Du Temps Research Articles

From Folklore to Proust: A Quest across Symbolic Universes

This study explores the intersection of folklore and literature, specifically examining how a methodology developed for interpreting wondertales can be applied to a complex literary corpus, such as Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). The discussion proposes a case study for the use of allomotifs, or interchangeable motifs, to understand symbolic patterns in Proust’s literary work. The paper lays bare a widespread metaphorical field in wondertales, then follows its complications in the Proustian corpus. It suggests that Proust’s œuvre, much like folklore, operates within a symbolic universe where binary oppositions, such as good and evil or male and female, are fluid and dynamic. The discussion shows that Proust’s literary imagination aligns surprisingly well with the workings of folklore. This hybrid space of the imagination challenges conventional distinctions between folklore and literature, and brings to mind Lévi-Strauss’ erstwhile ruminations on the pensée sauvage.

Son et lumière in Proust

ABSTRACT Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is underpinned by an enduring tension between sight and the other senses. Conventional scholarship on Proust claims that the visual pole of this tension is linked to the intellect, as opposed to the association of the remaining senses with intuition and the unfathomable. This reading, however, presents an oversimplification of the complex economy of the senses explored by Proust insofar as it falls prey to visualism, a theoretical predisposition characterised by a double reduction of the perceptual experience. Challenging this tendency, this article draws on sensorial cross-modality and multisensory processes in order to interrogate the connection between sunlight and song in Proust’s novel. In particular, we focus on the ‘little barometer man’ at the start of La Prisonnière, whom the narrator anticipates singing on his death bed ‘if there is a blink of sun’. We also consider this Proustian connection between song and sunlight in light of a longer tradition, including St Francis of Assisi’s ‘Canticle of Brother Sun’ and the statue of Memnon’s dawn song. Proust’s consequent demythologising of light and his materialist approach to song support an attempt to consider light shorn of its usual metaphorical connotations.

Réveiller la mémoire de l’espèce. La récapitulation haeckelienne et la race de Lahor à Proust

ABSTRACT This article revisits the foundation of Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation, that is to say, the bodily reincarnation of a species within an individual, which takes place within the broader context of interspecies competition. All individuals carry within them their race, and this is what differentiates them from others and places them in opposition with others. This image is ideally suited to poetry and to fiction, where the individual becomes loaded with multiple voices, which transcend him or her. These voices are not immemorial, but on the contrary, loaded with memory. We will be exploring these whispers of an incarnated memory as a vehicle for racial theories in the poems of Jean Lahor and in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of a Modernist Work Composed in Captivity: Olivier Messiaen, "Quartet for the End of Time"

French composer Olivier Messiaen, who joined the French army as a medic in the Second World War, was imprisoned by the Germans as a prisoner of war in Görlitz's Stalag VIII A camp in June 1940. Because he did not actively fight in the war as a medic, a German officer sympathized with Messiaen, secretly delivering him paper, pencils and erasers and even having a room in the rectory cleared for him to compose. Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) was composed in such an environment. The fact that the piece includes a non-standard instrumental combination consisting of piano, cello, violin, and clarinet as a quartet is a result of the existing instruments in the camp and the presence of competent musicians playing them. The structural design of the work includes both musical and mystical qualities on the axis of Messiaen's personal belief. The work, which consists of eight parts in total, symbolizes timelessness, that is, eternity, by depicting the seven days of creation and the eighth day when God rests, as represented in the Bible. The premiere of the work took place on January 15, 1941, in front of an audience of four thousand prisoners and guards. In this article, the non-musical motivations and the composition techniques used in the work titled Quatuor pour la fin du temps are examined in relation to each other. The main purpose of the research is to discover the determining effects of the non-musical motivation, which guides the compositional process of the work, on the musical elements of the work. In addition to some technical aspects such as Indian rhythms/Indian modes, Greek rhythms, medieval classical rhythmic principles, French organ music tradition, synthetic modes/synthetic rhythms, and total serialism, Quatuor pour la fin du temps is also analyzed in terms of phenomena and concepts such as Catholicism, ornithology, and synesthesia. In the Introduction chapter, Messiaen's life is summarized on the basis of his personality as a composer, the compositional process of the Quartet is reviewed in the historical framework, and the research purpose, including the research methods used in this article are explained. In the following chapters, all movements of the Quartet are analyzed one by one. The compositional techniques used by the composer are examined in detail through the written out (text) analysis of the musical passages detailing them with footnotes whenever necessary, and these prose analyses are supported by musical examples of the relevant musical passages quoted from the Quartet’s score. The Conclusion chapter consists of the inferences and evaluations made from the findings.

