Contemporary French Culture Research Articles

La Fontaine à l'École républicaine: du poète universel au classique scolaire

By Ralph Albanese, Jr. (EMF Critiques). Charlottesville, Rookwood Press, 2003. vii+378 pp. This book will interest equally readers of La Fontaine and students of modern French culture. It is a compelling account of the place assigned to La Fontaine's Fables in the creation and teaching of French Republican values. Ralph Albanese evokes both the glories and the dangers of the French dream of a secular republic whose people would share the peculiarly French values inspired by its great writers (immortalized in the Grands Écrivains editions which were prepared when the Republican project was at its zenith). La Fontaine, Molière and Hugo were at the heart of the Republican strategy. Unsurprisingly, the delicate, rich, endlessly varied, often ironical, even on occasion gnomic Fables of La Fontaine suffered from their use as propaganda. For different Republican commentators, especially in the years between 1870 and the 1920s, La Fontaine was in turn a rustic sage extolling the life of the peasant farmer, a believer in the Colbertian values of commerce, an early advocate of scientific progress — and hence of industrial progress too. Evidence for all of these views was easily adduced by citing some fables and ignoring others. Worse still, the fabulist was enlisted on the side of the pedagogues in their war against rebellious schoolchildren: Albanese cites a 1909 text in which teachers are advised to use ‘L'Ours et les Deux Compagnons’, where a hunter is so unwise as to sell the skin of the bear before killing it, as ‘une mise en garde adressée aux candidats par trop présomptueux au baccalauréat’ (p. 86) (an odd use for a poet who disliked pedagogues and schoolchildren equally). As Albanese points out, ‘grâce à un discours critique répétitif et pétrifié, l'École a créé, de toute évidence, un obstacle entre La Fontaine et les Français; elle a fini, en un mot, par écraser le vrai La Fontaine’ (p. 1). He shows in an introductory survey of fable criticism from Rousseau to the present day how hard recent scholars have worked to rescue La Fontaine from his Republican colonizers. Albanese also describes, however, the strengths of the Republican educational programme: its focus on the mastery of the French language as the key to Frenchness; its rigorous practice of the disciplines of the dictée and the explication de texte; and its belief that some knowledge of French literature, including an ability to recite at least two or three fables by heart, should be part of the civic make-up of all French men and women. Sections in his concluding chapter on ‘Le dépérissement de La Fontaine et le “mal français” actuel’ and ‘L'effacement de la mémoire collective’ tell of the fading of the Republican dream. Albanese leaves the reader with the sense that the loss of this dream, however clumsy the attempts to realize it through pedagogy, is leaving a disturbing void in contemporary French culture.

Black-Blanc-Beur: multi-coloured Paris

Until the final quarter of the twentieth century, the black presence in Paris was far more visible than that of Arabs or North Africans. Since the mid-1970s, the tendency has been reversed, with North Africans generally overshadowing the Afro-Caribbean presence. After documenting this shift, this article explores relations between ‘Blacks’ and ‘Arabs’ in contemporary French society and culture. It suggests that while the changing demographics of mass migration to France are clearly among the factors contributing to this transformation, wider patterns of geopolitical and geocultural change have also been at work. The article shows that shared experiences of disadvantage and discrimination have not always resulted in a common cultural and/or political front among minority ethnic groups. While a ‘Black- Blanc-Beur’ trio of buddies is now a lieu commun of popular culture, competition between minority ethnic groups has often been in evidence in the political sphere.

Catholicisme, protestantisme et laïcité: Réflexion sur la trace religieuse dans l'histoire contemporaine de la France

This article examines the traces of Protestantism in contemporary French history and political culture. After contextualising the legacies of Protestantism and Catholicism and recalling the latter's primary role in conceptions of French identity, the study focusses on how Protestant cultural influences came to bear. The article weighs the contributions of renowned Protestant historians and politicians, in the case of the latter, right down to the contemporary period.

Dishing the Dirt: Metamorphosis in Marie Darrieussecq's Truismes

The theme of metamorphosis and the construction of the gendered subject are examined in Marie Darrieussecq's provocative first novel. The literary trope allows the author to expose the violence of sexist language and the brutality of contemporary French culture. However, in this profoundly ironic text corporal changes are disturbingly consistent with the narrator's naïveté and inability to learn from her experiences. Elle est bête in more ways than one. This essay also explores how the naïve stance of the speaking voice constructs the reader as sharing the same truistic beliefs and may account for some of the strong reactions to the novel.

Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture (review)

Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture (review)

Declining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures. By Mireille Rosello. Contemporary French Culture and Society. Edited by, Richard J. Golsan, Mary Jean Green, and, Lynn A. Higgins. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998. Pp. viii+213.

Previous articleNext article No AccessDeclining the Stereotype: Ethnicity and Representation in French Cultures. By Mireille Rosello. Contemporary French Culture and Society. Edited by, Richard J. Golsan, Mary Jean Green, and, Lynn A. Higgins. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1998. Pp. viii+213.Alice Conklin Alice ConklinUniversity of Rochester Search for more articles by this author University of RochesterPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 72, Number 2June 2000 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/316020 Views: 85Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

Review Essay : Contemporary French Culture

Review Essay : Contemporary French Culture

Book Reviews : French Studies Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture. Edited by Michael Temple. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998. Pbk, £14.99

Book Reviews : French Studies Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture. Edited by Michael Temple. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998. Pbk, £14.99

Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

Encyclopedia of contemporary French culture

Encyclopedia of contemporary French culture

MOLIÈRE AND THE SECOND FRENCH REVOLUTION

(1998). MOLIERE AND THE SECOND FRENCH REVOLUTION. Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association: Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. 39-50.

Liquid Passions: Marguerite Duras

'Ma vie, elle est dans les livres. Pas dans l'ordre, mais qu'est-ce que ~a fait?' This comment by Marguerite Duras may be interpreted as a reference to the autobiographical dimension of her work and as an allusion to the fact that she dedicated most of her life to writing. Her work, comprising more than a hundred texts and films, must be one of the most extensive in contemporary French culture. Writing represented, for Duras, an essential motivating force to the extent that it gradually became an absolute necessity, comparable to an addiction in its very compulsiveness. For more than thirty years of her literary career, from the early 50s to the late 80s, Duras also suffered from progressively severe alcohol addiction and, according to Frederique Lebelley, underwent hospital treatment for alcoholism on four occasions during this period. The centrality of alcohol in her life is mirrored in her work, in its recurrence as a key motif, and in the prominence of fictional characters who are either heavy drinkers or who are explicitly described as alcoholics.3 In this article I propose first to analyse the significance of alcohol in Duras's work (focusing on Le Marin de Gibraltar [1952], Moderato cantabile [1958], Dix heures et demie du soir en he [1960], Le Vice-consul [1966] and Emily L [1987]), and then to examine the different functions of alcohol in her life, with reference to interviews and essays in which Duras commented on her own alcoholism.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France, suite et début

The article discusses France's new national library, the BNF, due to open in stages between 1996 and 1997. It begins by completing an earlier account, published in Modern & Contemporary France, of the Library's inception, and in particular of the controversy to which it gave rise. It goes on to describe the BNF's appearance, facilities and internal organisation as they stood shortly before opening. It then examines the three theoretical principles on which current Library discourse is founded: démocratisation, technology and encyclopédisme. It concludes with the view that the Library has in fact served as a kind of cultural laboratory for a number of issues facing contemporary French culture on the threshold of the new millennium, including an implied challenge to post‐modernist discourse by means of a reaffirmation of Enlightenment universalism.

The erotics of colonialism in contemporary French West Indian literary culture

Argues that creolité, antillanité and Negritude are not only masculine but masculinist as well. They permit only male talents to emerge within these movements and push literature written by women into the background. Concludes that in the French Caribbean there are 2 literary cultures: the one practiced by male creolistes and the other practiced by a disparate group of women writers.

