Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2010"

Alien autographs: how translators make their marks

Abstract: Like other forms of treachery, translation can be either concealed or exposed. Though most literary translators work in the dark and some embrace invisibility as an ideal, all translations can be situated along the continuum of illusionist-anti-illusionist or domesticating-foreignizing. A variety of paratexts lay bare the devices of translation. The zero degree of translational invisibility occurs in utilitarian prose that is designed simply to convey information. But the minimal way for a book to make translation visible is to identify the name of the translator, on the title page if not on the cover and spine. A long tradition of translator’s prefaces further undercuts the illusion of unmediated contact with a pure, primal text. So, too, do the memoirs of translators. Second-degree translations can both display and conceal the derivative nature of the final text. If there are reasons—such as vanity or commerce—to disguise a text’s origins in translation, there are also reasons for pseudo-translations, texts that falsely claim to be translations. More than just an appendix to an Englishing of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is a poet’s tribute to the power of translation.

Foucault framing Foucault: the role of paratexts in the English translation of The Order of Things

Abstract: Paratexts, especially forewords, have an unenviable task of introducing the text to follow to the readers but doing so without closing off meanings or containing the text in a limiting paradigm, preventing the readers from reaching new/alternative readings. This task is especially problematic in the case of thinkers like Foucault who was keenly aware of the disciplining, if not punishing, features of established genres and the inevitable struggles over power/knowledge they create. It is therefore especially interesting to analyze how Foucault himself deals with the need to define his own volatile ideas, for a translated edition of his work. The present paper seeks to compare the two paratexts, foreword to the English translation and attached to the English translation of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. The analysis will, first, look at the discursive features of the two texts, analyzing how the specific choices made in the paratexts define, frame and contain the work that follows. The analysis will be placed in a Foucauldian frame, comparing the discourses employed in the paratexts to the orders of discourse as defined by Foucault, primarily the author-function and the contradictory role of the commentary.

The (meta)narrative paratext: coda as a cunning fictional device

Abstract: Our study draws on the array of functions assigned to the textual Coda in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, also turned into a successful movie It follows two diverging narrative discourses—the Text and its Paratext—that overtly compete over the understanding of the story and over its reading transaction In McEwan’s novel, the closing Paratext provides genre patterns and alternative reading strategies to the Text Turning back upon the story itself and upon its process of writing, its understanding and its genre expectations in a particular cultural context, Coda is being assigned by the British novelist an overt meta-narrative task

Perpetually Beginning Until the End of the Fair: The paratextual poetics of serialised novels

Abstract: Gerard Genette’s study of paratext, a primarily synchronic and taxonomic approach, is predicated upon the assumption that there is a neat border between what we can classify as text and the elements we can group together under the heading of paratext. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the relationship between these two elements is more complicated than Genette suggests. Not only is the term paratext itself saddled with a potentially limitless number of elements, but the way that these elements interact with texts cannot be reduced to a uniform border that applies in all cases. Can we continue to talk about paratext once we have acknowledged its potentially limitless proliferation and the fuzzy border it shares with text; and if so, how does this affect the way we talk about text? This paper will suggest that to answer these questions we should refocus the concept of paratext from a synchronic to a diachronic approach. Such an approach, moving away from a pure taxonomy of spatially oriented categories, enables us to examine the way that literary works are represented over time. By focusing on Victorian serialised fiction, a form of the novel preoccupied with the temporal framework of its own production, it is possible to explore the complex relationship between text and paratext. At the same time, by examining this relationship in the context of different ideas of duration, such as the notions of kairos and chronos used by Frank Kermode, this paper will suggest a theoretical framework for relating an understanding of text and paratext to the figure of the author.

This is all but a book: musicalized paratextuality in literature

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to assess modes and functions of paratexts drawing on music. The article examines paratextuality in relation to the phenomenon of intermediality, and more precisely the concept of musicalization of fiction. By analyzing paratexts taken from twentieth-century and contemporary novels, it argues that musicalized paratexts have specific implications, both in terms of their characteristics and interpretation.

