French Studies vol. 63 n° 3 (juillet 2009)

Parution revue sur Internet

Parution : 1 juillet 2009.

Information publiée le jeudi 25 juin 2009 par Bérenger Boulay (source : Becky Wray)

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.

The July issue of French Studies is now online:
Volume 63, Number 3, July 2009

The below table of contents is available online at:

http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol63/issue3/

*Articles*
Visit the links below to read abstracts and access the full text.

- Pique-niquer sur le volcan: une pratique culturelle de Winckelmann à Sade, David McCallam

http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/63/3/259?etoc

A partir de deux épisodes aux accents infernaux tirésde la vie de Winckelmann et de la prose de Sade, cet articleexamine une étrange pratique culturelle de la fin dudix-huitième siècle: pique-niquer sur le volcan,en l'occurrence le Vésuve, escale essentielle et spectaclesublime du Grand Tour. Puisant dans des lettres et des récitsde voyage des touristes français et anglais, nous interrogeonscette commensalité — le fait de manger ensemble— aux flancs du volcan, interrogation qui réviseet précise la signification du terme pique-nique au dix-huitièmesiècle. De plus, nous rapprochons cette vision ‘alimentaire'du volcan d'un autre phénomène culturel napolitainde l'époque: la cocagne. Ainsi, selon nous, volcan etcocagne constituent les deux pôles symboliques entre lesquelss'exerce le régime (au sens à la fois politiqueet diététique) du roi de Naples. En conclusion,nous analysons quelques réponses des touristes àl'appétit démesuré du Vésuve, constatantque ces réponses (dont le pique-nique lui-même)s'efforcent avant tout d'y réimposer une certaine mesure— que celle-ci soit scientifique ou esthétique.

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- ‘Une tortue avec des ailes': Progressing in Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet, Kate Rees

http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/63/3/271?etoc

This article considers Flaubert's relationship to the nineteenth-centurybelief in progress. It focuses on his last, uncompleted novel,Bouvard et Pécuchet (1880). Progress is discussed asa historical force of momentum which can be analysed throughthe metaphor of the journey. The contention is that Flaubert'swriting offers a complex response to the flux of history andis detected in Bouvard et Pécuchet through the structuraldualism offered by the characters' differences, and throughthe obstacle-strewn journeys they undertake as they embark ontheir quest for knowledge. Virgil Nemoianu's study of literatureand progress, A Theory of the Secondary, offers a model forthe dynamic found in Flaubert's work. Nemoianu suggests a movementwhereby progress is achieved not necessarily in spite of obstaclesbut as a result of the impediments to linear progression thatthey provide. These contradictory energies are found in Flaubert'snovel and are examined in relation to two of the numerous expeditionsundertaken by Bouvard and Pécuchet: their initial movefrom Paris to the countryside, and a later trip to Fécamppursued as part of their research into geology.

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- How to Begin a Novel: Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu and the Author–Reader Relation, Suzanne Dow

http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/63/3/283?etoc

This article offers a reconsideration, from a Lacanian psychoanalyticperspective, of the opening to Proust's A la recherche du tempsperdu. The discussion reopens the debate on the founding statusof the madeleine scene for the novel as a whole with referenceto the narrator's own promotion thereof and critical accountsoffered by Beckett, Genette, Landy and Doubrovsky. While thesecritics have tended to identify a single founding cause to thenarrative that is discovered in this scene, this article findsin Proust's circuitous path to the start of his Recherche aninscription of the Lacanian account of subject-formation givenin the eleventh seminar via the twin processes of alienationand separation. This account of the coming to desire, furthermore,is identified as consonant with Roland Barthes's presentationof the author–reader relation in Le Plaisir du texte asa ‘dialectique du désir'. What Proust thusdiscovers in the madeleine scene, it is argued here, is desiringsubjectivity itself as condition of possibility of narrative,furnishing simultaneously a narrating subject of the unconscioussusceptible to involuntary memory, the economic means for thatnarration to proceed (metonymy) and, at the metatextual level,the mode of appeal identified by Barthes as proper to the author–readerrelation itself.

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- Les Démêlés de Merleau-Ponty avec Freud: des pulsions à une psychanalyse de la Nature, Alain Beaulieu

http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/63/3/295?etoc

Résumé: Avec la phénoménologie, la psychanalyse constituel'autre point d'entrée dans l'oeuvre de MauriceMerleau-Ponty qui demeure sans doute le seul philosophe françaisd'importance à avoir entretenu un dialogue ininterrompuavec la pensée freudienne. Merleau-Ponty n'adopte pasla perspective clinicienne et son point de vue sur la psychanalysen'est pas toujours orthodoxe. C'est une lecture tantôtcritique, tantôt intempestive, de la démarche freudienneà laquelle il nous convie. Le nouveau défi consisteà soutenir que la phénoménologie husserlienneet la psychanalyse freudienne n'entretiennent qu'un minimumde contradictions, et à la limite qu'elles abordent lesmêmes domaines d'étude à travers une problématisationincessante de la conscience. Nous verrons comment le lexiquemerleau-pontien se développe au contact de la psychanalyse(pulsion, ambiguïté, chiasma, investissement, culture–nature,etc.) et comment aussi la psychanalyse permet à Merleau-Pontyde faire avancer ses thèses phénoménologiques(monde, autrui, corps propre, perception, chair, etc.). Pource faire, nous analyserons la percée des années1940 (distinction entre pulsions et instincts), ainsi que lesrecherches des années d'enseignement à la Sorbonne(psychologie de l'enfant) et au Collège de France (psychanalysede la nature).

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- Mudimbe's Fetish of the West and Epistemological Utopianism, Pierre-Philippe Fraiture

http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/63/3/308?etoc

This article will provide a close reading of Mudimbe's earlycollections of essays L'Autre Face du royaume (1973) and L'Odeurdu père (1982). In the English-language exegesis of Mudimbe'swritings, these two key texts have been unduly neglected infavour of The Invention of Africa (1988), an essay which, froma chronological point of view, coincided more conveniently withthe advent of the postcolonial ‘turn'. I will howevercontend that these two collections offer a rare combinationof revolutionary idealism and early postcolonial methodology.I will also argue that Mudimbe's erudite exploration of Westernknowledge on sub-Saharan Africa in these two books, albeit somewhatfetishizing in relation to the ‘West' and its purportedoneness, offers more than a meta-philosophical exercise andassessment of Africa's intellectual dependency. Mudimbe's engagementwith Foucault's archaeology is a strategy to advocate an epistemologicaland hence political revolution which reaffirms Mudimbe's filiationwith anticolonialist utopianism and Sartre's philosophy of subjectivity.