Elle Est Research Articles

Guerre by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Reviewed by: Guerre by Louis-Ferdinand Céline Jane E. Evans CÉline, Louis-Ferdinand. Guerre. Gallimard, 2022. ISBN 978-2-07-298322-1. Pp. 191. Literary scholars contend that the term "autofiction" better captures the nature of life-writing than the term "autobiography," with the former allowing for the enhancement and downplaying of certain events by the writer for a variety of reasons, modesty, lost memories, and creativity, among them. Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novel, Guerre, exemplifies autofiction as it interweaves fact with fantasy. Based on his 1914 experiences in the Great War, Céline's first-person account was composed twenty years later. The narrator, "Louis-Ferdinand," "Ferdinand," or "Loulou," compelled to share his war experiences, declares early in the story, "J'ai attrapé la guerre dans ma tête. Elle est enfermée dans ma tête" (26). His words convey the effects of having been bombed, both literally and figuratively: his head reverberates from the explosions and the deafness in his left ear; he also expresses the idea that sharing his experiences will be psychologically beneficial. While he leads people to believe that he was shot in the head as well as in the arm, his concussion resulted from falling against a tree during the bombardment. If he later adds, "Mais faut que je raconte tout" (34), he refrains from promising accuracy. Rather, he addresses the reader as follows, "J'ai appris à faire de la musique […] et, vous le voyez, de la belle littérature aussi, avec des petits morceaux d'horreur arrachés au bruit qui n'en finira jamais" (28). Thus, events documented by letters from the French Army to Louis-Ferdinand's father regarding his son's "héroïsme" (97) towards his fellow soldiers and grave injury to his right arm appear alongside romanticized elements, such as the eagerness of nurse L'Espinasse to gauge the wounded soldiers' potential for recovery according to how well they respond to her manual stimulation of their genitals. In real life, Loulou's nurse, Alice David, struck up a friendship with him and behaved like a big sister (14). The narrator's receipt of a military medal of valor, another verifiable occurrence, contrasts sharply with the fantasized verbal altercations between Céline's wardmate, Bébert, and his prostitute wife, Angèle, that purportedly end their marriage. Additional instances of diverting the truth include modifications of real names in Part Two of his récit: "Bébert" becomes "Cascade" while the narrator's mother, "Célestine" in Part One, is renamed "Clémence" in the subsequent section. These changes attest to creativity on the narrator's part, although he does not explain why. He does, however, caution the reader about the fallibility of memory with the passage of time: "À tant d'années passées le souvenir des choses, bien précisément, c'est un effort. Ce que les gens ont dit c'est presque tourné des mensonges. Faut se méfier. C'est putain le passé, ça fond dans la rêvasserie" (117). This avowal underscores the imaginary nature of his characters' dialogues once again. At the end of Guerre, the narrator claims to have left the French hospital in Peurdu-sur-la-Lys to continue his convalescence in London directly, although the truth is that Louis-Ferdinand spent several months in a Parisian hospital before making his way to England (169). [End Page 224] Jane E. Evans University of Texas, El Paso Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

A Story with Characters and Action

A Story with Characters and Action

Translating Race on the French Stage

Translating Race on the French Stage

Pioneers of the plantation economy: militarism, dispossession and the limits of growth in the Wa State of Myanmar

The characteristic mobility of highland populations in Southeast Asia relied to a large extent on their particular adaption to an ecological environment: swidden cultivation of tubers on mountain slopes. This ecology corresponded to cosmologies in which potency was limitless, or at least had no fixed and delimited precinct (as did the rice paddies and Buddhist realms in the valleys). Military state building, modern transport, and new crops and agricultural technologies have effectively ended swidden cultivation. In this article, I follow the pioneers of the plantation economy in the Wa State of Myanmar, who dispossess local populations of their land and employ them as plantation labour. The limits of growth and potency they encounter are (a) in the natural environment and (b) in the resistance of local populations. Yet, even though there are such limits, the potency to which these pioneers aspire is still limitless. It is however channelled through a new economy of life, epitomised in the plantation, nourished in excessive feasting, and maintained by the kinship dynamics of capture and care.

