Quêtes littéraires

Nicolas François Guillard (1752-1814) was one of the best librettists of the Tournant des Lumières. The libretto of Proserpine by Quinault, set to music by Lully at the end of the seventeenth century, was adapted by Guillard and once again set to music by Giovanni Paisiello in 1803. Six years later, in 1809, La Mort d’Adam, adapt-ed by Guillard from Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’ Der Tod Adams (1757), was set to music by Jean-François Lesueur. These rewritings, with religious or sacred topics staged for a secular theatre by Guillard, are very different from the original works and tend to be family dramas: he then transforms them into secular works with secular content. Human sacrifices are present in these works but seem to feature here for family reasons and not only for religious purposes. Divinities are presented by the librettist as human beings, whose family roles are predominant. The sacred and the profane are mixed in these two librettos, changed into hybrid works. Guillard seems to use the same model to adapt historical, mythological or religious works, which means that the role and the impor-tance of the religious in the works staged at the Académie Impériale de Musique in the period of the Tournant des Lumières has to be examined.

The paper analyses three works having employed a similar narrative strategy which triggers tension between the explicable and inexplicable and an interpretative crisis that allows a fantastic reading of the fictional text. This strategy is related to the paradoxical statute of the narrator due to which the reader is faced with an incomplete elliptic account because of the former’s reluctance (or impossibility) to offer a definite interpretation of the events.

La période de la Monarchie de Juillet est jalonnée d'épidémies de grippes, dont il est régulièrement rendu compte dans la presse. Étonnamment, tandis que les effets de ces épisodes contagieux sont systématiquement minorés, la grippe elle-même fait l'objet de nombreuses charges textuelles et visuelles et d'analogies avec la vie politique, sociale, économique et culturelle. La Grippe aux mille visages, mégère, diable ou femme du monde, est déjà celle que Cham nommera « la lionne de la saison » en 1858. Épidémie obligeante, elle s'associe au carnaval et aux bals qu ’elle perturbe ou agrémente. L'article s'interroge sur le choix d'un tel motif comme moyen satirique et évoque les modalités de cette charge qui passe simultanément par l'atténuation et l'outrance. C'est du côté de la littérature des Physiologies qu'il convient de chercher l'explication de cette typification de la grippe et celle de son statut de « mal à la mode ».

In Romantic literature, water often serves as a symbol of death and of the dissolution of the individual, representing a passage from presence to absence. In order to show this transformation, writers frequently rely on scenes of drowning. However, in these depictions drowning does not always lead to an absence, but rather, it reveals a physical presence: that of the cadavers themselves. Through a detailed analysis of two romantic texts whose treatment of drowning sheds light on the relationship between absence and presence, Lélia (1833) by George Sand and L’Éducation sentimentale (1845) by Gustave Flaubert, this study engages the following questions on thematic and structural levels: Does drowning undeniably bring about an annihilation of the individual? Are the boundaries between absence and presence, disappearing and (re)appearing, decomposition and (re)composition, clearly defined? Or is there another interpretation? One that is specific to textual portrayals of immersion? From an eco-critical perspective, it is clear that water represents an ideal space to portray the tension between life and death. As presented by Sand and Flaubert, drowned bodies inspire images of life rather than death and therefore cause the reader to question these boundaries on an imaginative and symbolic level.

Entre 1871 et 1872, le dessinateur Paul Hadol publie dans l ’hebdomadaire satirique Le Charivari onze portraits-charges formant une série intitulée La Mythologie politique. Cet article rappelle d'abord comment celle-ci s'inscrit dans une tradition préexistante de parodie iconographique de l'Antiquité qui naît en Angleterre à la fin du XVIIIe siècle avant d'être acclimatée en France à partir de la monarchie de Juillet. On interroge ensuite les critères de sélection biographique des célébrités caricaturées et la cohérence thématique possible de la série à partir de la typologie des filtres mythologiques – le cycle de Troie, les divinités olympiennes, les héros, les monstres. Enfin, l'analyse plus spécifiquement sémiotique des caricatures met en évidence la reprise du procédé associant grosse-tête et légende versifiée aux deux séries du Panthéon charivarique (1838-1841 et 1866-1867), la dimension de rébus politique, et le jeu de citations artistiques, littéraires voire musicales. L'épilogue montre que la portée de la série peut s'envisager d'un point de vue politique et artistique mais aussi intellectuel dans le rapport au temps qu'elle questionne.

Ayant adopté une position pro-maoïste pendant les années 1970, Philippe Sollers part en Chine pendant 3 semaines en 1974 pour témoigner du grand succès de la Révolution culturelle (1966-1976). Selon l’écrivain, directeur de la revue Tel Quel, la révolution doit passer par l’écriture et par la théorie. Néanmoins, la Chine qu’il découvre durant le séjour semble s’éloigner de la Chine rêvée avant le départ… En s’appuyant sur des articles publiés par Tel Quel, notre étude cherche à montrer comment la Chine de Mao, idéalisée par un discours idéologique, se transforme en un réel théâtralisé que le peuple chinois est obligé de mettre en scène devant les touristes qui sont autorisés à visiter la Chine.

