Showing papers in "Neohelicon in 2012"

Different times, different themes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: a diachronic critical discourse analysis of translator’s prefaces

Abstract: The present study pleads for the idea that translator prefaces offer concrete directions along which these texts can construct and contest authority, highlight cultural values and differences, underline self-identity, influence readers’ perception, and unveil related changes of a historical, social and political nature. In other words, prefaces offer a readily available and reliable source of research to bring ideology to the surface and to explore social and political conditions in a given society at a given time. This assumption yields the basic argument of critical discourse analysis that a text offers a mediated interpretation (or a variable version) of objective reality and changes in language use are linked to wider social and cultural processes in a dialogical relation. Concerning both internally and externally imposed pressure, the primary aim of this study is to analyze two prefaces written by two different translators of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the scandalous novel of D.H. Lawrence in Turkish, for its two translated versions published in 1942 and 1981, respectively. Trying to highlight the discourse-ideology relationship, we aimed to explore the social and cognitive factors determining the translators’ stance towards constructing the discourse in their prefaces as a manifestation of self-legitimization for the translation of a stigmatized novel, and also to indicate the diachronic shifts in two discourses in accordance with the changing sociocultural/political conditions in Turkey in the span of forty years. Accordingly, while the first preface published in 1942 was woven around legitimization of sexuality in the form of a public self-defence of a translator who had dared to translate Lady Chatterley’s Lover within the 40s of Turkey under the strict single-party regime, the second one is in the form of an exculpation of a stigmatized literary novel by highlighting its universal artistic value and by defocusing its sexually stigmatized nature within strongly liberalized post-military coup period.

Annexing the unread: a close reading of “distant reading”

Abstract: In contemporary debates about World literature, Franco Moretti’s method of enquiry called “distant reading” has attracted considerable attention. Many have hailed it as a genuine method, and many have criticized different aspects of it. This essay tries to provide a close analysis of distant reading, and points out a number of misconceptions in it. Starting by an overview of the current discussions regarding Moretti’s method, the essay makes a detailed scrutiny of some of its practical examples. After illustrating the main problem of his method, i.e. not differentiating between two different kinds of noncanonical literature, few methodological suggestions will be offered to help distant reading avoid the current problematic condition.

Rethinking the translator’s voice

Abstract: This paper presents an effort to clarify the conceptual confusion of the translator’s voice. Drawing on the theoretical integration of narratology/narrative theories and translation studies, it begins with a sketch of the conceptual development of the translator’s voice. Then, it proceeds to introduce the distinction between illocutionary intention and perlocutionary effect in speech act theory to rethink the vulnerabilities of conceptualization and identification of the translator’s voice. The major finding of the paper is that the significance of the translator’s voice has long been interpreted in a one-sided way. Tracing the translator’s voice is not only a way of perceiving the translator’s subjectivity, but also a perspective from which the implication of the interrelations between the translator’s use of language and the translator’s subject position for the target-reader may be better observed and understood.

Life writing as a slave in Turkish hands: Georgius of Hungary’s reflections about his existence in the Turkish world

Abstract: In Georgius of Hungary’s Tractatus (ca. 1480) we learn of a slave’s long-term experience in Turkey, reflected upon after his eventual escape. While Georgius provides extensive details about the culture and religion in the Ottoman Empire, he ultimately utilized his account to overcome the trauma that he had suffered when he was taken prisoner and made into a slave. The term ‘life-writing’ fits the Tractatus well because despite the brevity of the autobiographical references the author outlines to an impressive degree how much his later condemnation of Islam provided him with the necessary narrative framework to reconstitute his own identity as a Christian. Radical rejection thus becomes the epistemological tool for the rebuilding of the own self after slavery.

Poetry and narrative: an evolutionary perspective on the cognition of verbal art

Abstract: The study of the aesthetic genres reveals important design features of cognition, in how complex higher-order abilities are organized mentally. An evolutionary perspective frames this research in a way that considers the componential nature of language-related abilities in particular. In addition, it directs our attention to the important problem of understanding how different abilities are related. In this review of the research the focus will be on poetic and narrative abilities: (1) as they develop in children, (2) how the component sub-structures of poetry and narrative might be represented cognitively, and (3) how they may have emerged in early humans. Crucially, the analysis of component structures implies understanding how they interact in performance, and more interestingly how different abilities and faculties share competence modules and processing mechanisms in common. This approach helps put the discussion regarding the relative weight of domain-specific and domain-general structures into perspective, potentially reconciling some seemingly opposing viewpoints in evolutionary science and in the study of language development.

