French Studies, juillet 2007

French Studies is published on behalf of the  Society for French Studies. The journal publishes articles and reviews spanning all areas of the subject, including language and linguistics (historical and contemporary), all periods and aspects of literature in France and the French-speaking world, thought and the history of ideas, cultural studies, film, and critical theory.


Vol. 61, no 3 (juillet 2007)


ARTICLES

Caroline Jewers
C'est li chevaliers au poisson: Richars li biaus as a Model of Speculative Chivalry
Richars li biaus is a late medieval romance that exemplifiesthe verisimilitude, even realism, that had crept into the genreby the thirteenth century. Concentrating on the dialectic ofwealth and poverty, this article analyses the suggestive lexicalchoice treating the theme of economy in the text and, more widely,feudal, urban culture and economics, and how the hero must overcomeissues of class, rank, and cash-flow as he speculates in orderto accumulate, as he speculates in order to accumulate. Thetext's attitude to money mirrors social changes of the thirteenthcentury, and a parallel can be drawn with the content of contemporarymedieval sermons critical of the misuse of money. Attentionis paid to philology: the names of major and minor charactersare dissected in order to suggest a programmatic intention onthe part of the mysterious author, Mestre Requis. Richars tapsinto the matrix of words connected to the idea of richness,and the verb querre, central to the action, also conceals thepseudonym of the author. This curious secondary romance deservesmore attention, and illustrates how much such texts have toreveal about the cultural context of the Middle Ages.

Michael Hawcroft
Racine and Chauveau: A Poetics of Illustration
This article examines the original illustrations for Racine'splays, mostly drawn by François Chauveau, and attacksseveral perennial received ideas about them: that they mostlydepict off-stage violent action; that they are aestheticallyat odds with the plays themselves; that the illustrations owemore to the artist's fantasy than to Racine's text. The articledemonstrates that most of the illustrations depict on-stageevents, and, with particularly detailed analyses of the illustrationsfor La Thébaïde and Mithridate, argues that, whetherthe event depicted is on-stage or off-stage, the artist engagesscrupulously with the text of the play, producing an illustrationthat is faithful to Racine's work and inviting the reader toengage in fruitful parallel readings of text and image. Theillustrations respond to, and capitalize on, Racine's dramaticpoetry.

Michael Tilby
Balzacian Aporia: The Case of La Vieille Fille
In the majority of the critical assessments of Balzac's La VieilleFille, the inconsistencies and contradictions found within theportrayal of its picturesque characters have either been consideredflaws or have been the subject of attempts at rationalization.The present article, which shares a starting point with theperspective adopted by Fredric Jameson, argues that these inconsistenciesare linked, through an acceptance of the inevitability of aporia,to the way both fiction and writing acknowledge their ultimateimpossibility. It goes on to show that the radical ambiguityof Balzac's text with regard to truth and falsehood, and thegeneric instability it displays, point to a representation,at the level of political allegory, in which difference is deprivedof all pertinence, while arguing, more generally, that it isthe activity of representation itself that is Balzac's centralconcern.

Judith Still
Continuing Debates About ‘French' Feminist Theory
This article analyses attempts to write the ‘herstory'of feminism, and the tendency to use the vocabulary of ‘generation'(in particular Julia Kristeva, Toril Moi, Kelly Oliver and LisaWalsh). It concludes that the issues raised by ‘earliergenerations' are still alive, and that important questionsthat now seem to be given greater prominence such as ‘intersex'or cultural difference do not necessarily involve any methodologicalshift. Examples (including recent publications) are drawn mostlyfrom the work of Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, with some referenceto Michèle Le Doeuff.

Mari C. Jones
The Martin Manuscript: An Unexplored Archive Of Guernsey Norman French
Although the Channel Islands have formed part of the Romance-speakingworld for some two millennia, they are unlikely to do so formuch longer. In 2001, Census figures revealed that, in Guernsey,only some 2% of the population (or 1327 individuals) could stillspeak Guernsey Norman French (Guernesiais). The hitherto-unstudiedMartin manuscript is the largest corpus of prose from a singlepen in Channel Island French. Dating from the turn of the twentiethcentury, it consists of 295 exercise-books which contain a completetranslation into Guernesiais of the Bible and of 100 plays fromthe work of Shakespeare, Longfellow, Pierre and Thomas Corneille,Molière and Voltaire. The manuscript's extensive naturemeans that, after the death of the last native speaker, it willrepresent one of the most important sources of data availableon the dialect. This paper examines Martin's translation ofthe Gospel according to St Mark. It investigates possible sourcesof the translation, the orthographic system used, lexical featuressuch as regionalisms, the use of register and borrowings, andends by considering the way in which the translations can offeran unprecedented insight into late nineteenth/early twentiethcentury Guernesiais and provide new morphosyntactic and lexicaldata on the dialect.