of literary evolution and creation.

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Les Amours de Psyché et de Cupidon de Jean La Fontaine comme exemple de prosimètre

Author(s): Alicja Rychlewska-Delimat / Language(s): French Issue: 6/2016

The loves of Psyche and Cupid by La Fontaine is a romance of mixed genres, combining the features of a tale, a narrative poem and a philosophical dialogue. The author of this study classifies it as a prosimetrum, to focus her analysis, on the one hand – upon the interrelation between prose and verse, functions and means of introducing rhyming parts, etc., on the other hand – examining metatextual texts of the narrator who provokes interesting aesthetic reflection.

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Mallarmé et la poétique de l’hybridité

Author(s): Olivier Sécardin / Language(s): French Issue: 6/2016

The hybridity that is seen everywhere in symbolist poetry is not so much evidence of a temporary trend of the era following the interest in the crossing of species in nature as much as it is an attempt to confront the very nature of “art” itself. The time of the “quarrel of monsters” has passed, and the hybrids of contemporary poetry – competing for a place in the mythological scene that is symbolism – roam guiltless. And yet, beyond literary conventions, this mythological bestiary is anything but innocent and outdated; in fact, it embodies a genuine mythopoetic repertoire. For Mallarmé in particular, this hybrid bestiary reflects the illusive “Chimera” of poetry.

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Le parlé-chanté dans Phèdre de Jean Racine et Partage de midi de Paul Claudel

Author(s): Marine Deregnoncourt / Language(s): French Issue: 6/2016

In this article we will seek to answer how, in Phèdre to Jean Racine and Noon’s Sharing to Paul Claudel, the « parlé-chanté » is particularly significant. To do so, this article will be divided in three parts. In the first part, the « parlé-chanté » will be defined and linked to Arnold Schoenberg’s Sprechgesang. While the second part will issue on Phèdre by Jean Racine, the third and final part will focalize on Paul Claudel's Noon’s Sharing. By focusing on the two aforesaid plays we will try to prove that the operatic voice is always present in the acting choices and that the two playwrights accustomed the dramatic rules of their time.

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L’hybridité dans La Steppe rouge de J. Kessel : limite ou complémentarité ?

Author(s): Rached Chaabene / Language(s): French Issue: 6/2016

The Red Steppe of Joseph Kessel is a valuable work, insofar as it is mainly characterized by its generic hybridity. The six novellas oscillate between the biographical and autobiographical, between history and fiction, between the individual and the collective, between the current and the universal. A sort of juxtaposition and/or co-existence can be traced between the novella of Kessel and other literary genres such as the travelogue, the initiation story, the adventure story, the historical narrative and the fictional narrative. This interdiscursive report makes the historical text an open text, "a hybrid text."

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Cris des cœurs de Jean-Victor Pellerin, exemple d’une pièce hybride

Author(s): Tomasz Kaczmarek / Language(s): French Issue: 6/2016

Cris des cœurs by Jean-Victor Pellerin consists of the three parts, each of them corresponds to a different genre: melodrama, tragedy and misterium. Rejecting the reality, the writer resignes also from the scene’s materiality what leads him as a consequence to the deconstruction of the space-time’s categories. Traditional drama’s division on act and scenes is replaced by the loose images (tableaux) where the dreamy visions mingle with reality. Puting the pressure on oniric dimension of a play, the playwright prepares the area for a break of characters who moving in a hostile and an unspecified world without the laws of physics, get going in quest for the lost identity. Breaking the unity of action and psychological consistency of a character, Pellerin presents the crisis of a temporary human being, moreover by using heterogenic forms, he shows this crisis in ist best.

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Les anthologies surréalistes : l’élaboration collective d’un genre littéraire hybride

Author(s): Roberto Mannu / Language(s): French Issue: 6/2016

Published for the first time in 1940 the André Breton’s Anthology of black humor inaugurates the great season of surrealist anthologies, which will last until late 60s. The use of the traditional form of the modern anthology by the Surrealists, does not involve into a complete acceptance of its rules, already codified since the end of the 19th century, but rather a deformation of its textual structure and of its objectives, producing a literary genre with particular characteristics. The surrealist anthology, such as those realized by André Breton, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon and Benjamin Péret, represent an hybrid literary object with structural elements in common with the dictionary, the glossary, the anthology and the catalogue. The surrealist literary collections represent both a different approach to the history of literature and an expression of surrealist poetics.

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Vanités : une invitation à jouir et à se réjouir ?

Author(s): Jean-Claude Vuillemin / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

Although a distinction between a Still life and a Vanitas painting could rest upon their respective mode of reception: iconographic for the former, iconological for the latter, the interpretation of Vanitas remains highly problematic. In direct opposition to its intended message of repudiation of earthly goods, the Vanitas runs always the risk to be perceived as an incitement to enjoy and rejoice. Tempus fugit? Therefore, carpe diem instead of memento mori.

