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Vagabondage et dévergondage du personnage: réflexions sur les déambulations du héros dans les contes renardiens de la France médiévale

Author(s): Jacques Raymond Koffi Kouacou / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

The continual monotony and the wandering life of individuals, members of the French society of the Middle Age has been a big concern for the fox folktales tellers. They have focused on the strolls of Renart the fox, hero of Le Roman de Renart, deriving from populous tales of former France. In fact, the fox folktales tellers represent the reign of social anarchy triggered off by the decay of central power and the implementation of an asocial life grounded on the quest and conquest of an uncertain future and desperately marked by anguish and the resort to deceit means to the disdain of human being. Even the knight dignified forfeit of the social honorable and respectable manners in the past, is compelled to a roving, boredom and brutality for survive. This contribution aims to visit this central and worrying question of the Middle Age society to establish the contemporary value and show how it is dozed a potential outline of wandering whose expression comes from the absence of a controlled life and an irresponsibility of any resignation power.

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Du Paria à l’Émigré : une typologie des vagabonds post-révolutionnaires

Author(s): Hugo Sert / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

The « great detention » analysed by Michel Foucault shows the fear societies have of wanderers and tramps. During the wholeclassical period, political and religious elites try to lock up people who don’t have neither home nor work, thinking that they are a danger to society’s order. Arts and literature represent this threat, reinforcing the negativity of wandering and mobility in minds. However, there is a time in French history leading to question this doxa. A political revolution turns these representations round. The French Revolution changes the camp of suspicion towards wandering. Starting from 1789, old elites, ironically, find themselves out in the streets with nothing. These people, the Émigrés, are the ones creating literature during the revolutionary period. This phenomenonaffects writing at this time, and arises ethical and aesthetic questions. The texts written in exile trying to answer these questions create a new sensibility which is going to influence the minds of the 19th century.

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Le motif du vagabondage dans quelques nouvelles « noires » d’Émile Zola

Author(s): Anna Kaczmarek / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

The paper shows the importance of the motif of vagabondage recurrent in three of Zola’s short stories: For a Night of Love, Jacques Damour and The Death of Olivier Becaille. Their characters’ aimless wandering through the coutryside, through France or the entire world either means perfect happiness, time-filling strategy, or consequence of one’s past or bad luck. It is aways opposed to immobility of sleep or death.

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L’éloge du vagabondage au XIXe siècle : une pensée minoritaire

Author(s): Julien Jeusette / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

All along the nineteenth century in France, the vagabond becomes a main social and philosophical issue, for he is hunt down by scientists – vagrancy is conceived as a mental illness – and by jurists – different laws are created to criminalize the act. By establishing a link between this sudden obsession and the concern expressed by thinkers (Tocqueville, Comte, Bourget) that the society is dangerously blowing apart in separate individuals, this paper aims to analyze the manifestation of this conflict between society and vagabond in literature, among others Barrès’ Les Déracinés and Gide’s Nourritures terrestres.

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« J’allais sous le ciel, Muse ! et j’étais ton féal ». Le vagabond dans la poésie française de la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle

Author(s): Maia Varsimashvili-Raphael / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2014

Throughout history, vagrancy appears as one of the notions of the Human Condition. Its artistic and poetical representations are drawn from multiple sources and offer various models. The fantasy of vagrancy in French poetry in the second half of the Nineteenth Century is fashioned as much through the vagrant’s relationship with space as with Society. Its models spring from marginality and contestation. Spatial structure presents an opposition between « closed » and « open », « interior » and « exterior », and so forth... These separations fluctuate and interact mutually. The poet conjures, from any questing, marginal figure, his own image. The general tendency, from Hugo to Rimbaud, shows both a crushing of the poetical figure, transforming it into a magus or a prophet, and the proliferation of the accursed poet’s « negating anger ».