Writing in secret: kabbalistic language mysticism and messianic teleology in lettrism

Abstract: The article addresses the influence of Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and messianism in the avant-garde movement lettrism. The poetic experiments of Jewish avant-gardists were often influenced by Kabbalah and this study focuses on the theme of secrecy and its manifestations in writing. Lettrism adopts the elements of the so-called kabbalistic secret writing, which resembles written language but is fundamentally opaque. The secret thus hidden is at once linguistic and ontological. Therefore, the secret is here analysed both as a medial and an ontological opening, which dispel the dualisms recurring in rational modes of thinking. Hence, the secret appears as a manifestation of a cognitive void. Even though the secret cannot be known, it resides at the temporal limits of the phenomenal world and includes a teleological vector. This vector implies that the secret is entwined in a messianic promise according to which language will eventually signify and mediate meaning.

Ecological awareness in contemporary Chinese literature

Abstract: If perceived from a thematic perspective, Contemporary Chinese fiction harbors a variety of political dimensions. To subvert the conventions of socialist realism, many works in the 1980s joined to affirm the Party’s reform policies, but writers today seem to be keen on the status quo resulting from the economic reform. The fiction of the new century has fully recovered from the sentimental retrospection and naive, simplistic socialist realism in the decades following the end of the Cultural Revolution. The main characteristic of Chinese fiction in the twenty-first century is its sheer diversity featured by various thematic concerns. Examples of novels can be identified that address issues of globalization, hi-tech, urbanization, marketing economy, internet and poverty and their impact upon the lowly common Chinese such as the disadvantaged rural farmers. This turn to reality gives rise to a burgeoning ecological awareness in Chinese literature. Writers in the new century have diverged from the conventional way to sing along with or speak for the dominant ideology of the economic reform as many did during Deng Xiaoping’s time. They have shifted their attention to the shaded side of contemporary China, writing about the marginalized and reflecting on the social issues that accompany the existing social order. Efforts have been made to explore specific national and regional identities, displaying a reengagement with a realist tradition. It is argued that more and more Chinese, having felt distressed by increasing evidence of environmental deterioration, are now becoming conscious of environmental issues and speaking out about their concerns. This paper then attempts to examine how contemporary Chinese writers contemplate the consequences of China’s explosive capitalist growth and environmental issues in order to fashion their greening dimensions.

The original sin in Finnegans Wake

Abstract: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is mainly about indecent behavior H. C. Earwicker committed while drunk, which is usually believed parallel with Adam’s sin, original sin of human kind. However, the details and the nature of the misdemeanor, as well as words and stories hidden in the text, indicate that it parallels mostly to the “original” sin committed by Noah, instead of Adam. This difference shows that Joyce composes and interprets human history in a new way in Finnegans Wake. His history begins from Noah’s family and has a dense sexual undertone because of Noah’s sin. In this book, Joyce also tries to end the original sin and gives human being a rebirth, not a religionary one but a literary and allegorical one.

Exile and narration of self/communal in Syl Cheney-Coker’s Concerto for an Exile

Abstract: This essay discusses how exilic narration is used to explore personal and communal experience by Syl Cheney-Coker in Concerto for an Exile. It also focuses on how an autobiographer becomes a representative construct of a community in the process of telling personal tales as could be seen in the exposition of displacement orchestrated by colonial and postcolonial tendencies in Sierra-Leone. The poet juxtaposes the historical template of Sierra-Leone and his exilic experience to place on record the moral, cultural, political and economic consequences of colonial domination. The essay maintains that there is a noticeable symbiotic relationship between a writer and the site of his/her artistic production and that exilic narration privileges the autobiographical mode as it draws from personal experience to accentuate the collective interest of a community.