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Le sablier, la vanité et le sermon protestant français au XVIIe siècle

Author(s): Christabelle Thouin-Dieuaide / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

As a symbol of the passage of time, the hourglass is an important iconic element of vanitas paintings. It is also, in the 17th century, the object set on the pulpit of the Protestant preacher who, within the time limits of the hourglass, must exhort the faithful to make good use of their mortal life so they can expect eternal life. The theological and moral discourse of preachers is echoed in the aside sentences that recur in the texts about the little time left to the preacher to deliver his sermon, thus meaning that if human life is vanity, the very discourse conveying the idea must avoid it, banishing all hollow or swollen words, and remain within the limits of the hourglass.

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Bossuet face à La Vallière : la topique de la vanité, entre enjeux religieux et enjeux politiques

Author(s): Nicolas Pelleton / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

We will analyse the motives of vanity and of contempt of the world in Bossuet’s Carême du Louvre and Sermon pour la profession de La Vallière in both a topical and clearly enunciated perspective. The relationship between Louis XIV and La Vallière raises a religious and political issue: the motive of vanity is used by the preacher not only as a theological argument, but also as a political weapon. The motives of contempt of the world can’t do without the world itself: religious and political fields are constantly reflected on one other.

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Les mouvements de la vanité à l’époque des Lumières

Author(s): Fayçal Falaky / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

This article examines the progressive secularization of vanity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Once removed from its theocentric origins, vanity will denote less the vacuity and transience of earthly life and will refer increasingly to socially indecorous behavior that is firmly anchored in the temporal. This shift from the sacred to the saeculum will also cause a shift in the way we imagine vanity’s connoted movements. Once the transient and fleeting, vanity in the 18th century will come to designate the unpliable and the rigid.

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Plénitude du vide : dévoiement libertin des vanités classiques

Author(s): Marine Ganofsky / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

Could vanities be the overlooked essence of so-called ‘libertine’ fiction? 18th century French erotic literature has observed and analysed the new human condition on the brink of modernity. There is no more God to fill up the void, no more eternity to hope for beyond human finitude; only humanity, the present moment and the truth of a sensation. The adventures of this fiction’s characters stage the wisdom of the homo bulla that would be, tacitly, a coping mechanism to that new reality. Nothing is vanity for these frivolous beings, as long as the vanity of pleasures manages to keep away the memory of the vanity of life. However, the irony of those narrations suggests, like in the classical model of vanitas, that these temporal delectations may not be enough to avoid angst. The reader is asked a question as he or she discovers in the libertine figure an anamorphosis of all humanity: knowing that you are mortal, what will you choose between anguishes and vanities?

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Chateaubriand et la vanité : varietas ou pari pascalien ?

Author(s): Marie-Christine Alix Garneau de l’Isle-Adam / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

Chateaubriand’s work is a paradox: he was accused of being vain although he endlessly fought against vanity; he used all the meanings of the word vanity, this, contrary to contemporaneous writers or predecessors like Rousseau and Retz. Hence these questions: Should we reduce his work to a vain and egocentric rhetorical exercise full of brilliance and profusion, varietas, or should we consider its author as the heir of a moralist like Pascal and therefore an “incomprehensible monster” during his century.

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La Vanité à l’usage des demoiselles : savoir-vivre et savoir-mourir dans le roman d’éducation pour filles dans le Second Empire

Author(s): Marie Kawthar Daouda / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

In the 1850es, the Second Empire settles in after five stormy decades that unveil the vanity of temporal power. The legitimist writers Sophie Rostoptchine, countess de Ségur, and Victorine Monniot, have left a deep imprint in the education of Second Empire young ladies. Their teaching, which taps on practical interpretation of Cahtolic catechism illustrate the Christian principles of renunciation taught by the memento mori while echoing the anguishes of the time. The article aims to study the presence of vanity as a pedagogical tool in Le Journal de Marguerite (1858) and the cycle of Sophie (1858-1859) and to highlight the links between these edifying novels and the fears expressed by Baudelaire and Edmond de Goncourt.

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Le théâtre des vanités mondaines : le Bois de Boulogne dans les chroniques zoliennes

Author(s): Anna Kaczmarek-Wiśniewska / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

Emile Zola’s journalistic work deals with every aspect of Parisian reality of his time, from “serious” political and social subjects to slight or frivolous ones. The existence of the Parisian upper classes under the reign of Napoleon III is considered by the author as trivial, based on appearances and an ostentatious display of one’s richness. Actually, vanity is the main default of the Parisian high society of the Second Empire, and showing off is their new religion. The everyday parade of wealthy and fashionable people takes place at the Bois of Boulogne, freshly reshaped into an English landscape park. The paper analyzes some elements of this “vanity parade” in relation to Zola’s hostile attitude towards the Second Empire.

