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 exemplifies the verisimilitude, even realism, that had crept into the genre by the thirteenth century. Concentrating on the dialectic of wealth and poverty, this article analyses the suggestive lexical choice treating the theme of economy in the text and, more widely, feudal, urban culture and economics, and how the hero must overcome issues of class, rank, and cash-flow as he speculates in order to accumulate, as he speculates in order to accumulate. The text's attitude to money mirrors social changes of the thirteenth century, and a parallel can be drawn with the content of contemporary medieval sermons critical of the misuse of money. Attention is paid to philology: the names of major and minor characters are dissected in order to suggest a programmatic intention on the part of the mysterious author, Mestre Requis. Richars taps into the matrix of words connected to the idea of richness, and the verb querre, central to the action, also conceals the pseudonym of the author. This curious secondary romance deserves more attention, and illustrates how much such texts have to reveal 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's plays, mostly drawn by François Chauveau, and attacks several perennial received ideas about them: that they mostly depict off-stage violent action; that they are aesthetically at odds with the plays themselves; that the illustrations owe more to the artist's fantasy than to Racine's text. The article demonstrates that most of the illustrations depict on-stage events, and, with particularly detailed analyses of the illustrations for La Thébaïde and Mithridate, argues that, whether the event depicted is on-stage or off-stage, the artist engages scrupulously with the text of the play, producing an illustration that is faithful to Racine's work and inviting the reader to engage in fruitful parallel readings of text and image. The illustrations respond to, and capitalize on, Racine's dramatic poetry.
Michael Tilby
Balzacian Aporia: The Case of La Vieille Fille
In the majority of the critical assessments of Balzac's La Vieille Fille, the inconsistencies and contradictions found within the portrayal of its picturesque characters have either been considered flaws or have been the subject of attempts at rationalization. The present article, which shares a starting point with the perspective adopted by Fredric Jameson, argues that these inconsistencies are linked, through an acceptance of the inevitability of aporia, to the way both fiction and writing acknowledge their ultimate impossibility. It goes on to show that the radical ambiguity of Balzac's text with regard to truth and falsehood, and the generic instability it displays, point to a representation, at the level of political allegory, in which difference is deprived of all pertinence, while arguing, more generally, that it is the activity of representation itself that is Balzac's central concern.
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 Lisa Walsh). It concludes that the issues raised by ‘earlier generations' are still alive, and that important questions that now seem to be given greater prominence such as ‘intersex' or cultural difference do not necessarily involve any methodological shift. Examples (including recent publications) are drawn mostly from the work of Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, with some reference to 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-speaking world for some two millennia, they are unlikely to do so for much longer. In 2001, Census figures revealed that, in Guernsey, only some 2% of the population (or 1327 individuals) could still speak Guernsey Norman French (Guernesiais). The hitherto-unstudied Martin manuscript is the largest corpus of prose from a single pen in Channel Island French. Dating from the turn of the twentieth century, it consists of 295 exercise-books which contain a complete translation into Guernesiais of the Bible and of 100 plays from the work of Shakespeare, Longfellow, Pierre and Thomas Corneille, Molière and Voltaire. The manuscript's extensive nature means that, after the death of the last native speaker, it will represent one of the most important sources of data available on the dialect. This paper examines Martin's translation of the Gospel according to St Mark. It investigates possible sources of the translation, the orthographic system used, lexical features such as regionalisms, the use of register and borrowings, and ends by considering the way in which the translations can offer an unprecedented insight into late nineteenth/early twentieth century Guernesiais and provide new morphosyntactic and lexical data on the dialect.