Poetics of infinite regress

Abstract: Within the tangled skein of Zola’s Nana, malady—metaphysical and metaphorical—yields but violated debris: a disassemblage of annexed marginalia, bits of flesh, disinherited, as it were, and subsisting in the absence of all signifying matter. So with discourse. It, likewise, transpires as a breed of involuted play, a repository of ill-defined wantingness, an interstice, an illusion, oxymoron, annulation, oneiric absence—until it slakes perniciously into silence. To the extent that readability (the infamous “lisible”) is constructed largely upon some brand of referential chain (even in its post-modern, intratextual demeanors), the disintegration of the novel’s nuclear substance un-does, in a very real sense, any brand of integrality. As the inexorable “virus” eviscerates and strips away the actrice, the theater, the stage, the visage of Venus, the play, the script, the auto-referentiality of narcissistic glances, the vituperative glare of those “perdu[s] derriere les jupes,” in sum, the very matter of the expose (enonce and enonciation), we, as readers, are extradited to the margins of discourse, left at an end, at the end with none but the somatic vestiges of Zola’s bloat queen, whose deleted marrow is the only marrow that there is, usurping the text and, ultimately, the contours of its own ravaged frame. Yet there lurks, all else effaced, this “monstre de l’Ecriture, lubrique, sentant la fauve”: Zola’s epithetic turn of phrase, the genitive pitting of beastliness and textliness, significantly repeals difference and proffers a conjunctive vision of word and world withered.

The posthumous legacy of Khlebnikov versus Mayakovsky sub specie Avant-Garde performance of scandal Debating the semiotic pragmatics of Avant-Garde behavior and life-creation

Abstract: The paper addresses the issue of the posthumous legacies of the two main Russian Avant-Garde revolutionary poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velemir Khlebnikov and draws largely on the memoir accounts available in this regard. The essay examines the pragmatics of operation of the post-Futurist public scandal which contributed to establishing/undermining the “symbolic value” of each poet’s debated legacy. The paper brings into discussion various methods of cultural analysis that include Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital, theory of speech-acts and different apprehensions of public memory. Some inconsistencies in the strategic maneuvering of each author are brought into attention, dwelling upon the possible reasoning for their respective successes and failures. The complex issues that may be seen responsible for this process are analyzed in the essay along with additional Russian avant-garde figures who exploited the same pragmatics of performing practices.

Ecological consciousness and human/nonhuman relationship in Edward Albee’s Seascape

Abstract: This paper investigates the ecological issues manifested in Edward Albee’s play Seascape (1975), in which he presents a direct contact of humans and nonhumans. The main discussion consists of three parts. The first part investigates how critics conventionally apply an anthropocentric analytic approach to dramatic studies and hence ignore the ecological concern implicit in the play. Instead, Seascape should be elaborated both as a challenge to and a destabilization of the patriarchal, dualistic, and hierarchal mode of perception in Western thought system. In addition, it calls for a reexploration of human/nonhuman/natural environment relationships in term of interconnectedness and mutual dependence. While it advocates embodied communication as an appropriate means of realizing human/nonhuman interconnection, the play corresponds to ecocritics’ claim that theatre can be an immediate, communal and material medium for provoking ecological consciousnesses.

Wagner or Beethoven

Abstract: The essay focuses on the role music played in Virginia Woolf’s life and writings. By relying on information gleaned from her diaries, correspondence, essays, and fiction, on Leonard Woolf’s autobiography and his reviews of gramophone recordings, as well as on the critical and autobiographical works of their contemporaries, the author gives a detailed analysis of Virginia Woolf’s musical background and education. He sees continuity between her early opera-going experiences and her later interest in the string quartets and piano sonatas of Beethoven, arguing that a major artist never forgets the inspiration of early, formative years. Furthermore, this essay addresses complex questions of whether and how a comparison of music and literature can lead to a better understanding of Virginia Woolf’s works.

La jonction de l’homme à la machine numérique. De nouveaux paradigmes pour l’humain

Abstract: Dans les romans La Fin des temps (1985) d’Haruki Murakami et La Cite des permutants (1994) de Greg Egan, il faut lire la jonction de l’homme a la machine numerique comme une figuration exemplaire des bouleversements anthropologiques que les nouvelles technologies, integrees a la diegese, engagent dans les representations litteraires de l’humain. En effet, posee dans un cadre scientifique et donc rationnel, qui ecarte d’emblee tout principe explicatif merveilleux ou fantastique, une telle jonction implique un repositionnement de l’etre humain au regard de la duplicite, desormais pensee entre deux mondes distincts – la sphere materielle et la sphere virtuelle –, et au regard de l’eternite, qui se construit comme un possible selon le rapport particulier du virtuel a la matiere. Ultimement, cette jonction de l’homme a la machine doit donc s’interpreter comme le dessin par le recit des nouvelles technologies d’une redefinition des horizons de l’humanite, qui la fait acceder a un au-dela d’elle-meme.