Elle, la mère par Emmanuel Chaussade

Reviewed by: Elle, la mère par Emmanuel Chaussade Warren Motte Chaussade, Emmanuel. Elle, la mère. Minuit, 2021. ISBN 978-2-7073-4671-1. Pp. 94. When Tolstoy offered his famous remark about unhappy families, he was surely not thinking of the kind of family that Emmanuel Chaussade describes in this, his first novel. For the state of this family beggars the notion of unhappiness, so deeply is it marked by catastrophe of every imaginable sort. At ninety-four pages, Elle, la mère is clearly no Anna Karenina. Nonetheless, it brims with event, with character, and with stories. It focuses upon a mother and her son. Both are anonymous (though on two occasions we are encouraged to infer that the latter's name is "Gabriel"). The narrative point of view is that of the son, but the story is told in the third person, rather than the first, a technique that affords the son some distance, and likewise serves to keep we readers at a safe affective remove. The novel begins with the mother's funeral, at which the son is the lone mourner. The mood of the tale does not brighten in any significant way thereafter, as the son tries to understand who his mother actually was, seeking out her origins, her experience, and the source of the misery that bedeviled her, and that constitutes his principal inheritance. He understands that she spent her entire life in moral paralysis—"La mère est vivante à l'extérieur, morte à l'intérieur" (58)—and he wonders if he is not condemned to follow her example. He discovers a multigenerational story of neglect, indifference, violence, and abuse wherein men rape their sisters-in-law and mothers sexually abuse their sons. In some cases, this "Gabriel" is obliged to do a considerable amount of excavation to uncover these events, such is the way this family hushes its scandals. In other cases, the "secret" is right before his eyes, yet recognizing and acknowledging it nevertheless proves challenging. Others do not welcome the revelations of family secrets, however. When late in life the mother begins to tell hard truths about her family, the son's siblings take care to silence her, arranging for her to be interned in a psychiatric hospital: "À leurs yeux, elle est l'unique dépositaire de leur propre folie" (74). All this to say that there is very little light on the horizon of this novel, where things go from bad to worse in an unrelenting manner. Chaussade practices a very effective strategy of saturation here, using techniques of accretion and iteration to argue the persistence of wrongdoing in a family unwilling ever to confront and denounce it. The chronic nature of that dynamic suggests that it will indeed persist. However, Chaussade invites us to reflect upon the son's quest and its consequences. Though there is no question of definitive relief, one wonders whether the son may expect any therapeutic effect, however modest, beyond the most salient result of his inquiries, that is, a most difficult story, very well told. [End Page 256] Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Éloge du mauvais lecteur par Maxime Decout

Reviewed by: Éloge du mauvais lecteur par Maxime Decout Warren Motte Decout, Maxime. Éloge du mauvais lecteur. Minuit, 2021. ISBN 978-2-7073-4662-9. Pp. 147. The appeal of this book becomes evident in its very first pages. It is both learned and amusing, non-sectarian and critically pluralistic. It is pleasantly discursive and intellectually invigorating. It is moreover distinctly engaging. That latter feature is nourished in the first instance by Decout's rhetorical decision to address his reader directly in the second person, switching to the first person plural when he seeks to invoke a commonality of experience. He launches his study with a contention that may seem obvious: "[N]ous ne lisons pas tous de la même façon" (7). As we scan that difference, that multiplicity, we identify the "bad" reader, easily defined as that other person, the one who does not read like we do. Decout suggests, however, that bad readers may have something to offer us, insofar as their readings are active rather than passive, and are often animated by creative impulses that we "good" readers repress. He urges us to think about good and bad readings in new ways, inviting us to consider literature in long focus. The examples that he offers in support of his argument are well chosen and widely ranging, from Cervantes, Montaigne, and Sterne; to Chateaubriand, Balzac, and Flaubert; to Proust, Kafka, and Joyce; to Chevillard, Viel and Senges. Bad reading was long considered a very dangerous thing, Decout points out; and if bad readers were easily identified (Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, for instance), good readers were defined mostly by implication. Until the twentieth century that is, and the work of figures like Sartre, Barthes, Booth, Eco, Riffaterre, and Iser. More recently still, as part of a broad reconsideration of readerly practices, certain critics have begun to question those normative formulations, and certain writers have begun to furnish space intended to promote freer readings, ones less constrained by textual prescriptions. "La mauvaise lecture, malgré ses aberrations, a ses vertus," argues Decout, "surtout quand elle est plus sage que la bonne lecture" (67). He points out that bad reading comes in an astonishing variety of shapes. It can result from fetishism, fanaticism, or fantasy. It can be fueled by naiveté or by an excess of erudition, by projection of subjectivity, or by a strained and threadbare objectivism. It can be leisurely in character or aggressively programmatic. In extreme instances, it can be interventionist, seeking to change what the text provides as notionally given—and here, as elsewhere in the book, the influence of Pierre Bayard can be detected, most particularly the dimension of his work that Bayard has designated as a kind of "critique d'amélioration." In its best expressions, bad reading responds more readily to our readerly desire than good reading. The playful, puckish tone in which Decout invites us to serve an apprenticeship in bad reading functions [End Page 221] to leaven more sober considerations. For at its most fundamental level, Éloge du mauvais lecteur is an eloquent, ardent brief for a more mobile, agile, resourceful, creative sort of reading, one that might accommodate that most elusive and precious of readerly attitudes: joy. Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Le cœur synthétique par Chloé Delaume

