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I wrote a novel, "Tita". An homage to my mother. I was deeply affected by her death. After the common writing experience I realized that nobody dies. Is just a change of location. A mechanism to double our love capacity…
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The mainstream repertoire in the cinemas is made up of either “escapist” stories (produced and directed at Hollywood) or, occasionally, of observational, realistic kitchen sink dramas (produced and directed in Europe, Romania included). Realism and fantasy (“the two sides of the same coin”, said Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky) rarely meet on screen, as they happily co-exist in the astonishing, non-linear, fictious works by Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrei Platonov, or Chinghiz Aitmatov, where the reader can hardly find any signposts between fantasy and reality. When they do, the screening of such and ambitious epic like Petrov’s Flu becomes a feast
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The paper provides a perspective on the short stories “Kletvata” (The Oath) by Petar Delchev and “Kak Kupihme Lenin” (Buying Lenin) by Miroslav Penkov. The aim is to interpret and distinguish the plot models of the works from each other. A linear model is used in the first story, while in the second a multilinear one. Although these two models are found in many different variations and/or with a number of modifications, they are frequently observed and intensely manifested. At the same time, they occupy a key place (as types of plot construction) in Bulgarian narrative traditions. In other words, the paper can be used as a prerequisite for analysis of the literary processes.
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This paper examines three poems by three American poets – W. D. Snodgrass, J. Berryman and A. Ginsberg who subscribe to the confessionalism of the 1950s and 60s being largely spared the complication of clinical depression which plagued the other three major confessionalists – Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. Not having a severe form of it – Snodgrass – has resulted in generally more light-hearted texts by them containing irony and yearning which differ in mood from the rather mostly bleak verses of the other three mentioned American poets. These three, however, were also perfectly capable of their own personal darkness represented in verse and in turn did not fail to scandalize with the content of some of their verses. The paper also discusses the power of sincerity in these autofictional poems vs what could have been mere authenticity of dissimulated lived experience. As such, it aims to dispel possible attacks of self-display or glorification, as well as of possible victimization that autofictive poets, including some of the ones under scrutiny, have come under.
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As well as being an academic, Chicago-born Tony Ardizzone is one of the most prominent American writers of Sicilian origin. In 1985 he travelled to Morocco and settled in Rabat, where he taught at Mohammed V University. As he has elucidated in more than one interview, he had no intention of writing about Morocco, even though, during his stay, he kept a diary. He travelled to Morocco a second time, in 1988, and, when he came back, he decided to weave some of the stories he had already started to draft into one collection of fourteen interlaced pieces, entitled Larabi’s Ox: Stories of Morocco, re-issued in 2018 as The Arab’s Ox to mark the 25th anniversary of the book publication. As this essay sets out to demonstrate, by setting the collection in a foreign territory at the crossroads (between Europe, Africa, and the Arab world), by choosing American characters (not just Italian Americans) who are struggling to balance their identity in a country whose mores they do not fully understand, Ardizzone aims at casting light on the difficulties and the negotiations each person of ethnic origin has to grapple with, in his/her path of recognition in America.
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The present paper aims to discuss the journey from page to screen of ”The Invention” of Hugo Cabret, a gripping novel written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. Throughout this process, critical approaches will be examined to understand how specific narrative elements have been condensed or reimagined for the purpose of cinematic flow. This article delves into the fascinating world of film production and emphasizes the harmonious relationship between film and literature.
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According to Roger Caillois’s social epistemology, agôn and alea are the first two principles of games which unfold between the arbitrary polarity of the play tendencies of paidia and ludus. The traditional view on tragedies strongly supported by Aristotelian authors is that, in its particular tragic universe, the stakes are determined by an implacable fatality directed by the probable and the necessary. However, in most of Racine’s plays, the course of events seems to revolve around fortune which ends up creating a sort of middle field of tragic action between agôn and alea. The article maintains that chance takes center stage in Racine’s theater, of which the tragic plot must be explored from a stochastic perspective. It uses the notion of “mid-field” borrowed from ball games meaning the mid-fielder position, a position which maximizes the potential for chance in these games.