In Fuir, Linda Lê features two characters – a vagrant nicknamed “Le Japonais” and the narrator, exiled to an unnamed Asian country – that seem to be re-cognized for what they are : lonely beings in search of an alter ego. Their improbable than astonishing meeting marks the beginning of a wandering both geographical and mental; the reader follows through the streets, alleys, driveways, sidepaths, pedestrian streets of indeterminate city symbolizing the maze of life whose meaning is to be decoded. The figure of the vagabond reflects the obsessions and concerns of the writer on his anguish of living. It also crystallizes its founding and formative reading, including the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran and the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman who greatly influenced in the writing and the construction of her novel. Fuir is both a question about the absurdity of life and a metaphor for the condition of the exiled writer.

If there is an aesthetic that characterizes the novel Tels des astres éteints writing by Leonora Miano, it is the combination of literary art and the art of music. This artistic hybridity that starts from paratexts transforms the novel into iso-epistemic space and into an archive of memory discography. For this poetic hybrid, the author expands the fields of observation and intensifies cognitive quest (Krysinski, 2004). It is also a scriptural technical mobilized to translate and defend the identity hybridity.

Le monde tel qu’il sera en l’an 3000, écrit par Émile Souvestre en 1845, est volontiers considéré comme la première dystopie française. Il inaugure en effet cette pratique qui consiste à projeter dans le futur une situation contemporaine exacerbée de manière à lui donner valeur d’alarme. Or, ce voyage dans le temps participe d’une tradition qui voit utopies et dystopies s’interpeller et se poser en interlocutrices des sciences sociales et politiques. Le monde tel qu’il sera… peut ainsi être appréhendé comme une réponse aux constructions doctrinales qui manifestent une foi inébranlable en l’avenir. Car, comme Saint-Simon, Souvestre considère que le progrès technique ne peut mener à l’avènement de la cité idéale que s’il est conjugué à un progrès moral, auquel il entend contribuer en montrant à ses contemporains les conséquences désastreuses à long terme de la doxa providentialiste qui domine ce milieu du XIXe siècle.

L’article propose une lecture de deux livres de Caroline Lamarche, L’Asturienne et La Fin des abeilles, dans le contexte de la réflexion sur la mémoire familiale qui est considérée ici comme fondatrice du sentiment de soi. Les œuvres en question s’inscrivent dans le large courant de textes autobiographiques qui prolifèrent depuis 1980. Les livres récents de Lamarche offrent l’exemple d’une écriture mémorielle originale ancrée dans l’incertitude de l’époque présente qui cherche ses racines et sa raison d’être dans le passé. L’article s’intéresse, d’une part à la poétique de ces textes et, de l’autre, à la manière dont se manifeste ici le travail de la mémoire. La réflexion sociologique d’Anne Muxel sur la mémoire familiale complète cette analyse, en fournissant les outils méthodologiques nécessaires. Les notions de transmission, de reviviscence et de réflexivité proposées par Muxel montrent le sens de l’acte de mémoire, aussi bien pour l’individu que pour la collectivité.

“Night has enshrouded my childhood” write Jorge Semprun. Civil War and exile have erased any trace of the childhood he spent in Madrid. What was left to the writer were only flashes of memory and an old picture of his mother. Jorge Semprun was eight years of age when his mother died of septicemia. Through writing, thirty years later, he was able to evoke her death, but how was he to tell about her absence? Between fiction and reality, five of Jorge Semprun’s novels recreate his childhood. His mother will first of all be an absence or an implicit presence behind his relating the city of his childhood. Having set the scene, ghostly characters whose identities are undefined but whose discourses become more and more outlined will appear. The mother will become a nostalgic absence. Her features, her character will be sketched out. Jorge Semprun will move forward hiding behind the multiple identities of his characters and the freedom which fiction provides him. It will be up to the last character, a fictive double of the writer, to find the last traces of a mother who has turned into a haunting presence.

The absence of decision making is one of the aspects of the issues of will and choices in short French court narratives of the XII and XIII centuries. The paper focuses on two executions that present this motif. Protagonists facing numerous options – or, on the contrary, being faced with dramatic turning points in the plot that restrict their choices – feel a kind of decision deadlock. In the analysed texts, the absence of decision – short or long term – is shown in the narratives with ‘ne set que faire’ formula (“does not know, what to do”) and a reference to advice needed by the indecisive protagonist.