Reviewed by: Le cœur synthétique par Chloé Delaume Deborah Gaensbauer Delaume, Chloé. Le cœur synthétique. Seuil, 2020. ISBN 978-2-142545-1. Pp. 208. Delaume's novel, awarded the 2020 Prix Médicis, continues in the fourth-wave feminist vein of her 2016 novel Les sorcières de la République and her 2019 manifesto Mes bien chères sœurs, although it tempers the exuberant style of the earlier works. Concerned in Le cœur with directing her feminist message at a broader audience, Delaume traces the vicissitudes of the synthetic heart of Adelaïde Berthel, a Parisian publicist, in a mostly straightforward linear narrative. At age 46, anticipating exhilarating independence, Adelaïde divorces her husband only to experience stunning isolation as a "produit obsolète" (43). This "fleur bleue qu'on trempe dans l'acide"—an autofictional reference to the fragile young Chloé in Boris Vian's L'écume des jours from whom Delaume has taken her pen name—chafes at solitude and the confines of the small apartment she can afford as a single woman (13). Delaume launches the ludic intertextuality that permeates the novel by entitling the first chapter "Une chambre à soi." Poking fun at her heroine's superficial struggle with insufficient storage space for her extensive wardrobe, Delaume simultaneously salutes Virginia Woolf's feminist agenda. Adelaïde's dependence on a new partner to resolve her social invalidation and real estate problems confronts statistical evidence—in variations that echo throughout the novel to forlornly comic effect—that marital prospects for a Parisian woman in her forties are dismal: "13 700 femmes célibataires de plus que les hommes," enough to fill "les Arènes de Béziers" (42). In a sustained lampoon of the publishing world, Delaume compounds the endless humiliations of hunting for a spouse with Adelaïde's frustration with her career. At Éditions David Séchard, where female assistants "pullulent comme au temps des sténos" in support of the men in power, "Adelaïde ne sait plus qui elle est […] à force d'être devenue […] la voix des autres" (12). Salvation from the multilayered identity crises eventually comes by way of an adopted cat, social media, and the support and occasionally bungled sorcery of four women friends, including a 47-year-old writer named Clotilde whose eccentric autofictional titles parody Delaume's. There is risk of tedium and occasional chick-lit banality in this drawn-out saga. It dissipates, however, in the poetic rhythms of Delaume's prose (alexandrins abound), the sardonic, albeit surprisingly tender humor, and the threading of her vision of sorority through iconic feminist works. The novel concludes with another literary appropriation. The final chapter, in which an elderly Adelaïde, cured of "épousité aiguë," shares a house and an artistic cooperative with her friends and parties with abandon, is entitled "Les guérillères." Equating her octogenarians' resistance to devaluing masculine mores with the epic battle for freedom staged by a tribe of women warriors in Monique Wittig's Les guérillères, Delaume elicits the kind of freeing laughter that is also key to women's success in both novels. Ludically reminding readers that battles like Adelaïde's can be revolutionary as well as winnable, Delaume's latest paean to sisterhood effectively argues that "[i]l n'y a que l'amitié ou la sororité qui préservent de l'abîme" (195). [End Page 258] Deborah Gaensbauer Regis University (CO), emerita Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

HIV testing and self-testing coverage among men and women in South Africa: an exploration of related factors.

Uptake of HIV testing is critical to halting the spread of HIV. Our study aimed to examine the coverage of HIV testing and self-testing and the individual-level, household-level and community-level factors associated with HIV testing and self-testing awareness. We analysed data of 12 312 men and women from 2016 SADHS and used multilevel mixed-effects models to examine the factors associated with uptake of HIV testing and self-testing awareness. About 80% of participants had ever tested for HIV, and 64% had tested in the past year. Only 49% of adolescents aged 15-19years had ever tested for HIV compared with over 80% of adults. Self-testing awareness was low (22%), and only 2.9% of respondents had ever self-tested for HIV. The odds of having ever tested for HIV were significantly higher among respondents who were aged 25-29 (AOR: 4.02; 95% CI: 3.27-4.95), had a higher level of education (AOR: 3.18; 95% CI: 2.19-4.61), were married (AOR: 1.63; 95% CI: 1.36-1.94), had high media exposure (AOR: 1.23; 95% CI: 1.06-1.44) and had ever had sex (AOR: 5.57; 95% CI: 4.67-6.64), but lower among men (AOR: 0.39; 95% CI: 0.35-0.44). In conclusion, HIV testing coverage is high in South Africa relative to most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, but falls short of the UNAIDS first 95. We found no evidence of socioeconomic and geographic inequalities in access to HIV testing. However, adolescents had a lower level of HIV testing uptake, suggesting a need for interventions to expand testing in this age group.

Translation as a Form of Literary Communication in Poetry of Silver Age: Three Lyrical Versions of a Poem by Paul Fort

Three translations of Paul Fort small poem “Cette fille, elle est morte” by Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov and Mikhail Kuzmin are considered. The results of a comparative analysis of these three texts using the analysis of the original are presented. The question is raised about the originality of the form used by Paul Fort: the text he wrote is a deformed trio, and this deformation should be recognizable for his potential reader. It is stated that the semantic side of the text is ambivalent: in the first half of the text negative moods prevail, in the second - positive ones, which is shown not only lexically, but also rhythmically. The relevance of the study is due to a detailed analysis of the three translations using material about the biography and work of the translators themselves. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that such an analysis of the translation options for the Fort text and its formal, rhythmic and sound features has not been carried out before. The author dwells on the characteristic features of each of the three translations, noting both their connection with the original and the reliance on the translation of the predecessor, or, on the contrary, ignoring it. Particular attention is paid to the grammatical and lexical features of the original, which allow for an ambivalent interpretation of the meaning of the text.

