French Studies, vol. 62, no 4 (octobre 2008)

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 4 (octobre 2008)

Kathryn Banks
Opposites and Identities: Maurice Scève's Délie and Charles de Bovelles's Ars oppositorum
In early sixteenth-century France, uses and conceptions of oppositionwere varied and shifting. This article analyses some complexand apparently paradoxical notions of opposites and identitiesfound in two very different texts, Charles de Bovelles's Arsoppositorum (1511) and Maurice Scève's Délie (1544),examples of Latin prose philosophy and vernacular love lyricrespectively. I argue that Scève's poetry, like Bovelles'stheory, reflects profoundly upon opposition, difference andidentity. In particular, I focus in the Délie upon relationsof opposition and similarity between ‘microcosm'and ‘macrocosm', evoked through the poet's use ofthe ‘jealous sun' topos. Bovelles explores modelsof opposition drawn from contrasting generic contexts, includingAristotelian logic and Cusa's mystical theology. However, boththe Délie and the Ars diverge in striking ways from strictcategorizations of difference and identity (as typified by traditionaldialectic). Both think through the relationships between antitheticalmodes of difference and other kinds, attempting to imagine eventhe co-existence of difference and identity. Both also presentways in which one relation of difference inflects another, andthus offer particularly complex accounts of dynamic interactionsbetween opposites.

Kate E. Tunstall 
The Judgement of Experience: Reading and Seeing in Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles
In addition to the usual question underlying empiricist epistemology,namely how we are to judge our sensory experience, Diderot raisesthe question as to how we are to judge our reading experience,explicitly asking ‘Madame', the reader, to cometo a view as to whether his presentation of the blind man ofPuiseaux as a real person is persuasive or not. This essay,building on an earlier article published in French Studies Bulletin(2006) which provided original evidence as to the historicalreality of the blind man, revisits the question as to his imaginarynature by arguing for the intertextual presence of Montaigne'sdescription of ‘un gentil-homme de bonne maison, aveuglenay' in the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond'.The presence of this intertext, which has not been identifiedas such before, suggests that in order accurately to judge hisor her reading experience the reader requires knowledge of theLettre's literary and philosophical context, a view which isechoed in a different form in Diderot's discussion of Molyneux'sQuestion. In Diderot's view, the woman who sees for the firsttime will be unable to judge her sensory experience and unabletherefore to answer Molyneux's Question, if she does not haveknowledge of the question's metaphysical and mathematical background.Where other readers have recently argued that the Lettre emphasizesthe importance of language in understanding experience, thisessay thus argues that the Lettre also makes a case for theimportance of a literary and philosophical education in ourunderstanding and judgement of experience, be it visual or textual.

Max Silverman
Interconnected Histories: Holocaust and Empire in the Cultural Imaginary
Interconnections between fascism and colonialism and betweenantisemitism and colonial racism, perceived by post-war theoristsof racialized violence such as Hannah Arendt and AiméCésaire, have for a long time fascinated a number ofwriters and filmmakers in post-war France, yet their works arenot often received from this point of view. This article considersGeorges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975) and PatrickModiano's Dora Bruder (1997) to show how these are not simplypost-Holocaust works but contain an overlapping vocabulary,imagery and, ultimately, history of racism, dehumanization andapocalyptic violence which embraces the Holocaust and Empire.It also argues that the interconnections sought by the post-wargeneration of theorists of modern forms of violence can be moreclearly exposed in imaginative works (rather than historicalor sociological works) because these blur the frontiers betweenthe literary imagination, memory and history. Repetitions, substitutionsand transformations — the very substance of the literaryimagination — open up an alternative history (though oneannounced by Arendt and others), which challenges the compartmentalizationof metropolitan history, colonial history and the history ofEuropean genocide.

Simon Kemp
Darrieussecq's Mind
From Naissance des fantômes onwards, Marie Darrieussecq'srepresentation of the self draws heavily on the materialistmind/brain model of cognitive science. Her fiction makes useof the discipline's discourse with and against the grain, creatingmicro-narratives of the mind's surface level and present momentwhich contrast sharply with more familiar psychoanalytic perspectives.Narrative form in Darrieussecq, I argue, can be characterizedas a stream-of-consciousness, which, while failing to conformto the literary model set by Dujardin and Joyce, is in factcloser to the original psychological conception of the term.The article concludes by examining Darrieussecq's model of themind in the context of France's current ‘guerre des psys'between cognitive science and psychoanalysis.

Nora Cottille-Foley
L'usage de la photographie chez Annie Ernaux
A la suite d'une expérience personnelle tragique —un cancer du sein qui a failli lui coûter la vie, AnnieErnaux publie en mars 2005 un livre surprenant, L'Usage de laphoto. Jouant sur l'expérimentation littéraire,Ernaux emprunte le pacte référentiel àl'autobiographie, le processus d'analyse en cours à l'autoportrait,ainsi que les caractéristiques propres à la photographieet à la photobiographie pour se lancer dans un questionnementsur le cancer et sur la mort, qu'elle conduit tantôt surle mode de l'enquête policière, tantôt surle mode de l'interrogation métaphysique. Choses fortuites,les photographies successives de vêtements abandonnésaprès l'acte amoureux forment un kaléidoscopede formes et de couleurs qui doivent susciter l'analyse et finalementmener à une révélation épiphanique.Les vêtements vides, à la fois anthropomorphiqueset inanimés, l'inquiétante étrangetéd'un tableau de Chirico ornant les murs dépouillésd'un appartement modeste, et une réflexion sur l'épithèteargentique qualifiant un type de photographie tombant en désuétudeservent tous à suggérer l'étrange relationde l'absence à la présence, évoquant finalementle mystère de la mort. Empruntant la dialectique manichéenne,Ernaux utilise l'image du Saint Suaire pour renforcer le lienentre le corps et l'écriture, désignant L'Usagede la photo comme le cénotaphe devant contenir in absential'analogon corps-corpus de son oeuvre. Le texte mèneultimement à la révélation épiphaniqued'une re-co-naissance — reconnaissance pour la valeurde la vie, connaissance des mystères de l'absence, co-naissancetout à la fois du texte à deux voix et de Marieà l'écriture. L'article s'inspire des thèsesde Philippe Lejeune, Michel Beaujour, Gilles Mora et RolandBarthes en ce qui concerne la discussion des genres littéraireset l'exploitation des caractéristiques inhérentesà la photographie. Les essais de Didi-Huberman informentl'analyse de la relation du fortuit à l'écritureexpérimentale et ont fourni l'image du kaléidoscopecomme modèle théorique.