All aboard the U.S.S. New Zealand? Voyaging through the literary responses to the American 'occupation,' 1942-1944

Abstract: This article reviews and compares the literary fictions of the United States and New Zealand, as they have sought to respond to the ‘occupation,’ 1942–1944. During the period in question, approximately 100,000 United States Army and Marine Corps servicemen landed and resided in New Zealand, where they undertook final preparations for the island campaigns of the Pacific War. In the aftermath of the war, American fiction writers wrote of the social and cultural difficulties endured by New Zealand civilians, but New Zealand writers took longer to come to terms with the events.

From Perrault’s “Riquet à la Houppe” to Buero Vallejo’s Casi un cuento de hadas: The evolution of a formidable female voice

Abstract: This article discusses the female characters of Casi un cuento de hadas (Almost a Fairy Tale), a play written by twentieth-century Spanish dramatist Antonio Buero Vallejo. Based on Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale titled “Riquet a la Houppe” (“Ricky of the Tuft”), Buero’s play borrows from its literary forebear the latent voice of its female characters. The present study analyzes the role of women in the earlier work in order to demonstrate how their essence is resurrected and developed by Buero in Casi un cuento de hadas to represent a budding feminist voice. While neither Perrault nor Buero were ardent feminists, both imbue their female characters with a palpable strength that warrants attention. In Buero criticism, the women of Casi un cuento de hadas have largely been ignored and other female characters have been credited with being the prototypes for the strong women who appear later in Buero’s oeuvre. This article argues that the women of Casi un cuento de hadas are the true prototypes for Buero’s most formidable female characters; an intriguing assertion given that their voices originated in Perrault’s seventeenth-century text.

Begnadigung und Sendung in Dantes Commedia und Goethes Faust

Abstract: Der Vergleich der beiden Werke begann nach dem Erscheinen des Fragments in den 1790er Jahren. Nach kurzer kritikgeschichtlicher Durchsicht der ersten Jahrzehnte stellt die Studie die Charaktereigenschaften von Dante, der den gewohnlichen Weg der Begnadigung geht und die von dem doppelseeligen Faust vor dem „Offnen des Vorhangs“ dar. Im Falle vom letzteren erhielt das falsche Ich eine kontinuierliche ausere Unterstutzung vom bis zuletzt in seiner physischen Gestalt anwesenden Mephisto. Die edle Halfte seiner Seele blieb oft allein. Das eine Werk ist eine himmlische Vision, das andere ein irdisches Drama. Goethe beschaftigte sich seit 1824 in seinen Gesprachen und seiner Korrespondenz immer ofter mit Dante. Die Suche und der heroische Kampf gegen die Welt reichen fur die Seligkeit nach dem Urteil eines Gottes aus, der unsere Welt nicht „nur von ausen stiese“. „An der Stelle“ des Verlangens nach Vergebung, das auf den ersten Blick in Faust fehlt, steht sein individuelles, von Irrtumen belastetes Sendungsbewusstsein, das nichts anderes ist, als der Entschluss seines freien Willens, das Werk der Schopfung durchzusetzen. Im Subjekt gibt es keinen Gnadenmoment (wie bei Dante), dem die Handlung entspringen wurde, sondern der Prozess der Handlung selbst konnte vor dem Augenschein der Mater gloriosa zum Schlus gnadenwurdig werden. Diese Gnade ist eine Folge der Tat.

Les défis de la traduction de La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. en anglais et en polonais

Abstract: S’il a fait l’objet de nombreuses etudes critiques, le roman La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. a plus rarement attire l’attention des traductologues. Traduit pourtant en plus d’une vingtaine de langues dont l’anglais et le polonais, le roman de Catherine Millet pose nombre de defis aux traducteurs. Le premier de ces defis est stylistique : il consiste a apercevoir les strategies scenographiques de figuration de la sexualite au-dela de l’obscenite aveuglante du texte lui-meme. Le second de ces defis consiste a conserver la neutralite de ton de la narratrice, laquelle recourt tres souvent a une terminologie technique pour decrire ses pratiques sexuelles. Dans le cadre de cet article, nous verrons quelles solutions les traducteurs anglais et polonais de La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. ont propose pour faire face a ces deux defis. Nous serons egalement attentifs a la facon dont ils adaptent le texte a leurs contextes culturels respectifs.

