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. 62, no 1 (janvier 2008)
Luke Sunderland
Le Cycle de Renart: From the Enfances to the Jugement in a Cyclical Roman de Renart Manuscript
This article is a reading of a Roman de Renart manuscript from the often neglected gamma family, which subsumes the narrative to a broadly biographical (or cyclical) framework. The manuscript studied here therefore opens with an Enfances text, which lays the ground for seeing the fox as a radically evil creation, and his crimes as inevitable repetitions of his evil propensities. Whereas the alpha and beta families open with the famous trial (Le Jugement de Renart), the gamma family locates it later, after a series of misdeeds by the fox, meaning that this episode now serves less as an attempt to punish Renart for a single sexual crime than to mark the impossibility of holding him to justice for anything he has done. Using an approach to repetition deriving from Lacanian theory, the author argues that the Jugement, itself now a rerun of a previous trial, represents the community's failure to confront the Renardian trauma that haunts it, and, by extension, its inability to function effectively. Thwarting the ideological closure of justice allows Renart to become an emblem of the fiction itself.
Katherine Lunn-Rockliffe
Death and the Aesthetic of Continuity: Reading Victor Hugo's Contemplations
This article addresses the importance of continuity in Victor Hugo's poetry, understood both as connection between author and reader and as sheer length. Arguing that his very prolixity merits analysis, it investigates the relationship between his connective readability and his ability to sustain long verse paragraphs. It uses examples from the long visionary poems in book VI of Les Contemplations, which represent death both as a rupture and as a continuity. The first part considers the connection between poet and reader, focusing on Hugo's use of solitude as an experience shared by the dead, the poet and the reader. He plays on the concrete reality that the printed book is read in isolation to draw the reader close to the visionary experience of death. The second part examines how the reader is made to go through this solitary experience line by line, a process that unfolds in time. It shows how Hugo builds verse lines into a continuum and plays on turning points, particularly line-endings, to sustain his long verse paragraphs. Far from being monolithic blocks, these sequences are articulated by a series of transitions which constantly oblige the reader to reconsider the relationship between breaks and joinings, separation and continuity.
Andrew Counter
The Legacy of the Beast: Patrilinearity and Rupture in Zola's La Bête humaine and Freud's Totem and Taboo
This article explores the legacy of primitive violence evoked by Zola and Freud in La Bête humaine (1890) and Totem and Taboo (1913) respectively, and attempts to show how Zola's and Freud's use of a paradigm of primitive aggression might be ideologically complicit with a violent inclination in their contemporaneous societies. This issue will be considered in its relations with the notions of patrilinearity and rupture, concepts which are integral to both texts, and which, it shall be argued, constitute in some sense the essence of patriarchy. Reading both writers through the prism of Deleuze's theory, patrilinearity itself will begin to appear as a series of ruptures rather than a continuous genealogy, a history of struggle which both perpetuates and conceals the dominance of violence. The ambivalence of Freud's and Zola's rendering of that violence will ultimately appear as an ethical challenge to the reader.
Dorian Bell
Cavemen Among Us: Genealogies of Atavism from Zola's La Bête humaine to Chabrol's Le Boucher
Although critics have rightly linked Claude Chabrol's film Le Boucher (1969) to Zola's novel La Bête humaine (1890), the two have yet to be considered in the context of the century-long tradition of thought about atavism that informs them both. This article reconstructs that tradition, examining how Le Boucher's modern-day caveman suggests twentieth-century cultural continuities with nineteenth-century notions of man's relation to his evolutionary forebears. Noting Le Boucher's debt to a Freudian conception of atavism — a conception heavily influenced by the very same scientific paradigm that shaped Zola's fascination with man's prehistoric self — I argue that Chabrol's film revives a nineteenth-century European anxiety of proximity whereby technological and scientific advances prompted unease about ever closer contact with the distant reaches of humanity. Chabrol achieves this by building on Zola's proto-cinematic vision, refracting it through a Freudian lens in which atavism and the cinema occupy common psychological space, and updating the thematics of atavism for a twentieth century chastised by the colonial experiment.
Mairi McLaughlin
(In)visibility: Dislocation in French and the Voice of the Translator
This article presents the results of the investigation of a corpus consisting of translated and original French taken from contemporary prize-winning fiction. The focus of the inquiry is the difference between original and translated French and the consequences for the voice of the translator. The differences between the two language types are examined through a case study of the syntactic structure known as dislocation. Through careful analysis of the form, function and usage of this construction in the two language types, I arrive at several conclusions. First, the very existence of formal, functional and usage variation highlights the differences between translated and original language, and this may in future play a greater role in governing the composition of corpora in linguistic research. Second, the way in which this variation manifests itself has consequences for the status that translation holds in a specific culture and the effects that translation can have on the target language. Finally, variation between the two language types is shown to be relevant to the debate regarding the voice of the translator: Lawrence Venuti's invisibility theory is reworked to include three types of invisibility.