French Studies is published on behalf of the Society forFrench Studies. The journal publishes articles and reviews spanning allareas of the subject, including language and linguistics (historicaland contemporary), all periods and aspects of literature in France andthe French-speaking world, thought and the history of ideas, culturalstudies, 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 opposition were varied and shifting. This article analyses some complex and apparently paradoxical notions of opposites and identities found in two very different texts, Charles de Bovelles's Ars oppositorum (1511) and Maurice Scève's Délie (1544), examples of Latin prose philosophy and vernacular love lyric respectively. I argue that Scève's poetry, like Bovelles's theory, reflects profoundly upon opposition, difference and identity. In particular, I focus in the Délie upon relations of opposition and similarity between ‘microcosm' and ‘macrocosm', evoked through the poet's use of the ‘jealous sun' topos. Bovelles explores models of opposition drawn from contrasting generic contexts, including Aristotelian logic and Cusa's mystical theology. However, both the Délie and the Ars diverge in striking ways from strict categorizations of difference and identity (as typified by traditional dialectic). Both think through the relationships between antithetical modes of difference and other kinds, attempting to imagine even the co-existence of difference and identity. Both also present ways in which one relation of difference inflects another, and thus offer particularly complex accounts of dynamic interactions between 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 raises the question as to how we are to judge our reading experience, explicitly asking ‘Madame', the reader, to come to a view as to whether his presentation of the blind man of Puiseaux 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 historical reality of the blind man, revisits the question as to his imaginary nature by arguing for the intertextual presence of Montaigne's description of ‘un gentil-homme de bonne maison, aveugle nay' in the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond'. The presence of this intertext, which has not been identified as such before, suggests that in order accurately to judge his or her reading experience the reader requires knowledge of the Lettre's literary and philosophical context, a view which is echoed in a different form in Diderot's discussion of Molyneux's Question. In Diderot's view, the woman who sees for the first time will be unable to judge her sensory experience and unable therefore to answer Molyneux's Question, if she does not have knowledge of the question's metaphysical and mathematical background. Where other readers have recently argued that the Lettre emphasizes the importance of language in understanding experience, this essay thus argues that the Lettre also makes a case for the importance of a literary and philosophical education in our understanding 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 between antisemitism and colonial racism, perceived by post-war theorists of racialized violence such as Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire, have for a long time fascinated a number of writers and filmmakers in post-war France, yet their works are not often received from this point of view. This article considers Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975) and Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder (1997) to show how these are not simply post-Holocaust works but contain an overlapping vocabulary, imagery and, ultimately, history of racism, dehumanization and apocalyptic violence which embraces the Holocaust and Empire. It also argues that the interconnections sought by the post-war generation of theorists of modern forms of violence can be more clearly exposed in imaginative works (rather than historical or sociological works) because these blur the frontiers between the literary imagination, memory and history. Repetitions, substitutions and transformations — the very substance of the literary imagination — open up an alternative history (though one announced by Arendt and others), which challenges the compartmentalization of metropolitan history, colonial history and the history of European genocide.
Simon Kemp
Darrieussecq's Mind
From Naissance des fantômes onwards, Marie Darrieussecq's representation of the self draws heavily on the materialist mind/brain model of cognitive science. Her fiction makes use of the discipline's discourse with and against the grain, creating micro-narratives of the mind's surface level and present moment which contrast sharply with more familiar psychoanalytic perspectives. Narrative form in Darrieussecq, I argue, can be characterized as a stream-of-consciousness, which, while failing to conform to the literary model set by Dujardin and Joyce, is in fact closer to the original psychological conception of the term. The article concludes by examining Darrieussecq's model of the mind 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, Annie Ernaux publie en mars 2005 un livre surprenant, L'Usage de la photo. Jouant sur l'expérimentation littéraire, Ernaux emprunte le pacte référentiel à l'autobiographie, le processus d'analyse en cours à l'autoportrait, ainsi que les caractéristiques propres à la photographie et à la photobiographie pour se lancer dans un questionnement sur le cancer et sur la mort, qu'elle conduit tantôt sur le mode de l'enquête policière, tantôt sur le mode de l'interrogation métaphysique. Choses fortuites, les photographies successives de vêtements abandonnés après l'acte amoureux forment un kaléidoscope de formes et de couleurs qui doivent susciter l'analyse et finalement mener à une révélation épiphanique. Les vêtements vides, à la fois anthropomorphiques et inanimés, l'inquiétante étrangeté d'un tableau de Chirico ornant les murs dépouillés d'un appartement modeste, et une réflexion sur l'épithète argentique qualifiant un type de photographie tombant en désuétude servent tous à suggérer l'étrange relation de l'absence à la présence, évoquant finalement le mystère de la mort. Empruntant la dialectique manichéenne, Ernaux utilise l'image du Saint Suaire pour renforcer le lien entre le corps et l'écriture, désignant L'Usage de la photo comme le cénotaphe devant contenir in absentia l'analogon corps-corpus de son oeuvre. Le texte mène ultimement à la révélation épiphanique d'une re-co-naissance — reconnaissance pour la valeur de la vie, connaissance des mystères de l'absence, co-naissance tout à la fois du texte à deux voix et de Marie à l'écriture. L'article s'inspire des thèses de Philippe Lejeune, Michel Beaujour, Gilles Mora et Roland Barthes en ce qui concerne la discussion des genres littéraires et l'exploitation des caractéristiques inhérentes à la photographie. Les essais de Didi-Huberman informent l'analyse de la relation du fortuit à l'écriture expérimentale et ont fourni l'image du kaléidoscope comme modèle théorique.