Marisa Verna

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore | UNICATT · Department of Foreign Literature and Linguistics

Our goal in this essay is to analyse the “dramatic archetype” of women’s sexuality in the realistic French theatre of the late Nineteenth century. To this end, we have compared two apparently opposite dramas: The Lady of Camellias by Dumas fils (1852) and The Dupe by Georges Ancey (1891). The Lady of Camellias is a ‘canonical play’ for European cu...

Everyone knows that Proust's Recherche is the history of an artistic vocation, the history of a quest of truth. Truth, however, is not easily found and hides itself. The novel 's hero hides himself, he flees during three thousand pages to avoid to face his mission. This article aims to analyze this flight and it is structured in three parties: the...

Perception, mémoire autobiographique et permanence du moi : le nez de Proust Cette contribution représente une première systématisation d’une étude plus vaste sur l’odorat dans la Recherche proustienne, dans laquelle nous nous concentrerons spécialement sur la relation entre olfaction et mémoire. En effet, s’il est notoire que le temps constitue l...

Until now, critics have shown little interest in the bouquet of aromas and scents that permeate the linguistic fabric of À la recherche du temps perdu , to the point of forming an olfactory (and cognitive) underlay. The aesthetic impact of these odors warrants further investigation, starting with a reconstruction of the “problem of smell” in Proust...

Quaderni Proustiani, 17(1), 229-239. Death, as well as sleep, seem to leave us facing the category of the unspeakable. This paper aims at studying Proust’s novel from this point of view, examining the paradox of a writing that crosses the threshold between what can be said and “what cannot be said but must nevertheless be heard” (Blanchot). We inte...

Contrary to the “populist linguistic purism” of Remy de Gourmont, who believed in a “native” and primal language, as well as in a literature that “does not receive neither borrow anything” (Roussin), Proust moulds his novel in a “gloriously impure, lumberfilled” linguistic matter (Malcolm Bowie). Proust’s idea of language is radically opposed to th...

In this essay we reinterpret Camus’s novel The Plague in light of the urgency of history, that with Covid 19 pandemia made us face a real pestilence, thus allowing us to read reality and fiction as even. Our rereading relativizes the traditional allegoric interpretation of critics, while at the same time it widens its perspectives. It is in fact in...

This article aims at a better comprehension of the series of lectures that Joseph Czapski gave in the Soviet camp of Grazovietz between 1940 and 1941. The case of Czapski is well known, but his exceptional performance (of memory, and critical inquiry) deserves further investigation. Not surprisingly, the Polish painter focuses on memory as a concep...

The tunefulness of Proust and Senancour. From the silence of mountains to the silence of music For Proust, great books are the “children of silence” (CSB, p. 309), and his novel endeavors to express what could not, in principle, be formulated: nature, sensations, in brief the physical and psychic existence as a whole. In his vision, language is th...

The last issue of our journal includes the proceedings of the conference Les silences de la montagne. Littérature et discours alpins (XVIIIe-XXIe siècles) held in the Université de la Vallée d'Aoste en décembre 2019

Where was Baudelaire standing, when facing the "great questions" of the Infinite, of evil, and of the christian faith? Was he a Christian? This article does not aim to respond once for all to this question, instead it states two key words that may help to ask it in a more correct way: incarnation and charity.

This paper analyses the category of space in Fanny Taillandier’s last novel Par les écrans du monde. We argue that Taillandier tries to “make sense” of 9/11 terrorist attack through a stylistic recomposition of the dimension of space, while situating it in a “geometry of words” that makes it meaningful and human again. In effect, in Taillandier’s n...

Ce livre examine les relations que l’œuvre de Proust entretient avec l’histoire, avec la société de son temps et du nôtre, les conflits ouverts ou souterrains qu’elle révèle ou recèle, et se demande s’il est possible de répondre avec Proust aux défis socio-politiques auquel la littérature se heurte aujourd’hui.

Proust s’opposa de manière nette à l’idée d’unelangue nationale « claire » par nature, dont l’ordonnance serait inhérente à la pensée elle-même. Ce livre interroge le style proustien du point de vue de sa théorisation et de la mise en oeuvre d’une rhétorique sensorielle diffuse dans La recherche du temps perdu. Proust was strongly opposed to the i...

A new issue of L'Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria is available. New perspectives and insights on linguistics and literature.

Between 1870 and 1888, in the letters and sketches of his correspondance, Rimbaud is portrayed as an eternal traveller. The places of his wanderings change (countryside, cities, imaginary places), so does his representation by Verlaine, Delahaye and Nouveau. From reality to imagination, the sketches fix Rimbaud in his friends’ memory. Yet his repre...

