Eloge De La Research Articles

Eu-Topiile. Joc, Colecționare Și Multiplicitate în Construcția Posturală a Simonei Popescu

Abstract The study aims to analyze the way in which the posture of the Romanian contemporary writer Simona Popescu is created, based on concepts in the field of postural analysis, as posture and ethos, theorized by Alain Viala and Jérôme Meizoz. With emblems as exuviae, Matryoshka doll, Rubikʼs cube, the image of the collage dilettante, or the one of postman Cheval, the self-image constructed, by discursive means, by Simona Popescu is one of the adult-child, who keeps childhood and youth as defining layers of the mature personʼs identity. The writerʼs fascination with Gellu Naumʼs figure, the subject of her doctoral research, is justified mainly by her interest in collage and by the possibility of using this technique as the instrument of construction of her figure as a writer (the account of her childhood is seen as an attempt to stage surrealism). The analyzed corpus highlights also as representative of Simona Popescu the collectorʼs figure – even the toy collectorʼs figure, for the analysis of which will be used Walter Benjaminʼs famous texts about childhood and dolls (Enfance. Eloge de la poupée et autres essais).

Sur les Lettres diverses d’Henry Le Bret, éditeur de Cyrano et prévôt de l’Église de Montauban

The Lettres diverses attributed to Henry Le Bret were published anonymously, without any date nor place of publication. This article deals with three problems : authorship, datation and Le Bret’s direct involvement in its publication.Le Bret’s paternity of Lettres diverses, included the only letter addressed to himself, is proven mainly by his signature found in many of them and by his attested private relationships with the majority of addressees. The publication date is resolved after a meticulous comparison of Lettres diverses and Recueil de quelques discours et lettres écrites à des personnes studieuses sur differentes matieres (1692), in which 15 letters (out of the 64 of Lettres diverses) are present with some variations. From an omission in the Recueil I theorized that a great number of pages from a published copy of Lettres diverses were detached/untied and reused as a material hypotext for the Recueil ; this theory is substantiated and confirmed by a lot of informations related to events, books, and people, especially to Bossuet, Queen Marie-Thérèse and the Clergy Assembly of 1665. All these data lead to the conclusion that Lettres diverses were published between 1678 and May 1681, which invalidates all previous datations proposed by Lacroix, Forestié, Cioranescu, and myself in 2004.And finally there is no historical evidence nor objective argument for believing that Le Bret did not want his readers to know that he was responsible for the publication of these letters : the book was obviously destined to a private and chosen group of friends, which was not uncommon in xviith century. In 1692, given his geographic and not so private new public, Le Bret withdrew from Lettres diverses all the ones addressed to his Parisian friends as well as some destined to Toulousan ladies in which good taste was questionable (like his Eloge de la petite vérole, i. e. small-pox).We can now reformulate the bibliographical description of this book : Lettres diverses par Henry Le Bret, prévôt de l’église cathédrale de Montauban, Montauban (?), ca 1678-1681.Among the addenda completing this article are a brief account of the controversy between Le Bret and the minister Pierre Isarn, a restitution of one of his remarks concerning Boileau’s Satire IX, and his quasi unknown éloge de la petite vérole.

When the Walls Fall

This essay, which introduces part 2 of the special section Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Eloge de la creolite , considers the Eloge' s relationship with time, specifically the idea that it was before its time or that it was published in advance of the existence of an appropriately prepared reading public. Referring to some recent global events, and drawing on a largely neglected pamphlet by Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, the author wonders if the time for the Eloge and the broader, related Caribbean theories of history and culture may have arrived and argues that Caribbean thought needs to rediscover and reengage with its radical foundations.

Manifestes et programmes littéraires aux Caraïbes francophones : En/jeux idéologiques et poétiques by Michal Obszyński