Self-translation/rewriting: the female body in Eileen Chang’s “Jinsuo ji”, the Rouge of the North, Yuannü and “the Golden Cangue”

Abstract: This paper studies the legendary modern Chinese writer Eileen Chang’s (1920–1995) “Jinsuo ji” (1943) and her three rewritings/translations of it into The Rouge of the North (1967), Yuannu (1966), and “The Golden Cangue” (1971). I argue that “Jinsuo ji” and its revisions/translations exemplify a state of in-betweenness, wherein Chang both elaborates upon and even undermines the representations of the female body depicted in earlier versions. The female body, as constructed in these four versions of the story, illustrates at once an imprisonment by and a resistance to Chinese and Western aesthetic ideals. In what follows, I will investigate the multiple revisions and translations of this tale, the changes of title and focus, the beginnings and the endings, and the revisions of the representations of the female body, as well as offering possible reasons for their transformation and the significance of them.

Reinventing the “Red Classics” in the age of globalization

Abstract: The resurgence of revolutionary literature or Red Classics at the turn of the century is indicative of the cultural logic of the revolutionary hegemony during Mao and post-Mao China. Revolutionary hegemony served quite effectively to legitimate Mao Zedong’s, and much of Deng Xiaoping’s reign, but it has become increasingly difficult to sustain its viability and efficacy. From the beginning of the new century, both the state and consumer popular culture sectors have pushed for a Red Classic resurgence. While the ideological content and styles of the Red Classics are apparently incommensurable to China’s social reality today, their current popularity suggests a success in capturing or eliciting emotional responses from the audience primarily derived from their lived and felt experience during the Mao era. For the state, the Red Classics and the entire revolutionary legacy can now exist only as mummies of history, serving as a nationalist, “patriotic” narrative of the recent past. Meanwhile, the Red Classics is reinvented as nostalgia, a commodity in China’s cultural market. The paper examines the genealogy and current reinvention of the Red Classics, in order to shed some light on China’s post-revolutionary cultural politics.

Towards a taxonomy of the preface in English, French, and German

Abstract: In his article “Towards a Taxonomy of the Preface in English, French, and German” Steven Totosy de Zepetnek asks whether the preface can be considered a genre in its own right and presents a selected taxonomy of this text type in English-, French-, and German-language scholarship. In prefatorial taxonomy in the languages at hand, some terms were more frequently used at a particular time, while some were used more specifically than others. In the nineteenth century, but also at present, in both English and French it is the term “preface” or “preface,” which best expresses and is most used for this type of text. In German the most often used term is “Vorwort,” whose meaning is analogous to “preface” and “preface” (it should be noted here that German-language scholarship in particular has contributed much to the study of the preface; also, the volume of German-language prefatory taxonomy is significant). Based on selected texts on the preface and their taxonomies suggest that the preface is a genre in its own right.

How to do things with mottoes: recipes from the romantic era (with special reference to Stendhal)

Abstract: This article investigates the textual embedding of epigraphs in the first decades of the nineteenth century. While it had long been customary to use a Latin or Greek quote on title pages, many British and French Romantics went further, placing one or several mottoes at the beginning of each chapter or poem. From an intertextual perspective, these quotes are indexical traces of absent texts. The paratextual dialogue, this article’s main focus, rather involves equally present elements (motto and title, motto and chapter, motto and motto). As a form of commentary, epigraphs shed light on the text they accompany, thus operating in a convergent manner, but their divergent potential should not be underestimated: instead of helping us plod through the plot, mottoes can lead us astray, much like unreliable narrators. Taken as a whole, they form a parallel text, an alternative narrative, where writers sometimes allow themselves to develop a different, paradoxical, poetics. The above-mentioned issues are illustrated with examples from Stendhal, whose Red and Black, arguably the most playful and ironic example of “motto-mania” in French Romantic literature, is reread in light of Roland Barthes’ S/Z.

