Au Lecteur Research Articles

A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON THE MANIPULATION ON THE PREFACES IN TERMS OF PARATEXTS: THE FIRST FRENCH AND ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE HOLY QUR’AN

The manipulation in translation is a fact that can sometimes be seen through history. The statements such as, “All translations imply that the source text is manipulated in some way for a specific purpose”, and “Translation cannot be thought differently from ideology” are partly correct especially in the sacred texts, social media translations and translations related to politics because the translation of a sacred text related to a religion to which you are not connected is very difficult and it necessitates precision, and also the manipulation in translations of social media and political texts is a way sometimes used to manipulate. When the translations of the Qur’an examined, the strategies such as addition, omission, modulation are seen to be used very often. However,even though the manipulation is not usually deliberate, the using of prefaces is a way sometimes used to manipulate the readers. In the first Qur’an translation in French done by André du Ryer in 1647 and the first translation in English directly from the French version by du Ryer, it can be seen that the readers are manipulated through the section “Au lecteur” in French translation and “To the reader” in English version. In this study, the first French and English translations of the Qur’an will be examined with regards to the manipulation in the prefaces in terms of paratextes.

Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics by Maaheen Ahmed

Reviewed by: Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics by Maaheen Ahmed Alisia Chase (bio) Maaheen Ahmed, Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 235 pp, $30, $90. Maaheen Ahmed begins Monstrous Imaginaries: The Legacy of Romanticism in Comics with a quote from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleur des Mal: “Aux objets repugnants nous trouvons des appas . . .” (21). The line is from “Au Lecteur (To the Reader),” in which Baudelaire opines that humanity is compelled to seek out monstrous vices “. . . swayed / By noisome things and their repugnant spell.” In being lured by deviance, humankind steps ever downward, into hell. Ahmed mistakenly attributes the line to “Las Phares (The Beacons)” from the same collection, in which Baudelaire lionizes seven artists whose visions will be “re-echoed through a thousand megaphones” until eternity. But given that Francisco de Goya is one of the painters Baudelaire exalts, and that Ahmed posits comic monsters as remediations of Romantic tropes, her conflation of the two poems is fitting. One merely has to glance at the myriad choices in Netflix’s horror category to see that humankind’s obsession with repugnant monsters as mirrors for our depravities is alive and thriving. Ahmed structures her ambitious text into five chapters, bookended by an introduction and a conclusion. Her first chapter contextualizes the dominant features of the nineteenth-century European movement known as Romanticism, and outlines the major characteristics of the monstrous archetype that emerged from the art and literature of this period. Ahmed postulates that the Romantic monster foremost embodies an imperfect version of humanity. Due to its ambiguous and often terrifying form, the monster becomes a spectacle that generates both fear and fascination and, as such, is eventually exiled by mainstream society. In forced solitude, the monster undergoes an internalized quest, rebelling against said society once it recognizes why it has been rejected. Ahmed’s remaining chapters are devoted to singular examinations of the monstrous but sympathetic comic protagonists in whom this Romantic legacy lives on: Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, Monstre by Enki Bilal, Hellboy by Mike Mignola, and The Crow by James O’Barr. Her motivation for exploring this inheritance is well justified. As Ahmed asserts, the Romantic imaginary has been extensively researched in other disciplines but has not yet been explored in comics. Furthermore, little scholarly attention has been paid to the comics she analyzes here. Within each chapter, Ahmed deploys close textual analysis to great effect and illustrates how each comic manifests various facets of the Romantic imaginary. In the chapter devoted to Moore’s Swamp Thing, she makes connections between Goethe’s Faust, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Francisco de Goya’s demonic, disfigured forms. In the next, dedicated to Monstre, Ahmed finds echoes of Baudelaire’s ennui-laden modernity, interplay of opposites, and love of the counterpastoral. In chapter four, she shows how Mignola’s Hellboy intertextualizes Goya, Edgar Allan Poe, and the era’s dark nostalgia. Ahmed’s last analysis, of The Crow, explicates how O’Barr’s use of fragmentation and extreme emotionality resurrects the Romantic spirit, collaging the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, [End Page 361] the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, New Wave music, and postpunk aesthetics into one spectacular character. The most notorious and most remediated monster from the Romantic period is in-arguably the antagonist of Frankenstein. Accordingly, Ahmed demonstrates how Shelley’s creature lives on, both conceptually and aesthetically, in comic form. Frankenstein’s monster is the obvious model for Abigail’s father, Patchwork Man, in Swamp Thing and shares much with him in his solitude and sorrow at being perpetually misunderstood. But one of Ahmed’s more nuanced theorizations proposes that the formal qualities of Shelley’s composite monster are similar to the structure of comics. In the same way that Victor Frankenstein synthesizes his creature out of various cadavers—essentially “patchworking” multiple dead bodies into one new life-form (a form both fascinating and repulsive)—so, too, does a comic artist piece together a textual and visual narrative. Additionally, comics themselves are comprised of ostensibly disparate art forms: literature, drawing, printmaking, and graphic design. A skilled artist like O’Barr can fuse these incongruent pieces...