Cet article s'adresse à un lecteur non spécialiste, mais désireux de rencontrer l'écriture de Marcel Proust: une invitation au voyage proustien à travers l'un de ses thèmes les plus significatifs. En effet, Venise n’est pas qu’un thème dans À la recherche du temps perdu. Pour Proust Venise est un lieu de l’esprit et du coeur, un véritable parcours...

Public conference within a series about time. Space-time, time of the body, time of conscience and time of art in Proust's oeuvre

This conference was organized by the Alliance Française Biella, in order to promote and support French culture and literature. It focuses on the relation between life and art in Proust's aesthetics, often misunderstood and twisted by an Idealist interpretation of the Recherche. http://www.newsbiella.it/2019/02/05/leggi-notizia/argomenti/cultura-e-...

This paper aims to tackle the ambiguity of Péladan’s interpretation of the Malatesta Temple of Rimini, the prestige of which is related for him to the faith in the Absolute of Art. In effect, in Példan’s novel Le Vice Suprême, Sigismondo becomes a hero for both his criminal reputation and his artistic prestige. Furthermore, in his theoretical work...

2018, Introduzione sezione tematica Monumenti This thematic session of the journal is devoted to expressions of creative writing inspired by monuments. Our aim is to understand how and why diverse re/constructions of their specific genesis, descriptions of architectural features, explanations of symbolism, histories of mentors, sponsors and artist...

La poesia dell’inverno (del letargo, dice Proust) è materia della Recherche che coniuga arte e vita, o piuttosto impasta i materiali della vita, per farne arte. In un passo del Côté de Guermantes l’eroe del romanzo si trova a trascorrere una notte nella guarnigione di Doncière. L’associazione di diverse sensazioni fisiche (il freddo, la luminosità...

Les textes critiques ici recueillis constituent le fruit du travail de formation que j’ai conduit dans une classe de Littérature Française du Master en “Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere” de la Faculté de Sciences Linguistiques et Littératures Étrangères de l’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore de Milan pendant l’année académique 2017-2018....

This article describes a pedagogical project that took place between 2015 and 2016, and involved my students of the French Literature class, third year of Bachelor of Arts (foreign languages). The intersection and interrelation between figurative art and poetry were at the centre of the theoretical insight, whereas the necessity of adapting our tea...

This article focuses on a vast category of texts, the so-called “Tableaux de Paris”, or “Paris-Guides”, which contributed in a relevant way to the creation and the vulgarization of the Myth of Paris all along the Nineteenth Century. The relation of these publications with the “high” literature is sometimes ambiguous: several great authors participa...

This is my CV. It can be lacking of some detail, but the core is there

This is my CV. It can be laking of some detail, but the core is there.

The Jewish 'question' is treated in the Recherche by way of the Dreyfus Affaire, which is not spoken of but scattered in the discourses of different characters. Definitions, opinions, even facts are, therefore, spread in the ubiquity of social instability, so that it is impossible for the reader to identify any of Proust's ideologies.In our paper w...

Review of Sparvoli's book, which focuses on the aesthetic project of Proust's novel, inquired through the lens of melancholy

Mooc. Art and poetry teaching https://openeducation.blackboard.com/mooc-catalog/courseDetails/view?course_id=_1373_1

Conférence tenue dans le cadre de la journée d’étude Stylistique et comparatisme, organisée par Gilles Philippe à l’université de Lausanne, dans laquelle est développée l’idée de ”langue étrangère” dans l’esthétique et le style proustiens. L’auteur de Contre l’obscurité (1896), contrecarre en effet plutôt la clarté et son idéologie, qu’il ne se ran...

Une heure de conversation avec le public sur Baudelaire et sa relation au théâtre de pantomime, spécialement avec le mime Deburau et le mythique théâtre des Funambules. Baudelaire voyait dans la pantomime la réalisation du comique pur, de l’absolu théâtral.

This paper aims to define the concepts of ”material thought” and ”material time,” as they are theorized by Proust in the Preface of his Ruskin’s Amiens Bible translation, and as they are developed throughout the Recherche. In Proust’s oeuvre ‘material thought’ manifests itself mostly in linguistic and stylistic features, or in concrete images, like...

Oneself in another. Hélé Béji, Proust and the Tunis doors. In her autobiographical novel L’oeil du jour (1985), Hélé Béji passes thrice through the Tunis’ doors, thus breaking through the barriers of her own identity, as a Tunisian and/or as a French woman. The frontiere can indeed be considered as an aesthetic category in this narrative of the No...

Si l'émergence du numérique dans l'époque contemporaine peut modifier l'approche cognitive du lecteur et que le « clicking and browsing reading » 1 peut renforcer son autonomie d'interprétation (Fitzpatrick, p. 45), tous les textes ne sauraient être interrogés de la même manière. Certains d'entre eux manifestent leur modernité dans une nature ouver...