Distance and proximity

Abstract: In order for the value structure of a given culture to be established, a number of its constituents have to be pushed beyond its boundary by shaping an abhorring figure of its Other. The exteriorization of such a figure is a necessary operation of any identity formation. According to Foucault, this entails a steady re-introduction of the delimited exterior into each interior instance of established identity. Not one of the identified instances remains ultimately spared of the rift caused by the necessity of founding elimination, although each of them tries to relegate it into oblivion. Foucault′s ethics resists such oblivion insisting upon the non-relation to alterity as the condition of possibility of relation to other human beings. The paper follows the further development of this ethics in the work of Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben. All of them highlight the constitutive priority of distance over proximity advocating therefore an eternal deferral of all established identities. In the conclusion an attempt is made to trace the genealogy of this ethical stance.

Decolonizing paratexts: re-presenting Haitian literature in English translations

Abstract: This article analyses the roles of paratexts in the translations of several Haitian novels as a basis for re-visioning the paratext in my own translation of Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s novel Les Rapaces (1986). I suggest that paratexts often play a colonizing role in relation to the texts they present through the generalized assumption that the purpose of paratexts is to facilitate access to a foreign language and culture. By examining the functioning of paratexts in several previous translations of Haitian literature, I reveal the colonizing effect of conventional paratexts, and begin to imagine a decolonized paratext for The Raptors. I propose that a more critical role for the paratext of a translation is to draw attention to the translated nature of the text, the resistance and opacity of its linguistic and cultural differences, and the process of negotiation, exchange, and travel on which the translation depends. This strategy is in line with a feminist critique of the limited repertoires for relating to difference offered by masculine epistemologies and promotes an activist feminist agenda through literary re-presentation.

Parody and Paratext in J.J. Grandville’s Un autre monde (1844)

Abstract: J.J. Grandville’s Un autre monde (1844) is a parody of nineteenth-century utopianism. One of the themes that the artist and his anonymous collaborator (the author Taxile Delord) are interested in exploring is the way in which the public’s desire to contemplate and, indeed, to possess visions of alternative modes of existence had led to the commodification of utopianism in their day. In the book, the artists’ use of parody shows how the products of the imagination occasion a series of derivatives not unlike––and often rigorously identical to––the paratext. I will argue that these paratextual elements are places where the text’s discourse is transformed and assigned a “use value.” But how, exactly, does Grandville use parody to reveal––and to undermine––this derivative function of the para- and the meta-textual? And what can this tell us about the proliferation of paratextual hermeneutics in our day?

Faust made in China: Meng Jinghui and Shen Lin’s irreverent socio-cultural deconstruction of Goethe’s iconic masterpiece

Abstract: China’s unparalleled economic rise in the past 30 years and the blistering social transformation associated with it has generated immense interest globally in China as a nation. Regrettably, Western interest is still extremely narrow and restricted to statistical economic data and the belief that social change in China and modernisation is driven exclusively by the forces of globalisation, that is, economic forces, is widespread and little attention is given outside of specialist circles to the new robust intellectual and artistic-creative energies underlying China’s transformation and self-invention since 1978, identified by Deng Xiaoping as absolutely essential for China’s modernisation program. Bootleg Faust (Daoban Fushide, written by Shen Lin of the Central Academy of Drama, 1999), the ambitious staging of the translation-adaptation-deconstruction of the German classic by Meng Jinghui, China’s leading experimental theatre director on January 1, 2000 to welcome the New Millennium (and to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth) is a remarkable artistic achievement. The very fact that Goethe’s FaustOne and Two, completed in 1832, and rarely performed in its totality in German-speaking countries, can be staged in Chinese adaptation for weeks, and to full houses in Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese provincial centres and overseas is proof that the Luhanite vision of a global village is no longer virtual, but real, just as real as Meng Jinghui and Shen Lin’s theatrical professionalism and genius to give Goethe’s signature work relevance in twenty-first century China. Some of the salient aspects of this theatrical achievement and the socio-cultural significance of Meng and Shen’s irreverent artistic endeavour of deconstructing Goethe’s Faust will be explored in this paper.

