Michel Pierssens

• Université de Montréal

La science-fiction connaît un regain d’intérêt ces dernières années, non seulement auprès de son lectorat traditionnel, mais également auprès des chercheurs et même des décideurs. Certes, elle est utile pour anticiper et éventuellement modeler l’avenir, mais elle s’avère surtout un puissant outil pour comprendre la face cachée d’un présent gros de...

La carte postale, à peine apparue dans les années 1880, se répand aussitôt par millions sur toute la planète. Pour mettre un comble à la désolation qu'avait pressentie Baudelaire, c'est peut-être en même temps dans cet avatar ultime de l'antique daguerréotype que vient s'achever, pour la plus grande joie de la multitude, une certaine histoire de la...

Ce volume réunit les actes d’un colloque international organisé à Montréal en 2010. Il part d’une interrogation, et ouvre un champ d’investigation : après avoir connu une sorte d'apogée à la fin des Lumières, autour de figures comme Delille, Erasmus Darwin ou Goethe, la « poésie scientifique » a-t-elle disparu avec le romantisme, qui, selon Sainte-...

In his 1904 novel Au jardin des vierges, Albéric Cahuet takes up where the celebrated and infamous Les demi- vierges (1894) by Marcel Prévost had not ventured to tread. The turn-of-the-century period was obsessed with the seemingly irreversible disappearance of the young lady, ever more emancipated and rebelling against the rules of a patriarchal s...

In scientific as well as in social histories models often fatally end up as caricatures after having spawned great utopias. In the meantime, they may have troubled ideas and represen~tations in the most productive manner. Any model, because it is uncertain, insufficient, exces~sive or fanciful, can be both a by-product and an agent in the crisis th...

In scientific as well as in social histories models often fatally end up as caricatures after having spawned great utopias. In the meantime, they may have troubled ideas and representations in the most productive manner. Any model because it is uncertain, insufficient, excessive or fanciful, can be both a by-product and an agent in the crisis that...

SubStance 34.1 (2005) 3-5 There was a time when "French Theory" meant Structuralism. In those years, the late 1960s, the debate that had been raging in France was not very well understood in the US, even though the big names were already familiar to many: Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault... In literature departments, people were interested mo...

Besides being a unique compendium of fin-de-siècle French culture and civilization, Marc Angenot's 1889 raises important issues regarding the rationale and methodology of historical reconstruction. The choice of a single year rather than a larger period, the choice of an exhaustive study of discursive possibilities, the refusal of traditional hiera...

The recounting of literary history has always been staged from the winners' camp. Despite the work done by historians who seek to restore a counter-history to the literary canon, it is instead necessary to consider the same History from the point of view of literature's peripheral figures. During the nineteenth century a vast majority of poets and...

SubStance 32.1 (2003) 53-56 What I wanted to know has continued to change over time, even though neither the desire to know nor my fascination for Change and Time has ever become weaker. Quite to the contrary. It is only the naïve belief that I might at some point get a glimpse of what rules those deepest of all mysteries that has dimmed, to an ext...

Peut-on concevoir d’autres modes d’organisation cognitive du passe — en particulier du passe litteraire — que le progres lineaire, le retour periodique et le modele de la decadence ? Les questions qui sont ainsi posees, dans le champ restreint qui est le notre, ne relevent pas seulement d’une cosmetique (comment « lisser » les rides du Temps ?) ou...

Francis Ponge ha dedicato soltanto un testo a Lautréamont, ma si tratta di un testo importante. Questo testo sembra possedere una eccezionale precisione di mira, condensando in alcuni brevi paragrafi tutta la forza esplosiva del suo argomento. In questa maniera assume i tratti che ci fanno percepire nelle forme brevi la densità di senso e l'equilib...

Résumé La fin du XIXe siècle a connu, au Canada comme en Europe, une floraison de revues littéraires, parmi lesquelles L'Écho des Jeunes, publié à Montréal, se distingue par son éclectisme et sa modernité. Cette revue est la création d'un groupe de jeunes qui, depuis la petite municipalité de Sainte-Cunégonde, noue des rapports étroits avec une par...

The adverse report of the Academy of Sciences, published in 1784, failed to put an end to the proselytism of Mesmer's early followers, nor did it scale down their ambitions to gain scientific recognition. The allure of mystery, the taste for wonders and the call of the unknown prevailed, and throughout that century numerous clashes occurred between...

Pierssens Michel. Un etat du discours social [Marc Angenot : 1889. Un etat du discours social, Montreal (Quebec), editions Balzac, coll. « l'univers des discours», 1989, 1175 p.]. In: Litterature, n°89, 1993. Desir et detours. pp. 90-97.

Many of the points I will touch upon are quite well-known: the whole matter of the disappearance of linearity in modern fiction for one. But by going back to such antiquated themes my aim is not so much to come up with striking novelties as to try and connect some of the features of 20th century novel with notions that can be drawn (whether that be...

In its curving watercourse, the Loire encompasses vast areas of central France—Touraine, Blésois, Sologne, Berry—former provinces, all closely related, where one travelled from one town to another by imperceptible degrees, a whole district which since time immemorial, has been, above all, French. The towns there have remained as they were in olden...