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Spinoza considers how to even out wagers in a game of chance when the players have uneven means, compared to one another. It has already been observed by critics, that in the novel by Prévost, Manon Lescaut (1731, 1753), the hero and his lover do not play their games in the same manner, either in society or at the gambling house. They also do not weather the same losses. In fact, des Grieux wins even when he no longer cheats. Instead of following the logic of punishments, such as the Christian condemnation of gambling and promiscuity, or Prévost ’s own perspective of the abbot over his tale, it seems more relevant to consider that des Grieux attempts to pursue his case and correct chance to arrive at his desired outcome of earthly pleasure and fulfilment, by legal or illegal means. No matter the exhaustive efforts of des Grieux, their gamble to remain a couple backfires miserably. Manon dies; and he is left to follow the path devised by his family, and a role securing a suitable, comfortable happiness instead of blissful love.
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By requiring us to think the notion of play in his dramaturgical aspect, the main purpose of this paper is to shed light on the question of the individuality of the character of the Nephew in Rameau’s Nephew. The field of the theatre and performing arts is of great importance in Diderot’s texts. Therefore, in Rameau’s Nephew, through the dialogue between Him and Me, the question of the theatrical space and the structure of the text are coupled with a questioning of the “I” of the characters. We want to observe, in this paper, the way in which the theme of play in Rameau’s Nephew illuminates the theatrical space and the structure. The character of the Nephew is only an actor. He laughs at the Philosopher and subverts the materialist point of view, as much as philosophical practice.
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This paper examines the way in which Marivaux, in The Life of Marianne, plays at “making it true” by deploying a set of rhetorical and narrative devices: from the old trick of themanuscript found by chance to the call of prestigious witnesses ready to guarantee the authenticity of the episode, all means are good to produce the effect of veracity expected by the reader. However, in an opposite movement, Marivaux constantly violates the reading pact which he instituted: the reader ends up wondering about the composition of what he reads and realizes that the text exhibits too much negligence for the story to be true. Fiction is thus staged, and Marivaux underlines the processes which force the reader to question his own credulity. This paper examines the consequences of this double movement and offers a few theoretical hypotheses to account for this paradoxical poetics of play.
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For the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, playing constitutes a “positive value of illusion” which, for the adult as well as the child, allows access to reality in a way that is gradual and bearable. Although better known for his concept of the transitional object for children, Winnicott makes the claim for an essential role played by transitional phenomena at all stages of life, particularly in artistic creation. This article seeks to read together the psychology of Winnicott, especially Playing and Reality (1971) and Joséphin Péladan’s La Décadence latine (1884 & seq.), a little-known and poorly studied work of decadent literature. Through his use of a nostalgic gaze on history, Péladan transforms it into a counter-cultural fantasy, an act of resistance to the present. He creates for himself an alternative to history which acts as an “illusory experience” – a half game, half remaking of reality – allowing him to overcome the moral decadence that he laments. Thus, Péladan opposes his new arc of history to the fears he has about the end of the Latin race, effectively rewriting the world à rebours.
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There is no fiction in narrative prose that testifies to a playful intentionality more manifest than a “comic story”: this article illustrates it by first analyzing the strategies of Scarron, master of the game, in the burlesque incipit of The Comic Novel. Spanning the three centuries that separate the publication of Scarron’s novel (1651) from that of Molloy (1951), not without underlining the impact that silent cinema has had on the means and effects of burlesque in a fiction in narrative prose, we then question Beckett’s strategies, more complex or more equivocal, not only because the author seems to hide his game, sheltered from a narrating voice, but also because fiction, understood as “shared playful pretense”, then opens up to the registral interference of pathos.
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Without any reason or clue, the main character, Bruno, is convinced that he is cuckolded to the point where he actually wants it to be true, to remove any doubts. This delusion results in words and deeds which come to involve his reason and his relationship to others. But in Le Cocu magnifique, the status of the game is multivocal. It is present in diegesis, but it also related to dramaturgy. We will see how Crommelynck plays with mimesis, with regard to the very notion of the character, through games of masks and double-dealing. Moreover, at the aesthetic level, language games meet with the research into modern poetry. Intertextual games with poetic and theatrical references subvert them through pastiche, and the playwright, playing with registers, upsets aesthetic categories.