Considering poetry as a literary form in close relation with absence and scarcity; this paper deals with some of the most frequent and significant forms of absence that appear in poetic texts. The physical absence of the other, due either to death or to the distance between the two individuals, is the most common kind in lyric poetry. Modern poetry often deals with Gods’ absence, which represents an important loss for the contemporary human being, trying to understand or face it. There is also the lack of inspiration and words with efficient expressive capacity that make poets suffer. However, poetry is the only way in which they express their situation and create a meaningful language. Finally, absence in poetry is also a fundamental sign of its generic specificity in connection with the means that it uses, as well as with its printed representation on paper, especially in the contemporary production. In all cases, poetry, based on the dialectic of being – not being, operates as a material, sensible and intellectual presence, which like the primordial logos fillsthe vacuum, eliminates absence and scarcity, generates and animates the human world and en-riches it with presence and meaning.

This paper deals with intentional breakaway of novel elements in romantic story published in 1820. On the one hand, the book belongs to the rich tradition of epistolary, on the other, it also gives un example of how formal borders can be transgressed between novel composed of letters and novel written as intimate diary, what leads to the disappearance of typical novel elements in texts from the turn of XVII and XVIII c. This absence of fiction appears firstly in paratext (especially in preface to the novel), where the author presents his own concept of novel, and then in letters.

Except for Étienne de la Boétie, the friend for ever gone but whose presence pervades the Essais so vividly, the reader can notice the nearly total – and therefore puzzling – absence of Montaigne’s mother, Antoinette de Louppes, contrasting with the recurrent mentions to his father, Pierre Eyquem. He will also encounter strange omissions, such as Montaigne’s silence on St-Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and telling lapses, for instance on the answers given to young King Charles IX by the cannibals from Brazil. Do the Essais really “tell everything” (On vanity, III, 9), as Montaigne claims they do?

Sex and sexuality are two obsessions of the 19th century. As the literature of this time, influenced by the Victorian hypocritical morality, rejects these subjects, considered as “immoral”, the relation of any form of sexual act is consequently absent in the works of 19th century writers, even of those who consider themselves as realists. However, the work of a writer like Emile Zola cannot overlook this problem, so important for naturalism. For Zola, sex is a vital activity and should be shown in works of art. Therefore, to give his writings the appearance of decency, Zola uses metaphors that “sexualise” some elements of the world of his novels, like plants, animals, things, places and everyday occupations. This allows him to show, in an imaginary way, the aspects of life that cannot be displayed openly and directly. Thank to his poetic talent these images constitute a valuable part of his Rougon-Macquart series.

Connaisseur de la psychologie humaine, Maupassant va plus loin encore : il se lance dans l’exploration de l’inconscient en s’interrogeant sur des zones obscures du psychisme. Le conte « Sauvée » inscrit ce questionnement au cœur de la représentation de la mémoire sensorielle involontaire. Le récit mettant en intrigue le ressouvenir sensuel, sollicité à des fins de séduction manipulatrice, l’effet anecdotique de l’aventure rocambolesque masque des niveaux de complexité du sens dépassant la légèreté de l’anecdote. Cet article examine la façon dont le texte travaille les scènes de ressouvenir qui s’articulent en interrelation entre la sphère des sens, le sensoriel et le sensuel, le comportement impulsif, les facteurs socioculturels et l’actualité scientifique, formant un réseau complexe dont les modalités de l’écriture maupassantienne approfondissent le sens.

Retracing in his novel the labyrinthine journey that leads Oedipus from the place of his abomination (Thebes) to the city of his future glory (Colonus), Henry Bauchau fills the emptiness between Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Bauchau’s hero, a powerful king, loses everything and stabs his eyes out when the cruel truth about his real identity is revealed. Blind, homeless, devoid of meaning of life, Oedipus leaves on a journey to pass away anywhere. However, his way to death turns out to be, thanks to benevolent presence of others and art’s liberating power, the road to personal elucidation. The story of Bauchau’s Oedipus, who finally recognizes himself as a truly human, is based therefore on the passage between absence and presence, between darkness and lucidity, on the union of contradictions which symbolize the complexity of human nature. This paper attempts to analyse different representations of absence in Bauchau’s novel. Afterwards, the article focuses on the ways which facilitate Oedipus’s road leading from depersonalization to rediscovery of his own identity.

The present article seeks to analyze the way in which the blasphemous figure of God in Dolce agonia by Nancy Huston allows the author to describe the sacred element in human life, seen as deprived of transcendental character. This is possible thanks to the three aspects of the text dependent on the type of God’s figure, which are: the contrast between passages marked by the cynical God’s voice and passages focused on man’s life filled with suffering; the tone and the appropriation of time var-iations and, finally, the double character of God who, at the same time, is indifferent to man’s lot while touched by his capacity of love.

Les premiers albums du dessinateur Jean Bruller proposent une caricature sociale originale par la combinaison du texte et de l’image. Si La danse des vivants (1932-1938) aspire à illustrer la comédie humaine du XXe siècle par la caricature de mœurs et un ton universaliste, Visions intimes et rassurantes de la guerre (1936) s’ancre dans la période de l’entre-deux-guerres pour développer une critique sociale fortement influencée par les menaces de guerre. Cet article propose une analyse approfondie de l’esthétique de ces deux ouvrages brulleriens, marqués par un humour particulièrement mordant et ironique et par un certain arrière-goût pessimiste. Cette approche analytique se nourrira de même du dialogue entre l'œuvre et la pensée de l’artiste, ainsi que du dialogue entre sa production et le contexte historico-social.