Problematic metaphors for the temporality of languages

ABSTRACT From the Church Fathers to the nineteenth century, countless libraries bear witness to the quarrels in which scholars, using the exegetical and philological techniques of their times (notably those of etymology), had striven to make out the Adamic vestiges which have remained intact in post-Babelian languages. For them, languages were to remain outside historical time. However, at the same time there existed other currents of knowledge. Authors use diverse metaphors – bodily, botanical, etc. – to formulate a dynamic history of languages. Through the evocation of a few problematic metaphors, which create relationships between diverse forms of temporality employed to indicate the historicity of languages, this study underlines the tensions which presided over the genesis and the early development of linguistic knowledge. The Adamic language, endlessly appealed to, was also regularly called into question, and even outright rejected. No matter: recovering the purity of these origins managed to work as a powerful impetus for historic scholarship, and not only in the seventeenth century. This article was first published in French as “Quelques images problématiques du temps des langues” in Le Genre humain, 35 (autumn 1999–spring 2000): 273–290 (EHESS colloquium on “Actualités du contemporain”).

Intermedialità e sinmedialità nella videoarte contemporanea: Robert Cahen e Pierre Boulez

Intermediality and Sinmediality in Contemporary Video Art: Robert Cahen and Pierre Boulez The French video artist Robert Cahen (Valence, 1945), member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) founded in Paris in 1958 by André Schaeffer, begun to apply to images the experimental techniques of the so-called «musique concrète» in the early Seventies. Since his first video («L’invitation au voyage», 1972) Cahen manipulates images like sounds and explores the dimension of time perception. Inspired by the complex, fluid motions of sounds in space and by the Schaeffer’s theory and practice of the «écoute réduite», he develops a visual style deeply influenced by a musical conception of time. The concept of time is central in both the Cahen’s works devoted to Pierre Boulez’s music and conducting: the film «Boulez-Répons» (1985) and the video installation «Le Maître du temps. Pierre Boulez dirige Mémoriale» (2011). The article presents and analyzes the original audiovisual language and aesthetic meaning of both works according to the concept of «intermediality» and «sinmediality» in contemporary video art.