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Comment le rapport au texte biblique transforme le rapport au texte littéraire au XVIIIe siècle : le cas Rousseau

Author(s): Geneviève Di Rosa / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

In the 18th century, the Bible felt the full force of criticism by radical Enlightenment thinkers who read it piece by piece and denounced its making as an imposture - thus extending the break initiated by moral and historical critiques of the previous century. In doing so, they nevertheless did not grant it the literary status of a “profane work”. Yet, Rousseau, who produced a literary rewriting of the Book of Judges with his Levite of Ephraim, pondered over the violence inflicted to biblical intertextuality during his exile in Môtiers: in his Letters Written from the Mountain, he thus made it an analogon of the violence caused to his own literary works. By drawing this parallel, he opened a reflection on the different manners to read a text, as well as the possibility of regulating the reader’s violence through proposing an ethics of literary reception. Analogy might not work as a substitute; however, it enabled Rousseau to go beyond the mistreatment which anti-philosophers or philosophers inflicted to his works, by giving, among other things, an autobiographical orientation to his writing: one in which the author is ready to take responsibility for giving himself to the reader. The ambivalence of the sacred and the profane, the perception of a common essence of religion – defined either by sacrifice or gift – were thus what helped Rousseau invent the autobiographical pact.

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Le mélange du sacré et du profane dans les livrets de tragédies lyriques du librettiste Nicolas-François Guillard (1752-1814)

Author(s): Cécile Champonnois / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

Nicolas François Guillard (1752-1814) was one of the best librettists of the Tournant des Lumières. The libretto of Proserpine by Quinault, set to music by Lully at the end of the seventeenth century, was adapted by Guillard and once again set to music by Giovanni Paisiello in 1803. Six years later, in 1809, La Mort d’Adam, adapted by Guillard from Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’ Der Tod Adams (1757), was set to music by Jean-François Lesueur. These rewritings, with religious or sacred topics staged for a secular theatre by Guillard, are very different from the original works and tend to be family dramas: he then transforms them into secular works with secular content. Human sacrifices are present in these works but seem to feature here for family reasons and not only for religious purposes. Divinities are presented by the librettist as human beings, whose family roles are predominant. The sacred and the profane are mixed in these two librettos, changed into hybrid works. Guillard seems to use the same model to adapt historical, mythological or religious works, which means that the role and the importance of the religious in the works staged at the Académie Impériale de Musique in the period of the Tournant des Lumièreshas to be examined.

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La toile et le voile : l’art, la littérature et le sacré dans trois récits romantiques

Author(s): Esther Pinon / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

The literature of the Romantics, in the first part of the 19th century, is steeped in religious doubt. Moreover, the sacred was a taboo yet unavoidable subject especially in novels and short stories that were considered at the time profane genres. Romantic writers exploited certain covert strategies in order to speak of the unspeakable and touch the untouchable. They resort, for instance, to their artistic culture with its centuries of pictorial tradition that render religious figures and events more familiar and accessible. Musset’s Le Tableau d’église, Vigny’s Daphné, and Gauthier’s La Toison d’or, all bear witness to a striking (meeting) harmony between iconoclastic and / or cavalier characters and sacred works of art that focus on Passion. All three writers interweave aesthetic contemplation with mystical communion thus revealing a new sense of the sacred that is often ambiguous, nay, subversive. And since sacred art is not in itself sacred, it allows writers to come very close to sacrilege in order to examine the fine line between the profane and the sacred.

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La musique sacralisée dans les œuvres de quelques écrivains romantiques

Author(s): Anna Opiela-Mrozik / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

This article analyses poetic visions, based on synesthesia and appealing to Swedenborg’s correspondence theory, evoked by listening to music. In these visions the musical impressions are in some way sanctified and they contribute to the development of spiritual area. This aesthetic phenomenon is noticeable in Balzac’s novels. The music for him is the light penetrating the listener’s soul and a way to access to divine mysteries. Similarly, in George Sand’s works music is the inspiration to create soulful poetic visions and the character of Consuelo who, by her singing, gets to know divine things.

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Le « sacré gauche » chez Georges Bataille et Hubert Aquin

Author(s): Candy Hoffmann / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

Georges Bataille and Hubert Aquin explore a mystic experience presenting strong similarities, related to what Roger Caillois calls « left sacred », that is the impure, malefic sacred, which is accessible by transgression and corresponds to the privileged moment of unity between people. To Bataille, God is absent, even dead : Lamma sabachtani is the question become assertion in his essays. The object of his new mystic theology is not God, but « the unknown». So what is divine is returned to the human being, transcendence to immanence. The goal is to free the mystic experience from its religious background and to make ecstasy accessible to everybody. It is precisely by communicating, that men can break their isolation and unite themselves with the others. « Eroticism of bodies » and « eroticism of hearts » are two of the experiences proposed by Bataille which lead to the sacred. Hubert Aquin is also fascinated by the « left sacred », by eroticism in particular, but it represents for him a temptation which takes away from the « right sacred », in this case, Jesus Christ and the perfection He is. The absolute consists much more for Aquin in being in communion with the Son of God, in being reborn and in living in the Christ of the Revelation.

