Showing papers in "French Studies in 2009"

The New Face of Political Cinema: Commitment in French Film since 1995

Abstract: audiences, Nacache suggests that they can render the critical function superfluous. She concludes that denunciations of popular films can be linked to defensive strategies on the part of critics concerned to preserve their positions of influence. Several of the essays in this collection foreground attempts to bring togetherwhat such protectionist criticismwould rather keep apart.WillHigbee, RaphaëlleMoine and François-Xavier Molia all identify a generic and geographical hybridity in French ‘superproductions’ like Les Rivières pourpres (Kassovitz, 2000) and Le Pacte des loups (Gans, 2001). Sarah Leahy and Deirdre Russell interrogate the blend of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture that characterises films like Le Goût des autres (Jaoui, 2000) and Ma femme est une actrice (Attal, 2001). Meanwhile, Tim Palmer presents an eloquent case for Valeria BruniTedeschi’s Il est plus facile pour un chameau. . . (2003), which is said to achieve a particularly fertile balance between avant-garde idiosyncrasy and mainstream entertainment. That balance is also at issue in essays by Joseph McGonagle, Binita Mehta and Carrie Tarr, which examine the ways in which recent French films have used popular form to investigate questions of ethnicity and social marginality. Though it might seem obvious to look for sources of box-office appeal in the filmic text, Graeme Hayes reminds us that the economic realities of distribution and exhibition are exerting an ever greater influence on a film’s chances of reaching a large audience. For Hayes, the increased costs involved in getting a film onto cinema screens represent a serious threat to the survival of the independent French film. Nevertheless, as is evidenced by the range of work surveyed here, the broader French film industry remains in enviable good health. Vincendeau notes that popular French cinema has generally been seen to be ‘beyond the pale’ (p. 64) of serious study. As a result, its vital and continuing contribution to the industry’s well-being has, all too often, gone unnoticed. Of evident interest to students, researchers and the general reader alike, this collection goes some way towards redressing that imbalance.

The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy

Abstract: This book, a member of the Cambridge Introductions to Literature series, is an elegant and complex account of Derrida’s writings ‘in relation to’ literature. The reader looking at the cover asks herself whether the world needs another introduction to Derrida and/anything under the sun; then as she reads, struck by the book’s styled and nuanced articulation, wonders whether it is in fact an introduction at all. It chooses not to retread the philosophy, for yet more students to run on these tyres, but to look at the ‘critical proximity’ that Derrida is said to engineer in his writing between certain philosophers and certain writers. It is this ‘between’ that is the subject of the book. Beginning with an account of the ‘Life’, Hill shows the main facts of the biography and their implantation in the academic literary and social scene of Paris (Chapter 2 Contexts). The relation to Sartre, to structuralism, to the phenomenology of Husserl, to linguistics and to post-structuralism is sketched out in ways that permit a clear and concise account of Derrida’s way into his own writing. From L’Écriture et la différence we move to the work produced in a kind of cooperative or co-ambiance with Tel Quel, on Mallarmé, Blanchot (Leslie Hill is the author of distinguished work on Blanchot), then to Joyce, Freud, Ponge and Genet. There is nothing mechanical about the construction of this book; we do not move from literary name to name, but through text and text to what are nevertheless conclusions: Derrida’s work is turned to the future, it leads out rather than closes off. The fluidity of this book’s writing is itself a neat way out of the paradox implied in my last sentence — can one conclude about a philosopher much of whose greatness consists in looking forward into, not back over seminal works? It is paradoxical that Hill’s subtle edgy writing should have its home in a publishing framework which rejects what to my mind is the very premise of Derrida’s work: philosophy and literature are not a seamless whole, but nor can they be treated as separable. And that it is a framework in which Hill seems not unhappy to reside. In that way, at least, he seems to this reader at any rate unfaithful to his subject: Derrida taught philosophy all his life; all his life he looked at the way philosophy was written because it could not be separated from the philosophy itself. So to prise off the ‘literary’, as this book with all its excellence implicitly does, is to get stuck back again into the pedagogic mud, that traditional separation which Derrida helped us out of.