Le monde horizontal by Bruno Remaury

Reviewed by: Le monde horizontal by Bruno Remaury Alain Ranwez Remaury, Bruno. Le monde horizontal. José Corti, 2019. ISBN 978-2-7143-1225-9. Pp. 176. Traversing from one historical age to another and interlacing both fictional and historical characters make this unique novel, or chronicle as some would label it, a truly intriguing and challenging read. As the title would indicate, the subject deals with the horizontal world which must then be compared to its alternative, the vertical one. It is 1906, and Félix Régnault discovers the negative hands in the Gargas grottos in the Pyrénées. While pondering his discovery he concludes that the hands, aimed upward, are destined to represent the birth of the sacred. This vertical world is quickly interspersed with a disastrous event when over a thousand miners were killed in Courrières, also in 1906. Both events evoke the awe of fear and the sacred. The novel continues to intertwine stories of one Marie whose bourgeois status gives her feelings of anxiety living above ground. The reader is then transported to a cavernous chateau in 1506, where Francisco, an intern to his master Leonardo de Vinci, recounts his master's fear and obsession with the minacious inner rocky grottos and water. Fear of worldwide flood becomes the major fear of the populace at that time, and floods do create vast liquid plains in the Pô region: "Pour Léonard, la fluidité de l'eau est le recouvrement et l'aplanissement du monde" (91). The liquid plains now become the vast plains of America, and Remaury focuses on the horizontal, which does not necessarily mean for the better. It is 1946, the skyline weighing heavily becomes the motif of expansion, and the development of the Greyhound bus line crisscrossing its new and vast pattern consecrates this new geography. Geography, asserts the author, is the first mythology of America: "L'Amérique se mesure à l'aune de sa démesure. Elle est comme le dit Camus la civilisation même de l'espace et de la quantité" (116–17). Everything becomes horizon and it is in the confines of this horizon that one [End Page 266] Issac Woodward becomes the victim of racism. Still 1946, and Jackson Pollock places his large canvas on the floor and paints while walking around it and destroying the horizon. He then places several traces of his hand in the upper corner. Pollock's gesture opposes the artist of the negative hands by turning his back to the skies, and Pollock's taste for large spaces emphasizes his wish to present a space without borders, the infinite. The vertical man was the center of the world, stars above turned around him while the horizontal man is at a crossroad, but it might just be in this ever-expanding horizontal world that the vertical man is still respected. All the images depicted in the novel: hands, plains, mines, Marie, Diane Arbus, et al., intersect with each other, albeit in different worlds. But the interpretation or meaning of this enchanting work remains, however, in the reader's creative imaging. Alain Ranwez Metropolitan State University of Denver, emeritus Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

New Discoveries: The Marriage Certificate of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey (July 22, 1929) / Sean O'Casey, Letter to Eugene O'Neill (November 25, 1936)

New Discoveries: The Marriage Certificate of Eugene O'Neill and Carlotta Monterey (July 22, 1929) / Sean O'Casey, Letter to Eugene O'Neill (November 25, 1936)

