L'Esprit Créateur 

About: L'Esprit Créateur is an academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Poetry & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 0014-0767. Over the lifetime, 1455 publications have been published receiving 3059 citations. The journal is also known as: Esprit Createur & L'Esprit créateur.

"Un honneste passetems": Strategies of Legitimation in French Renaissance Women's Prefaces

Abstract: I N THE INTRODUCTION to her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination, Barbara Johnson states that the preface as genre is “ a metalinguistic moment of self-reflection.. . . Situated both inside and outside, both before and after the ‘book’ whose ‘book-ness’ it promotes and transgresses, the preface has always inscribed itself in a strange warp of time and space.” 1 This study explores, in the form of an overview, the self-reflection occurring in prefaces of publications by several French Renaissance women writers. How do these writers reveal, by means of the preface, the circumstances of their writing? What prefatory strategies do they use in their deployment of the classical exordial tradition? And, in what way does their use of the preface differ from that of contempo­ rary male writers?

The Second Time Around

Abstract: PYRRHUS'S STATEMENT IN THE FOURTH ACT of Andromaque, wherein he agrees (at least with himself) to forget a disturbing past, is the point of departure for an analysis of the attempted suppression of memory, an effort that leads, in ostensibly paradoxical fashion, to the exact opposite result: a wholesale replication of the earlier scarring, traumatic moment. My focus is therefore on the concept of antériorité, as it structures and controls Racinian theater.

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: Eluding the Frames

Abstract: IN THE FOURTH AND FINAL VOLUME of Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical comic book Persepolis, the author recounts the difficult process of gaining admission to art school in Teheran in 1989 at the age of twenty.1 Along with a written examination in Persian, a language that she has not studied during four years spent in Austria, she has to pass a drawing test. Certain that one of the subjects will be “Les Martyrs,” she practises copying a photograph of Michelangelo’s Pietà, kitting Mary out in a tchador and Christ in a military uniform (Figure 1). The subject does indeed come up. Marjane2 executes her drawing and two weeks later is thrilled to discover that she has passed. This incident is significant in its impact on the life of Satrapi the future artist, but the large (over half-page-sized) panel in which she narrates it has further significance through its play upon symbolic representations of national and gendered identity. Michelangelo’s masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture is, of course, considered to be a work of genius within art-historical discourse. This is a discourse, though, that began to be challenged by feminists in the latter part of the twentieth century. Griselda Pollock points to the “false universalization of a positivist Eurocentric, masculine and often Christian subject position which mistakes itself for humanity in general.”3 The Pietà, whose sublime beauty calls forth a powerful aesthetic-emotional response in spectators, offers a particularly effective example of the capacity of Western art to naturalize and render highly tenacious a set of meanings around the sign “woman,” in this case selfless, tragic motherhood. As Satrapi transforms Mary into an icon of selfless, tragic, Iranian motherhood, and transmutes the monumentality of the marble into a black-andwhite line drawing, she represents her own hand holding the pencil very prominently in the foreground of the panel. The strategic reappropriation of this canonical work of European masculinist high culture by an Iranian woman comics artist, affirmed through this meta-representative element, destabilizes the very symbols that it mobilises, demonstrating the provisional nature of the signifying systems that maintain gender hierarchies in place. The panel may in fact be read as a mise en abyme of Satrapi’s endeavour, through art, to regain agency and position herself vis-à-vis dominant discourses of both Western and Iranian culture.