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Fragments d’un discours iconographique : Poétique de l’image dans L’Empire des signes de Roland Barthes

Author(s): Khalid Lyamlahy / Language(s): French Issue: 5/2015

Roland Barthes was not only a literary theorist, a critic or a semiotician. Above all, he was concerned with signs, symbols and representations which shape the everyday life and nourish both identities of the individual subject and the social group. As the world celebrates in 2015 the centenary of his birth, the question of his intellectual and literary legacies has never been more relevant. In the large scope of his works, L’Empire des signes, published in 1970 following several trips to Japan, is rather a particular piece which hinges on a specific combination of text and images. By looking at the structure of Barthes’s work and the relationship between the author’s discourse and the meanings released through the images, this paper aims to highlight the poetics of the image as a founding element in L’Empire des signes. The study of three categories of images used in the volume and their confrontation with the author’s developments shed new light on the contribution of the iconographic element towards a valuable understanding of signs and significations.

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Images recadrées et pensées du détail dans « Les sentiers de la création »

Author(s): Alice Scheer / Language(s): French Issue: 5/2015

Among all pictures present in Albert Skira’s series « les sentiers de la création », the reframed ones are worth considering. A personal eye appears through the details that become their main subject. What thoughts on detail do the reframed pictures express? They show a particular way of borrowing and quoting other people’s work. The way of inserting those pictures in the text are various and sometimes, the detail seems to be diverted from its original function or meaning. How are other people’s works quoted in those books? What is at stake in pictorial quotation when, being part of an author’s reflection on his own creation, the picture passes, through reframing, from an imaginative world to another. This paper will focus on the books containing “reframed details” that is to say those written by Pierre Alechinsky, Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Butor, Octavio Paz, Gaëtan Picon, Elsa Triolet and Claude Simon.

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Du souvenir à l’image : enjeux narratifs dans L’Amant

Author(s): Anna Ledwina / Language(s): French Issue: 5/2015

In Marguerite Duras’ works the boundaries between text and image become fluid. This is particularly evident in The Lover, where descriptions of events and characters resemble yellowed photographs, constantly evoking images. The author strives to recreate faithfully certain past incidents, particularly from childhood and youth, such as meeting a Chinese millionaire, which was of paramount importance in her life. However, she is inconsistent in this and does not always follow typical rules of writing a semi-autobiographical work. She attempts to reconstruct the story of her life, emphasising the image in text and its perception by the character and the reader. Breaking of the "autobiographical pact" by blending fact and fiction, truth and falsehood implies a novel narrative technique, visible e.g. in the characteristic duality of the narrator, who is also the protagonist, present in the first and third person, either the subject or an object. This is an intriguing vision of reality, understood as an image locked in memories, created with original narrative solutions, where the reader becomes a spectator.

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Images et narration dans l’œuvre de Dany Laferrière

Author(s): Paola Ghinelli / Language(s): French Issue: 5/2015

Narrative developments often stem from images in Dany Laferrière’s work. On the other hand, some of the narration in Laferrière’s fiction and nonfiction is synthesized in narrative snapshots that resemble descriptions. Temporal dimension plays a key role in this constant shift between image and imagination, because, as Didi-Huberman has shown, images carry an anachronistic element. This element also allows Laferrière and his narrators to use mainly simple present tense, even when the content of the narration is set in the past. Nevertheless, images are never explained or rationalized in Laferrière’s work, which keeps the mystery and ambiguity that characterize visual representations.

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« Un pont admirable entre visible et invisible » : approches picturales de la mort et de la vie chez Lorette Nobécourt

Author(s): Constance Zoulim / Language(s): French Issue: 5/2015

Lorette Nobécourt is a living French writer (shewasbornin 1968). In herworktakes place a quest of the « Word », the holynameshegives to literature. A great feeling of spiritualitycomes out fromhertexts.From 1999 to 2012 shewrotethreetexts about threedifferent pictural works : La Raie by Chardin (french painter), L’Ordre du monde by Sujata Bajaj (indianartist) and L’Usage des jours by Guillaume Bardet (french designer). Troughhertextsappearsherliterary and spiritual evolution. Literatureproved to be a spiritual ritual, like a memento mori, but also an real prayer, an hymn in praise of the « living life ».

