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

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

Publié le 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 tirés de la vie de Winckelmann et de la prose de Sade, cet article examine une étrange pratique culturelle de la fin du dix-huitième siècle: pique-niquer sur le volcan, en l'occurrence le Vésuve, escale essentielle et spectacle sublime du Grand Tour. Puisant dans des lettres et des récits de voyage des touristes français et anglais, nous interrogeons cette commensalité — le fait de manger ensemble — aux flancs du volcan, interrogation qui révise et précise la signification du terme pique-nique au dix-huitième siècle. De plus, nous rapprochons cette vision ‘alimentaire' du volcan d'un autre phénomène culturel napolitain de l'époque: la cocagne. Ainsi, selon nous, volcan et cocagne constituent les deux pôles symboliques entre lesquels s'exerce le régime (au sens à la fois politique et diététique) du roi de Naples. En conclusion, nous analysons quelques réponses des touristes à l'appétit démesuré du Vésuve, constatant que 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-century belief in progress. It focuses on his last, uncompleted novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet (1880). Progress is discussed as a historical force of momentum which can be analysed through the metaphor of the journey. The contention is that Flaubert's writing offers a complex response to the flux of history and is detected in Bouvard et Pécuchet through the structural dualism offered by the characters' differences, and through the obstacle-strewn journeys they undertake as they embark on their quest for knowledge. Virgil Nemoianu's study of literature and progress, A Theory of the Secondary, offers a model for the dynamic found in Flaubert's work. Nemoianu suggests a movement whereby progress is achieved not necessarily in spite of obstacles but as a result of the impediments to linear progression that they provide. These contradictory energies are found in Flaubert's novel and are examined in relation to two of the numerous expeditions undertaken by Bouvard and Pécuchet: their initial move from Paris to the countryside, and a later trip to Fécamp pursued 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 psychoanalytic perspective, of the opening to Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. The discussion reopens the debate on the founding status of the madeleine scene for the novel as a whole with reference to the narrator's own promotion thereof and critical accounts offered by Beckett, Genette, Landy and Doubrovsky. While these critics have tended to identify a single founding cause to the narrative that is discovered in this scene, this article finds in Proust's circuitous path to the start of his Recherche an inscription of the Lacanian account of subject-formation given in the eleventh seminar via the twin processes of alienation and separation. This account of the coming to desire, furthermore, is identified as consonant with Roland Barthes's presentation of the author–reader relation in Le Plaisir du texte as a ‘dialectique du désir'. What Proust thus discovers in the madeleine scene, it is argued here, is desiring subjectivity itself as condition of possibility of narrative, furnishing simultaneously a narrating subject of the unconscious susceptible to involuntary memory, the economic means for that narration to proceed (metonymy) and, at the metatextual level, the mode of appeal identified by Barthes as proper to the author–reader relation 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 constitue l'autre point d'entrée dans l'oeuvre de Maurice Merleau-Ponty qui demeure sans doute le seul philosophe français d'importance à avoir entretenu un dialogue ininterrompu avec la pensée freudienne. Merleau-Ponty n'adopte pas la perspective clinicienne et son point de vue sur la psychanalyse n'est pas toujours orthodoxe. C'est une lecture tantôt critique, tantôt intempestive, de la démarche freudienne à laquelle il nous convie. Le nouveau défi consiste à soutenir que la phénoménologie husserlienne et la psychanalyse freudienne n'entretiennent qu'un minimum de contradictions, et à la limite qu'elles abordent les mêmes domaines d'étude à travers une problématisation incessante de la conscience. Nous verrons comment le lexique merleau-pontien se développe au contact de la psychanalyse (pulsion, ambiguïté, chiasma, investissement, culture–nature, etc.) et comment aussi la psychanalyse permet à Merleau-Ponty de faire avancer ses thèses phénoménologiques (monde, autrui, corps propre, perception, chair, etc.). Pour ce faire, nous analyserons la percée des années 1940 (distinction entre pulsions et instincts), ainsi que les recherches des années d'enseignement à la Sorbonne (psychologie de l'enfant) et au Collège de France (psychanalyse de 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 early collections of essays L'Autre Face du royaume (1973) and L'Odeur du père (1982). In the English-language exegesis of Mudimbe's writings, these two key texts have been unduly neglected in favour of The Invention of Africa (1988), an essay which, from a chronological point of view, coincided more conveniently with the advent of the postcolonial ‘turn'. I will however contend that these two collections offer a rare combination of revolutionary idealism and early postcolonial methodology. I will also argue that Mudimbe's erudite exploration of Western knowledge on sub-Saharan Africa in these two books, albeit somewhat fetishizing in relation to the ‘West' and its purported oneness, offers more than a meta-philosophical exercise and assessment of Africa's intellectual dependency. Mudimbe's engagement with Foucault's archaeology is a strategy to advocate an epistemological and hence political revolution which reaffirms Mudimbe's filiation with anticolonialist utopianism and Sartre's philosophy of subjectivity.

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*Etat present - FREE online*
Thomas Corneille (1625–1709): Beyond the Triumvirate, Julia Prest Visit

http://fs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/63/3/323

*Reviews*

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