Reflexions on the Motive Power of Fire: A Critical Edition with the Surviving Manuscripts by Sadi Carnot

144 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE This edition is serviceable. The introductions are brief and clear, the first of the four short articles perhaps slightly limp, but the others—on the architecture, the technology, and the drawings—are admirable. The (newly photographed?) plates are in some cases blurred, sometimes (plate 20) even out of focus. But this is a paper­ back to be bought and studied with endless fascination. Jacques Heyman Dr. Heyman is head of the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University. Reflexions on the Motive Power of Fire: A Critical Edition with the Surviv­ ing Manuscripts. By Sadi Carnot. Edited and translated by Robert Fox. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and Lilian Barber Press, 1986. Pp. ix + 230; notes, appendixes, bibliog­ raphy, index. $39.50. In 1814, Sadi Carnot joined with other students at the Ecole polytechnique in a last-ditch attempt to defend Napoleon’s Paris from the advancing armies of Great Britain and her allies. A dec­ ade later, he joined in the French response to another British ad­ vance, improved power technology. In a small book entitled Reflexions on the Motive Power of Fire, Carnot discussed in general terms the operation of heat engines. He argued that the maximum possible efficiency of an engine operating between any two tempera­ tures depended only on the temperatures at which heat was sup­ plied and removed. This maximum efficiency was the same whether the working substance of the engine was steam, air, or even a solid. Here Carnot assumed that heat, or, as he put it, calo­ ric, was conserved in the operation of an engine and not trans­ formed into work. Carnot’s Reflexions had no greater immediate effect than had his soldiering. Carnot himself soon abandoned the fundamental assump­ tion that heat cannot be converted into work. Contemporary physi­ cists and engineers largely ignored his book, and Carnot died in obscurity in 1832. At mid-century, however, the British physicist Wil­ liam Thomson drew new attention to Carnot’s work, making its ap­ proach a central part of the emerging science of thermodynamics. Over the past quarter-century, distinguished historians have exam­ ined the context, content, and reception of Carnot’s work. Robert Fox prepared a critical edition of the Reflexions in 1978 and has now completed a new English translation. His graceful introduction de­ scribes problems of steam engineering that concerned Frenchmen of the 1820s, outlines Carnot’s life, suggests connections between his approach to steam engines and his father’s work in mechanics, and discusses the reception of the book. The text follows, with a valu­ able commentary that reveals Fox’s careful examination of Carnot’s manuscripts, his wide knowledge of contemporary French physics TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 145 and engineering, and his assiduous attention to the work of other his­ torians. Appendixes give translations of a manuscript paper of Car­ not and of notes in which he recorded his doubts about the conservation of caloric. Here Fox again provides commentary, as well as a general discussion of surviving Carnot manuscripts. He con­ cludes with a useful bibliography and index. Fox’s translation not only makes the Reflexions accessible to the mod­ ern reader but places Carnot’s theory of heat solidly in the context of contemporary steam engineering. It will intrigue those who seek to understand historically the interconnections of science and tech­ nology. Peggy Kidwell Dr. Kidwell has written about 19th-century theories of heat as they were applied in astrophysics. She currently watches over objects in the Division of Physical Sci­ ences and Mathematics, National Museum of American History. The History of Civil Engineering since 1600: An Annotated Bibliography. By Darwin H. Stapleton with Roger L. Shumaker. New York: Gar­ land, 1986. Pp. xxxiii+232; index. $40.00. Since the appearance of Eugene Ferguson’s Bibliography of the His­ tory of Technology twenty years ago, both the volume of literature and the number of researchers in the field have grown enormously. There is consequently a real need for updated and more special­ ized bibliographies such as the present work by Darwin Stapleton on the history of civil engineering since 1600. Stapleton’s bibliogra­ phy is divided chronologically...

History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History

Anyone familiar with contemporary French culture could not fail to notice that, in the field of ideas, history and the philosophy of history occupy in France a more central place than in England or North America. The work and concerns—including the methodological concerns—of historians like Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and the Annalistes, Georges Lefebvre, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Le Goff and Francois Furet, are known, discussed and taken on board by most French intellectuals and academics.

History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault's Approach to History

Anyone familiar with contemporary French culture could not fail to notice that, in the field of ideas, history and the philosophy of history occupy in France a more central place than in England or North America. The work and concerns—including the methodological concerns—of historians like Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and the Annalistes, Georges Lefebvre, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Le Goff and Francois Furet, are known, discussed and taken on board by most French intellectuals and academics.

An NEH-Funded Institute On Contemporary French Culture

An NEH-Funded Institute On Contemporary French Culture