VOLODYMYR VINNICHENKO’S NOVEL “THE NEW COMMANDMENT”: POETICS AND FORMS OF EXISTENTIAL SELF-REFLECTION

The article considers the second edition of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s novel “The New Commandment” (1947), written for the first time in 1932. The author of the book translated it into French together with his wife after the end of World War II. The purpose of the work and the tasks dictated by it are to analyse the “French” novel “The New Commandment” by Volodymyr Vynnychenko in the paradigm of modernist aesthetics, to reveal the main philosophical ideas and aesthetic functions of the novel, to identify elements of intertextual memory, and to understand the influence of the book by Ukrainian dissident Viktor Kravchenko “I Chose Freedom” (1946). The set of goals determines the need to use hermeneutical (analysis of artistic text), comparative-typological (comparison of philosophical novel various functions), historical-literary (solution of a number of literary problems in the context of various national literatures) research methods. Vynnychenko’s work is analysed in the paradigm of the “Transcendent Homelessness” philosophical concept, introduced into scientific discourse by the Hungarian philosopher and literary theorist D. Lukach in his Hegelian-Weber essay “The Theory of the Novel” (1916), where he quotes the German romantic, a representative of the Jena school, Novalis: “Philosophy is homesickness – the desire to be at home everywhere”. In the study of Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s contribution to European modernism in the interwar era, the author pays attention to the key thesis of the trans-cultural theory, which touches such disciplines as anthropology, sociology and political science. Particular attention is paid to the genesis and specificity of the philosophical and figurative system of one of the key “French” texts by Volodymyr Vynnychenko. The leading aesthetic components and means of forming philosophical and ideologicalpolitical paradigms of the work are also determined. The French aristocracy had a great debate on “The New Commandment”. In April 1949, the translation was published in one of the Paris publishing houses (Nouveau Commandemant. Paris: Editions des Presses du Temps Present). The French literary critics of the time responded favourably to the publication of the Ukrainian author’s book, and the literary and artistic society “Club de Faubourg” already on 10th May 1949, arranged a massive discussion of “The New Commandment”, which testified to the approving attitude towards the author. At the same time, another well-known French artist club “Arts-Sciences-Lettres”, awarded Volodymyr Vynnychenko with an honorary diploma and a silver medal. On 21st July 1949, the prestigious Parisian weekly bulletin “Le Nuvelle Litterere” responded to this fact where noticed that after Shevchenko and Marko Vovchok, Volodymyr Vynnychenko is the first Ukrainian writer whose novels have been responded to by French audience. In this regard, it is noted that the philosophical foundations of Vynnychenko’s novel organically fit into the “spiritual crisis” European discussions of those times. We have studied philosophical character manifestation peculiarities in the genre of novel-dialogue, novel-polemic, which are widely represented in the “French” prose of the Ukrainian artist and are closely connected with the French literary tradition. It is proved that, having spent almost the last thirty years of his life in France, the Ukrainian writer seems to aim at identifying common thematic, aesthetic, philosophical and ideological paradigms that go beyond mononational boundaries, and demonstrates that Ukrainian emigrant artists were participants in pan-European literary modernism, although for the most part it concerns Volodymyr Vynnychenko himself, as well as Yu. Kosach, I. Kostetskyi, A. Arkhipenko, A. Ekster, A. Manevich, I. Pune, A. Boguslavskaya, M. Glushchenko. Particular attention is paid to the genre experiment of Vynnychenko, in particular, the philosophical and political novel with such poetic features as the presentation and discussion of concordist theory, the use of such a modernist technique as “a novel within a novel”, the constant inclusion of various discursive forms of concordism discussion. The critical optics of the study combines the historical and philosophical specificity of the era of the interwar twenties, on which the novels of Volodymyr Vynnychenko are based, as well as the national identity of the Ukrainian writer and his biographical individuality.

Waste lands: the lost infrastructure of Jean Rhys’s “Temps Perdi”

ABSTRACT This essay argues that Rhys’s “Temps Perdi” (1967) evokes modernist temporality – Proustian “lost time” – to connect the twentieth-century World Wars to the infrastructure of European imperialism. Set in England during World War II, Austria after World War I, and the “Carib Quarter” in Dominica in the 1930s, the story links the violence of the European wars to the violence of imperialism, and the “losses” of the twentieth century to the decayed Caribbean plantation, “Temps Perdi.” In the local patois, the phrase means not “lost time” but “wasted time, lost labor,” and recalls three hundred years of waste and ruin: the genocide of the indigenous “Caribs”; the devastation of African peoples enslaved in the Caribbean; and the “waste” of Europe itself – in the era of imperial collapse – in the destruction of the World Wars. All three of these historical realities are embedded in the story’s title, and though that title evokes the tradition of European modernism, it also marks a departure from it. Though structured, in its temporal shifting, by allusion to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, “Temps Perdi” also undertakes an excavation of the material structures of modernity: the infrastructure – variously concealed, ruined, lost, or missing – that marks the spot of European devastation in the Caribbean.