Dans cet article, nous proposons une analyse du roman Manèges de l’autrice franco-argentine Laura Alcoba. Plus précisément, c’est le rapport à la langue française en tant qu’évocatrice de la mémoire argentine qui nous intéresse. Réduite au silence durant son enfance clandestine à Buenos Aires, Laura Alcoba trouve dans cette langue de l’exil une liberté inespérée afin de mettre des mots sur une expérience jusqu’à présent tue et innommée. En tant que médiatrice de la mémoire, la langue française semble l’unique solution pour renouer avec un passé dont l’expression en version originale serait probablement insurmontable pour l’autrice. La distance créée par le français − synonyme de liberté et renaissance − vis à vis de l’espagnol – synonyme de répression et silence − est la condition sine qua non pour que la mémoire, enfin, parle.

The present paper focuses on some representations of male Oriental dancers who dance dressed as women. It tries to answer the question whether those representations form a caricature of Oriental woman or if it is another, perverse, Oriental dream. The first part of the paper presents the Oriental male dancer and shows how he was perceived in the Middle East and in Europe. The second part discusses the critics of male dancers’ behaviour in the travelogues by Jean Potocki and Vivant Denon. The three following sections analyse three examples of descriptions dating from the 1840-1850 by Gérard de Nerval, Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier. It turns out that, with time, the caricature becomes less obvious and the descriptions are more and more aesthetic. One can no longer only mock and condemn the male dancers, a new perverse dream seems to be born.

Magnus, a novel from Sylvie Germain published in 2005, is a narration made up of several marks of hybridity – structural, generic and discursive hybridity. Those marks are not simply formal but emphasize the necessity of a true presence towards the world and others. The itinerary of the character is a spiritual one, and the novel reveals the part played by reading and writing in the reconsideration of our relationship towards the world and the other people.

Le scénario durassien Hiroshima mon amour (1960) met en évidence une relation étroite entre la mémoire et l’oubli, véhiculée à travers une quête d’identité. L’idée de cette article vise à prouver que l’auteure se sert d’une histoire amoureuse d’une femme dans un lieu de mémoire collective pour se pencher sur la mémoire individuelle d’un être qui par l’évocation des expériences du passé affronte son traumatisme personnel. Nous chercherons à démontrer que l’interpénétration des deux concepts, mise en scène par différentes temporalités, traduit également l’aliénation d’un individu qui, suite à un amour tragique, ne peut échapper ni au souvenir ni à l’oubli. Ainsi, cette étude nous amènera à constater que par la répétition de la même histoire la mémoire fait revivre des situations douloureuses pendant que l’oubli conserve sa valeur positive car, même s’il est associé à une vacuité, il permet de commencer une nouvelle vie et d’envisager un avenir prometteur.

L’article traite du thème de la mémoire dans le roman Mémoires d’un ange maladroit de Francis Dannemark, auteur belge francophone. Pour vérifier l’hypothèse avancée que Dannemark réussit à illustrer le fonctionnement complexe de la mémoire, nous soumettons à l’examen les techniques de l’écriture, les dispositifs narratifs et de nombreuses constructions métaphoriques employées par l’auteur, et nous les décrivons en fonction des « instances mémorielles » (auteur, personnage, lecteur). Il se révèle que le roman n’est pas une simple variation sur le thème de la mémoire, ses mécanismes, mais qu’il contient une importante réflexion sur le processus de l’écriture, le jeu avec la fictivité de l’œuvre littéraire comprise, et l’acte de la lecture. Rappeler des souvenirs, rédiger des mémoires, écrire un roman et le lire, toutes ces activités ressemblent à un puzzle à reconstituer.

A dialectic between presence and absence, remembrance and oblivion, testimony and silence, body and its trace reflects the gist of the most recent Ernaux’es book. It constitutes not only plenteaus thematic confluence but also or even majorly an axis of the book’s construction. Its structure encompasses various layers such as: rhetorical, stylistic and typographic, which separately and together combined reside in prevailing tensioned coexistence of presence and absence.

At first glance, the protagonist of the play has none of the characteristics of a vagabond. However, subjected to a more thorough analysis, he proves to be endowed with many features typical of a wanderer, such as alienation, unrest, loneliness, social isolation and individualism. In the text he is described as a man who is « in the search for himself, » his exile is, first and foremost, a metaphysical search for his own « self » and for the meaning of life. He is also a character undergoing a metamorphosis – from a lecher he becomes a saint. The shift seems to come as a consequence of being an exile from his own country. This exile, however, in its literal dimension, becomes too heavy a burden for him, and, be rid of the burden, he chooses to die a martyr. This article presents the evolution of the personality and the shift in the social standing of the character, as well as the reasons for, and consequence of, his exile.

