Dante’s early 14th-century epic poem the Commedia (Divine Comedy) and Marcel Proust’s early 20th-century novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past) are both first-person narratives of literary vocation.1 The parallel was first drawn in the 1950s by the philologist Gianfranco Contini, according to whom Proust’s novel was built upon a question which was extremely pertinent to Dante studies: what is the relationship between the author and the protagonist?2 The Commedia tells the story of the otherworldly journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven of the poet Dante Alighieri, who is identified as the author of the poem. Through extradiegetic interventions, the Commedia also tells the story of its own writing. The highly individualized nature of the poem, with a protagonist who is its author and characters who are unique historicized individuals, led Erich Auerbach to describe Dante as “the first to configure [...] man [...] not as an abstract or anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man as we know him in his living historical reality, the concrete individual in his unity and wholeness” (Dante: Poet of the secular world 174–75).3 More recently, Dante’s literary self-awareness has led Albert

Le pacte autobiographique

Reading in Dante and Proust

Cultural adaptations have existed for a long time (Hutcheon & O’Flynn 2013). This article discusses adaptation from one narrative genre, the textual néo-polar crime novel, to another, multimodal comics. It explores three of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s néo-polars that have been adapted by Jacques Tardi to three graphic novels: Ô dingos, ô châteaux! (Folle à tuer), Le petit bleu de la côte Ouest and La position du tireur couché. The analysis suggests that Tardi remains attached to the fidelity paradigm while he also exploits characteristic features of comics, and his own personal style. While Tardi seemingly wishes to be respectful to his former friend Manchette’s novels, he creates adaptations that can be read without prior knowledge of the adapted works and which function as independent graphic novels in a recognizable Tardian style.

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The adaptation of three Manchette néo-polars to Machette-Tardi’s graphic novels

/pdf/how-to-read-autofiction-36oz6h8ifx.pdf

How to Read Autofiction

Following the Second World War Francis Poulenc took a keen interest in the music of the French avant-garde and was compelled to react in both his music and his writings to the aesthetic and technical experiments of the younger generation. Although the music of composers like Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez did not elicit a profound change on the substance of Poulenc’s compositional language, he did grow to the realization that the style he had embraced during the interwar period—one generally described as light-hearted and ironic—had become largely out of sync with new critical trends and concerns. Poulenc’s self-conscious aim to assert a personal form of “seriousness” in his works—one constructed with recourse to religiosity, stylistic homogeneity and the ostensibly concomitant values of sincerity and authenticity—formed the backbone of a new tone and persona that emerged following the war and which inflected his entire body of work up to his death in 1963. Poulenc’s desire to reinvent himself during this period forces us to re-examine his works, writings, and elements of his biography for the way in which they were constructed as a means of facilitating the discursive emergence of this new, more “serious,” persona.

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Constructing the Monk: Francis Poulenc and the Post-War Context

This article examines how Karl Ove Knausgard's My Struggle intertwines with contemporary developments in media and technologies of self-representation and - expression. First, I situate this series within the generic frame of 'autofiction' and explain the rationale behind this categorization. Then I outline developments that have led to an increasing emphasis on scale and quantification in Western culture: the emergence of big data, the accompanying mindset of 'datafication,' and 'quantified self-movement,' and the shift from narrative to database. I argue that these together amount to a shift to more inclusive scope in literature. I propose that My Struggle subverts the binary between narrative and database, and single out three devices through which this is done: interminable narration, lists, and the anaphoric singulative frequency. On the basis of these, I pose that My Struggle adopts an aesthetics of scale: a quantitative mode of narration in which causality and closure make way for seriality and accumulation. The second part of the article considers important media-specific differences between these works and self-representation through digital media. It examines how Knausgard's literature promotes an awareness of writing as a digressive and regressive mode of recording characterized by delay and poses an alternative to ideals of instantaneity and immediacy underlying trends of quantified self and big data. I conclude that contemporary autofictional narratives harbor a potential of provocation and a promise of pleasure and reflection in societies that privilege speed and immediacy. Thus, the article offers new insights in how book-bound literary narratives undergo transformations under the influence of digitalization.

“The Monumental Knausgård. Big Data, Quantified Self and Proust for the Facebook Generation.”

American magazine of international literature and culture

Le pacte autobiographique

Citations

Reading in Dante and Proust

The adaptation of three Manchette néo-polars to Machette-Tardi’s graphic novels

How to Read Autofiction

Constructing the Monk: Francis Poulenc and the Post-War Context

“The Monumental Knausgård. Big Data, Quantified Self and Proust for the Facebook Generation.”

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