Manifestes et programmes litteraires aux Caratbesfrancophones: En/jeux ideologiques etpoetiques. By Michal Obszynski. Leiden/ Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016. ISBN 9789004309128. 278 pp. $78 US. Print and E-book.Michal Obszyňski's Manifestes et programmes litteraires aux Caraibesfrancophones: En/jeux ideologiques et poetiques offers an excellent chronological account and analysis of texts whose overt intention has been to seek affirmation and worldly respect (from the Abstract, 259, which is in English, although the rest of the book is in French) by putting forth theories of aesthetics, ethics, and/or identity. Obszynski emphasizes the constant push and pull between the need for European affirmation, on one hand, and the desire to better articulate an ethos that expresses itself aesthetically, and that rids itself of the need for European recognition, on the other. The major contributions of Obszynski's study are: 1) its inventory and analysis of scholarly production in French from university milieus in the Caribbean, France, and Quebec, work that is often ignored by scholars working in the English-based academy; 2) its establishment of criteria to assess the rhetorical devices through which a text asserts an ethical agenda; and 3) its consideration of more contemporary texts, such as the two iterations of Pour une litterature-monde (2007), within a longer French (and in-French but non-Hexagone) tradition of the literary manifesto. As such, the volume resonates with Mary Ann Caws's prolific work on the manifesto and aesthetic practice; Kaiama L. Glover's Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2011), on the postcolonial star system; Richard Watt's Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (2005); the volume Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Litterature-monde (2010), edited by Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, and David Murphy; and, most recently, Chelsea Stieber's work on 1920s Haitian literary journals as well as the special section in Small Axe (vol. 52) titled Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Eloge de la creolite and Caribbean Identity, Culture, and Politics (2017), edited by Martin Munro and Celia Britton.1With outstanding clarity, Obszynski articulates the tension between three simultaneous dynamics pertaining to nonfiction and creative nonfiction texts that assert a specifically Antillean and/or Haitian identity: the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical, the conflict between the communal and the individual, and the desire to be part of Europe but also distinct from, if not completely rid of, it. Obszynski writes, Toute ecriture manifestaire a visee esthetique s'avere aussi une prise de position et un projet ethique (41). The volume is divided into three long chapters. The first works through theories around the manifesto; the second and third chapters chronologically take inventory of manifestos, prefaces, journals, and specific essays that proclaim a literary aesthetic or ethico-aesthetic agenda. The chapters are divided into subsections, each of which clearly identifies a given text.The first chapter, titled L'Ecrit manifestaire : Theories et axes d'analyse is dedicated to a review of literary manifestos that engage in the aesthetic and/or the literary, as well as genres related to the manifesto. For the reader who is not familiar with such literature, the chapter offers a clear overview of scholarship on the subject. Obszynski explains that manifestos draw on rhetorical devices that are polemique and even blasphematoire (25), and almost always overly dramatic and performative (23), because their intention is to impose themselves aggressively on their readers. They also follow prescriptive formats: one type denounces a certain social or aesthetic practice and proposes a break with the old but does not propose any alternative (25); a second denounces the old and proposes a new set of alternatives to replace what has been denounced (26). …

Le fonctionnement de l’«honneur» de L’Esprit des lois comme signe d’une véritable discontinuité au sein de la réflexion de Montesquieu. Une nouvelle explication de l’inachèvement du Traité des devoirs

This article regards the relation between the principle of Monarchy, the Honor (The Spirit of Laws, III, 7) and the project of Traite des devoirs. In the first part of this paper, I will consider some Works – in particular the Discours sur Ciceron and the Eloge de la sincerite – and the importance of the meditation on Cicero in the period 1715-1725, in order to understand how Montesquieu didn’t finish the Traite des devoirs. In the second part, the genetic approach adopted throughout this paper can allow to show a notable change in the elaboration of the President’s thought that concerns his whole work, from the works he wrote when he was at the Academy of Bordeaux until The Spirit of the Laws, where honour emerges for the first time.

From Aesthetics to Allegory: Raphaël Confiant, the Creole Novel, and Interdisciplinary Translation

This essay examines the roles played by ethnographic writing and translation in Raphael Confiant’s 1994 L’allee des soupirs . This novel fictionalizes the 1959 riots in Martinique while simultaneously creating characters who debate the relative merits of modes of expression capable of capturing the linguistic, cultural, and racial hybridity of creolite in literature. Confiant translates into fictional terms important precepts on Caribbean literary production set out in Eloge de la creolite , which Confiant wrote with Patrick Chamoiseau and Jean Bernabe. By transforming the aesthetic problems taken up in Eloge into a thoroughly creolized novel that deals with the hybridized messiness of everyday life, Confiant presents a text that ethnographically allegorizes its own conditions of production. This allegorization mobilizes a process the essay calls “interdisciplinary translation,” which relies on an ongoing process of conversion between ethnographic and literary modes of representation.

Essayism and the Multiplication of Possibility in Patrick Chamoiseau's Biblique des derniers gestes

This analysis shows the affinity between the concept of essayism and the project of creolisation undertaken by Patrick Chamoiseau and other Martinican writers. By translating the essayistic spirit—the will to assay, to try, to attempt, or to strive—to a non-European context, Chamoiseau and his fellow writers overhaul the form and stealthily undo assumptions about what the essay can or cannot accomplish. Through examples from Eloge de la creolite , by Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabe, and Raphael Confiant; Edouard Glissant’s Poetique de la Relation and Philosophie de la Relation ; and Chamoiseau’s epic novel Biblique des derniers gestes , this study demonstrates how Chamoiseau and his larger cultural project accord perfectly with the essayistic and how his translation of the genre reveals as-of-yet unexploited stylistic and modal alternatives to Montaigne’s original project. These examples all point toward vibrant prospects for essayistic fiction in the Caribbean and represent a productive appropriation and transformation of what is often considered a deeply rooted European form.