Paratexts as Praxis

Abstract: Our essay charts out the pedagogical, technological, operational, institutional, commercial, and theoretical implications of moving from a print-based casebook paradigm to an electronic course book model. Central to this venture is what we call the Conceptions Course Book (CCB), the law school course book of the future. That e-book is, as we discuss, the end product of an entirely new and sophisticated process of creating and distributing materials (textual, audio-visual, and interactive) to be used in law school courses. This process allows professors to develop (in an I-Tunes-like manner) their own custom-designed course books in efficient, economical, and innovative ways best suited to their pedagogical concerns. Unlike proposals for computer-based e-books, our CCB would be designed to take advantage of the unique opportunities offered by more advanced versions of e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, or Apple’s I-Pad.

I margini dell’opera nei libri di poesia: Strategie e convenzioni dedicatorie nel Petrarchismo italiano

Abstract: Legato a un progetto di ricerca sulle dediche a stampa nella tradizione italiana attivo presso l’Istituto di Italianistica di Basilea (www.margini.unibas.ch), questo intervento si applica alle dediche dei libri di poesia nel Petrarchismo italiano, esaminate su un campionario di opere di diversa provenienza e stampate nei principali centri tipografici della penisola. Queste scritture liminari, ancora poco indagate nonostante il crescente interesse degli ultimi anni, forniscono indicazioni rilevanti sull’opera e sulla sofisticata interazione tra le sue diverse parti. In precario equilibrio tra scritto pubblico e confessione privata, si configurano come testi nel senso piu forte del termine: da recuperare alla tradizione letteraria e da studiare nella loro codificata e pur variabile tipologia. Il Cinquecento appare un momento di particolare interesse per una ricerca su questo genere testuale, strettamente implicato, sia con la struttura dell’opera sia con la confezione materiale del manufatto librario.

Rethinking modern Chinese fiction in a global context

Abstract: Modern Chinese literature is most open in the history of Chinese literature, with various Western literary currents and cultural trends flooding into China. As the most important and popular genre in Chinese literature, modern Chinese novel has been developing under the Western influence, and it has played a vital role in flourishing modern Chinese literature and enlightening modern Chinese intellectuals and the broad reading public. To the author, toward the end of the nineteenth century, Chinese literature was almost “marginalized”. In order to resume its lost grandeur it moved from periphery to centre by identifying itself with Western cultural modernity or modern Western literature. To realize this grand and ambitious aim, translating novel became an important task. In dealing with the Western influence, the author also reperiodizes twentieth-century Chinese literature: modern literature started with the May 4th Movement in 1919 and ended in 1976; since 1976, Chinese literature has been in the contemporary era, which is characterized by more postmodern than modern. In this global context, Chinese fiction writing has become part of world literature and been developing in a pluralistic direction.

Espionage as a strategy of literary and cultural politics

Abstract: A nation-state is constructed on the imagined unity of race, nation, and citizenship. Ideally, one is a subject of a certain state where he/she belongs to the one and the same race, which shares the same culture and speaks the same language (as a mother-tongue). The imaginary nature of such a unity has been powerfully demonstrated in the recent critical theory with such key concepts as hybridity, diaspora, linguistic pluralities, (language as) translation, etc. This paper is yet another attempt at deconstructing the myth of a nation-state by exploring the critical significance of ‘‘espionage.’’ It is here mostly conceived as a literary/ textual construct, but not as a historical fact. This is not to say that I am concerned only in fiction, and not in history, if recent narratologists are correct in assuming that history itself is a form of narrative. In that sense I will take ‘‘espionage’’ as largely a literary, cultural, and historical phenomenon. I will be treating several rather unrelated episodes from both ‘‘real’’ history and literary works. The emphasis is not so much on the biographical connection as on the thematic coherence except that all of the episodes have to do with the imagined trinity of nationalism. The first one took place on an American street in the beginning of the twentieth century. Okakura Tenshin, the most influential art historian of modern Japan was once walking in Boston with his Japanese colleagues when he was accosted by an American. The latter asked them, ‘‘What sort of ‘nese are you people? Are you Chinese, or Japanese, or Javanese?’’ The art historian answered in perfectly fluent English, ‘‘We are Japanese gentlemen. But what kind of ‘key are you? Are you a Yankee, or a donkey, or a monkey?’’ (Saito 2000, p. 39). The author, from whose book I quote this well-known episode, describes the question of the American as ‘‘insulting and prejudiced toward Asia.’’ Now, what makes his question ‘‘insulting’’?