Émile Zola, La Confession de Claude

This volume is testimony to the scope of the Classiques Garnier ambition (see French Studies, 72 (2018), 448–49) to provide new editions of all Zola’s writing. For La Confession de Claude, his first-ever novel, remains largely unread, even by specialists. It was not a commercial success when it appeared in 1865 and it is unlikely to be a good investment, however admirable, for its modern publisher. Nicole Savy’s bibliography of critical studies devoted to it is revealingly thin. It is a text occasionally mentioned in passing, either in the context of Zola’s hesitant beginnings or in relation to its oblique autobiographical dimension. Savy rehearses the latter in her introductory essay, while insisting that this ‘n’infirme en rien le fait que c’est une œuvre littéraire, à lire en tant que telle et non comme un journal intime’ (p. 9). The challenges involved in such a revaluation have to overcome Zola’s own judgement of it, in a letter of 8 January 1866 partially cited here, that ‘il est faible en certaines parties, et il contient encore bien des enfantillages […]. Le poète reparaît, le poète qui a bu trop de lait et mangé trop de sucre. L’œuvre n’est pas virile; elle est le cri d’un enfant qui pleure et qui se révolte’ (p. 15). It did nevertheless have the intended consequence of bringing his name to wider attention, as a result of certain contemporary reviewers objecting to his ‘scandalous’ portrayal of the relationship between a grisette and her two lovers. To today’s readers, this portrayal seems pretty bland, veiled as it is by the mawkish stereotypes of la vie de bohême to which the novel is indebted. Even the report by the official censors concluded that, in spite of ‘la crudité des images et le cynisme du détail’, it should not be ‘condamné comme contraire à la morale publique’ (p. 224). Savy argues, however, that the question posed by ‘ce roman d’un premier amour irrémédiable, roman de la faiblesse humaine, est celle de la tension intolérable entre l’idéal et la chair, entre l’amour sacré et la souillure terrifiante du sexe’ (p. 15). Beneath its residue of Romantic euphemisms, she detects a more hard-edged discourse prefiguring that of his mature fiction. Zola himself allowed the work to be republished in 1880 as evidence of the distance travelled since this literary apprenticeship. Savy also makes a case for its formal qualities on the basis of its ‘plusieurs structures, assez savamment imbriquées’ (p. 21). More suggestively, given her own professional background at the Musée d’Orsay (she is the author of a number of brilliant analyses of Manet’s 1868 portrait of the writer), Savy alerts us to the ways in which Zola’s early engagement with the visual arts leaves its mark on descriptive segments of the text. It is not by chance that La Confession de Claude is publicly dedicated by Zola to Cézanne as well as to their mutual friend, Jean-Baptistin Baille. The text itself is barely 150 pages in length. This edition is filled out by several appendices, the most substantial of which is devoted to the novel’s critical reception in 1865–66, reprinting for the first time each and every reference to it in the Parisian and provincial press.

Loving Across Borders: The Queer, Transspecies Intimacies of Cixousian Sexual Difference

Loving Across Borders:The Queer, Transspecies Intimacies of Cixousian Sexual Difference Raquelle K. Bostow (bio) On ne peut même pas d'ailleurs en venir à bout puisque [… la Méduse,] elle est tentaculaire, elle est insaisissable, elle glisse comme la méduse. ("Méduse en Sorbonne" 143–44) In Hélène Cixous's texts, sexual difference cannot be seen, but rather is experienced through sensory engagement with others. Twenty-first century readings of Cixousian sexual difference have bypassed essentialist claims and rearticulate sexual difference as something to be read and deciphered outside of the realm of the visible.1 Cixous's deconstructionist approach displaces sexual difference, which historically has been located between male and female bodies. This article further insists on the radical inclusivity of Cixousian sexual difference by tending to its openness to intimacies between the human and nonhuman animal "other." Forging a space for transspecies communication, Cixous's writing disrupts the human/animal species hierarchy by exposing animals' emotional intelligence and complex forms of communication.2 [End Page 806] Cixous has always written on/with non-human animals as a way not only to examine alterity but also to poetically generate connective tissue that bridges across perceived differences by identifying common, transspecies acts like "thinking, laughing, suffering, mourning, and above all, speech" (The Portable Cixous 145).3 Scholarship treating the nonhuman animal in Cixous's work has emphasized the "animal humanity" that manifests in animals' capacity for suffering and unconditional love, and has also underlined the divine viewpoint that Cixous attributes to her animals.4 However, while scholars have noted the ways in which Cixous's texts rupture ontological barriers between human and animal, few have highlighted the ways in which her work on animality dialogues with her conception of sexual difference. This article connects these scholarly conversations by considering Cixous's understudied writing on animals in light of her work on sexual difference. I examine representations of nonhuman animals in "Le Rire de la Méduse" (1975, 2010), Messie (1996), and "Nous en somme" (2006), along with descriptions of the heart in "Contes de la différence sexuelle" (1994), to rethink intimacy within human-animal relationships as fostering queer kinship that veers from heteronormative, anthropocentric accounts of intimacy.5 My use of "intimacy" complicates and opens up the type of "love" shared between these [End Page 807] species, by considering love as an attentive caress that produces pleasure. By placing a selection of Cixous's texts in dialogue with strands of queer theory, I examine the ways in which transspecies physical and metaphorical touch fosters sexual difference. Specifically, through a study of Mel Y. Chen's Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (2012), I demonstrate how Cixous's disturbance of sexual identity and intimacy brings her work into the realm of queer scholarship. Ultimately, considering the ways in which the human and nonhuman animal relationship generates sexual difference demands that we reevaluate the meaning of "sexual" and foreground corporeal sensation in the discovery of sexual being, which, as Crevier Goulet claims, (re)asserts the body as a source of knowledge (311). I begin my study by examining Cixous's own deployment of "queer" in her 2010 description of the Medusa, where she posits the figure's contemporary relevance. I then consider how Cixous's queering (i.e. disturbing, repurposing) of Medusa's etymology affords linguistic intimacy between Medusa and the jellyfish, thereby making space for transspecies communication. The metaphorical touch between the medusas frames my reading of Cixous's brief coup de foudre with a faun, whose half-goat body complicates the human/animal divide, and whose mythology allows us to imagine transspecies intimacies. Next, I turn to Cixous's writings on her cats. I analyze the roles of the "heart" and "love" in the production of Cixousian sexual difference and examine the ways in which metaphorical transspecies intimacies influence human interactions with domesticated animals. I conclude by examining the connection between the animal figures introduced in this article through the trope of the crown, an image that suggests divinity as well as the twisting, unpredictable sex and sexuality of the human and animal figures Cixous portrays. Queer Speech: The Jellyfish as Metonymous Medusa La...