The eponymous hero of this little-known play by Jean Anouilh is perceived by other protagonists as absent. Nevertheless, his presence is becoming more and more vivid with the development of the plot, which is illustrated by the analysis presented in the article. It shows the process in which the absent hero transforms into a character fully present in the text. The detailed analysis of the character’s presence in particular space-time dimensions, as well as the actant analysis prove that the main character pretends to be absent from the beginning of the play in order to achieve a definite goal.

Published for the first time in 1940 the André Breton’s Anthology of black humor inaugurates the great season of surrealist anthologies, which will last until late 60s. The use of the traditional form of the modern anthology by the Surrealists, does not involve into a complete acceptance of its rules, already codified since the end of the 19th century, but rather a deformation of its textual structure and of its objectives, producing a literary genre with particular characteristics. The surrealist anthology, such as those realized by André Breton, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon and Benjamin Péret, represent an hybrid literary object with structural elements in common with the dictionary, the glossary, the anthology and the catalogue. The surrealist literary collections represent both a different approach to the history of literature and an expression of surrealist poetics.

Dans la presse française du XIXe siècle abondent les nouvelles de courte ampleur à caractère utopique. À l’examen, ces « courtes utopies » aux auteurs souvent méconnus ou demeurés anonymes (mais aussi parfois dues à des journalistes célèbres usant de pseudonymes), se révèlent des témoins de la pensée politique du moment : tantôt reflets de courants utopiques majeurs, tantôt extravagantes, parfois encore contre-pieds de la situation politique imposé par des régimes autoritaires, leur diversité doit interroger. Leur fréquente présence dans des almanachs populaires, leur parution dans la presse de pure distraction ou satirique (Le Charivari, Le journal amusant et Le journal pour rire en recèlent de riches gisements), leur juxtaposition fréquente à des illustrations amusantes sans visée politique, ou au contraire leur présence jusque dans la presse quotidienne politique les font légitimement entrer dans ce que l’on a appelé « la civilisation du journal ».

Concerning Antonin Artaud it has been question of some lack of work but in the article we propose to the reading we are talking about another kind of absence. Indeed, in his correspondence and in the writings of his youth, the poet was complaining to be absent to himself. He was saying that words could not convey what he felt, that he had the impression to be a spectator of himself. Over time, he will say that he was feeling some emptiness in him. Is it to fill this emptiness that he spent his time writing on notebooks and that he had replaced speaking by screaming? As a conclusion to this article, we spend some time thinking about the concepts of absence and emptiness, following some writings of Pierre Fédida.

Passionate about mundane details and singular beings, Apollinaire deploys throughout his stories and novels quite a collection of mysterious and paradoxical characters. A central place in his collection is occupied by the wanderer which illustrates the propensity of the writer towards the occult and the picturesque, towards the anecdotal and the extraordinary. As a being always on the run he is sometimes associated with a bohemian spectator, jouisseur of the street and sometimes a marginal presence bordering on antisocial. Versatile character, the apollinarian wanderer does not refer to a specific social type. Wanderer, bohemian, chiffonnier, antique dealer, he has a rather metaphorical position that allows him to expose multiple identities at once. His multivalent nature makes it difficult for a true literary taxonomy. Always seeking innovation and surprise, Apollinaire was able to refine the ambivalence of the wanderer and often relates it to the image of the artist. Marginal and mystifying, the apollinarian wanderer is yet lacking any pejorative sense because its uniqueness is only a sign of originality. With its attractive heterogeneity, the apollinarian prose creates a vast and fine repertoire with a wanderer who is constantly redefining the concept of wandering. With its multiple facets, it actually becomes a living metaphor of a work that is looking through a hybrid and plural writing, mixing genres and composite images. Exploring the prose of Apollinaire, however, we can detect multiple lines of coherence that ultimately reveal a rich array of the wanderer. Despite the nature of the chameleonic apollinarian wanderer, our challenge is to analyze his literary metamorphoses and thus arrive at a definition that surprises in its many urban disguises.

Père de substitution, mentor, tuteur, objet d’admiration et d’imitation, Barbey d’Aurevilly remplit pour Bloy, depuis leur rencontre, les fonctions d’un maître. Parmi tous ceux qui se revendiqueront d’un héritage de Barbey, Bloy semble en effet avoir été le disciple le plus fervent du Connétable des Lettres. Tout en nous concentrant en particulier sur la manière dont les figures d’autorité qui renvoient à Barbey se construisent chez Bloy, nous nous proposons de voir comment ces deux écrivains, qui sont entièrement du côté du figuratif, donnent une densité particulière à leur rapport à travers le travail de l’image qui prend une place centrale et essentielle dans la construction du lien entre un maître et un disciple. Cette enquête nous amènera en outre à considérer qu’une telle relation de va ni sans prise de distance ponctuelle ni sans agacement réciproque. Loin de s’effacer devant le maître, Bloy se construit clairement moins dans l’ombre que dans la lumière d’un maître qui l’éclaire.