Nanook of the North (1922) – Zur Rolle paratextueller Elemente für das Verständnis des Films

Abstract: Robert Flahertys Nanook of the North (1922) – wahrscheinlich einer der bekanntesten Filme der Stummfilmzeit – wird in der Filmgeschichtsschreibung haufig als erster abendfullender Dokumentarfilm, erster ethnografischer Film oder erster Kunstfilm charakterisiert. In diesem Beitrag soll es jedoch nicht um die Frage gehen, inwieweit es sich bei Nanook um einen Dokumentarfilm handelt oder nicht. Vielmehr sollen die unterschiedlichen Versionen und Ausgaben des Films im Vordergrund des Interesses stehen. Gezeigt werden soll, wie einige der paratextuellen Elemente – vor allem die unterschiedlichen Vorworter – sich von Ausgabe zu Ausgabe verandern und welchen Einfluss diese auf die Rezeption des Films haben.

The writer as a historical figure of modern China: Ye Zhaoyan’s passionate memory and fictional history

Abstract: This article examines the writings of Ye Zhaoyan, one of the most important contemporary Chinese writes. As the grandson of Ye Shengtao, a leading May Fourth writer, Ye Zhaoyan always feels responsible for connecting the contemporary with the early Republican period. The ways in which he makes the connection are interesting: he disguises under his popular appeals serious and critical reflections upon the relationship between history, memory, and love. I highlight Ye’s active remembrance of what has been repressed by the grand history, his constant examination of the writing of history through creating the writer as a historical figure of modern China, and his embedment of historical experience in the everyday.

Why we need binarism to go beyond it

Abstract: In answer to the criticism of binary distinctions of the last decades, my theoretical argument in this paper is that on the cognitive level we are strongly in need of binarism. In my approach binarism is not identical with ontological dualism. It pertains to world orientation, because without the cognitive tools of differentiation life would be characterized by entropy. In order to define their place in the world individuals are in continuous search for identity and difference. A following step is to be vigilant from an ethical perspective not to grant a one-sided value to one of the binary concepts at the expense of the other. It is the concern of cultural stereotyping which has elicited the criticism of binary distinctions. However, ethical commitment cannot do without the tools of cognition. Coming to literature, I discuss the binary terms of (historical) fact and fiction. Analyzing Romain Gary’s La Danse de Gengis Cohn, a satirical Holocaust novel, I want to demonstrate that it is the tension between fact and fiction that allows for ambiguity and irony, intellectual strategies that go beyond binarism while accepting it as an indispensible cognitive tool.