Faust and Dante: knowledge and allegory

Abstract: Dante’s Commedia and Goethe’s Faust, two classics of World literature seem worlds apart. One is a medieval work with deep religious connotations and an obsolete poetics, while the other is a modern epic that deals with the predicament of the individual at the dawn of a new technological and capitalist era. Yet, these differences are essentially historical and do not affect the way in which both works communicate as poetic representations. At this level, in fact, they are very much comparable, as I will try to show. These two works have in common not only the fundamental theme of the “quest for knowledge”, but they also share what is necessarily and inevitably the representational mode of any great poetic work: the mode of allegory.

Valeurs écologistes et enjeux d’habitat chez Claudel

Abstract: L’interet de Claudel pour la preservation du monde naturel, qui s’exprime dans un texte intitule « Le Sauvetage d’un continent » (1937), s’inscrit dans un cadre plus vaste des reflexions sur des relations transnationales qui, a partir du sejour de Claudel a Washington, touchent non seulement la mediation culturelle mais aussi font preuve d’une prise de conscience grandissante des rapports de la nature et de l’humanite. Le texte de 1937 met bien en evidence des valeurs tendant au respect de la nature et a la protection de l’environnement. De meme, au cours de la decennie precedente, de differentes modalites d’interaction des humains avec leur habitat se percoivent dans des textes en prose — notamment dans « La Legende de Prâkriti » (1933), ou tout lieu d’habitation renvoie a l’œuvre du Createur— mais aussi dans la « Preface » a Quelques planches du bestiaire spirituel (1948), dans « Le jardin aride » (1934), ainsi que dans quelques poemes. S’agit-il d’une vision ecologiste ? Quelle ethique de la terre se construit, et quelle image de la vie quotidienne se tisse? Quelle en est la part de l’engagement theologique ? Cet article propose de dresser des rapports du lieu et des activites humaines sans pour autant les reduire a une figure de relations culturelles. Puis, devant l’ouverture a de multiples composantes d’un ecologisme, il met en exergue l’ecriture claudelienne comme acte eco-critique.

Les essais critiques de J.-K. Huysmans dans la presse du XIXe siècle

Abstract: Les articles critiques de Huysmans publies dans la presse du XIXe siecle sont divises en deux categories. Certains sont des fragments biographiques ou des portraits intimes. Ainsi les articles sur Leon Hennique paru dans Les Hommes d'aujourd'hui ou sur « Emile Zola et L'Assommoir » publie dans L'Artiste de Bruxelles sont des essais biographiques sur ces auteurs. Huysmans pratique, dans l'etude de ces ecrivains, une forme de critique qui rappelle la methode de Sainte-Beuve parce que les œuvres sont lues a la lumiere de l'homme. Les autres articles critiques s’interessent directement aux oeuvres. D’un cote, Huysmans analyse les composantes de l'espace, du caractere et du style, de l'autre il fait une reflexion sur l'art de la critique. Dans les articles sur A mi-cote de Jacques Esquirol ou sur Marcelle de Maurice du Seigneur, il etudie la construction du roman ou du poeme. Dans les articles relatifs aux textes critiques de Barbey d'Aurevilly et d’Emile Mâle, il redefinit l'art de la critique litteraire, en mettant l'accent sur la lecture impressionniste des oeuvres. L’approche critique de Huysmans est proche de celle de Baudelaire car elle se fonde sur une critique subjective faite par les artistes. Avant le Contre Sainte-Beuve de Proust, Huysmans annonce la fin de la critique biographique.