Georges Bataille and Hubert Aquin both explore a mystical experience displaying strong similarities, related to what Roger Caillois called « left sacred », that is the impure, malefic sacred, which is accessible by transgression and corresponds to the privileged moment of unity between people. For Bataille, God is absent, even dead: Lamma sabachtani is no longer a question but an assertion in his essays. The object of his new mystical theology is not God, but « the unknown». The divine is reduced to the human, transcendence to immanence. The goal is to free the mystical experience from its religious background and to make ecstasy accessible to every-one. It is precisely by communicating that men can break their isolation and unite themselves with others. « Eroticism of bodies » and « eroticism of hearts » are two of the experiences proposed by Bataille which lead to the sacred. Hubert Aquin is also fascinated by the « left sacred », by eroticism in particular, but it represents for him a temptation which eliminates from the « right sacred » Jesus Christ and perfection He is, for Aquin, the absolute corresponding to the communion between the human being and the Son of God ; it consists in being reborn and in living in “the Christ of the Revelation”.

"Silence in Mme de Maintenon’s correspondence: the art of a quiet style" Mme de Maintenon’s letters often refer to religious silence. Heart of a christian woman’s life, silence is indeed a way to achieve salvation. Practising silence, both in speaking and writing, allows one to master and reduce one’s pride. It is then a good tool to control others, as it is to pursue a spiritual fulfilment.

Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel The Work in Black provides descriptions of artwork. Fingerprints artistic figurations in his novel become both a text and materiality of Intermediality Ut Pictura poesis. How is formed the symbiosis of the diegesis and Ekhprasis in the novel by Marguerite Yourcenar? Mannerist processes allow the author to play on two different display modes: the text and the image called by the text. How is this transposition within the Work in Black, a novel supposed to represent social circles of the Renaissance by taking the idea to Breughel and simultaneously echo the turpitude where there the contemporary world. Communication between the image and the text does not only nesting but also a representation that is created as a space, an "inner distance" in the words of Georges Poulet, which makes the work a bet abyss in the search for the essence the art work, the philosopher's stone which is the original experience of vision. The curveball opens an "inner space" as Claude Edmonde Magny analysis allowing the novel to open and expand this optical illusion, create connections, secret architectures. We will try to develop these problems merging form of osmosis The work at Black Yourcenar, at the intersection of disciplines and critical approaches that think the work of art in its many meanings and semiotic richness.

The works of Marguerite Duras show visible hybridity, broadly understood as a mixture of genres, correspondence of the arts, or intertextuality. Her texts reflect, par excellence, this tendency because they keep departing from classical forms. Consequently, the same text can be interpreted as a novel, screenplay, or film. This transgression seemingly results from the versatility of changing artistic interests of Duras, who, while writing, was fascinated by film-making and all possibilities of experimentation. The transgression is confirmed by a kind of polyphony of voices in her works, which makes them both extremely suggestive and open. A prime example of this technique is Le Navire Night. According to the concept of poetical-novelistic or cinematic writing, it can be seen as a ‘hybrid’ work. Therefore, Le Navire Night is sometimes read as a poem as understood by Henri Meschonnic, referring to the creativity of the author, especially in the field of language

The well-known French-language writer, Assia Djebar, teaches the reader to listen intently to cultural differences, inspires tolerance towards other people and touches upon the problem of the emancipation of women in the Arab-Muslim civilization. In her work entitled Le Blanc de l’Algérie Djebar recalls deceased Algerian intellectuals, such as Albert Camus, Frantz Fanon or Kateb Yacine, as well as cruelly murdered writers and less known persons, who proved to be important for the author herself (namely her friends) and for the history of Algeria. The author bemoans those absent figures, remembering their last minutes of life, their families’ despair, and the atrocity of death. The article is an attempt at a reflection on the problem of absence that is in dichotomy with presence. The absence of great Algerians is unbearable; it is not silence but a cry for the memory of the tragic moments in the history of the country. Those moments, when remembered, shall help understand better the painful contemporary times. Djebar in a subtle way removes a white shroud (white is the colour of mourning in the tradition of North-African countries), thus showing the reader the moving and colourful Algerian fresco.

Cet article se propose de lire Lieux, projet inachevé de Georges Perec publié posthumément en 2022, en tant qu’œuvre charnière dans l’évolution des réflexions de Perec sur la mémoire, considérée comme travail et comme appel au partage. Dans un premier moment, l’étude esquissera brièvement une histoire du projet pour saisir les enjeux de sa rédaction, comprendre les possibles raisons de son abandon final et répondre aux questions de légitimé au sujet de sa récente publication posthume en double version, papier et électronique. Ensuite, dans le sillon de l’étude de Philippe Lejeune La mémoire et l’oblique, l’article proposera une lecture de Lieux focalisée sur les approches de la mémoire à l’œuvre dans ce texte. L’approche expérimentale de Perec vis-à-vis de la matière autobiographique, se heurtant aux questionnements, aux tâtonnements, aux incertitudes de l’auteur, se reflète dans une écriture hybride, errante, préfigurant les notions de multiple, de potentiel, d’appel aux autres qui caractériseront les projets successifs de l’auteur.