Algérie 1962: une histoire populaire. Par Malika Rahal

Early in her remarkable ‘histoire populaire’ of the advent of Algerian independence, Malika Rahal, Director of the Institut d’histoire du temps présent, twice cites Benjamin Stora. As the pre-eminent scholar of the conflict, Stora appears in his expert capacity, but also as a witness to the lived experience of a revolutionary moment. The eleven-year-old Jewish boy who left Constantine with his family in June 1962 takes his place among the exiled pieds-noirs, in counterpoint to myriad ‘indigenous’ Algerian voices, as Rahal weaves a complex narrative that throughout exemplifies the writer’s commitment to letting the subaltern speak. Wide-ranging, frequently moving, and — inevitably — at times disturbing, these collectively inspirational testimonies reveal the fine grain of profound societal change. As Rahal’s incisive study makes clear, this process was not only practical and organizational, but also conceptual and symbolic. Her historical assemblage mobilizes interviews conducted in Arabic and French, underpinned by extensive archival research and related primary documentation. The ­investigation also draws upon prominent scholarship in the field, notably that of ­Natalya Vince in her own pioneering oral history of female nationalist combatants (Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954–2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015)). Rahal thus offers an intricate and engrossing chronicle of a pivotal year, her structuring chronology punctuated by three key events: the ceasefire instituted by the Accords d’Évian (19 March); the national celebration of Algerian independence (5 July); and the proclamation of the Algerian Republic (25 September). This essential contextualization allows the author to develop a detailed case study in each of her twenty-two substantive chapters. The resulting analyses are as individually absorbing as they are cumulatively compelling, so allowing 1962 to emerge as a political and cultural totality: simultaneously event and effervescence, empowerment and performance, things falling apart while others coalesce in modes ranging from the patriotically heroic to the festively euphoric. Rahal maintains the coherence of this ambitious project by dividing her findings into four thematic sections: ‘Violences’, ‘Corps’, ‘Espaces’, ‘Le Temps’. These broad headings provide an appropriately inclusive space for her compendium of telling tales, as male and female, young and old, urban and rural, arabophone and francophone contributors find a space in which to articulate their imbricated stories of this year of revolution(s). ‘Le long 1962’, as scrutinized by Rahal, is a crux in the fullest sense: a touchstone to Algeria’s past, present, and future, in which the all-too-evident threats — military, diplomatic, economic — are counterbalanced by hitherto unimaginable social opportunities. Rahal charts this post-conflict reordering in spheres as diverse as medicine and agriculture, education and housing, political infighting and trade union organization. Elsewhere, she targets demobilization, returns from exile and liberation from captivity, reunions for some and the often drawn-out confirmation of loss for others. Through this close reading of a momentous year, Rahal makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the transition from colonial rule to Algerian sovereignty and thereby to the broader histories of France in Algeria and Algeria since independence. Her monograph is essential reading in our own times and is likely to remain indispensable for future scholars.

The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, by Jonathan Freedman

Reviewed by: The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity by Jonathan Freedman Beth Newman (bio) The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, by Jonathan Freedman; pp. ix + 297. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021, $95.00, $30.00 paper, $29.99 ebook. What do Jewishness and late-nineteenth-century decadence have to do with one another? Depending on one’s conceptions of “Jews” and of “decadence,” the answer could seem to be not much—or quite a lot, none of it good. Influential late-nineteenth-century anti-Semites used the word decadent and its cousin “degenerate” as slurs with which to vilify Jewish people and foment hatred of Jews, a theme taken up as policy during the years of Nazi ascendancy. In The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, Jonathan Freedman folds this fact into his rich, complex celebration of the decadent movement and its long afterlife, and the Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in both. [End Page 698] A prolific scholar of English and American literature, Jewish studies, and modernism, Freedman shows that Jewish people both adopted decadent themes and topoi to establish themselves as fully modern participants in the culture of major Western societies, and adapted them to specifically Jewish interests and preoccupations. He demonstrates compellingly that in doing so, they contributed to the shaping of an emergent modernism. Freedman makes this argument in seven chapters that are by turns erudite, gossipy, nuanced, funny, and moving. He stretches his canvas across the half-century or so that he calls the long fin de siècle from 1870 to 1920, extending it geographically from urban America to European centers of culture. Victorianists will be immediately interested in his first three chapters, which in different ways focus on the fin de siècle they know, surveyed from an unfamiliar angle of vision. The first chapter argues that the history of Jewish persecution, together with the Torah’s narratives of catastrophe and decline from Eden forward, created a receptive audience for decadent themes. Here, Freedman also constructs a network of Jewish critics, patrons, art historians, dealers, gallery owners, editors, and other taste-makers who provided a crucial infrastructure for the production and circulation of fin-de-siècle decadence. A chapter titled “Oscar Wilde among the Jews” explores the work of Jewish writers and artists whom Wilde championed as well as of those who championed him. These include Amy Levy, Ada Leverson, Julia Frankau, Marc-André Raffalovich, William Rothenstein, and Jacob Epstein, the designer of Wilde’s gravesite monument. Perhaps even more interesting is what Freedman discovers about Wilde’s popularity among Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London and New York who flocked to performances of his plays in the Yiddish theater, and purchased translations of his works in Hebrew and Yiddish. He shows that Yiddish-speaking revolutionaries treated “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) as required reading at a time when Wilde was scorned by the mainstream reading public and press. A chapter uncovering the phenomenon of “Jewish Salomania” traces the enthusiastic adoption of Salomé by Jewish artists, dancers, and film actors (including Alla Nazimova of Charles Bryant’s 1923 silent film), embraced by them even before Wilde’s play added to the title character’s appeal. This chapter is lavishly illustrated, and Freedman pauses to provide compelling, often brilliant readings of the images, including of the 1897 Alphonse Mucha poster of Sarah Bernhardt that graces the book’s cover. In these chapters, as in the conclusion, Freedman serves as collector culling materials from a wide array of sources, arranging them into an often dizzying but unfailingly interesting and almost always entirely persuasive account that supports his thesis, each time from a different direction. Gender and sexuality, recurrent themes throughout, are central to one of the two chapters that crown the book: bravura readings of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40). Freedman observes that although Proust identified as Catholic, his mother was Jewish, making him Jewish in the eyes of rabbinic law. Even readers unfamiliar with Proust or the body of commentary on his vexed relationship to Jewishness...