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Sur l’image qui manque à nos jours, Pascal Quignard et l’imaginaire de l’absence

Author(s): Maria Concetta La Rocca / Language(s): French Issue: 5/2015

This article aims to investigate the role of the image in Quignard’s writing. Image is always present in his works, either directly, with the use of images taken from ancient art, or indirectly, thanks to the images that arise from his use of certain metaphors and expressions. In particular, here we take into consideration his Sur l’image qui manque à nos jours, in order to show how his discourse on the image takes the shape of a philosophical speculation on the missing images in our life. Indeed, for Quignard, we always live with the presence of the missing images, that is all we cannot see but we can imagine, for instance that of our conception. Moreover, the author analyses in this work four ancient images and four ancient texts. In so doing he confirms – even if partially – the Horatian formula ut pictura poesis, i.e. the link between these two forms of art. For him, the writing has the purpose of explaining the sense and the discourse that images represent. His way to present this to the readers is original and it does not belong to any other literary or artistic tradition of the past.

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L’image de la mort ou l’histoire d’une sensibilité. Charlotte de David Foenkinos

Author(s): Anna Żurawska / Language(s): French Issue: 5/2015

The aim of the article is to examine the figure of an artist in the novel Charlotte by David Foenkinos. With his text, he desires to pay homage to Charlotte Salomon, a Jewish painter murdered at age twenty-six in Auschwitz. The Salomon’s biography and works became famous thanks to the novel by Foenkinos. The great merit of his book is to make the painter recognizable to a wide public. The interpretation of the text in which central figure is a painter should include a question about the generic status of the novel, thus the reflection about the Künstlerroman, and about the status of the image in the text, the narrative processes used to make the text more plastic, the ekphrasis, etc. The problem seems interesting because Charlotte does not correspond with the traditional definition of the Künstlerroman. The narrator refers the reader to the extradégétique reality in order to make a connection between the reader and Charlotte’s painting; therefore, he focuses his story on the conception of the image and not on the image itself.

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Absents et absences dans les Essais de Montaigne

Author(s): Denis Bjaï / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

Except for Étienne de la Boétie, the friend for ever gone but whose presence pervades the Essais so vividly, the reader can notice the nearly total – and therefore puzzling – absence of Montaigne’s mother, Antoinette de Louppes, contrasting with the recurrent mentions to his father, Pierre Eyquem. He will also encounter strange omissions, such as Montaigne’s silence on St-Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and telling lapses, for instance on the answers given to young King Charles IX by the cannibals from Brazil. Do the Essais really “tell everything” (On vanity, III, 9), as Montaigne claims they do ?

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Absence du romanesque dans le roman hybride de Charles Nodier – Adèle

Author(s): Andrzej Rabsztyn / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

This paper deals with intentional breakaway of novel elements in romantic story published in 1820. On the one hand, the book belongs to the rich tradition of epistolary, on the other, it also gives un example of how formal borders can be transgressed between novel composed of letters and novel written as intimate diary, what leads to the disappearance of typical novel elements in texts from the turn of XVII and XVIII c. This absence of fiction appears firstly in paratext (especially in preface to the novel), where the author presents his own concept of novel, and then in letters.

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L’absence qui devient présence : la vie et l’Idée dans Sixtine de Remy de Gourmont

Author(s): Agata Sadkowska-Fidala / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

Sixtine by Remy de Gourmont marks the refusal of nature and tangible reality and the choice of imagination to the detriment of reality. Its principal character, Hubert d'Entragues is a faithful disciple of idealism of symbolism. Since he chooses to think rather that to live, it is not surprising that the plot of the novel is almost nonexistent. The plot develops around of d’Entragues’ desire to win the beautiful Sixtine, which is in itself condemned to failure since he is doing nothing to reach her and refuses to take any effort. The woman, who could have served as the principal impulse of the plot, is practically inexistent in this story (though it is a passionate story) and is replaced by the ideal woman: the story is doubled by the second story, e.g. a novel written by the character which is a transposition of his “cerebral” relation with Sixtine and a realisation of presence of the latter. Art replaces life and life does not exist in itself. It is shaped by thought. But the chosen absence of any facts of life is fruitful: it gives birth to a novel. It is a story of a prisoner in love with the statute of the Virgin which he sees while taking a daily walk. In this novel the carnal accomplishment is not necessary in order for a true and sincere passion to develop and the satisfaction of desire may destroy the dream and the ideal.