Les Démêlés de Merleau-Ponty avec Freud: des pulsions à une psychanalyse de la Nature

Abstract: Avec la phenomenologie, la psychanalyse constitue l’autre point d’entree dans l’œuvre de Maurice Merleau-Ponty qui demeure sans doute le seul philosophe francais d’importance a avoir entretenu un dialogue ininterrompu avec la pensee freudienne. Merleau-Ponty n’adopte pas la perspective clinicienne et son point de vue sur la psychanalyse n’est pas toujours orthodoxe. C’est une lecture tantot critique, tantot intempestive, de la demarche freudienne a laquelle il nous convie. Le nouveau defi consiste a soutenir que la phenomenologie husserlienne et la psychanalyse freudienne n’entretiennent qu’un minimum de contradictions, et a la limite qu’elles abordent les memes domaines d’etude a travers une problematisation incessante de la conscience. Nous verrons comment le lexique merleau-pontien se developpe au contact de la psychanalyse (pulsion, ambiguite, chiasma, investissement, culture–nature, etc.) et comment aussi la psychanalyse permet a Merleau-Ponty de faire avancer ses theses phenomenologiques (monde, autrui, corps propre, perception, chair, etc.). Pour ce faire, nous analyserons la percee des annees 1940 (distinction entre pulsions et instincts), ainsi que les recherches des annees d’enseignement a la Sorbonne (psychologie de l’enfant) et au College de France (psychanalyse de la nature).

Le Discours littéraire: Paratopie et scène d'énonciation

Abstract: Le Discours littéraire, qui ‘prolonge et renouvelle’ le Contexte de l’œuvre littéraire, publié par Dominique Maingueneau en 1993, concerne principalement les conditions d’émergence des œuvres. Maingueneau insiste sur le fait qu’il s’agit d’un ‘chantier’ plutôt que d’une étude aboutie, étant entendu que la notion même de ‘discours littéraire’ est ambiguë: un type de discours doté d’un statut particulier, mais aussi une unité instable qui regroupe nombre de phénomènes divers. La première partie présente une historique de la critique littéraire, de la philologie au structuralisme et à la nouvelle critique, jusqu’à la véritable ‘analyse du discours’ littéraire, qui ‘s’efforce de définir le cadre à l’intérieur duquel se déploient les multiples “lectures” qu’autorise une œuvre’ (p. 30). La deuxième partie est consacrée aux discours constituants. Maingueneau y examine en particulier le cadre herméneutique, et les vaillants efforts des interprètes pour trouver l’exégèse, l’interprétation nouvelle. Maingueneau explique par exemple comment on réconcilie les maximes conversationnelles et les ‘défauts’, en relatant l’interprétation que fait Michel Serres de la tirade de Sganarelle au début de Dom Juan. Il conclut: ‘De cette façon. . . la pièce perd son excroissance maligne’ (p. 59). Maingueneau nous fait donc voyager le long de l’évolution de l’analyse littéraire avec une évocation des théories, illustrées d’exemples ‘consacrés’ tout en admettant que ‘De toute manière, il y a contradiction entre le repérage de transgressions [. . .] et la tendance des analystes à tout légitimer [. . .]’(p. 67). La troisième partie est consacrée à la paratopie, l’‘impossible lieu’, dont il rappelle que les modalités varient avec les époques, les sociétés. . . et s’émeut de la condition de l’écrivain: ‘En littérature comme en religion, il y a toujours des clercs et des prophètes’. La quatrième partie s’attache aux positionnements. Qui a le droit d’énoncer? Comment sont gérées les transgressions? Qu’est-ce qu’un code langagier ‘légitime’? La section sur la linguistique moderne rappelle avec humour la défiance mutuelle entre littéraires et linguistes. Puis on en arrive à une problématique d’analyse du discours où l’opposition oral/écrit est revisitée. Enfin Maingueneau s’interroge sur les effets encore inconnus de l’avènement de l’informatique, du ‘livre électronique’. Il termine par un examen de l’importance du genre (on se perd un peu avec lui dans les complexités d’une définition du ‘genre’) pour l’analyse du discours. On aurait pu attendre d’un linguiste comme Maingueneau qu’il soit un peu plus critique à l’égard du côté ‘cuisine ésotérique’ des analyses littéraires. Il n’en est rien. On reste un peu perplexe devant des phrases telles que: ‘Si l’œuvre doit gérer la relation entre ce qu’elle dit et le fait même qu’elle puisse le dire comme elle le dit, elle doit donner à voir un certain monde et justifier le fait que ce monde-là soit compatible avec le cadre de cette énonciation qui le donne ainsi à voir’ (p. 231). Maingueneau conclut que ‘nous sommes loin d’avoir exploré les multiples champs de recherche qui s’ouvrent à une analyse du discours littéraire’. Cette dernière a donc encore de beaux jours devant elle. . .