“In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters” Identity and Otherness in Sandra Cisneros’ Writings

rn into a Mexican family, American writer Sandra Cisneros has repeatedly given voice to characters marginalized not only for being femalebut also for being Chicanas. Thoughapparently simple in their narrative modes, Cisneros’ texts present the readers with many complex layers of meaning in their endeavour to represent female expectations, anxieties and concerns in a world that is still very much challenging for women. One core concern is certainly language, reflecting the author’s divide between Spanish, her family’s mother tongue, and English, her own native language, and the language in which she writes. This paper will focus on two works by Cisneros: her 1984 novel The House on Mango Streetand her 2021 dual-language text Martita, I Remember You / Martita, te recuerdo: A Story in English and Spanish. The purpose of this paperisto address theimportance of linguistic choices in representing female identitiesandexperiencesof othernessin a largely patriarchal society. The title is inspired by a passage in The House on Mango Streetin which Esperanza, theyoung protagonist and narrator of the novel, reveals some discomfort about her ownname and specially the way it is constantly mispronounced by English speakers, including her teachers at school. Echoing Virginia Woolf, in Cisneros’ coming-of-age 1984 novel, female identity is dependent not only on getting a house of her own (away from the barrio),but also her own name,one that could be“la simple carte photographique d’identité”, as Proust would put it in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu(754)

Burgundian Cleric and Denis Fonvizin Teach Grammar: Court Manners in the Mirror of Two Epochs

In the 1780s the well-known Russian writer Denis Fonvizin created his “General Court Grammar”. The idea of this work still seemed original and the sources of borrowing were not known. Meanwhile, its idea is very similar to the French “Doctrinal du temps present” by Pierre Michault (15th century), an anticurial text where court manners are also shown through the teaching of grammar. The article has a dual purpose: firstly, by comparing it, it examines in detail the circumstances of both works, the reasons for their writing, the choice of plot and the contents, and puts forward a hypothesis about the possible borrowing of idea by Denis Fonvizin from the French text. Secondly, the methods of everyday history are used to conclude that both authors are dissatisfied with their place in courtly society and the need to make a career through their literary talent.