,,Mein eigen Selbst zu ihrem Selbst erweitern'' (Dante e Averroe `, Goethe e Hegel)

Abstract: L’autore, percorrendo diversi criteri che permettono di elaborare un’analisi comparata della Divina commedia e del Faust, adotta un approccio “strutturalista” secondo cui l’opera goethiana occupa, nel suo contesto storico e culturale, un posto analogo a quello che l’opera dantesca occupa nella propria epoca. Entrambe le opere racchiudono un contenuto intellettuale straordinariamente ricco, ricapitolando le idee fondamentali filosofiche, religiose e scientifiche del loro rispettivo periodo storico; idee che—proprio per l’intento di unficarle—molte volte si contraddicono. Nel saggio vengono confrontati l’”averroismo”, oppure l’aristotelismo radicale, di Dante e il presunto “hegelismo” di Goethe; due teorie che permettono, in modo analogo, di attribuire al genere umano il significato di una soggettivita collettiva che poi sara individualizzata nella figura dei due protagonisti: in quella di Faust e in quella di “Dante personaggio”. Si propone, infine, la tesi che l’integrazione di filosofie diverse in un unico quadro sia possibile soltanto sul piano estetico. Il compito da risolvere, con la Divina commedia e con il Faust, era proprio quello di creare, in forma estetica, l’unita delle tendenze spirituali che rappresentavano la totalita delle epoche dei nostri autori.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Absence et subterfuge modianesques

Abstract: La mise en spectacle de la fiction et de ses mecanismes aurait chez Modiano une fonction tant aporetique que determinante. En devoilant le processus scriptural, la thematisation du vide et les procedes de la reduplication servent a expliciter l’entreprise litteraire tout en faisant sentir la precarite qui la constitue. Suite d’evenements qui n’ont ni debut ni fin, actants qui n’existent qu’en assumant une autre identite (vivant leurs fantasmes a travers les etres du passe dont ils racontent/inventent le vecu), fragmentation du recit et aussi des personnages qu’on ne saisit que par bribes a des moments separes dans le temps et dans l’espace, lacunes narratives que le lecteur se doit de combler lui-meme tant bien que mal, l’ensemble de ces composantes de l’univers romanesque de Modiano fait invariablement echec a toute composition linearire et translucide refletant un ordre rassurant et connu. L’absence d’un metatexte (evident, palpable) qui aurait donne un sens au texte modianesque souligne l’aspect problematique non seulement de cette œuvre mais de toute entreprise litteraire moderne. Voila pourquoi Modiano fait de l’ellipse et du vide les paradigmes de la thematique et de la structuration de son ecriture.

The end of “re-colonization”: on Hong Kong, knowledge, and G.O.D

Abstract: Hong Kong studies often argue that 1997—a key moment of globalization—marked not re-unification and an end of colonialism but a “re-colonization” at the hands of Beijing. This essay refutes this claim on several grounds and situates it in the context of global knowledge production about China. When we interrogate the historiographic and cultural studies claims for a re-colonization we see that this is more often announced than substantiated. The claim is intellectually problematic on legal, historical and popular opinion grounds. It moreover indicates a continuing contradiction dating from the colonial/Cold War era in how knowledge about China, and China–Hong Kong is produced. Such work does not engage mainland perspectives but rather tends to “other” or orientalize the P.R.C. Globalization has not altered this academic/knowledge imbalance. But this may be changing in the commercial and popular realms. This essay’s final section analyzes the emergence of a Hong Kong–P.R.C. hybrid identity as seen in the design work of G.O.D, a local chain that sells home-goods, clothes, and the like with an avowed emphasis on both local and P.R.C. culture (e.g. Mao era things). All of this taken together suggests an end to the claim of re-colonization. Hong Kong has moved on and is now part of China’s globalization; the realm of knowledge production will, one should think, eventually catch up.

Letteratura degli esuli italiani a Malta durante il Risorgimento (1804–1849)

Abstract: Il risorgimento italiano ha influito molto sull'andamento della vita politica, sociale e culturale di Malta, isola vicinissima all'Italia anche culturalmente. Numerosi scrittori italiani, impegnati direttamente e in vari modi nella lotta per l'unificazione dell'Italia, hanno cercato e ottenuto rifugio nell'isola e dunque si sono trovati in grado di svolgere una vasta e intensa attivita politica. La loro formazione letteraria ha contribuito molto al loro successo di operatori politici.

Sensual women of Yoknapatawpha County: a Bakhtinian approach

Abstract: The aim of this essay is twofold. The first part of the essay discusses the Bakhtinian concept of the grotesque body and its possible connections to the expression of senses in the American South. The second part of the essay shows how the concepts of grotesque and senses have become the literature-generating principles in the American South. Their analysis in the essay relies upon the characters of Caddy and Quentin Compson, Eula Varner Snopes and Linda Snopes Kohl, and nameless mulattas in Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929), the Snopes trilogy (1940-1959), and Go Down, Moses (1942).