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Entre l’absence et la présence de la Morte dans Bruges-la-Morte de Georges Rodenbach

Author(s): Aleksandra Komandera / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

In his short novel Bruges-la-Morte Georges Rodenbach presents an inconsolable widower, Hugues Vianne, who ties to immortalise his dead wife by the worship of her souvenirs and installing himself in Bruges, a “dead town”. The aim of the study is to examine how the absence changes into presence. Firstly, the Dead returns in Hugues Vian’s mind, the spouse appears in multiple portraits the widower contemplates every day and especially in the cult of her hair. Then, she reveals herself also in the history and the actual state of Bruges. Finally, the dead woman returns in her “double” – Jane Scott, a theatre dancer, who becomes for Hugues Vianes, his wife risen from the dead, unfortunately only for a while. Georges Rodenbach chooses absence as the main aspect of his novel but he joins it to all kind of attempts, especially related to the fantastique, to transform it into presence.

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Antonin Artaud ou l’absence à soi-même et l’expérience du vide

Author(s): Dominique Rougé / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

Concerning Antonin Artaud it has been question of some lack of work but in the article we propose to the reading we are talking about another kind of absence. Indeed, in his correspondence and in the writings of his youth, the poet was complaining to be absent to himself. He was saying that words could not convey what he felt, that he had the impression to be a spectator of himself. Over time, he will say that he was feeling some emptiness in him. Is it to fill this emptiness that he spent his time writing on notebooks and that he had replaced speaking by screaming? As a conclusion to this article, we spend some time thinking about the concepts of absence and emptiness, following some writings of Pierre Fédida.

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La présence et le fonctionnement de l’absence dans le Nouveau Roman

Author(s): Czesław Grzesiak / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

The French nouveau roman is characterised by lack of numerous elements typical of the traditional, commonly called Balzacian, novel. This lack involves the rejection of plot, omniscient narrator, psychological, moral and ideological factors, social and political engagement, the decomposition of character, the indeterminacy and gradual implosion of time and space as well as the text generation based on some lack or void. The aim of the article is to present these missing elements of the represented world and to discuss their functions in the works of leading practitioners of the nouveau roman, such as Samuel Beckett (predecessor), Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon.

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Le manque en tant que métaphore de l’écriture : de l’indicible et du mot-absence chez Marguerite Duras

Author(s): Anna Ledwina / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

Marguerite Duras’s works deal with the problems typical of the literary studies in the second half of the twentieth century: presence and absence, abandoning chronological order of events, and eroticism. This article analyses her literary technique, including text fragmentation and elliptical style. The author searches for appropriate means of expression, often using silence and loneliness in keeping with her vision of absence attributed to women, kept silent by the dominant culture. Omissions in the narrative emphasise the inexpressible, beyond rational. Absence is meaningful, e.g. the missing photograph in The Lover. Absence also implies a desire to change and to write. Duras shows the problem in the context of a hidden image and an act of creation. The missing word alludes to a search of self. The author grasps complexity and diversity of absence. It is part of the theme, style, and text structure, emphasising the limitations of the language and the powerlessness of the protagonist.

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Le paradigme de l’absence dans l’œuvre de Jean Muno

Author(s): Renata Bizek-Tatara / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

In the works of Jeane Muno the absenteeism theme has got diffrent features and forms. Escape from grey and sad reality to world of imagination is the best way to deal with mental and physical absenteeism: weary figure is looking for loneliness away from his everyday reality. He wants to dream and reflect in peace and quite. The absence has been showed as a lack, also has been presented in the perspective of ontological. Characters created by J. Muno have personality problems cause by time reality and society. Society determined who character should become. All efforts being yourself ends failure. J. Muno in his works presents french speakers Belgians, called la belgitude. Heroes of Muno have problem with find them national identity, they suffer because of double culture. They are able to accept and take advantage of this situation.