Re-write and Re-create the French “Ballet du temps” (1654): Knowledge, Historical Sources, and Creative Strategies

"This article discusses the author’s process of reconstructing the “Ballet du Temps”, one of the great court ballets of the French 17th century, danced by King Louis XIV in 1654, which has remained partially copied by Philidor. With the Violin 1 being the only remnant of what has been this Ballet, the article presents the issues raised during the musical rewriting, notably the harmonic formulation, the instrumentarium, the ornaments, among others. This study also recalls the fundamental aesthetic differentiation between the Ballet dances (called Entrées and Airs in the score) and the society dances, which, in the context of the choreographic reconstruction, implies a flexible approach in which expressing the dramaturgy of the Entrée is central. Keywords: ballet de cour, recreation, French 17th century, performance study "

Marquis de Sade, The Marquise de Gange. Translated with an Introduction and notes by Will McMorran

This edition retrieves Sade’s late novel from the deep shadow of his pornographic production and places it squarely within the gothic canon. In so doing, it pursues a line also productively explored by Philippe Roger in his essay on Sade and the gothic in John D. Lyons’s collection The Dark Thread: From Tragical Histories to Gothic Tales (Newark: ­University of Delaware Press, 2019; reviewed in FS, 75 (2021), 405–06). Will McMorran’s excellent Introduction dramatically retells the story of the notorious true crime in which a Provençal noblewoman was murdered by her husband’s brothers in 1667, showing where Sade’s tale fits within the many accounts of her death. He also provides a very helpful selected bibliography of the retellings of the story, of which there are many from both before and after Sade, most recently in 1984, supplying in its fascinating entirety an English translation from 1744 of François Gayot de Pitaval’s influential version. ­Notable (re-)writers include Charlotte Smith, Alexandre Dumas père, and Elizabeth Gaskell. ­McMorran’s argument is two-pronged: firstly, that this novel is not of lesser importance to Sadean studies than the earlier works, and here he joins other recent scholars looking to rehabilitate the late novels (notably Michèle Vallenthini’s Sade dans l’histoire: du temps de la fiction à la fiction du temps (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019)). His second goal is to establish Sade as a properly gothic author, influenced both by the English gothic and by what might be seen as the genre’s origins in the Histoires tragiques tradition. And the result, in McMorran’s view, is that with The Marquise de Gange ‘the Gothic is coming home’ (p. xxv). So, what of the novel itself? Castles, dank rooms, fell premonitions, and a beautiful heroine unfairly treated are all abundantly present. The reader familiar with Sade will also recognize the disquisitions on nature and won’t be too surprised to discover that the ‘dissolute’ man is ‘inflamed rather than soothed’ by the beautiful ‘apologist for virtue’ (p. 90). There are some bravura passages of gothic horror and in one such we find the Marquise espying a hidden door: ‘a spluttering lamp reveals a glimpse of a chamber on the other side of the door; she enters… But what hideous object greets her eyes! There on a table before her, she sees an open cadaver, almost entirely ripped asunder’ (p. 130, punctuation sic). She escapes for the time being, yet ‘tottering, buffeted both by the gale and her own terror, [she] resembles a young willow battered by a storm’ (p. 131). Poor woman! Her horrid fate will not be eluded. In amongst all this turbulence, the (­relatively) sober account (p. 80) of what it’s like to be imprisoned adds depth and feeling, and if I can’t agree with McMorran that The Marquise de Gange offers a ‘taut, tense narrative’ (p. xxvii), he is right that this is a text worth revisiting and which should be part of a fuller sense of the gothic canon, on both sides of the English Channel.

Marcel Proust: Kinesic Styles and Consciousness as Interaction

In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, consciousness occurs as a dynamic cognitive event in such sensorimotor and psychophysical interactions as stumbling on uneven cobblestones, swallowing a dunked madeleine, or shaking hands with a member of the Guermantes clan. Gestures, such as a handshake, are a paramount focus of attention in La Recherche. Owing to Proust’s intensely kinesic style, they are multimodal and involve readers’ kinesthetic knowledge, kinesic intelligence, and active cognitive participation.