État présent: The livre d'artiste in Twentieth-Century France

Abstract: A recent exhibition at the British Library, Breaking the Rules (2007-08), explored early-twentieth-century avant-garde journals and books as a space of experimentation and subversion. The exhibition highlighted the creation of a new aesthetics juxtaposing visual and verbal elements, from Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrammes and Futurist poem-paintings to Dada and constructivist journals, surrealist book objects and livres d'artistes. The term livre d'artiste will be used here to designate various forms of the twentieth-century book in France as a collaboration between poets and painters or texts and images. Given the multiple origin of the livre d'artiste, critical studies are situated at the intersection of several disciplines: the history and technique of the book, art history and criticism, literary studies and semiotics. Three key issues dominate critical debate on the livre d'artiste, relating to its definition (limits and legibility) and historical development (from the livre illustre to the livre objet); its production (the material book); and its interpretation (relations between words and imagtes).

Flaubert's Reading Notes on Montaigne

Abstract: In summer 2008, Flaubert's reading notes on Montaigne's Essais and Journal de voyage surfaced in a British private collection. The existence of this manuscript had been known about since at least 1931, when it was sold at auction following the death of Flaubert's niece, Caroline. Its rediscovery offers the chance to reassess a much-discussed literary relationship. Scholars have long noted Flaubert's particular affection for Montaigne, an author he calls his 'pere nourricier'. This article, which concentrates on the notes on the Essais (those on the Journal de voyage will be the subject of a later companion piece), attempts to build on previous studies in three ways. It offers an introduction to the reading notes and seeks to convey a flavour of their content; it embeds them within a broader history of Montaigne's reception in early nineteenth-century France; and it tracks some of the affective, philosophical and aesthetic imprints left by Flaubert's reading of the Essais on his published work. Flaubert's notes register a many-faced Montaigne: egoiste, sensible, sceptique , even bovaryste . And in his remarks on the style of the Essais , he glimpses a new face for his time: that of Montaigne as self-conscious 'artiste'.

Pique-niquer sur le volcan: une pratique culturelle de Winckelmann à Sade

Abstract: A partir de deux episodes aux accents infernaux tires de la vie de Winckelmann et de la prose de Sade, cet article examine une etrange pratique culturelle de la fin du dixhuitie me siecle: pique-niquer sur le volcan, en l’occurrence le Vesuve, escale essentielle et spectacle sublime du Grand Tour. Puisant dans des lettres et des recits de voyage des touristes francais et anglais, nous interrogeons cette commensalite — le fait de manger ensemble — aux flancs du volcan, interrogation qui revise et precise la signification du terme pique-nique au dixhuitieme siecle. De plus, nous rapprochons cette vision ‘alimentaire’ du volcan d’un autre phenomene culturel napolitain de l’epoque: la cocagne. Ainsi, selon nous, volcan et cocagne constituent les deux poles symboliques entre lesquels s’exerce le regime (au sens a la fois politique et dietetique) du roi de Naples. En conclusion, nous analysons quelques reponses des touristes a l’appetit demesure du Vesuve, constatant que ces reponses (dont le pique-nique lui-meme) s’efforcent avant tout d’y reimposer une certaine mesure — que celle-ci soit scientifique ou esthetique.