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La désacralisation de l’église dans quelques romans des Rougon-Macquart

Author(s): Anna Kaczmarek / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

Being agnostic and believing in science only, Emile Zola perceived churches as simple buildings, monuments to a dead religion that would certainly lose the battle against nature and science. The paper gives some examples of this vision in four novels, parts of the Rougon-Macquart cycle.

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Autour de l’axis mundi. De la notion théorique à la mise en image littéraire dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne (Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras et Le Sphinx des glaces)

Author(s): Adam Jarosz / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

The symbolism of axis mundi constitutes an integral part of cultural and religious systems all over the world. Such symbolism appears clearly and precisely in all forms of religious life. As it is stressed by Eliade many a time, axis mundi is an intersection of three varied ontological zones (the interior of the Earth, the surface of the Earth, and the Heaven) and creates a contact place of the man with sacrum. The axis mundi symbolism, analysed here as a part of literary studies, is reflected also in two important novels by Julius Verne (Adventures of Captain Hatteras,1864-65; An Arctic Mystery, 1897) dedicated to the polar regions. In both novels, such sites (the northern and southern poles) become a literary image of axis mundi, while the hypothesis finds its confirmation in the nature of psychological experiences of the heroes cast in the polar regions. The symbolic and religious study of such experiences leads to the conclusion that in both analysed cases they may be understood as the experience of a contact with sacrum.

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Retrouver le temple du sacré : la logique des extrêmes dans le roman de Durtal

Author(s): Eléonore Sibourg / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

In the late 19th century a reversal of the values linked to the sacred and the profane can be observed. As Religion retreats, Positivism and faith in Progress fill the gap left by abandoned spiritual belief. A nostalgia for transcendence arises amongst writers. Naturalism turns out to be sterile, but it has nevertheless become impossible to believe in God. It is in this context that Huysmans writes his novels. The Durtal tetralogy in particular focuses on its problematics: desperate, the main character wanders around Catholicism, seeking a sense of the Sacred. He first explores the world of Satanism before converting. But even when faith is regained, problems are not solved. In the religious domain itself, Durtal condemns the sacralization of the profane. Henceforth, the Durtal tetralogy manifests itself as a novel of the in-between: from brothel to church, between up-above and down-below, between almighty materialism and bourgeois catholicism, this misanthropic writer prays for a renewed and primitive form of religious practice in which the individual can access the Sacred again. The quest for the supernatural, through a questioning of contemporary society, becomes a quest for Identity.

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Pèlerinages barrésiens

Author(s): Claire Bompaire-Evesque / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

This article is a inquiry about how Barrès (1862-1923) handles the religious rite of pilgrimage. Barrès stages in his writings successively three forms of pilgrimage, revealing what is sacred to him at different times. The pilgrimage to a museum or to the birthplace of an artist is typical for the egotism and the humanism of the young Barrès, expressed in the Cult of the Self (1888-1891). After his conversion to nationalism, Barrès tries to unite the sons of France and to inspire them a solemn reverence for “the earth and the dead” ; for that purpose he encourages in French Amities (1903) pilgrimages to historical places of national importance (battlefields; birthplace of Joan of Arc), building what Nora later called the Realms of Memory. The third stage of Barrès' intellectual evolution is exemplified by The sacred Hill (1913). In this book the writer celebrates the places where “the Spirit blows”, and proves open to a large scale of spiritual forces, reaching back to the paganism and forward to an integrative syncretism, which aims at unifying “the entire realm of the sacred”.

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Le choix de Ponce Pilate, entre le sacré et le profane

Author(s): Sara Tongiani / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

At the beginning of The man and the sacred (1939) Roger Caillois affirmed that “every religious conception of the universe implies that there is a distinction between the sacred and the profane”. Caillois discussed the theme of the sacred throughout his life, through several essays, articles and lectures. In 1961, Caillois wrote Pontius Pilate, a brief novel in which the author explored the dilemma of the governor of the Judea. For the first time, Caillois has changed genre. The author escaped the theme of the sacred by way of the novel. The purpose of this paper is to show how the theme of the sacred leads to a comparison between the thought of Caillois, the theories of the College of Sociology, and the theme of The Scapegoat by René Girard.