The Sympathizer: A Dialectical Reading

Viet thanh nguyen's award-winning novel, the sympathizer, interpellates an internal vietnamese reader alongside an american (or Anglo) reader through a dialectical appeal subsequently developed into a complex plot. The novel simultaneously demolishes the legitimacy of the American dream and that of the revolutionary communist one. Nguyen launches this two-sided attack with ironic digs whose target oscillates between Americans and Vietnamese. The critique begins lightheartedly when the Vietnamese-born, communist narrator concedes that the English of his American friend from the Central Intelligence Agency, Claude, is excellent—a point the narrator makes “only because the same could not be said” of Claude's fellow Americans (5). In the same disarming manner, he notes, “Even if” the narrator's Vietnamese compatriots “found themselves in Heaven,” they “would find occasion to remark that this was not as warm as Hell” (24). Then he turns back to “America,” which “would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam” (29). What quickly becomes evident is that the plot (and perhaps the point) is the narration. In an extraordinary formalist feat (or coincidence), the narrative illustrates the materialist dialectic as proposed by Marx and Engels (122-38). The narrator's confession, which frames the novel, becomes linked to his material reality in an extreme and vivid form when the narrator is imprisoned and consequently generates the narrative from the knowledge that his bruised body allows his mind to piece together. He incarnates, in his slippery and changeable identity, the essence of social reality: dynamism. This dynamism, as the subject (and hope) of Marx and Engels's theorization, illustrates through Nguyen's vertiginous plot the Marxian dialectic. The dialectic holds that opposites—as Hegel pointed out—inhere in one another and that the process of change occurs through transformation of quantity to quality. It also shows, dramatically, how the law of the negation of negation operates. These aspects of the dialectic are cleverly developed through a process that implicates the reader and is nothing short of brilliant, recalling the poem that opens Charles Baudelaire's collection Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”), at the end of which the poet addresses his reader as an “[h]ypocrite” (“hypocrite”) while also resembling him and being his “frère” (“brother”). Although Nguyen's narrator does not reach out to the reader in this type of direct address, he does establish complicity with the reader through the use of metaphor and revelations in the plot.

Poetry on Stage: Baudelaire's Theater Voices

Taking Barthes's concept of a Baudelairean "pre- theater" as its starting point, this article sets out to interrogate where Baudelaire's theater voices may be located, both in theory and in practice. It examines two specific examples of performed/staged readings of Baudelaire's poetry by two French actors (Pierre Blanchar and Fabrice Luchini). Through detailed analyses of "La Géante" and "Au lecteur," it sets out to explore Baudelaire's voices at variance and proxy voices which seem, perversely, to promote a work's longevity beyond the published page. It concludes by suggesting that Baudelaire embeds diverging, conflicting, and contaminating theater voices into his poetic language, and that this is what enables them to move beyond a private stage and onto a public one.

Poets as Readers in Nineteenth-Century France: Critical Reflections. Edited by Joseph Acquisto, Adrianna M. Paliyenko, and Catherine Witt

Long before Mme Rimbaud implored Georges Izambard not to let her son read anything more by Victor Hugo, there was great interest in what poets (and some future poets) read: for the potential influence of external reading on their own writing; for the presence in their poems of destinataires (ideal readers and others); and for the reverse-engineering of their understanding of the act of reading, rendered in new verses. Drawing on recent studies of literacy rates, readership trends, and book publishing, this volume’s twelve essays focus on individual case studies that illustrate many of the threads connecting poets to their readers. Whilst pushing beyond literary studies to consider the political, social, and cultural dimensions of poetic acts, this solid and coherent collection also offers a reminder of the breadth and evolution of French poetry from 1830 to 1900, its divergent approaches, and its cast of characters. If the usual suspects are certainly here — as Rosemary Lloyd’s opening essay demonstrates, it’s hard to imagine discussing nineteenth-century French poets as readers without Mallarmé taking centre stage — there are also important essays on less obvious writers, such as E. S. Burt’s insightful analysis of Nerval’s ‘Les Nuits d’Octobre’ and Aimée Boutin’s on Amable Tastu writing on (and reading) Shelley. Not surprisingly, Baudelaire also plays a pivotal role: as Timothy Raser deftly shows, he is one of the sources of three concurrent and related poems about Cythera; for Catherine Witt, he provides a fount of satire and critique in ‘Au lecteur’; Joseph Acquisto shows how his true colours come to light as Gautier describes them, albeit unwittingly and via Hawthorne; and Helen Abbott argues for a new appreciation of his work made possible by cross-aesthetic renderings. Poets whom we could call ‘Lecteurs maudits’ are here, too, explicated in strong analyses by Robert St. Clair (Rimbaud and Verlaine) and Nicolas Valazza (Verlaine and Coppée), before three unrelated but no less compelling chapters: by Adrianna M. Paliyenko on Malvina Blanchecotte and Louise Ackermann as poets, readers, and critics; by David Evans on the tensions between poetry’s rich oral/aural tradition and the increasing dominance of the printed word; and by Kevin Newmark on (Benjamin reading) Valéry reading Baudelaire (and Mallarmé). This volume raises fundamental questions about poetry as performance and as phenomenon, about the aesthetics of creation, and about the (real and perceived) relationships between writing and reading, poet and reader of poetry, and poetry’s aural traditions and its transposition into written form. Mme Rimbaud might have been right to try to keep dangerous texts out of young Arthur’s hands; readers of French poetry ever since have been grateful to Izambard for not heeding the request of a meddling parent. We owe just as much gratitude to this volume’s contributors for their thoughtful considerations of the complex relationship between reading and writing poetry, with all its perils and riches.