L’effet du temps et des compétences croissantes sur les résultats de l’anxiété langagière

The subject of the article is to discuss the research carried out at the Department of Romance Philology of the University of Szczecin. The research was conducted during a two-hour public speaking workshop based on the modified Toastmasters approach (the Modified Toastmasters Program), taking place weekly during the winter and summer semesters of the academic year 2014/2015. The results of our research (Kalińska, 2009) show that some students do not speak either for linguistic reasons (fear of making mistakes) or more personal ones (shyness). One of the first necessities was therefore to get the students to participate on their own. It is certain that the atmosphere of the class plays a significant role: an atmosphere conducive to communication is more likely to make students overcome their small blockages and their shyness, and to make them express themselves more freely without fear of being judged by others. In our opinion, the method inspired by the Toastmasters approach greatly promotes the climate of trust sought, facilitates the participation of all students and allows to overcome the stress associated with speaking in public due to the constant exposure to anxiety-provoking situations and the progressive habit of speaking in the group. To conduct this research, the mixed method was used, i.e. the combination of quantitative and qualitative methodology. The activities proposed in the workshop were aimed at reducing language anxiety and developing public speaking skills through behavioral and cognitive therapy exercises, including cognitive restructuring, systematic desensitization, skills training and public speaking training (oral communication and leadership activities). This study shows the positive effects of the Modified Toastmasters Program on reducing language anxiety and developing public speaking skills.

The Signifying Role of the Dress in the Novel “In Search of Lost Time” (A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu) by Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust knew how to write fashion. A fashionable dress makes a fashionable woman, and vice versa; a gorgeous, elegant woman makes her dress fashionable. The outfits of the best-dressed women in Parisian society are at one with their beautiful owners. As a result, the description of fine clothing in Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time” (A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu) is much more than just the accurate recreation of various dress codes and popular fashions of the time. The aim of the article is to explore how a costume “performs” in a work of literature. We assume that the attire does not simply highlight the natural beauty of a woman, but also gives a glimpse of her inner self, accentuating its strong and weak points. Through the agency of how she is clothed, we learn a lot about a woman, though the importance of Proust`s detailed descriptions has often been underestimated in academic literature.

Playing (Against) the Heritage: Absolutism and the French Revolution in French Digital Games Before 2000

This article demonstrates how digital games can confirm or subvert national historical discourses. The author analyzes selected 20th-century French historical adventure digital games about absolutist France and the subsequent French Revolution. Although most of them focused on reconstructing the era (e.g., the state-funded Versailles 1685), the emphasis is placed on two games by Patrick Beaujouan ( Le Passager du temps and Conspiration de l’an III). Their subversive content undermined the sense of reconstructing historical events on the screen. However, as the author concludes, the subversive content of Beaujouan’s games had its prize because they lacked the technical and institutional support that restorative projects such as Versailles 1685 had. However, Beaujouan’s games show that every “historical” game tells us more about contemporary discourses than past events.

Interaction between Special and General Meaning of French Legal Terms and Cultural Concepts as a Means of Social Characterization in Marcel Proust’s Novel “À la recherche du temps perdu”

The article deals with the analysis of the interaction between legal terms and cultural concepts in Marcel Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time” (“À la recherche du temps perdu”). Our primary concern is to contribute to the studies of the relations between the language of professional communication and general communication language within a literary text, and, therefore, to examine the functioning of legal and general vocabulary in the novel. Much has been done in the field of special terms and neutral lexis classification in professional language, but undoubtedly, just as much remains to be done. The analysis of different types of stylistic devices has been widely presented in specialized literature. It would be reasonable to study French legal terms from the point of view of their polysemy as well as from a larger perspective of the interaction between legal culture and culture in general. What we are aiming at is to establish some correspondences of legal concepts to those of everyday life, and above all, their relations with other allusions in the general culture domain. To attain our aim we should look at the legal concepts we detected within a larger context of their functioning. Our analysis reveals that the writer uses legal terms and legal concepts in order to describe some characters of the novel and to represent certain aspects of the social reality he depicts. Love relationship between Marcel and Albertine is illustrated with some examples from the domains of civil, criminal and financial law, which is not usually associated with such a theme. Multiple allusions to various cultural phenomena of legal culture and of culture in general, namely classical theatre and painting, the history of Ancient Greece and Rome express the author’s irony by contrast.

WTWO memoir extracts

Reading Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu again, always a completely immersive experience for me, I was struck again by the way in which the smallest details of that life become resonant, and make the text so eloquent, utterly involving a reader willing to give themselves up to the work. I was inspired to recall distant details of my own childhood in the West Midlands, and then of a period in a place that appears ‘remote’ from the mainland United Kingdom. These are two extracts from what will become a longer memoir, though not stretching to Proust’s twelve luminous volumes.