Le propos de cet article est de relever, dans une approche comparative, la versatilité du rôle des objets de collection dans le processus de remémoration chez les collectionneurs de certains romans de Pascal Quignard. L’analyse du discours mémoriel des collectionneurs relève deux aspects : un rapport différent à la valeur de l’objet (muséal ou intime) et le pouvoir de déclencher des émotions. Le discours balance entre une évocation impersonnelle, qui met l’accent sur l’importance matérielle, la dimension testimoniale et esthétique des objets d’art d’époques anciennes et une description passionnée et subjective de petits objets banals, mais chargés de significations psychologiques. L’article démontre que se rapporter excessivement aux objets-temps/trace en vertu de leur valeur documentaire ou commémorative débouchera sur un échec de la démarche mémorielle. Paradoxalement, le collectionneur reste toujours à la recherche de la mémoire perdue, malgré l’excès de preuves matérielles qu’il détient.

Cet article se donne pour ambition de questionner l’Abbaye de Thélème imaginée par François Rabelais afin d’en saisir le programme utopique initial tout en en observant les contours et les limites. Il s’agira alors de situer cette œuvre à un carrefour où se croisent les valeurs humanistes, les apports de More, les crises spirituelles mais aussi et surtout un besoin nécessaire de renouveau et d’inédit qui résulte d’une critique sociale et politique. C’est à partir de ce constat liminaire que nous tenterons ensuite d’approcher la structure, le projet et les lois qui règlementent et organisent cette société utopique avant d’en saisir les limites. Nous pourrons alors en apprécier la construction, tant physique que théorique, en dressant un parallèle révélateur avec l’architecture du couvent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette imaginé par Le Corbusier. Nous verrons enfin comment le jeu de la langue chez Rabelais outrepasse le projet idéologique au profit d’une écriture novatrice, complexe et protéiforme. Il faudra dès lors en entendre les paradoxes qui permettent de comprendre et saisir l’importance littéraire qui au final se détache progressivement de l’utopie initiale.

In the 18th century, the Bible felt the full force of criticism by radical Enlightenment thinkers who read it piece by piece and denounced the process of its creation as an imposture – thus extending the break initiated by moral and historical critiques of the previous century. In doing so, they nevertheless failed to grant it the literary status of a “profane work”. Yet, Rousseau, who produced a literary rewriting of the Book of Judges with his Levite of Ephraim, pondered over the violence inflicted on biblical intertextuality during his exile in Môtiers: in his Letters Written from the Mountain, he compared it to the violence caused to his own literary works. By draw-ing this parallel, he opened a reflection on the different manners of reading a text, as well as the possibility of regulating the reader’s violence through proposing an ethics of literary reception. Analogy might not work as a substitute; however, it enabled Rousseau to go beyond the mistreatment which anti-philosophers or philosophers inflicted on his works, by giving, among other things, an autobiographical orienta-tion to his writing: one in which the author is ready to take responsibility for giving himself to the reader. The ambivalence of the sacred and the profane, the perception of a common essence of religion – defined either by sacrifice or gift – were thus what helped Rousseau invent the autobiographical pact.

L’idée de cet article vise à présenter une relation particulière entre le peintre et le poète, et à examiner les influences de la vision de Gauguin, que Segalen nomme Maître-du-Jouir, sur la création littéraire de l’écrivain. Les deux Français avaient beaucoup en commun: un sens du mystère, une fascination pour le primitif et l’exotique et un don pour l’ambiguïté. À partir de 1903 jusqu’à sa mort en 1919, la poésie et la prose de Segalen tenteront, à l’instar de l’art de Gauguin, de découvrir l’exotisme à sa manière tout en confrontant de plus en plus les limites du pouvoir d’appréhension de l’artiste occidental. Dans Les Immémoriaux, Segalen adopte un point de vue maori pour commenter la culture occidentale. Le plus grand exploit de l’auteur était de rompre avec l’exotisme colonial d’écrivains voyageurs du XIXe siècle, à titre d’exemple Pierre Loti. Là où ces auteurs ne prétendaient pas renoncer aux valeurs occidentales, voire impériales, tout en décrivant des cultures étrangères, Segalen, imitant son Maître Gauguin, était extrêmement conscient de ses représentations de l’autre de manière particulièrement moderne. Segalen réalise dans son roman ethnographique une sorte de translation d’un art à l’autre qui est, pour lui, une démarche créatrice par elle-même.

The contemporary rewritings of Don Juan’s myth highlight several forms of hybridity and illustrate the stakes involved. The hybridation affects in the first place the sources of the myth since the authors appeal to numerous intertextual references. But the successive transpositions of the mythical scenario also lead to a generic hybridity. This intermediality has a reflexive dimension: it raises the question of the limits of language to talk about the myth and abolishes the frontier between fiction and critical speech.