Apories plurilingues: consolider et développer avec la « minorité linguistique » ou de l’exclusion des langues nationales. Approche comparative à la lumière du monde germanophone

Abstract: Les parametres « langues », « culture » et « Nation » posent le debat sur la fonction de la langue dans un Etat ou une nation telle que nous la connaissons en Afrique. De l’avis du penseur allemand Ernst Moritz Arndt, le role de la langue dans la culture et la construction d’une nation est primordial. Le regain des politiques de langues dans les differents pays d’Afrique connu sous la designation « D’alphabetisation en langues nationales » traduit bien ce souci de cohesion. Particulierement dans ce siecle ou la globalisation est devenue plus qu’une realite, la question de l’identite prend tout son sens et parait au vu des interdependances presque anachroniques, voire depassee. Dans aucun autre pays le debat sur la nation et la langue ne s’est pose de facon aussi accrue qu’en Allemagne du XIXe siecle. En effet, chez beaucoup de philosophes allemands, le rapport entre la langue et la nation est essentielle et meme existentielle. La nation ne pouvait se concevoir qu’avec la langue nationale. Chez Herder, Fichte et Ernst Moritz Arndt ce debat constituera meme un debat de fond dans divers ecrits. Cet article se propose d’aborder la question linguistique en Afrique et son rapport intrinseque avec le developpement. Il s’agira de demontrer les apories d’un developpement par le sommet avec comme soubassement, l’exclusion factuelle des langues nationales, donc d’une grande frange de la population.

Words against words: poetic reflections and linguistic manipulation in Duoduo's poetry

Abstract: In Duoduo’s poetry since the mid-1980s there is a fundamental paradox which lies in the relation between the aim of his poetry, to which he refers as “Dao”, and his linguistic manipulation. For Duoduo, today’s culture is loaded with overdeveloped theories, and the creativity of poets is seriously undermined by “the invasion of knowledge”. So Duoduo employs meta-poems to express this understanding of language, knowledge, and poetry. His meta-poem often comprises not only an aesthetically constituted poem but also reflections on poetry, especially on its genesis and development in history and personal writing, as well as on how to read and interpret it. Duoduo also employs self-contradictory language to destroy the referentiality and logic of ordinary language. The language of Duoduo’s poems often incorporates great tension and drastic contradictions, which are reinforced by prosodic movements, hence it incorporates the quality of “gesture”. Duoduo’s challenge to normal modes of expressing meaning and representing experience, his pursuit of a new poetic world and linguistic paradigm are now more and more welcome by Chinese readers and younger poets.

Autre temps, autres mœurs : altérité et identité dans le Supplément au voyage de Bougainville

Abstract: Les questions de l’alterite et de l’identite servent a encadrer le discours critique dans le Supplement au voyage de Bougainville. Tentant de se moquer de certains preceptes de la societe europeenne, Diderot evoque chez le lecteur une prise de conscience culturelle qui, au debut du texte, signale la superiorite morale d’un « autre » culturel et intellectuel. On se proposera ici d’appliquer le concept de l’alterite, a savoir, de la « difference » ou de « l’etrangete » sur le plan formel et thematique pour mieux comprendre la strategie rhetorique et textuelle du philosophe. Du point de vue formel, le dialogue fournit un moyen interrogatif et dynamique de mettre a defi les notions du « moi » europeen, alors que la thematique du voyage sert de metaphore pour la decouverte de l’identite individuelle et collective. En approchant l’ouvrage par le biais de l’alterite, nous chercherons a appliquer diverses definitions de ce concept afin de mettre en lumiere les diverses interpretations du texte sur la nature humaine, la sexualite, et les femmes. Ce faisant, nous offrirons une lecture qui tient compte de la subtilite qu’emploie Diderot en illustrant les themes de la tolerance, de l’intolerance, et de l’oppression. Alors que le portrait du rapport Europeen/Tahitien repose sur une certaine finesse d’esprit, on remarque aussi que Diderot met en evidence chez les deux communautes une volonte de dominer l’autre. L’Europeen veut dominer par sa puissance economique et militaire, tandis que le Tahitien cherche a affirmer son pouvoir par la parole. Ce qui en resulte dans les deux cas est un triomphe de l’identite, mais aux depens d’une juste appreciation de l’alterite de l’autre.