Randomness and Narrativity: A Cognitive Reassessment of Fortune and Nonsense in Montaigne's Essais

Randomness and NarrativityA Cognitive Reassessment of Fortune and Nonsense in Montaigne's Essais Jack I. Abecassis (bio) Vitam regit fortuna, non sapieta. Fortune governs life, not wisdom.1 When Montaigne visited Rome in 1580 he presented the first two books of the Essais to Roman censors for their seal of approval. Surprisingly, the censors' first and chief misgiving upon the second review of the Essais, the only misgiving that Montaigne actually mentions, and mentions twice in his Journal de voyage, pertained to the pervasiveness of the notion of fortune in the Essais (Journal de voyage 119 and 131).2 To the censors' mind, apparently, Montaigne's repeated ascription of fortune to inferential causality was the most threatening challenge to the metaphysical edifice upon which Catholic dogma stood, and not, [End Page 1037] as one would have expected, his skepticism, nominalism, and relativism, all deeply steeped in pagan Greco-Roman thought. The censors' intuition was spot on, and so was Montaigne's subsequent resistance to removing the discussion of this pivotal notion. Montaigne in fact kept all references to fortune and added many more in essays written at a later date.3 Fortune stands opposite Providence. The random nature of complex social realities and events stands opposite coherent narratives. And, among all such narratives, Providence, which is the overarching understanding of all events as being part of the unfolding of God's will in the world, is one of the worse offenders. Providence is a theoretical dogma as to the origin, current meaning, and future trajectory of history. Providence is thus a series of post-hoc, comforting, and most often self-serving "just so" stories (i.e., the systematic confusion of causes and consequences), precisely what, as I will show below, Montaigne frequently derided as the ultimate form of nonsense.4 Depending on the circumstances, what Montaigne names "fortune" may be understood as "things that take place," "happenstances," "chance," "contingency," "luck" or "destiny."5 More interestingly, from our point of view today, Montaigne uses "fortune" in certain passages to signify a special case of randomness, commonly known today as the butterfly effect. This is a contemporary mathematical notion that is just as ontologically and existentially disturbing at present (even among cognitive and mathematical elites!) as it was on the doctrinal level to the Roman censors in the 1580s. I will argue below that we are evolutionarily biased against reasoning in terms of probability and especially in terms of randomness, and that these evolved biases for the attribution of linear causality within narrative structures and against thinking in terms of probabilities and randomness impact our relationship to knowledge, and thus, to doubt, judgment, and decision-making. Indeed, Montaigne's frank emphasis on randomness is prescient in its depth, and especially so in its articulation of the linkage of randomness to our confabulating propensities. Being keenly aware of how [End Page 1038] randomness rules our lives allows Montaigne to become as lucid as a human being can ever become as to the empirical fabric of social reality, allowing him to shed the protective clothing of self-serving just so stories. Giving randomness its true preponderant role in all human affairs enables Montaigne to paint himself "tout entier, et tout nud" ("entirely and wholly naked"; "Au Lecteur" 27); that is, wholly naked, in the sense of being exposed and being subject to the vagaries of randomness all while avoiding as much as possible the fig leaves of coherent but deceptive narratives. To the best of my knowledge, only John Lyons, in a single sentence in the introduction to The Phantom of Chance: From Fortune to Randomness in Seventeenth-Century French Literature, has clearly highlighted in Montaigne's thought the crucial link between negotiating randomness and the human propensity toward narrativity (23–24).6 This article endeavors to flesh out in detail John Lyons' critical insight. My thesis is that contemporary cognitive sciences may permit us at this moment to take a fuller measure of Montaigne's pivotal insights into the link between randomness and narrativity, in the same manner that structuralist anthropology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism (and all their myriad offshoots) promoted in enlightening ways a rereading, a reassessment, and a re-actualization...

Baudelaire Vampirizes Racine

Beginning from an underexplored intertextual link between Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Metamorphoses du Vampire’ and Racine’s play Athalie, I argue that the contrast between the two works underlines the fundamental conjunction between religion and sexuality in Les Fleurs du Mal. Transgression, in both the religious and sexual spheres, is an engine of literary creation for Baudelaire, and ‘Les Metamorphoses du Vampire’ operates in both at once. The analysis is supported by a set of readings of other poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, along with the poem’s allusions not only to Athalie but also to the Bible. ‘Les Metamorphoses du Vampire’ enacts a scene of divine punishment for both blasphemy and fornication, yet as this punishment is visited on the vampire, the poet loses the text. This differentiates Baudelaire’s view of religion from Racine’s hidden God, and also connects the poem to the wider themes of Les Fleurs du Mal, expressed in ‘Au Lecteur’ and revisited throughout.