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De la fiction d’une absence à l’autofiction d’une présence : l’écriture de la mort de la mère dans l’œuvre de Jorge Semprun

Author(s): Catherine Ponchon / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

“Night has enshrouded my childhood” write Jorge Semprun. Civil War and exile have erased any trace of the childhood he spent in Madrid. What was left to the writer were only flashes of memory and an old picture of his mother. Jorge Semprun was eight years of age when his mother died of septicemia. Through writing, thirty years later, he was able to evoke her death, but how was he to tell about her absence? Between fiction and reality, five of Jorge Semprun’s novels recreate his childhood. His mother will first of all be an absence or an implicit presence behind his relating the city of his childhood. Having set the scene, ghostly characters whose identities are undefined but whose discourses become more and more outlined will appear. The mother will become a nostalgic absence. Her features, her character will be sketched out. Jorge Semprun will move forward hiding behind the multiple identities of his characters and the freedom which fiction provides him. It will be up to the last character, a fictive double of the writer, to find the last traces of a mother who has turned into a haunting presence.

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Représentations de l’absence et du manque : de La Dispersion au Livre brisé de Serge Doubrovsky

Author(s): Nurit Levy / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2011

Author and academic, Serge Doubrovsky is an important figure in contemporary French literature. His numerous publications foretell the emergence of a new literary concept, positioning him in the domain of post-modernism with the emergence of auto-fiction. From The Dispersion to The Broken Book, the auto-fiction unfolds in a jerky narrative while the genesis of the work revolves around a profound sense of lack and absence that the writer tries to fill through his writing. The experience of World War II left a life long indelible mark on the writer’s own identity and brings forth the creation of this hybrid autobiography that aims at tearing down generic and literary boundaries. Letters and words are used to confront what is missing in his life in a transgressing style that describes the violence of this experience. In this way, Doubrovsky leaves a trace of his existence, transforming his life into a novel – a work of fiction – and by giving space to imagination when telling his own story.

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THE UN(TRANSLATABILITY) OF SHAKESPEARE'S BAWDY PUNS: A CASE STUDY OF ROMEO AND JULIET’S EARLY RENDERINGS INTO FRENCH

Author(s): Anca Simina Martin / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

"He was a savage who had some imagination,” Voltaire noted of William Shakespeare in a letter in 1765, foreshadowing his country’s tumultuous relationship not only with his works, but also with what is probably the most infamous aspect of his style—the bawdy puns. By analyzing two of Shakespeare's ribald wordplay as they appear in six renditions of Romeo and Juliet, the article aims to highlight how early French translators too sometimes interfered with them, for reasons ranging from perceived untranslatability, through their purported non-Shakespearean origin, to they allegedly being faults of the playwright’s time or Shakespeare himself.

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CONSTRUCTING NATIONALISM IN CRÈVECŒUR’S LETTER “WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?”

Author(s): Adela Livia Cătană / Language(s): English Issue: 13/2018

This essay aims to offer a close analysis of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur's well-known letter "What is an American?" (1782), using a nationalist perspective and taking into account some of the principles shared by authors such as Homi Bhabha, Anthony Giddens, Walker Connor, Hutchinson and Smith, Mungiu-Pippidi in their critically acclaimed works. It tries to highlight an important step in the construction of the American cultural identity as Crèvecœur highlights the transformation faced by the immigrants coming to a new land, talks about their social fluidity and amalgam, and foresees the "melting pot" metaphor. This essay combines the technique of close reading with theoretical interpretations of concepts such as "nationalism", "nation", "identity", "ethnicity" and "assimilation", and preserves at its core the idea that "the American is a New Man, who acts upon new principles" revealing the natural changes of the American thought which generates a new type of a national consciousness.

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THE POETRY OF A FLOWER OF EVIL

Author(s): Margareta Onofrei / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 12/2017

The two poets, Charles Baudelaire and Tudor Arghezi, demonstrate that ugliness can generate beauty through literary creation. This article focuses on the following aspects: the depiction of the actions of the three guests of a poem, the aesthetic points of view concerning the relation between beauty and ugliness/ good and evil, the analysis of two poems, "To the Readers", by Charles Baudelaire and "Flowers of Mold", by Tudor Arghezi. In conclusion, evil is a productive aesthetic category mainly expressed by the lexico-semantic level of the language.

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