Jean Echenoz’s text presents Victoria’s story who runs away from Paris, believing that she has killed her lover. Her straying (that embraces the form of a relative deterritorialization in a Deleuzian sense) lasts one year and it is built up geographically upon a descent (more or less symbolical) to the South of France and, after that, she comes back to Paris and encloses the spatial and textual curl. From a spatial point of view, she turns into a heterotopia (Foucault) every place where she is located, fact that reflects her incapability of constituting a personal, intimate space. The railway stations, the trains, the hotels, the improvised houses of those with no fixed abode are turning, according to Marc Augé’s terminology, into a « non-lieux » that excludes human being. Her vagrancy is characterized through a continuous flight from police and people and through a continuous decrease of her standard of living and dignity. It’s not about a quest of oneself, but about a loss of oneself. Urged by a strong feeling of culpability, her vagrancy is a self-punishment that comes to an end when the concerns of her problems disappear and she finds out that her lover is alive.

Cet article étudie les stratégies de la caricature dans Le Jardin des supplices, œuvre emblématique du discours exotique et jalon dans la constitution des stéréotypes sur la Chine. Cependant, le récit, loin de chercher à représenter une Chine réaliste, ni même à en indiquer la barbarie supposée, vise au contraire à produireen creux une caricature de son pendant européen. Le Jardin des supplices a ainsi une vocation spéculaire, par laquelle l'’Occident se reconnaît dans l’utopie fantasmagorique proposée ; on identifiera alors à la fois, dans cette farce sadique, une parodie des structures institutionnelles européennes et un pastiche des traits caractéristiques de la décadence littéraire. Nonobstant, Le Jardin des supplices informe bien durablement,et au second degré, la représentation de la Chine et des Chinois dans l’inconscient collectif.

All along the nineteenth century in France, the vagabond becomes a main social and philosophical issue, for he is hunt down by scientists – vagrancy is conceived as a mental illness – and by jurists – different laws are created to criminalize the act. By establishing a link between this sudden obsession and the concern expressed by thinkers (Tocqueville, Comte, Bourget) that the society is dangerously blowing apart in separate individuals, this paper aims to analyze the manifestation of this conflict between society and vagabond in literature, among others Barrès’ Les Déracinés and Gide’s Nourritures terrestres.

Author and academic, Serge Doubrovsky is an important figure in contemporary French literature. His numerous publications foretell the emergence of a new literary concept, positioning him in the domain of post-modernism with the emergence of auto-fiction. From The Dispersion to The Broken Book, the auto-fiction unfolds in a jerky narrative while the genesis of the work revolves around a profound sense of lack and absence that the writer tries to fill through his writing. The experience of World War II left a life long indelible mark on the writer’s own identity and brings forth the creation of this hybrid autobiography that aims at tearing down ge-neric and literary boundaries. Letters and words are used to confront what is missing in his life in a transgressing style that describes the violence of this experience. In this way, Doubrovsky leaves a trace of his existence, transforming his life into a novel – a work of fiction – and by giving space to imagination when telling his own story.

La mémoire occupe une place privilégiée dans l’œuvre de Claude Simon. À travers Les Géorgiques, L ’Acacia et Le Jardin des plantes, notre but, dans le présent article, est de montrer qu’il n’a pas cherché à rédiger une « autofiction » ou un « roman historique », mais à écrire une autobiographie littéraire. Son objectif ultime n’était pas de « retrouver le temps perdu », mais d’inscrire « le temps perdu » dans la littérature. Il résulte de cette étude que la nouvelle forme de l’autobiographie initiée par Claude Simon se démarque entièrement de l’autobiographie classique. Elle est écrite par le recours inlassable de l’écrivain à des stimuli, c’est-à-dire par le questionnement de textes écrits par des personnes, qui se sont trouvées dans des situations similaires. Elle est une auto-sensorio-graphie : l’écriture s’appuie essentiellement sur la description de la sensation et non des faits rapportés. Elle est par ailleurs une auto-thanato-graphie, puisque la mort y est le personnage central.

Cette étude s’intéresse à la façon dont le travail de la mémoire est mis en scène dans l’œuvre de Michel Leiris. Dès sa première œuvre autobiographique, L’Âge d’homme, Leiris adopte une technique de composition novatrice, qui s’accompagne d’un développement considérable de son discours autobiographique, à travers lequel il se montre au travail. Mais cette inflation discursive n’est pas sans interroger, tant elle souligne que la remémoration est fatalement déformatrice, dans la mesure où elle reconstitue le passé à partir de la perspective actuelle du narrateur. Pourtant, à partir de La Règle du jeu, Leiris semble embrasser l’idée d’une libre réinvention de la mémoire. C’est qu’entre-temps, dans un texte de genèse intitulé L’Homme sans honneur, il a jeté les bases d’une réflexion originale sur la remémoration et l’écriture, qui anticipe sur les analyses ultérieures de Philippe Lejeune.