Dans cet article nous nous proposons d’étudier la catégorie de la frontière -- culturelle, psychologique, mais surtout esthétique -- dans L’œil du jour (1985) de l’écrivaine tunisienne Hélé Béji, que nous allons lire à travers le philtre du style proustien. Notre objectif est de démontrer, entre autre, que la relation de Béji à l’œuvre proustienne...

Dans cet article nous nous proposons d’étudier la catégorie de la frontière -- culturelle, psychologique, mais surtout esthétique -- dans L’œil du jour (1985) de l’écrivaine tunisienne Hélé Béji, que nous allons lire à travers le philtre du style proustien. Notre objectif est de démontrer, entre autre, que la relation de Béji à l’œuvre proustienne...

If synesthesia is rare in "Le Spleen de Paris", it is also differently constructed and shaped than in the Fleurs du Mal. This article aims to demonstrate that this evolution points out a shift in Baudelaire's esthetics, that from Unity of Univers seems to move towards fragmentation of reality: actually, from Baudelaire to Proust. Abstract in france...

Online course The course Au coeur de Paris, Baudelaire et Paris is a Massive Open Open Course, and focuses on the relation between Baudelaire’s poetry and the city of Paris, within an interdisciplinary approach that includes literary, geographic and artistic features. The course is available at address : https://openeducation.blackboard.com/mooc...

Online course The course Au coeur de Paris, Baudelaire et Paris is a Massive Open Open Course, and focuses on the relation between Baudelaire’s poetry and the city of Paris, within an interdisciplinary approach that includes literary, geographic and artistic features. The course is available at address : https://openeducation.blackboard.com/mooc...

Du paletot idéal de «Ma Bohème » à la robe de laine des anges di Mystique, les tissus se dématérialisent dans la poésie de Rimbaud. En effet, la portée du champ sémantique des étoffes et des vêtements dans l’œuvre de Rimbaud est cruciale dans sa poétique, au sens où elle structure, avec d’autres thèmes, l’esthétique de la Voyance. Si un simple rele...

Du paletot idéal de «Ma Bohème » à la robe de laine des anges de Mystique, les tissus se dématérialisent dans la poésie de Rimbaud. La portée du champ sémantique des étoffes et des vêtements dans l’œuvre du poète de Charleville structure, avec d’autres thèmes, l’esthétique de la Voyance. Le monde s’habille, en effet, d’âme, tandis que l’âme n’aspir...

The "oily liquid, which, from nightfall onwards, seeps incessantly from the lamps' reservoir" (II, 395-396) is a marker of Proust's style. Describing this style means borrowing regularly from the lexicon of "unctuous". From Italian to English, have translators of Swann been able to conserve this semic molecule or have they had to change its substan...

Our aim in this essay is to analyze animal life as a key topic in Rimbaud's writing. An animal thematic permeates, in effect, the whole of of Rimbaud's poetic work and its importance is evident from both quantitative and qualitative point of view. A large variety of animals are alive in Rimbaud's texts: ravens, doves, louses, fauns, tigers, panther...

Péladan’s Prométhéide was written in 1893 and published in 1895. In the Preface of the trilogy Péladan had inserted a letter of Émile Burnouf, a famous French scholar of ancient Greek literature, in which the latter testified to the philological correctness of the play. Burnouf proclaimed his certainty that Aeschylus’s work was an esoteric introduc...

The main topic of this article is the history of a rare and precious French magazine of the late Nineteenth century, in which a vivid and crucial discussion about arts and their inter-relation grew the more and more intense in the short space of four years (1892-1896). The “Livre d’Art” was first conceived as a simple booklet to be distributed to t...

Everyone knows that Proust's Recherche is the history of an artistic vocation, the history of a quest of truth. Truth, however, is not easily found and hides itself away. The novel's hero hides himself, he flees during three thousand pages to avoid facing his artistic mission. This article aims to analyse this flight and it is structured in three p...

The hero of the Recherche seems to despair of ever being able to master a life in which everything is nothing but fragment and loss. Friendship, love, travel, art itself are dispersed and crumble in the luring diversity of our senses. Indeed, unity only lies within writing, in the fusion of sensorial rhetoric (TR, IV, 470), that 'small furrow' wh...

Le volume constitue les actes d'une journée d'étude organisée en 2011 à l'université de Paris-Sorbonne en hommage à Sergio Cigada (1933-2010). Suivant sa méthode analytique, qui est une véritable redéfinition en acte de la philologie, après les deux textes introductifs dus à Joëlle Gardes Tamine et à Marisa Verna, les auteurs des contributions s'in...

he aim of this book is to identify the aesthetic role of synaesthesia in the work of Marcel Proust. Often confused with metaphor, synaesthesia is a crucial element in Proust's writing, and is interpreted here as the reconstruction of meaning through the senses, namely spiritual and corporal access to knowledge. Synaesthesia is considered here in...