État Présent: Thomas Corneille (1625–1709): Beyond the Triumvirate

Abstract: In 1761, Voltaire wrote of Thomas Corneille: ‘si vous exceptez Racine, auquel il ne faut comparer personne, il etait le seul de son temps qui fut digne d’etre le premier au-dessous de son frere’. With characteristic wit and acuity, Voltaire neatly sets up the stakes of the debate by putting his finger right on the challenges that still accompany any attempt at evaluating the work of our playwright, even 300 years after his death. Of course, the comparisons with Pierre Corneille, nineteen years Thomas’s senior, are in many ways legitimate; their contemporaries were quick to compare the two men, and Thomas himself openly acknowledged his debt to his older brother in matters theatrical. Furthermore, Thomas married the sister of Pierre’s wife, and the couples shared a house for many years; they moved from Rouen to Paris together in 1662 and when, in 1684, Pierre died, Thomas was unanimously elected to take his seat at the Academie Francaise. Thomas is also widely remembered by means of another great playwright: in 1677, he devised a more anodyne verse version of Moliere’s controversial Dom Juan (1665), using Moliere’s original title, Le Festin de pierre. Contrary to what is often stated, this is not simply a verse adaptation; rather it is a rewrite that has much to teach us about what Thomas (who was a good judge of such matters) considered to have been the objectionable aspects of Moliere’s play and the means of rendering them acceptable. Whether or not Thomas had his rewrite performed under Moliere’s name out of modesty or false modesty, the fact remains that this was the form in which the play (ostensibly Moliere’s) was known until the prose version was resurrected in the nineteenth century. In this instance, the comparison with a more famous colleague is not only unavoidable but essential. Often, however, such comparisons are fraught with potential pitfalls. How and where exactly is one to create a space for dramatists such as Thomas Corneille (or Jean Rotrou, born in 1609, whose anniversary also falls this year) in a discipline that is so thoroughly dominated by the towering presence of the dramaturgical Holy Trinity of Pierre Corneille (the Father), Racine (the Son) and

Jacques Roubaud and the Ethics of Artifice

Abstract: Jacques Roubaud’s multivolume prose cycle ‘ Le grand incendie de Londres ’ (1989–) has variously been termed a novel, a self-portrait, an autobiography, and a work of autofiction . Several factors contribute to this generic uncertainty: a long-standing suspicion, shared by critics and writers, of autobiography; Roubaud’s status as a member of the Oulipo, a group associated with formal artifice rather than referential writing; and Roubaud’s own equivocating or cryptic statements about ‘ Le grand incendie de Londres ’. Nevertheless, to label this complex work a fiction is to obscure its deep concern with the relationship between form and authenticity. This article argues that Roubaud’s explicitly stated principle of truth-telling ( veridicite ) generates a complex and paradoxical strategy, based on a form of sincerity that foregrounds itself as artifice and constraint. Framed in mathematical, philosophical and rhetorical terms, Roubaud’s theoretical pronouncements do not necessarily amount to a coherent conception of truth. However, they successfully provide the basis for a new type of autobiographical contract and for the creation of original narrative forms. Rhetorical artifice and Oulipian constraints provide the conditions for Roubaud’s investigation of memory and his ethical engagement with the reader.

The French Creoles of Trinidad and the Limits of the Francophone

Abstract: This article is framed by the argument that, for all its justified condemnation of the closed nature of traditional French studies, the realm of Francophone studies constructs its own barriers and its own conventions of what constitutes Francophone writing. The influence of postcolonial theory on the field, it is argued, has focused interest almost exclusively on the literature of the colonized and the repressed in neocolonial and postcolonial situations. The influence of conventional French studies has, moreover, led most Francophone scholars to work on areas where France and French language retain an important presence. While not denying the necessity of this dual focus, the article proposes that attention be paid to areas where French colonial presence was interrupted or subsumed by that of another colonial power. The body of the article considers the history and cultural legacy of the French Creoles of Trinidad as an example of a Francophone group that wielded considerable influence in the nineteenth century, but which has now all but disappeared. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the study of such forgotten pockets of Francophone literature is one way of ensuring a creative discordance within the realm of Francophone studies.