Infectious Diseases Risk While on Chronic, High-Dose Corticosteroids

Infectious Diseases Risk While on Chronic, High-Dose Corticosteroids

La sociologie de la littérature par Gisèle Sapiro

of a reader’s complicity in a perpetrator narrative.Yet Sanyal is also willing to recognize where literary figuration falls short: while Boualem Sansal’s Le village de l’Allemand productively uses irony to underscore the French Republic’s problematic uses of Holocaust memory (à la Sarkozy), the novel’s unwillingness to interrogate France’s colonial legacy undermines its engagement with comparative histories.While offering fresh insight on a number of canonical texts, Memory and Complicity is timely, provocative , and relevant well beyond the French example: the plasticity of Sanyal’s framework, like the rhetorical figures she assesses, suggests the possibility of new crosspollinations across a range of linguistic and historical contexts. Trinity College (CT) Sara Kippur Sapiro, Gisèle. La sociologie de la littérature. Paris: Découverte, 2014. ISBN 978-27071 -6574-9. Pp. 125. 10 a. As Sapiro explains in her detailed and judiciously conceived survey, the field of studies and research known as the sociology of literature was constituted in the second half of the twentieth century. This new approach to literature originated at a time when literary theory, under the influence of new criticism and structuralism, was increasingly focused on the internal analysis of literary works. In contrast, a sociological perspective developed in the context of Marxist theory and of work done in the field of cultural studies. The fundamental assumption governing a sociological approach is that the meaning of a literary work vastly overflows the boundaries of an authorial intention—not only taking on a significance provided by the context in which the work is created—but also having the potential of acquiring inflections and emphases according to subsequent configurations of social or cultural developments. In this sense, literature appears as“une institution, un champ, un monde ou un réseau de relations, elle est médiatisée par l’univers social dont elle est le produit” (34). Accordingly, Sapiro proceeds to outline three particular levels on which these processes of mediation take place, namely, the conditions surrounding the production of works of literature, the sociology of these works, and the sociology of their reception. Thus the production of literary works is subject to external factors such as economic, political, and religious pressures as well as to internalized ethical and aesthetic conventions or convictions. The theory of Pierre Bourdieu, as it locates the production of literay works at the intersection of a habitus and a champ or field, has been particularly useful in this regard. Such an approach helps avoid what Bourdieu has termed “l’illusion biographique” informing traditional studies that typically conflate an author’s life and work. The author’s role is to be understood instead in terms of “un travail de mise en forme,” a process defined as a “transubstantiation de la matière vécue, imaginée ou empruntée à des sources extérieures et leur amalgame, dont le 268 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 269 principe échappe le plus souvent à l’auteur lui-même” (65). This endeavor inevitably bears the mark of an author’s point of view and, according to Bourdieu, encompasses the entire history of the field of literature (67). As for the reception of literary works, a sociological approach seeks to go beyond a quantitative approach by providing an appreciation of the various modes of appropriation and interpretation to which works are subjected over time. Needless to say, a “sociologie de la lecture” proves eminently daunting in its realization. Moreover, it is a task whose complexity has only grown as a result of the international circulation of literature and literary theory. New fields, such as the sociology of translation and the sociology of transnational modes of appropriation are emerging. In concluding her concise, dense, and most valuable survey Sapiro notes that“si de nombreuses pistes de recherche ont été ouvertes, il reste beaucoup à faire” (108), thus stating what has become both obvious and challenging in the area of her investigations. Ohio State University Karlis Racevskis Spandri, Francesco, éd. La littérature au prisme de l’économie: argent et roman en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-2981-1. Pp. 400. 49 a. This important collection, comprised of an introduction and...

The Economics of Colonialism: Hunger, Expropriation and Mendicancy in Mohammed Dib's Algerian Trilogy