Paratesto e narratività in antropologia: il prologue a Non-lieux di Augé

Abstract: Attraverso una disamina dell’introduzione a Nonluoghi di Marc Auge, scritta dall’autore per il suo lavoro sull’antropologia della contemporaneita, questo studio esplora le modalita secondo cui si creano, nei suoi testi, ‘effetti di letterarieta’ pregnanti sia per le strategie narrative utilizzate, sia per i risvolti teorici in antropologia. La tesi che viene sostenuta e che, gia nelle prefazioni dei testi di Auge, l’invenzione di ‘storie dei tempi moderni’ diventa un mezzo per riflettere criticamente su alcuni fenomeni tipici della nostra epoca, quali le nuove formazioni spaziali, il senso della memoria e della storia, le conseguenze delle nuove tecnologie e le relative forme di ritualita. Teoria della cultura e strategie narrative costruiscono insieme, nel caso di Auge, un tipo di testo che ostenta effetti letterari il cui valore dipende da intenti memorialistici, autoriflessivi ed estetici che si mischiano e si sovrappongono per consentirgli di avanzare una critica della surmodernita. L’analisi del prologue a Nonluoghi permette di riflettere sull’antropologia in quanto testo e di rivelare le dinamiche attraverso cui un autore costruisce, implicitamente o esplicitamente, lo stesso impianto teorico, le strategie narrative e i principi letterari cui affida il senso del suo lavoro.

Could you be more specific, please?

Abstract: The notion of ambiguity raises questions about the nature of texts and the limits of interpretation. Both of these questions were addressed extensively by the theorists of reading and by the deconstructionists and their critics. It seems however that some of the political aspects of the academic praxis of disambiguation remain to be explored. Textual ambiguity and the possibility of disambiguation raises questions that go beyond the cognitive mechanics of reading, to include the politics of interpretation and the teaching of reading. This paper explores some of the problems raised when the scholar recognizes that ambiguity is an essential and inevitable part of texts and reading. Techniques of disambiguation rely on the agency of an individual reader, whether this is a real person or a theoretical construct. The reduction of a text’s ambiguity, we argue, necessarily increases the ambiguity of this agent’s own position. The process of disambiguation, when accomplished for someone else, as is the case with when an academic reads as text for his or her students or readers can be seen as a way of transferring ambiguity from the text to the reader. As a reading gains in clarity, the position, motivations, idiosyncrasies of the reader introduce a new kind of ambiguity.

Meaning in literature

Abstract: The concept of meaning is often treated as if it were a unitary concept, also when it is used about literature. Yet literary meaning is not all of a kind, and hence one cannot generalize about its overall characteristics. What is commonly called meaning in literature comprises a number of separate phenomena. A simple distinction between linguistic meaning, applicatory meaning, and critical meaning is introduced with the help of a literary example, Edith Sodergran’s poem “My Childhood Trees” (“Min barndoms trad”, 1922). The dangers of treating literary meaning as a homogeneous phenomenon are then illustrated by considering the standpoints of two theorists: Jonathan Culler, who describes literary meaning as indeterminate, and Robert Stecker, who portrays it as determinate. In reality, linguistic meaning will have to be understood as being determinate, applicatory meaning as indeterminate, and critical meaning, existing in many varieties, as sometimes the one, sometimes the other. Problems analogous to those besetting the concept of meaning also arise in connection with the critical use of several other key literary-theoretical notions, such as “literature”, “text”, “form”, and “genre”.

Tropes of solitude and Lu Xun’s tragic characters

Abstract: Much ink has been spilled over how Lu Xun’s (1881–1936) political views inform his creative writing and how politics and literature are mutually implicated, but the aesthetics of his tragic narratives remains marginal in literary studies. Often lauded as the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun has not only made major contributions to the formation of literary realism but also put his unique vision of tragedy into practice. At the core of his tragic poems and narratives lie the tropes of solitude. The tragic is characterized, not by tragic incident, but by void thereof, by a state of speech-less solitude and nothingness (xuwu). The aesthetic implications of such a tragic vision are twofold. The creation and consumption of literature in China during the first half of the twentieth century focused on questions of the nation and society, but Lu Xun’s solitary characters in The Weeds ask fundamental existential questions while carving a space for a new genre of writing.