The air becomes denser and clearer, like an “industrious, crystal clear jelly". Françoise is able to carve her braised beef’s jelly as Michelangelo sculpted Carrara marble. The good, old French of the Duchesse de Guermantes and of Francoise, so evocative of them both, is only to be found now in old recipe books in which only "les gelees, le beurre,...

L’approche à la didactique de la littérature qui est ici présentée constitue le résultat – le produit, en langage plus correctement pédagogique – du « Laboratoire de Littérature Française » de la IIe Année de la Laurea Magistrale en Langues et Littératures Etrangères de la Faculté de Sciences Linguistiques de l’Università Cattolica de Milan. Chacu...

The aim of this contribution is not to propose a literary history of the ‘Dreyfus case’, which could be easily outlined as an ideal list of the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’. Instead attention will be placed on the significance of style as defined in the works and declarations of two authors - Marcel Proust and Ferdinand Céline – who place themsel...

The drame à thèse by Dumas fils appears as a form of “intelligent” theatre, proposing moral reflections in at times explicit opposition against the vaudeville and the pure divertissement. Besides a new translation of the drama and of the preface by Dumas fils (previously published by EduCatt in 2008 for teaching purposes), the volume contains an i...

Among all rhetorical strategies, synesthesia is certainly the one most commonly associated to Symbolism and, notably, to Baudelaire’s poetics. The relevance of this trope in the work of Marcel Proust is less known, since critics preferred metaphor which is known to be at the center of Proust’s reflections on style. However the combination of differ...

Many are the works on the language of proustian characters and the unavoidable critical text by Gérard Genette, Proust et le langage indirect, has by now shown that the emergence of the characters’ deepest psychological dimension is necessarily expressed through an often swerving language: mistakes, omissions, shifts in meaning, and often an unexpe...

Even if few have read it entirely, Proust’s novel is undoubtedly famous: to this day in France the number of publications on Proust each year exceeds the number of those on Napoleon or De Gaulle, and the Recherche has been classified – not surprisingly – as a “lieu de mémoire”, place of the memory, in that huge work by Pierre Nora that collects all...

The aim of this article is to analyze the impossibility of conceiving of the idea itself of synonymy within the proustian understanding of language and his esthetics. Since his first theoretical reflections on literary language, Proust considered meaning as the result of a complex dynamics, never established once and for all. In his notes to his t...

Comme les réflexions de Merleau-Ponty sur l’œuvre proustienne le suggèrent, la Recherche consititue une ‘mise en œuvre’ artistique et littéraire de cet ‘avènement du sens’ qui est au centre des interrogations de la phénoménologie contemporaine. La dynamique entre expérience sensible et expérience langagière se réalise pour Proust dans le miracle la...

La deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle a recueilli les suggestions contenues dans la réflexion baudelairienne sur le rire (« significatif » : imitation du réel ; « grotesque » : absolu) ; l’engouement démontré par les Romantiques et par Baudelaire lui-même pour le mimodrame de Deburau a donné lieu entre 1870 et 1895 à ce que j’ai appelé dans cet article...

Cet article est un compte-rendu du livre : Edward Bizub, Proust et le moi divisé. La Recherche : creuset de la psychologie expérimentaire (1874-1914), Droz, 2006, 296 p., ISBN : 260001327.

Synaesthesia in Proust is achieved in a complex manner and it challenges the very same methods already adopted by Gérard Genette in analysing metaphors: the analogy link among different perceptive elements often rests upon a contiguity link and the intermingling of the two rhetorical figures (metonymy / metaphor) is based on the narrative evolution...

Synaesthesia in Proust is achieved in a complex manner and it challenges the very same methods already adopted by Gérard Genette in analysing metaphors: the analogy link among different perceptive elements often rests upon a contiguity link and the intermingling of the two rhetorical figures (metonymy / metaphor) is based on the narrative evolution...

The object of this article is the idea of theatrical synesthaesia, as it was developed into the relationship between painters and symbolist poets at the “Théâtre d’Art” directed by Paul Fort since november 1890 till march 1892. Aesthaetic theories of two of the most important Nabis painters (Maurice Denis and Emile Bernard) are examined in relatio...

The object of this article is the idea of theatrical synesthaesia, as it was developed in the short relationship between some symbolist poets and the Nabis painters in Paul Fort's Theatre d'Art from November 1890 to March 1892. The aesthetic theories developed by Maurice Denis and Emile Bernard, two of the main painters who participated in this exp...

Between 1820 and 1846 the mime actor Jean-Gaspard Deburau was Pierrot in the Théatre des Funambules, a popular theatre in the parisian Boulevard du Temple. His reckless and impassable style of play was read as a new poetic and dramatic pattern by two generations of poets. The Romantic Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier created the myth of the ‘white...