Noireclaire par Christian Bobin

d’une publication. Ou encore lorsqu’elle recherche un nom de plume jusque dans À la recherche du temps perdu (47). La narratrice fait part au lecteur de sa peur devant l’ampleur et la responsabilité d’un tel récit. La narratrice entreprend une narration autour de la création de son ouvrage, en somme une méta-narration, où elle nous confie ses notes, ses doutes ainsi que les réactions de ses amis lorsqu’elle leur dit sur qui elle écrit: “Je note dans mon carnet de travail: ‘scène qui montre que Françoise Sagan n’avait jamais peur de rien’” (21). Doté d’une prose élégante, juste et semée d’anecdotes et de remarques parfois surprenantes—comme le fait que “Sagan est l’anagramme de ‘à sang’” (50)—ce récit de genre indéfinissable rend parfaitement hommage à l’année 1954 que vécut Sagan ainsi qu’aux personnes qui eurent une grande influence sur elle. Cependant, c’est également un récit exutoire qui semble avoir dit au revoir à la tristesse de la narratrice. California State University, San Marcos Véronique Anover Bobin,Christian. Noireclaire.Paris: Gallimard,2015.ISBN 978-2-07-011448-1.Pp.88. 11 a. In 1996, in response to the sudden death of the woman he loved, the author wrote a book of short essays, La plus que vive. Now, twenty years later, having published over two dozen books in the interim, he writes again of the woman he calls Ghislaine, this time in short prose poems addressed to her. As anyone who has suffered such a loss knows, love does not end with the death of the beloved, and the dead often remain vividly alive to those who love them. This is the case for Bobin, who finds death only a frail barrier between himself and Ghislaine, whom he imagines in heaven, but also present on earth though separated from him by her incorporeality. For example, he can drink a glass of water, but she cannot. In some ways she is more vividly present now than when she lived, as“le manque est la lumière donnée à tous”(13), but not always: “Je cherche ton visage comme on cherche l’interrupteur dans le noir”(63). Sometimes her death seems to have happened just a moment before, but not always, for he has forgotten most of her former telephone number. His own life, the “vie d’écriture,” he compares to “la rêverie de l’oiseau qui, contemplant le ciel vide, oublie un instant la faim” (24). Yet to write about Ghislaine’s absence and presence is to remember, not to forget, his hunger for her. These paradoxes are in a sense summed up by the book’s title: “Noireclaire. Ta mort n’y change rien: je te vois en mouvement, toujours avançant” (71). Ghislaine herself is paradoxical, “ange et pécheresse” (46), but the information he included about her in La plus que vive is largely missing in this book, whose focus is on the mourner, not the deceased. Much of his love now seems to be directed toward nature, particularly trees and birds. The prose poems are often built around surprising metaphors, as when he interprets broom flowers blown onto the windshield of his parked car as a “lettre adultère” that Ghislaine has left him (43) or 212 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 213 says that a poem is a flute made from holes pierced “dans l’os du langage” by the poet (63). Bobin’s university study of philosophy and his Christian faith seem to underlie much of the thought and feeling behind this book’s attempt to represent and cope with love that persists for a beloved who is more present in death than she may have been in life. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Carion, Christian, et Laure Irrmann. En mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. ISBN 978-2-0813-6636-7. Pp. 150. 17 a. Toward the middle of this novel, one reads: “C’est tout un peuple qui se déverse sur les routes, comme si le pays perdait son sang en...

L’urgence et la patience by Jean-Philippe Toussaint

accablés par les silences qui ne sont que des mots que l’on garde pour soi-même que ce livre s’adresse. Rompre le charme est le huitième roman de Sthers. Ou bien serait-ce le premier? Sthers arrache du plus profond d’elle-même le livre sur la mère, le livre interdit qu’elle n’avait jusqu’alors jamais osé, le dernier livre peut- être: celui par lequel on devient écrivain. University of Cincinnati (OH) Étienne Achille TOUSSAINT, JEAN-PHILIPPE. L’urgence et la patience. Paris: Minuit, 2012. ISBN 978-27073 -2226-5. Pp. 112. 11 a. Looking back at Toussaint’s literary output over the last 27 years, one can discern a theme of opposition throughout his works: despair and elation, presence and absence, public versus private space. Toussaint’s Spring 2012 exhibition at the Louvre, “La main et le regard,” which seeks to represent the act of reading through various visual means—paintings, photographs, videos, or brain scans— follows a similar tack. This is also true of Toussaint’s latest work, L’urgence et la patience, a collection of new and old essays that explores literature in both a personal and universal manner, alternating, much like his novels, between serious reflection and lighthearted anecdote. Quoting Baudelaire, Toussaint argues that literature is a “rêve de pierre” (24). It is unfettered, like a dream, yet terrestrial and heavy through the rigorous work its form demands. “Un livre doit apparaître comme une évidence au lecteur, et non comme quelque chose de prémédité ou de construit. Mais cette évidence, l’écrivain, lui, doit la construire” (26). It is this focus on the craft of writing that is most revelatory in L’urgence et la patience. There is no difference, he contends, in constructing a hotel or a character; both are made of words. For Toussaint, writing is a mixture of the title’s two elements—the patience to spend hours working through thorny prose to be able, later, to revel in moments where everything flows smoothly and perfectly. This is not inspiration , however. Urgency results from hard work when “tout est juste, chaque image, chaque mot, chaque adjectif pris à la volée et renvoyé sur le terrain, tout trouve sa place exacte dans le livre” (44). But for this to happen there must be a great distance between the writer and his subject. Whereas Toussaint has done research to prepare his novels, for example consulting an equine veterinary manual for La vérité sur Marie, he believes that great literature is produced when the writer recedes to the bottom of the ocean, far from surface reality, as this same novel illustrates . Similarly, although he worked daily on his first few novels, he now only writes “porté par un élan” (22) for periods varying from several weeks to months. It is when one is in this creative cocoon that words flow and writing becomes a musical line with a natural rhythm. Toussaint learned of writing’s musicality from reading Beckett: “C’est la lecture la plus importante que j’ai faite de ma vie” (97). Discussing a Beckett sentence that particularly struck him, he writes: “Je me rends compte que c’est dans sa forme, et nullement par son sens, qu’elle m’avait ébloui” (95). However, not all is serious. While Toussaint devotes three of the book’s eleven chapters to Beckett, he admits that his knowledge of Beckett’s texts is “très approximative, incomplète, lacunaire” (97), and cannot precisely remember the conversation when Jérôme Lindon introduced him to the iconic writer, “Ah, comme mémorialiste” (89). The chapter on Proust is mostly autobiographical, 1304 FRENCH REVIEW 86.6 discussing the various chairs where Toussaint has (re)-read À la recherche. We also learn minutiae. He wrote the final part of La salle de bain in his underwear. Toussaint has used five Mac laptops, prefers Uni-ball eye pens (micro or fine with tungsten carbide ball), and A6 format notebooks from Muji: “Je croyais aimer la littérature, mais c’est l’amour de la papeterie que j’ai, ma parole!” (37). He formats his texts in a miniature...