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This article seeks to analyze three novels by Jean Genet: Our Lady of the Flowers (1943), Miracle of the Rose (1946) and The Thief’s Journal (1949). Its main goal is to verify how the game with discursive techniques applied by Genet allows him to create a diegetic universe inspired by his private life and, therefore, to conduct a role-playing game, undertaken for ideological and ontological purposes. In order to carry out his plan, the author takes into account not only tools related to the poetics of a literary work but also selected aspects of an autobiographical pact aiming at persuading the reader of an “apparent truth” of the literary text. The study of these elements shows that the universe in Genet’s novels is, on the one hand, inspired to a certain degree by the reality, on the other hand, used to construct a narrative space where a continuous game with the truth and falsehood is located in the foreground.
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In this article we propose to explore the poetic features of Michel Leiris’ L’âge d’homme on the basis of a series of specific examples and attempt to inquire how the “I” is recorded in his autobiographical experimentation. Rejecting the classical model of autobiography, the author places the history of his personality within a framework formed by recurring images in which the games on lexicon, analogical connections and seemingly arbitrary associations intermingle. Aiming to erase himself, he pushes back the limits of conventional language and exploits a lyrical dimension within his narrative work, and in this process constitutes his genesis.
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What is the value of play for a reader when the literary text itself is radically conceived as a ludic device? The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’s flagship product, Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a collection of combinatory poems, is an exemplary interrogation of reading, in view of the double problematic it raises: auctorial effacement and lectorial activity. The aim of this article is to pave the way for an epistemological re-qualification of the notion of humour, by approaching it as a (playful) practice of making sense, and more specifically here as an interpretative practice. Based on a dialectical conception of play, inherited from Kant’s “free play of the faculties”, it is intended as an opportunity for an unusual rapprochement between humour and literary reading. With the author’s ambivalent complicity, the reader’s own staging merges with the work’s semiosis.
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In this paper, we examine the relationship between the Oulipian aspect of G. Perec’s Life A User’s Manual (1978) and R. Zylberman’s investigation in her book 209 Saint-Maur Street (2020). If we dwell on this comparison, it is because there is a twist between them: on the one hand, this reportage is certainly a fine example of ‘investigative literature’, but it is not, unlike Perecquian reportages, under the domination of ‘existential constraints’; on the other, it is set in collective housing, as is the case with Perec’s novel, but without resorting to linguistic constraints. In the end, we show that the tutelage of Life A User’s Manual in the book of Zylberman is existential in nature, but with a hint of Oulipian playfulness.
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At the casino, Frédérique abandons herself to the roulette wheel, which gives her a protective “out of reach” place. A moment of oblivion, gambling gives her intense vertigo and appears to be a form of abandonment, an act of revolt against the diktats of society. It is also defined as an ordalic practice, meaning that the character relies on chance. As a kind of pharmakon, the game provides a feeling of omnipotence, curbing the heroine’s anguish but also proving to be mortifying. Frédérique, the specular double of an author in the grip of ontological anguish, quickly slips into gambling madness. Is the game really beneficial? Does it have a cathartic effect on the character? Or, on the contrary, is it pure fantasy, an illusion incapable of fulfilling the heroine’s fantasies, except for a brief interlude outside reality?
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Play, in its many forms and categories, is a connecting thread running through Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s poetics. The aim of this article is to study the ludic modalities of reading practices represented in the writer-philosopher’s short stories. Analyses of the thematization of playing, game and reading experiences are conducted through the prism of theories of reception and play. The significant cases of readers with psychotic or (post)bovarian tendencies, experienced or beginners, reveal various effects and uses of ludic reading and its possible drifts. The practices of different types of readers in fabula, whether pathological or beneficial, are studied with the aim of identifying ludic and game devices of this novelistic art with a singular childhood spirit.
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The text discusses the dramatisation of Adam de la Halle’s 13th century pastourelle Le Jeu de Robin et Marion as a modern genre. This work was connected to the projects for modernising Russian theatre during the first decade of the 20th century. The essays offer an analysis of Evreinov’s Игра о Робене и Марион performed at the Old Theatre in 1907 within the context of theatralisation, theatricality and art synthesis.
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