The colonial endeavor as argued by Aime Cesaire in his Discourse on Colonialism is neither an evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor an aid system to combat systems of ignorance, sickness, and tyranny (32). It is a system of power relations based on exploitation and violence without concern for the Other. To borrow Cesaire’s term, colonialism is nothing other than chosification; it makes objects of people, tearing them from their land, home, and families, depriving them of essential, life-providing commodities. Colonization’s social and economic policies disrupted traditional society and the Algerian way of life more so than the physical military conquests had done. Albert Camus, as a Pied-Noir author, provides an outsider’s perspective on the suffering of the Algerian population, declaring, “Pour aujourd’hui, j’arrete ici cette promenade a travers la souffrance et la faim d’un peuple. On aura senti du moins que la misere ici n’est pas une formule ni un theme de meditation. Elle est. Elle crie et elle desespere. Encore une fois, qu’avons-nous fait pour elle et avons-nous le droit de nous detourner d’elle ?” (Camus 40) ‘For now, I must end this survey of the suffering and hunger of an entire population. The reader will have seen, at least, that misery here is not just a word or a theme for meditation. It exists. It cries out in desperation. What have we done about it, and do we have the right to avert our eyes.’ Mohammed Dib’s Algerian trilogy gives flesh to Camus’s statement; misery in these novels shouts and despairs, it shows itself through the characters and narration. This literature shows, as only literature can, the Algerians’ misery, and their desperation; it creates a collective trauma to be shared and understood by many through the act of storytelling. This collective trauma brings out the emotions of the characters and allows the reader to feel empathy toward the plight of the Algerians.

Nostalgérie: l’interminable histoire de l’OAS par Alain Ruscio

Reviews 225 d’une trilogie, nous propose tout bonnement une philosophie de la nature. Le deuxième tome, qui a pour titre Décadence, suggère une philosophie de l’histoire. Quant au dernier volet, Sagesse, l’auteur nous promet une vraie philosophie pratique. Voilà de quoi satisfaire les lecteurs. Oregon State University Nabil Boudraa Ruscio, Alain. Nostalgérie: l’interminable histoire de l’OAS. Paris: Découverte, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7071-8564-8. Pp. 316. 21 a. The specter of the OAS (Organisation armée de libération) reappears in Ruscio’s book, which details the organization’s responsibility in hastening the freedom of Algeria and the exile of its sizeable pied-noir population. Ruscio does not mince words about the identity of the culprits in the mysterious assassinations of French Algerians in the last years of the Algerian war of liberation, nor does he absolve the organization from the mass killings of Algerian Muslims. With an emphatic verdict thoroughly substantiated by historical facts and political events, he investigates a clandestine organization that embraced terror and targeted killings in order to silence its detractors in Algeria and intimidate those in France opposed to the idea of l’Algérie française. Among the murderous acts meant to send a message: the repeated and failed attempts by the OAS to take the life of its nemesis, General de Gaulle, to whom it gave the contemptuous epithet “Grande Zohra,” and to one of its assassination attempts the code name: “Opération Grande Zohra” (171). Its targets also included eminent intellectuals and writers, such as Sartre, Camus, and Mauriac. Colonel Trinquier, one of the strategists of revolutionary wars, reputedly said: “La première personne que je fusillerai, c’est Mauriac” (216). Five weeks after denouncing the OAS in his Diary, Mouloud Feraoun fell victim, execution style, to a commando attack on March 15. To read Ruscio’s book is to descend into the underworld of an organization that spared no effort in its attempts, first to keep Algeria under the French flag, and second to flood it with white Europeans in order to dilute the composite ethnicity of its aboriginal people.As if sensing the arduous task of criticizing the champions of the colonial past, Ruscio imputes the cacophony that surrounds French colonialism to the intransigence of the vociferous members of the OAS, some still alive today, who managed to repackage French colonialism in the ongoing discussion on terrorism, immigration, identity, religion, and laïcité, hence the significance of the book’s subtitle. For Ruscio, the history of colonialism is ubiquitous in twenty-first-century France and exemplified by“Mohamed,”“Fatima,”“Mamadou,”and“Nguyen”who do not have“à s’en justifier ni à prouver leur identité [...] L’histoire coloniale n’est plus dans les vieux manuels d’hier, elle est dans leur vie d’aujourd’hui, dans leurs rues, dans les bus, dans les cours des écoles et lycées. Impossible de détourner les yeux”(247–48). The OAS managed to convert its crushing defeat in Algeria into a caustic discourse that found a host in the acerbic rhetoric of the Front national. Now that the colonial legacy has penetrated the mainstream, Ruscio sees an opportunity to“débloquer l’histoire,”a process that could enable French society to be free from the demons of its past. University of Maryland, Baltimore County Zakaria Fatih Serres, Michel. Le gaucher boiteux. Paris: Pommier, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7465-0695-5. Pp. 280. 22 a. Despite the potentially misleading nature of its rather peculiar and comical title, this book is one of the most rigorous and thought-provoking essays that Serres has written during the latter part of his career. In this sequel to his most commercially successful work Petite poucette (2012), which landed the philosopher on the bestseller list in France, Serres probes the conditions that facilitate invention. As the aforementioned title unequivocally suggests, Serres posits that one serendipitously stumbles across or discovers novelty when straying from the well-worn epistemological paths that stifle innovation. For Serres, every great feat of human ingenuity has always been the result of a bifurcation that eventually led to unexpected and unpredictable discoveries. The philosopher maintains that...