Force and Fraud in Michel de Montaigne’s Essays

Although Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) inscribes the Essays within a tradition of private, meditative, and self-reflexive writing in his Au Lecteur and De l’oisivete, they offer philosophical speculations and practical perspectives not only on ancient and early modern warfare, but also on the religious wars that the author witnessed during his lifetime. Indeed, their meditativeness allows the Essays to develop critical, engaged perspectives on war in general, and the uses of fraud and force in particular. Throughout the Western literary tradition, force and fraud have represented opposing alternatives to each other—the former representing a direct, honest approach to warfare, and the latter representing a cunning or strategic one.1 In so discussing the relationship between private and public morality, the Essays intervene in a longstanding tradition of civic and humanist thought. This essay argues that Montaigne’s speculations on force and fraud in ancient and early modern warfare represent a response to the general problem of war and more specifically, though indirectly, to the French sixteenth-century religious wars.2 It shall focus on the (Ciceronian and

Writing Against Theodicy: Reflections on the Co-Existence of God and Evil in Baudelaire’s Poetry and Critical Essays

This article uncovers a sustained reflection in Baudelaire’s writings on the coexistence of God and evil. In the 1857 and 1861 editions of Les Fleurs du Mal , there is already a movement away from the divine in poems that depict evil as a more compelling concept and as the dominant force. In his critical writings and prose poems, Baudelaire increasingly engages in questions of theodicy to suggest the incompatibility of God and evil. This article describes an overarching system of writing “against theodicy” that links Baudelaire’s book reviews, art criticism, and essays on child psychology and psychedelic drugs, and that provides a conceptual framework for the shift in his poetics from romanticism to realism. As a textual analysis of these works demonstrates, Baudelaire’s writing “against theodicy” repeatedly leads his readers to draw the conclusion of God’s nonexistence in the face of the reality of evil. ( smp )

André Thevet's ‘true’ portrait of Moctezuma and its European legacy

André Thevet's ‘true’ portrait of Moctezuma and its European legacy

The Faces of Judith: Nationhood and Patronage in La Judit of Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas

In the Avertissement au lecteur of his poem La Judit, the Huguenot poet Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas states that he chose to write about the biblical figure Judith because he was asked to do so by Jeanne d'Albret, ayant este commande, il y a environ quatorze ans, par feu tres illustre et tres vertueus Princesse Jane, royne de Navarre, de rediger l'histoire de Judit en forme d'un poeme epique ... (1) At the same time that he wrote an epic poem for his patroness, Du Bartas wrote for her subjects in the sovereign territories she controlled in southwest France. (2) Threatened by Catholic forces from Spain and northern France, Jeanne's Huguenot subjects were in need of strong leadership, both spiritual and military. It does not seem unreasonable that, at a moment of crisis in the mid-1560's, Jeanne asked for an epic poem about Judith to serve as a guide. (3) Judith's story legitimizes the actions of an isolated group of Elect in their fight against an invading imperial power. In the context of its production, Du Bartas' poem invited readers to link the patroness and the heroine Judith and to link her people and the inhabitants of Judith's village Bethulia. For Jeanne d'Albret and her subjects, La Judit thus carried a message of solidarity and rebellion. Jeanne d'Albret died in 1572 and a new queen of Navarre, Marguerite de Valois, succeeded her. Du Bartas responded to these events by proclaiming Marguerite the patroness of La Judit: Fille du grand HENRY, et compagne pudique D'un autre grand HENRY, o MARGUERITE unique, Qui decores la France, oy ce vers qui ne dit RIEN, si non ton beau los sous le nom de Judit. (J 1.5-8) (4) Such a move can easily be explained as opportunism on the part of the poet, but to dismiss the difference in patronesses too quickly would be to miss the complexities of the poem's second incarnation. The shift from Jeanne to Marguerite was not merely an exchange of one prominent noblewoman for another. The two women belonged to different sides of the religious and political controversies of the sixteenth century: Jeanne was an outspoken and at times militant Protestant, and Marguerite, whose marriage to Jeanne's son Henri had set the scene for the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre, was firmly Catholic. Furthermore, whereas Jeanne d'Albret often found herself at odds with her Valois cousins ruling the north, Marguerite was the sister of the king of France and supported the interests of the French monarchy. For Du Bartas, a Protestant born in Jeanne d'Albret's territories, offering Marguerite de Valois a poem whose subject was originally conceived by her mother-in-law required a reconfiguration. (5) Interestingly enough, these changes rarely occur within the poem itself. (6) Although the poet made numerous revisions to the text between the first and second editions, his main concern seems to have been improving the language in the newer edition; few of the revisions grant a new meaning or message to the earlier edition. Instead, the re-orientation of the poem takes place on the level of the paratext. Within a letter addressed to Marguerite and in the second version of his Avertissement au lecteur, Du Bartas manages to present his potentially divisive poem as a welcome gift that unifies north and south, Catholic and Protestant. In the course of this essay, I will examine La Judit in its original context and above all the political implications it held for Queen Jeanne d'Albret and for the adherents of the Reformed Church in southwest France. As a Protestant version of a classical epic commanded in the 1560s, La Judit was an expression of Jeanne d'Albret's political power and an iteration of the nation served by it, reinforcing the legitimacy of the Protestant cause in the face of the imperial (and Catholic) other. I will consider how Du Bartas edited his text for Marguerite de Valois by dissociating the new patroness from the more political content of the poem, adapting the poem's message to promote a peaceful coexistence for all of the citizens under Marguerite's influence. …