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Lyrisme de la vanité et vanité du lyrisme. Quelques exemples de poétiques du XIXe siècle, de Baudelaire à Laforgue

Author(s): Sandra Glatigny / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

At its peak in the 17th century, Vanity, thanks to its codification, persists beyond that age favourable to its blossoming. Just as the religious and dogmatic dimension tends to fade in the 19th century, the symbols of vacuity and existential delusion are partly used again. Can we still talk about Vanity then, when the symbolic discourse is incomplete? From Baudelaire to Laforgue, the poetics of the 19th century bring about an axiological transfer which tends to annihilate the initial argumentative impact. Consequently, why revive a tradition which is apparently incompatible with the lyrical discourse? In fact, endowed with a metadiscursive dimension, Vanity seems to relate to the critical dynamic specific to the lyricism of the second half of the 19th century and contributes to renew it. Between seriousness and irony, the pictorial transposition of Vanity fosters an intersemiotic dialogue which makes room for another method of transmission of feelings.

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Entre la danse macabre et l’apologie de la vie, ou les vanités selon Joris-Karl Huysmans

Author(s): Zofia Litwinowicz / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

In Joris-Karl Huysmans’ works, particularly those created in the transition between his decadent phase, symbolised by Down there (1891), and the period of mystical naturalism, which reaches its peak with The Cathedral (1898), it is possible to trace a complete and profound evolution of the vanitas motif. This article offers an analysis of three major stages of this change. It begins with the macabre vanitas characteristic for Down there. It is interpreted in the light of Félicien Rops’ aesthetics, which fascinates Huysmans in the 1880s, and the artistic adaptations of the temptation of saint Anthony in late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Then, the article examines Huysmans’ approach to the Karlsruhe and the Isenheim Altar pieces by Matthias Grünewald, which marks a transition between the aesthetics of the dance of death and the mystical naturalism. The article finishes with a study of Grünewald's ekphraseis’ legacy: the apology of life, a new interpretation of the vanitas in The Cathedral.

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La vanité et le tragique existentiel dans l’œuvre durassienne

Author(s): Anna Ledwina / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

Duras’s work is a deep reflection on the emptiness of the human condition. In her works, a man realizes his/her inability to live in a senseless, unfriendly world in which all efforts to change the course of events or improve fate turn out to be futile. Therefore they express senselessness of any activity or commitment of the individual as confronted with the cruelty of fate. This state of affairs results from the inseparable connection between life and death inscribed in human nature. The works by Duras reflect the end of the world so perceived and the absurd manifestations of the inevitable disaster. In this dramatic way, the author shows the tragedy of human existence associated, in particular, with the despair of suffering and injustice. The protagonists who are powerless and lost in precarious reality submit passively to unrelenting fate.

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La vanité ou le miroir des faux-semblants dans Chaque heure blesse de Raoul Danaho

Author(s): Mylène Danglades / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

Vanity, in its most general representation, invites us to stop for a moment our race ahead, to set aside our various actions and to ask ourselves about our destiny. Literature, painting often focuses on the fragility of life. It is compared to a breath, a vapor that appears for a short time. Earthly goods, worldly pleasures seem vain and ephemeral and the incessant quest of man equally illusory. Raoul Danaho, in his novel Every hour hurts, published in 1968 evokes the story of a young man who seeks his own identity and his own place in the world. Albert, this man from Cayenne, ended up in Paris, but he did not find the desired tranquility. There is no attraction to life in his eyes. He must "strive to live". It feels empty, unable to merge with the surrounding world and the writing of Danaho becomes by the same fragmentary as to "reflect" the vanity of existence. Will Albert seek "vainly" to "continue his journey," "This groping in the dark, this blind march in the night," or is the rhetoric of vanity so distended to allow him to find a salutary way? The Rochefoucauld stated with some acuity the following words, referring the man to himself, to his fellows and to the reflecting prism: "What makes us the vanity of others unbearable is that it hurts ours " (1664, 390). We are entitled to ask ourselves whether the light will be able to reach and radiate the human heart.

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"Le Tramway" de Claude Simon : une vanité postmoderne ?

Author(s): Mokhtar Belarbi / Language(s): French Issue: 8/2018

The theme of vanity occupies a prime place in Claude Simon's "Tramway". In this text, he has adopted a new conception of vanity. Certainly, the author has always evoked themes intimately associated with vanity, such as the theme of death, the theme of melancholy, the theme of war, etc., but the “finitude” has always been for him a crucial phase for the return to the primordial and the origin for the beginning of a new cycle of life. In "The Tramway", the vanity of the world is presented in a tragic way. No reference to the primordiality or the cyclical return of things. The author insists on updating in the memory of the time of death. A large number of metaphors and symbols highlight this theme of death; it is as if the author throws to the reader a memento mori from someone on the point of experiencing this fatal experience which is irremediable and definitive. This gives the text a tragic and undeniable human dimension.

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