Word and Music Studies: The Nineteenth Century

Abstract: The comparison of text to music is perhaps one of the most enduring metaphors of our critical practice, and, as Steven Paul Scher observed in an essay of 1972, its many variants are among the terms most often abused and misused in literary criticism. Musical techniques such as counterpoint, melody, harmony and rhythm abound in analyses of both verse and prose, and critics frequently resort to a musical metaphor when discussing textual effects or processes which seem to transcend the denotative, representative realm of language and enter the domain of the properly literary. While the ‘terminological chaos’ against which Scher rails may frustrate a musically literate reader, scholars are not entirely to blame for the irresistible attraction that musical metaphors exert, for it is a commonplace among poets themselves to trace the relationship between poetry and music back to Antiquity and the myth of Orpheus, in whose song both word and lyre accompaniment formed an indivisible whole. Moreover, as Ardis Butterfield demonstrates in Poetry and Music in Medieval France, text and music were joined in a single practice during the Middle Ages, in the performances of chansonniers and troubadours. The essays in Poetry and Music in the French Renaissance explore how this close relationship is maintained by Pierre de Ronsard and the Pleiade poets, Louise Labe, and composers of lute-song. Ronsard’s Abbrege de l’art poetique francois (1565) appears as a key text, highlighting the common aims of poetry and music; indeed, only five years later the Academie de poesie et de musique was founded by Jean-Antoine de Baif and Thibault de Courville to promote the kinship between the two arts. In the nineteenth century, however, poetry and music emerge as separate cultural artefacts. Whereas they had historically been conceptualized as complementary parts of the same art form, the surge in interest, post-Beethoven, in instrumental concerts, along with the rapid rise of a mass print culture and an educated, wealthy middle class, made the printed book, rather than oral performance, the home of a new, exciting Romantic poetry: Alphonse de

Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001

Abstract: nor completely satirical. He saw such practices as therapeutic and educational for budding writers: they help them to find their own voice. Pasticheurs beg to be rumbled, because they mutely appeal to an ideally alert audience over the head of the victim. Aron astutely notes the similarity between collections of pastiches in the nineteenth century and the contemporaneous, proliferating sottisiers. Latching on to the stupider moments of leading writers is the name of both games. He misses out, however, the splendid critique by Jules Vallès of the institutionalized plugging of pastiche of famous classical authors as a learning tool in nineteenthcentury lycées. He does include the programme of self-pastiche of Lautréamont, for pastiche is not always outward-turned. It was to be expected that Oulipiens like Queneau would want to flex their mental muscles by fabricating pastiches, for it was a key part of their cultivation of inventive recycling. We should listen, all the same, to Céline’s spot-on terms for the parodist/pasticheur (he was a favoured Aunt Sally): ‘Half leech and half tapeworm’ (p. 280). Commonly, like Céline himself, pastiche goes over the top, for good taste is one thing, despite what snobs think, that you cannot copy. There is so much name-dropping in this survey that an index would have been helpful. Aron says that his bibliography can be found in a companion volume of texts featuring pastiche and parody. Aron knows his onions. His book is an excellent example of the best kind of French (or, more exactly, Belgian) literary history: continuously lucid and coherently structured throughout.

The Origins of la vie neutre: Nicolas Caussin's Influence on the Writings of Gabrielle Suchon

Abstract: This article examines the influence of Nicolas Caussin’s writing on secular celibacy ( vie neutre ) — and especially of his Vie de Sainte Isabelle (1643) — on Gabrielle Suchon’s Traite de la morale et de la politique (1693) and Du celibat volontaire, ou la vie sans engagement (1700). I argue that this overlooked source played a considerable part in shaping Suchon’s theories regarding the subordination of women and the usefulness of a celibate life in the secular world. In order to establish this source’s importance, Caussin’s influence is considered in relation to Suchon’s other known sources as well as in the context of the Querelle des femmes . The similarities between the two authors’ works are considered in terms of vocabulary, rhetorical issues and theological positions in order to prove that Suchon uses a number of ideas originally found in Caussin as a springboard for a far more extensive and complex argument. Unlike him, she does not take the notion of secular celibacy for granted but examines the obstacles put in the way of those who would choose it (especially women), analyses dominant discourse on the place of women in society and offers counterarguments and practical advice for potential neutralistes .