THINGS AS THEY WERE: THE GOTHIC OF REAL LIFE IN CHARLOTTE SMITH'S THE EMIGRANTS AND THE BANISHED MAN

"The Gothic" is a hybrid genre relying on a set of narrative conventions: the setting a dark and crumbling castle, its plots fuelled by motifs of pursuit and flight. With the publication of The Banished Man (1794), which included Avis au Lecteur, her manifesto on realistic writing, Charlotte Smith turned on the genre she had done much to popularize with her early romances. This article examines how Smith harnessed spaces and themes generally classified as "Gothic" to serve her novelistic project of writing the "real"—at a moment in history when authors searched for an appropriate mode to present a credible account of the socio-political horrors perpetrated in the Revolutionary Wars without having recourse to a conventional Gothic discourse and genre, which routinely centred on representations of monstrous humankind.

Two Ways of Asserting Individuality – Presentational Strategies in Montaigne’s Essais

The Montaigne of the Essais has since long been seen as one of the prime examples of early modern individuality. The paper discusses two essential passages in the establishment of Montaigne’s individual voice, the preface Au lecteur and Essai 1.8, De l’oysivete. In both texts the author is seen not only to play with topical passages from classical Latin poetry, but moreover to hint in different ways at the originality of his prose collection.

Redefining Nobility in the French Renaissance: The Case of Montaigne’s Journal de voyage

Redefining Nobility in the French Renaissance: The Case of Montaigne’s Journal de voyage Alison Calhoun (bio) La mort est l’Echo de la vie : ce que la vie a dit, soit bien, soit mal, la mort le répète : et cette répétition retentira toute l’éternité : Mais comme il dépend de nous de bien ou mal régler nostre vie, aussi dépend-il de nous de rendre bonne ou mauvaise nostre mort.1 Debilem facito manu, Debilem pede, coxa, Lubricos quate dentes: Vita dum superest bene est.2 After completing the first edition of his Essais in 1580, having spent two years suffering from kidney stones, secluded in his tower in the provinces of Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne makes a bold move: he decides to embark upon a long journey to Italy via Germany and Switzerland on horseback. The details of this journey come down to us today in a narrative posthumously entitled Journal de voyage, a work based on a manuscript recovered only in the eighteenth century. Until [End Page 836] now, critical literature on the Journal has focused upon Montaigne’s motives for traveling to Italy and, more specifically, to Rome. The majority of these studies conclude in varying manners that Montaigne’s travel was either psychologically necessary, medically therapeutic, or both.3 Indeed, some of the strongest examinations of Montaigne’s motives incorporate passages from the Essais or from contemporary travel and tourist guides to speculate upon his chosen itinerary.4 Yet, while these analyses ask why Montaigne decides to leave home, they have tended to ignore the question of the journal itself. In light of the unillustrious and degrading nature of its descriptions of the stone, [End Page 837] the following will explore the reasons behind Montaigne’s writing the journal. Although Montaigne makes it rather explicit in the Au Lecteur that his motive for writing the Essais is to present himself as authentically as possible to his close family and friends,5 there is no such guiding text for the reader of the Journal. In addition, the oblique and indirect nature of the prose Montaigne weaves in the Essais is quite different from the detailed, pragmatic narrative in the Journal. Whereas in the former, the reader has to deduce the activities which might fill up Montaigne’s hours in his library and at his estate, in the Journal, the reader finds a veritable log of the day’s activities: places visited, people encountered and, of course, a thorough account of the seigneur’s health. The log approach, perhaps closer to Montaigne’s Livre de raison than to his Essais, structures much of the text so that it appears technical, sometimes repetitive and, in the case of the stone, medically thorough. In fact, many early editors claim it was poorly written, which in turn nourished the argument for its questionable authorship.6 However, regardless of its rupture and separation from the Essais, the Journal’s récit has a style important in its own right. For example, Terence Cave characterizes the narrative of the Journal as “disjointed,” “variable,” and always “une suspension de toute péripétie définitive.”7 Furthermore, in what we might call its poetics of suffering and curing, the treatment of the stone should be carefully regarded in relationship to the text’s more conventional views of nobility. The Journal tends to ironically combine more predictable observations of Montaigne, the wealthy tourist, with details from the toilet, even though in Montaigne’s time, the garderobe—as Marie de Gournay characterizes the object of his franchise in her preface to the Essais (1595)—was not an acceptable subject for writing.8 Hence the [End Page 838] reader’s puzzlement: Does the Journal provide a “noble” account of Montaigne’s time abroad, or are his “virtuous” actions sullied by the surplus of facts about his illness? Moreover, if the details from the passing of each stone do indeed overshadow the “noble” activities, was there perhaps some other objective at play? The following study investigates the interplay between suffering and nobility in the Journal in order to show how it was a contrived effort on Montaigne’s part, as...

