Revue
Nouvelle parution
French Studies, vol. 62, no 2 (avril 2008)

French Studies, vol. 62, no 2 (avril 2008)

Publié le par Gabriel Marcoux-Chabot (Source : Site web de la revue)

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 2 (avril 2008)


Elisabeth Hodges
Representing Place in Corrozet's Antiquitez de Paris
This article investigates how the French Renaissance guidebook creates a legible sense of place. In part a response to the developing marketplace for printed texts in the capital, the genre was developed by Gilles Corrozet between 1530 and 1550. A hybrid text, part urban history, part folkloric national memoir, the guidebook narrates the history of the city through an examination of its antiquities and origin stories. For Corrozet, place was a means to understand and negotiate relations between history, the self and space at an historical moment when the book, like the map, functioned as a material signifier for the exploration and the representation of the self and the world. While Corrozet's guidebooks locate the experience of given places within an historical trajectory, the portability of these books, produced mostly in handheld format, reveals another of the guidebook's functions as it traces a traveller's itinerary, a journey that provides the book's spatial plan. As a portable ‘lieu de mémoire', it guides the reader to experience place and landscape as a continuum between the book and its object, and also participates in a larger historical and political demography by aligning writings on cities with an emerging politics of centralization.

Jérôme Brillaud
La Jouissance de la vérité ou le plaisir tragique selon le Chancelier d'Aguesseau
Le Chancelier d'Aguesseau, architecte du code civil, était aussi homme de lettres. En réponse à un discours de facture aristotélicienne sur la tragédie prononcé par Valincour, il compose des remarques sur la nature du plaisir tragique qui se situent en marge des théories contemporaines. Nous nous proposons ainsi d'étudier les Remarques sur la tragédie de d'Aguesseau en regard des textes de Fontenelle et de Dubos qui abordent également la question du plaisir tragique. L'originalité du texte de d'Aguesseau se situe dans une nouvelle conception du plaisir tragique entendu comme un accès à la vérité signifiée lors de l'émotion produite par la tragédie. La mise en échec momentanée du jugement lors de l'émotion esthétique autorise le surgissement d'une vérité morale provisionnelle. Le plaisir tragique, selon l'hypothèse de d'Aguesseau, consisterait en une ‘jouissance de la vérité' ressentie lors de la représentation des tragédies.

Anne Holmes
‘De nouveaux rythmes': The Free Verse of Laforgue's ‘Solo de Lune'
This article considers Laforgue's ‘Solo de lune' in the light of the Symbolists' claim that their free verse was inspired by music. After referring to the views of two contemporary poets on the subject (that Laforgue's free verse was psychologically rather than musically determined) and outlining Laforgue's position with regard to music and his counter-claim, his practice is examined in two areas: first, ‘Solo de lune''s double narrative and consequently contrapuntal structure, alternating free verse with an approximate ‘quatrain populaire'; second, the use of other musical features which work against the random nature of free verse (parallelism, modulation, innovative phonetic repetition). The article argues that Laforgue's musical aspirations influence both the structure and the detail of the text. Finally, Laforgue's interest in connecting the three art forms — music, Impressionist painting, and liberated verse — and his awareness of a parallel modernity, are briefly illustrated.

Dauda Yillah
Envisioning Difference in Le Clézio's Onitsha
Le Clézio's Onitsha was published in 1991 and is to date the most important fictional piece the author has devoted to his childhood experience of colonial black Africa (British-ruled Nigeria of the late 1940s). I approach the work as an instance of postcolonial discursive practice and focus specifically on the nature and function of the cross-cultural perspective it offers. I grant that any attempt to describe a culture other than one's own inevitably involves using one's cultural reference to describe that culture. I further grant that the unavoidable use of one's cultural lens to relate to another culture rules out the possibility of there being a one-to-one relationship between what one writes about the other culture and what that culture is in its complexity. I claim none the less that the attempt at crossing boundaries — even from a culture that has stood in a position of antagonism and domination in relation to another — is not always to be seen as a cultural self-serving and self-aggrandizing venture. The attempt may well be for all its imperfections a necessary exercise in cultural self-questioning and a welcome threshold of engaging with or indeed opening up to difference. This is perhaps particularly so when one considers that Onitsha was written and published some three decades or so after the achievement of independence in black Africa.

Pierre-Louis Fort
La Filiation inversée : Annie Ernaux et le ‘corps glorieux'
Cet article s'intéresse à façon dont la filiation est remise en perspective dans l'oeuvre d'Annie Ernaux. Plus précisément centré sur Une femme, le texte que l'auteur a consacré à sa mère disparue, il montre comment la filiation s'y trouve inversée, la fille devenant la mère de sa propre mère. L'analyse étudie ainsi cette redistribution des rôles et en dégage les enjeux. Elle insiste sur l'omniprésence corporelle de la mère dans le récit avant de montrer, au moyen d'une lecture précise du texte (que soutient une interrogation du paratexte et une lecture attentive de la Bible) par quels processus Ernaux parvient à créer le ‘corps glorieux' de sa mère.