Le malentendu—Kundera et ses paratextes

Abstract: Milan Kundera a fait son entree sur la scene litteraire europeenne en chevauchant l’âne du malentendu. Le malentendu n’est pas seulement un theme fondamental dans son œuvre, il plane egalement sur la receptions de son œuvre a la fois en Republique Tcheque et a l’etranger. La publication en France et en Grande Bretagne de son premier roman, La plaisanterie (1967), coincida avec l’invasion russe de la Tchecoslovaquie. Les circonstances politiques, la preface redigee par Aragon pour l’edition francaise et les choix editoriaux fait par l’editeur britannique determinerent la reception de Kundera, en soulignant la nature politique du roman, en renforcant le stereotype d’un « auteur de l’Europe de l’est ». Depuis Kundera n’a cesse d’essayer de corriger cette image erronee, notamment dans ses paratextes. Paradoxalement les tentatives de s’expliquer ont eu pour effet de renforcer les prejuges : de nombreux critiques considerent que les interventions de Kundera constituent une violation de leurs droits de critique et q u’elles imposent une seule lecture correcte, a savoir celle homologuee par l’auteur. En analysant les relations complexes entre La plaisanterie, ses paratextes et sa reception, je montre que tel n’est pas le cas et que le malentendu qui entoure l’œuvre est un resultat quasi inevitable du fonctionnement du champ litteraire en Occident.

Realitätssystemisch einfache und komplexe Varianten der Spiel-im-Spiel-Struktur

Abstract: In Dramen, die eine Spiel-im-Spiel-Struktur realisieren, werden (mindestens) zwei Fiktionsebenen etabliert, die realitatssystemisch entweder klar getrennt sind (einfache Variante) oder interagieren (komplexe Variante). In letzterem Fall vollzieht sich eine realitatssystemische Autonomisierung des sekundaren Spiels.

The palimpsest of ruins: cultural memory, European literary intertext, and post-romanticism in Simon Jenko’s “Picture VII”

Abstract: In 1865 short poem ''Obraz VII'' (Picture VII) published by the Slovenian post- romantic poet Simon Jenko (1835-1869), paradigmatic figures of speech (exclamation, apostrophe, and rhetorical question) subvert the presence of the speaking persona and the subjectively modalized landscape (Stimmungslandschaft) that were characteristic of the obraz genre. Rhetoricity of the lyrical voice may be seen as the trace of the underlying traditional intertext of ruins stemming from the early modern topos, in which the image of demolished buildings is linked to the notion of vanitas vanitatum, i.e., to the idea of the elusiveness of being, society, and culture. Jenko's short poem is a variation within the vast and intermedial imaginary of ruins that has been central to the fashioning of European cultural identity (viewed as the presence of the past under permanent de- and recon- struction), especially since the eighteenth century. Compared to other variations of the ruin motif in romanticism (e.g., Byron, Uhland, Lenau, Mickiewicz, Pet} Jenko's ascetic, fragmented poem re-writes the topos differently, through semantic undecidability that comes close to the post-modern existential condition.

Paratexte et postulat autobiographique dans l’œuvre de Joris-Karl Huysmans

Abstract: La connexite discursive entre le narrateur et le heros huysmansien, ajoutee aux correspondances entre la vie de l’auteur et celle de ses personnages, ont oriente une partie de la critique a apprehender l’œuvre de Huysmans exclusivement en termes biographiques et theologiques Prenant acte de certaines donnees paratextuelles, la critique biographique explique l’œuvre par l’homme et l’homme par l’œuvre et etablit une logique d’identification toujours plus forte Pour certains critiques, Huysmans ecrirait dans le but de realiser une autoanalyse, une catharsis aptes a satisfaire sa quete d’identite Selon nous, une telle lecture dessert plus qu’elle ne sert la comprehension de l’œuvre et restreint dangereusement sa complexite Les partisans de la lecture autobiographique omettent en effet de confronter le paratexte aux differents textes et minimisent certains elements paratextuels qui restreignent la validite de leur demarche Bon nombre de donnees paratextuelles associees a une mise en contexte revelent en effet que l’œuvre de Huysmans n’est pas fondee sur une logique d’ecriture par identification mais par amplification Cette deformation du reel replace Huysmans dans l’ordre de la creation : l’ecriture « fictionnalise » et le paratexte permet de le revendiquer et de ne pas masquer le travail d’imagination