Self-Regulation, Reception and Ridicule in Hölderlin’s Hyperion

Self-Regulation, Reception and Ridicule in Hölderlin’s Hyperion Kirk Wetters (bio) I. Hyperion’s Enigmatic Character “Ein Scherz des Weisen, und das Räthsel sollte fast nicht gelöst werden.” [A philosopher’s joke, and the enigma shall become almost insoluble.] (Friedrich Hölderlin, „Pindar-Fragment: Das Unendliche”) Hyperion’s characteristic” tone can be described: lyrical beauty combined with paradoxical and often contradictory general formulations, frequently “in the form of exclamations; the latter reveal an unmistakable pathos, which serves to personalize, relativize, and critically undermine often quasi-philosophical claims of the epistolary narrator and protagonist of Hyperion. These features can be joined to produce an altered perspective on both novel and protagonist: situations that Hyperion narrates with profound pathos may appear comical, or at least come close to it, depending on the reader’s willingness to read between the lines of what is told. This potential for comedy has often been overlooked by readings that seek to normalize the work within well-known (and rather earnest) paradigms like the Bildungsroman. Hyperion’s lyricism also has the potential to undercut the comic elements: it is easy to be taken in by his rhetorical talents, by the beauty and rhythm of the text, its obvious craft. The lyrical-philosophical side of the text makes a powerful claim for its own autonomy. And Hölderlin [End Page 534] himself is generally understood—not wrongly—as a profoundly, abyssally serious author. Thus, without refuting these understandings, the present essay hopes to demonstrate an equally abyssal comic dimension at work in Hölderlin’s only novel, which can be read as a comedy of the suffering idealist (in the tradition of Goethe’s Werther and Tasso). The attempt to talk about humor in Hyperion inevitably focuses on novelistic, narratival, and situational aspects. This does not mean that one must ignore the novel’s obtrusively high tone, but it requires a narrative contextualization of the lyrical tone. The representation of lyrical affects through an effusive and antisocial narrator does not allow these lyric expressions any purity or autonomy. Like Werther but even more extreme, Hyperion pushes the ambiguity concerning the status of the protagonist’s words to the limit without resolving the novel into anything like a unified perspective. This problem of the mixed status of Hyperion’s words forces the reader to regulate, to reconcile the dissonances between quasi-comical situations and the hyperbolical intensity of Hyperion’s linguistic self-assertion. The specific inversion at issue, which leaves the reader laughing at the protagonist, is constantly thematized in the novel itself: Hyperion’s enthusiasm often makes him an object of mockery and ridicule. Overemphasizing such reversals will make him look foolish and progressively undermine the credibility of the narrative (assuming credibility is the relevant category here). To read humor in Hyperion therefore means provisionally joining those who oppose and mock the novel’s hero. Uncertainty about how what is narrated is to be taken introduces the possibility that the novel’s humor is unintentional: the reader’s perverseness is to blame. Such a claim presupposes a fixed authorial intent in order to posit a proper and authentic reading. This general hermeneutic problem is a real dilemma in the case of Hyperion: even if the reader’s insensitivity alone makes the novel seem comical, the structural possibility of this kind of mis-reception must be admitted and then discounted from the author’s intention (as established elsewhere). In this case, the blame is placed with the author who has proven unable to unambiguously regulate the novel’s tone. Readers of the novel have therefore typically either identified with the socially ostracized protagonist (who is implicitly identified with the author), or have judged that the inadequate differentiation of author and hero, producing ambiguously comic effects, are the symptoms of a second-rate novel. [End Page 535] Hyperion’s preface (Vorrede) provides an important (if cryptic) insight into the novel’s intents. This extremely brief avis au lecteur makes no claims to the veracity, probability, or the didactic value of the text to follow. Instead, it denounces both learning (at least in the form of a moral, dogma, or “fabula docet”) and enjoyment (Lust) in a...

La Théorie du langage de Pierre-Simon Ballanche: contribution à Vétude de la philosophie linguistique du romantisme. Avec des extraits des ouvrages de Ballanche by Alan J. L. Busst (review)