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L’amour vu comme un « rite de passage » : la confrontation du sacrum et du profanum chez Marguerite Duras

Author(s): Anna Ledwina / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Marguerite Duras’ works is her focus on contradictions, especially in the realm of physicality, which is part of the "dialectic of desire", nonverbal pleasure. In the analysed novels: Un Barrage contre le Pacifique and L’Amant this passion manifests itself through the "rite of passage". It is a double discovery of one’s own and someone else’s physicality. Duras perceives love as an uncontrollable, violent "experiment", a rebellion against the mother and restrictions. Narrating one of the most important (and secret) episodes of her life – crossing the Mekong – the author depicts sexual initiation of a young heroine (Duras’ alter ego), who seduces a mature man with her behaviour and dress. This experience allows her to experience the absolute and become initiated and free. For the narrator it is an opportunity for in-depth analysis of the secular and the sacred aspects of desire. To fully understand the sacred and the profane in Duras’ works, it seems necessary to approach the phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective.

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Sylvain Trudel et le réenchantement du monde

Author(s): Jean-Pierre Thomas / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

Since the middle of the 1980s, French Canadian novelist Sylvain Trudel constantly puts his characters in contentious situations from which they try to escape by way of creating alternate worlds at the same time real and fantastical. This action brings these characters away from their trite everyday life and into a symbolic and mystical universe. The synthème seems to be feeding that symbolic frame. Through the child's point of view – which seems then to become some sort of secret language –, each object belonging to the realm of the profane becomes tinted with a sacred meaning. Synthème and symbol would then be considered as vehicles for the sacred, that which shows through Sylvain Trudel's novels.

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Un Dieu sadique : le rôle de l’image blasphématoire de Dieu dans Dolce agonia de Nancy Huston

Author(s): Izabela Front / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

The present article seeks to analyze the way in which the blasphemous figure of God in Dolce agonia by Nancy Huston let the author describe the sacred element in man’s life, seen as deprived of transcendental character. This is possible thanks to three text’s aspects conditioned by the God’s figure, which are: the contrast between passages marked by the cynical God’s voice and passages focused on man’s life filled with suffering ; the tone and time approach variations and, finally, the double character of God who, at the same time, is indifferent to man’s lot while touched by his capacity of love.

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La quête du sacré dans les romans de Chantal Deltenre

Author(s): Judyta Zbierska-Mościcka / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

La plus que mère, La cérémonie des poupées and La maison de l’âme, the trilogy of the Belgian writer and ethnologist Chantal Deltenre – published in the first decade of the 21st century, illustrates post-modern religiosity, the main characteristics of which are diversity, syncretism and relativism. The search for the sacrum is supposed to be a type of initiation journey undertaken mostly by lost and uprooted individuals. It is a search for a safe and meaningful space (place) which is not just the opposite of the shapeless and meaningless world of the profanum, but also allows one to build one’s own identity.

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La transposition profane de l’Exode dans Moïse fiction de Gilles Rozier

Author(s): Piotr Sadkowski / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2013

Throughout the centuries Franch and Francophone writers were relatively rarely inspired by the figure of Moses and the story of Exodus. However, since the second half of 20th c. the interest of the writers in this Old Testament story has been on the rise: by rewriting it they engage the question of the identity dilemmas of contemporary people. One of the examples of this trend is Moïse fiction, the 2001 novel by the French writer of Jewish origin, Gilles Rozier, analysed in the present article. The hypertextual techniques, which result in the proximisation of the figure of Moses to the reality of a contemporary reader, constitute literary profanation, but at the same time help place Rozier's text in the Jewish tradition, in the spirit of talmudism understood as an exchange of views, commentaries, versions and additions related to the Torah. It is how the novel, a new “midrash”, avoids the simple antinomy of the concepts of the sacred and the profane. Rozier’s Moses, conscious of his complex identity, is simultaneously a Jew and an Egyptian, and faces, like many contemporary Jewish writers, language dilemmas, which constitute one of the major motives analysed in the present article. Another key question is the ethics of the prophetism of the novelistic Moses, who seems to speak for contemporary people, doomed to freedom in the world perceived as chaos unsupervised by an absolute being. Rozier’s agnostic Moses is a prophet not of God (who does not appear in the novel), but of humanism understood as the confrontation of a human being with the absurdity of his or her own finiteness, which produces compassion for the other, with whom the fate of a mortal is shared.

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