Info-médicaments

L’anémie et la carence en fer sont des questions de santé publique majeures au niveau mondial. Ce travail synthétise la situation existant chez l’enfant de 6 mois à 5 ans dans 11 pays d’Afrique francophone, à partir d’études démographiques de santé récentes et d’une recherche bibliographique complémentaire. La prévalence de l’anémie (taux d’hémoglobine [Hb] < 11 g/L) chez les enfants s’établit à 72,4 % (60,2–87,8 %) ; elle est légèrement plus élevée chez les jeunes enfants, notamment pour les formes sévères, que chez les enfants de plus de 3 ans. Près de 50 % des femmes en âge de procréer sont anémiées. Moins de la moitié des enfants consomment régulièrement des aliments riches en fer et seulement 12,6 % d’entre eux reçoivent des suppléments de fer. La malnutrition (protéino-énergétique et vitaminique) contribue à la survenue d’une anémie. L’existence d’un statut inflammatoire, d’origine infectieuse ou parasitaire, modifie certains critères d’évaluation de la carence en fer dont le diagnostic devient alors délicat. Dans les populations étudiées, le niveau de prévalence du paludisme et des infections intestinales et respiratoires, et leur distribution suggèrent toutefois qu’une large partie des anémies observées seraient ferriprives. Ceci justifie les vastes programmes de fortification en fer de la farine mis en œuvre dans la quasi-totalité de la zone étudiée. Bien que leur efficacité n’ait pas encore été formellement évaluée, une amélioration semble se dessiner. Elle reste cependant modérée et des actions complémentaires sont nécessaires.Anemia and iron deficiency are major public health issues worldwide and particularly in Africa. Reliable information about their prevalence and associated factors is required to allow for effective actions. In this study, we used data from recent (2006–2012) large population health surveys, carried out in 11 French-speaking African countries (Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo Brazzaville, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Senegal). Hemoglobin (Hb) was assessed and demographic and health-related parameters were obtained from nation-representative samples of children aged 6–59 months. Anemia (Hb < 11 g/dL) was found in 72.4% of the children (60.2–87.8%), with no gender difference but a slightly lower incidence in older children (62% at age 4–5 years versus 85% at age 9 months), especially for the more severe forms (2.1% versus 8.7%, respectively). Anemia was only slightly but significantly affected by location (75.5% in rural areas versus 67.3% in towns), income (79.8% in lower quintile of income versus 62.3% in higher quintile), or maternal education (74.1% in children from non-educated mothers versus 62.4% in children whose mothers had secondary education). Nearly 50% of women of child-bearing age had anemia. In the countries that report this information, less than 50% (17–65%) of children consumed iron-rich foods regularly and only 12% (7.4–20.5%) received iron supplementation. Infection and parasitism are known to affect some markers of iron status, because of the inflammatory reaction, thereby making the diagnosis of iron deficiency difficult. In the study countries, acute respiratory diseases and diarrhea affected 6.2 and 15.6% of children aged between 6 and 59 months, respectively; their distribution according to age and location is very different from the one of anemia, which is also the case for the distribution of malaria. It is thus likely that a large part of the anemia observed in young children is due to iron deficiency, although further research is needed to confirm this. This fully justifies the nationwide programs of iron fortification of flour, currently undergoing in most countries of French-speaking Africa. Their formal evaluation is still pending but the initial data suggest some efficacy, although far from optimal. It is thus likely that a more holistic approach, including iron fortification, actions against undernutrition and parasitism in children, and actions in favor of improving young women's iron and nutritional status, together with appropriate communication and education objectives, would be more effective.

Compensating for the past: debating reparations for slavery in contemporary France

The article explores the place of reparations for slavery in the contemporary politics and culture of France and the French-speaking Caribbean. Considerable attention has recently been paid to the recent decision of CARICOM leaders to set up a reparations commission, but similar questions relating to slavery and its (financial) afterlives have also been raised (and remain equally unresolved) in the Francophone world. In a press conference in Dakar in October 2012, François Hollande answered questions about the subject: “La réparation”, he claimed, “elle n'est pas que morale, elle est aussi de savoir ce que nous voulons faire ensemble.” (Weider, Thomas. “Couacs entre l'Elysée et Matignon sur les traites négrières.” Le Monde. 14 October 2012). In the wake of these comments, legal action was launched in France by the group CRAN (Conseil représentatif des associations noires) against the Caisse des dépôts, itself accused of profiting from compensation paid by Haiti to the French state from 1825 onwards. The article draws on speeches by Sarkozy and Hollande as well as recent publications by the CRAN in order to locate reparations for slavery within the wider geopolitical, historical, and memorial context of the Francosphere. In conclusion, it will analyse one of the few cultural artefacts to address the question of reparations for slavery, the controversial 2011 comedy Case départ.

FFminisme Et Droit International : Le FFminisme De Gouvernance LLLpreuve Du FFminisme Critique (Feminism and International Law: 'Governance Feminism' Put to the Test of 'Critical Feminism')

FFminisme Et Droit International : Le FFminisme De Gouvernance LLLpreuve Du FFminisme Critique (Feminism and International Law: 'Governance Feminism' Put to the Test of 'Critical Feminism')