202 Reviews which corresponds to what we would call 'critique musicale' today. This ambitious project, originating in a doctoral dissertation, leads to much useful material on the periodicals studied, though the choice of titles may surprise some readers. Certainly most of the major periodicals of the period are covered, though the decision to ig? nore the Journal de musique seems unjustified. In a brief three-page introduction to the Journal and its principal editor, Framery, the author states that the journal 'va s'eteindre de lui-meme' (p. 38) a few years afterits establishment. This is true enough, but the Journal de musique, as the firstspecialized periodical on music in the period of study to include critical reviews, deserves attention, as many aspects ofthe editor's critical practice differin essential respects from those studied here. In spite of this caveat, the corpus is very broad and covers a genuinely useful sample of the major periodicals of the period. The organization of the book is as follows. Part 1gives an introduction to the differentsources studied and the writers in question. Part 11defines criticism itself, and considers the knowledge and education of the writers in question, and their style, and Part 111studies two aspects of criti? cism: aesthetics and 'un apport historique', which refers not to the historical slant of the texts themselves, but their role as precious historical documents which can tell us about musical life and the performers ofthe time, the role ofthe public (and especially the increasing power of the bourgeoisie), and the Gluckian reform of opera. The definition of 'critique musicale' is delayed until Part 11(p. 83), which is a pity because the integration of periodical criticism and books and pamphlets is awkward: placed earlier in the book, it would have been much more helpful. And a perhaps inevitable result of the subject of study is that the author's attention is spread wide, so that much ofthe comment on individual sources, and particularly the long and rather basic contextualizationof sources and topics, feels superficial. Nevertheless, the sheer amount of information gleaned from the press itself,and particularly the comparison of entries on the same performance in differentjournals (which leads to compelling evidence of the specificities of differenteditors' sympathies and practices), makes this a useful book on a hitherto neglected topic. University of Nottingham Mark Darlow La Theorie du langage de Pierre-Simon Ballanche: contributiona I'etude de la philosophie linguistique du romantisme. Avec des extraits des ouvrages de Ballanche. By Alan J. L. Busst. (Studies in the History of Philosophy, 59) Lewiston, Queenston , and Lampeter: Mellen. 2000. x + 246pp. $109.95. ISBN 0-7734-7456-0. The academic function of Alan J.L. Busst's modestly titled 'contribution' stems from his observation that 'Ballanche laisse [. . .] au lecteur la tache de completer sa pensee' (p. 100). Although Ballanche enjoys 'la vision du systeme total', the 'obscurite' of his fragmentary output has become 'proverbiale' (p. 2). In Sainte-Beuve's words, 'II avance par cercles et circuits' (pp. 2-3). This book fails into two virtually equal parts; firstBusst's admirable reading of the circular and the circuitous, and second a reprinting of judiciously selected excerpts of Ballanche's work which deal with the philosophy and history of language (particularly useful as the four-volume (Euvres cited in the bibliography was published by Barbezat in 1830). These excerpts are drawn from four works which are presented in chronological order: Essai sur les institutionssociales (1818), Essais de palingenesie sociale (1827-30), Orphee (1829), an(l Vision d'Hebal (1831). Busst's preceding interpretationstresses the way in which Ballanche 's compromises in the argument over the origins of language emblematize his negotiation of the politics of Romanticism: 'ce traditionaliste est en meme temps un liberal et un progressiste; ce defenseur du trone et de l'autel deviendra partisan d'un MLRy 98.1, 2003 203 plebeianisme radical, se scandalisant toujours davantage de l'entetement reactionnaire des Bourbons et du Vatican' (p. 6). The opening three chapters of Busst's analysis focus on debates over the 'origine de la parole'. Ballanche postulates a divine reve? lation of language to humanity, at odds with the sensualist and empiricist notion of language evolution...

Libertinages: The Franco-American Divide

Dufournet, Jean. Philippe de Commynes: Memoires, livres I-VI. Presentation et traduction (bilingue). 2 vols. Paris: GF Flammarion, 2007. Pp. 450 and 559. This edition and translation are destined for students learning to know Commynes and his memoirs, for the general francophone readers, and for medievalists interested in fifteenth-c. France. The two volumes are reader-friendly and bring technical aspects (some variants, but mostly explanations and details about persons and events) in the notes, exactly forty-five pages of each book. The introduction (32 pages) contains everything needed to study Commynes (c.1447-1511) and his work (1489-98). Volumes Vu and VIII have not been included (they had been published by D. earlier). Until Cs Memoires, the only historiographical genres were chronicles, diaries, and chivalric biographies. Composed for Angelo Cato (archbishop of Vienne), the memoirs have since become a new genre which gives eyewitness reports of events during the second half of the century; the work does not serve to enhance princes or persons who commissioned a report in their honor with all the writer's resources of rhetoric, but it exalts King Louis XI, whose confidant and advisor Commynes had been for quite some time. The king's mistakes are mentioned, nevertheless, unlike in works of chroniclers such as Jean Molinet and George Chastellain, who never criticized their masters. C. even minimizes his own work (9-10) - whether as a polite disclaimer (desaveu poli) much used at the time, or not: il se presente comme un 'homme non littere' (lettre) qui ne sait que 'parler naturellement comme un homme qui n'a pas beaucoup de sens naturel ni acquis' (D. p. 10, quoting C, livre VI, ch. xii), but offers instead his experiences as eyewitness. Princes, C. says, are humans like everyone (12). [These disclaimers are common in Montaigne's Essais: see M. Rat, ed. Book I, p. 350, and, of course 'Au lecteur,' p. 1 - the reviewer.] History must be told, C. continues, by those who have lived and acted during a certain period. This directness requires a special style, Dufournet continues: realism and precision; an individual's point of view, in Cs case about the actions of three individuals: Duke Charles of Burgundy, King Louis XI, and himself, Commynes. The Memoirs become an autobiography, told by je [Montaigne's expression: moi], even a plea pro domo: he had left service for Charles (though C. was born in Burgundy, a member of the Flemish nobility) and joined Louis XI July, 1472), the new monarch who (in Cs opinion) deserved Cs courage, devotion, lucidity, secrecy, and skill in deception - an early Machiavelli. In fact, C. believed that diplomacy should replace reliance on military strength. After Louis's death in 1483, Commynes's position deteriorated: he lost his lands, was imprisoned (1487-89), and began composing the Memoires. …

La novela como género literario en el siglo XVII en Francia

This paper deals with the configuration of the novel as a literary genre in France during the 17th century. After a brief introduction to the concept of literary genre, with Aristotle's Poetics as the main source, it deals with the study of the novel as a genre that, although it did not posses a fixed status in its origins, it had become by the 17th century the genre par excellence. A brief survey of the Italian and Spanish forerun- ners, with a special reference to Cervantes, leads to the study of the development of the novel in France, which is mainly based on the theoretical discourse that the authors brought about within their own production, in Prefaces, Avertissements, Avis au lecteur, etc. This extradiegetique relationship that the autor keeps with his/her narrative gives shape, throughout the century, to a history of the novel written by authors who strive to impose both their criteria and their own creative principles on the readers.