<em>Patrick Chamoiseau. A Critical Introduction</em> by Wendy Knepper

Reviewed by: Patrick Chamoiseau. A Critical Introduction by Wendy Knepper Maeve McCusker Patrick Chamoiseau. A Critical Introduction By Wendy Knepper Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2012. xv + 274274 pp. ISBN 9781617031557 cloth. Patrick Chamoiseau’s work has been the subject of five previous monographs. Of all five, this is perhaps the most inclusive study of his writing, methodically tracing Chamoiseau’s progression from his earliest through to his most recent texts; embracing drama, screenplays, film, theory, autobiography, and fiction; and, on the way, attending to a number of his less-studied texts (e.g., Maman Dlo contre la fée Carabosse, Au temps de l’antan, A Bout d’enfance, and a range of works for children). The introduction sketches the writer’s evolution and reception and draws usefully and meticulously on hard-to-access Martinican resources. Similarly, in the second chapter, “Insurgent Performance Works,” valuable material about early plays and their performance in Martinique is unearthed. The next three chapters cover more familiar territory. Chapter three examines Solibo Magnifique and Chronique des sept misères, chapter four deals with the Eloge de la créolité, Lettres créoles, and Texaco, and chapter five with Chamoiseau’s autobiographical works. Knepper’s readings are generally sensitive and well-grounded. Particularly acute are her comments on the pace of Chronique slowing down to prepare for its tragic conclusion (69), her analysis of a critique of nostalgia being embedded in this highly nostalgic novel (73), and her observations on the role of the messianic figure and of twins in Texaco (111). Indeed some of these points could have been further developed and teased out. At other times, for this reader at least, the close reading was more tenuous—the association between chaux and chaud in Texaco is over-stated (123), as is the notion that the scraping of burnt confectionary has racial connotations in Chemin-d’école (136), or that the making of bread becomes a metaphor for “the production of selfhood” in the same text (Ibid.). Chapter six offers an original reading of Ecrire en pays dominé via the figure of the Warrior of the Imaginary and the pierre-monde. This essay is often invoked by critics, but such a detailed analysis of the text, on its own terms rather than as a way into other Chamoiseau writings, is unusual. Chapter seven, “Visual Texts and the Revolutionary Epic,” gives a valuable flavor of the films on which Chamoiseau has worked. This is the chapter in which Knepper allows herself the most critical distance from Chamoiseau. She rightly acknowledges that the oneiric qualities of his screenplays can lead to a “somewhat plodding cinematic experience” (187) and that the collaborations with Guy Deslauriers at times risk perpetuating “a colonial and/or doudouiste vision” (Ibid.). This chapter also includes an illuminating reading of the role of Vodou in Biblique des derniers gestes. A final chapter on “Activism and Tales of Initiation” brings the reader right up to date with Chamoiseau’s work, analyzing a number of recent political pamphlets as well as novels such as Un Dimanche au cachot (2007) and Les Neuf consciences du Malfini (2009). Knepper’s democratic approach, in which texts are given if not equal then at least comparable status and space, allows for a holistic and comprehensive treatment of this major writer. If the study lacks the theoretical or thematic focus of much previous writing on Chamoiseau—and therefore, at times, the critical distance from the author—it is a sympathetic, informative, and scrupulously [End Page 204] researched introduction. It is for this reason that it is perfectly placed to appeal to undergraduates, but should be of interest to all researchers working on Caribbean writing. Despite a disappointingly high number of typos and errors, especially— but by no means exclusively—in the French quotations, this is moreover a stylish and beautifully presented book. Maeve McCusker Queen’s University Belfast m.mccusker@qub.ac.uk Copyright © 2013 Indiana University Press

Fleshing out Language and Intersubjectivity: An Exploration of Merleau-Ponty’s Legacy to Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract This paper examines how recent cognitive linguistic work on conceptualization and intersubjectivity (Verhagen 2005, 2008; Langacker 2008) echoes Merleau-Ponty’s older reflection on the notion of intersubjectivity, a key factor in embodiment and language. Three topics are explored in this respect. First, the largely implicit references to Merleau-Ponty in Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh (1999) are related more explicitly to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh. Second, the discursive status of usage events is shown to be directly connected to the linguistic consequences of Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporality, as it brings together living bodies in intersubjective experiences. The third objective is methodological: the focus is not only on Merleau-Ponty’s often quoted Phenomenology of Perception 1945, 1958), but shows lines of continuity with the explicit philosophy of language in his later work, like Eloge de la philosophie (1960,1963), Signes (1960, 1968b), Conscience et acquisition du langage (1964, 1973a) and La prose du monde (1969, 1973b). This discussion includes Merleau’s relation to Saussurean linguistics, and gives rise, perhaps surprisingly, to a dynamic view on language as a locus of intersubjective creativity, which reaches beyond the individual basis of perception, gesture and incorporated language.

Preface: Islands of Créolité?

When Eloge de la creolite appeared in 1989, there was an understandable enough elation in francophone Caribbean studies.1 It was something of an intellectual event. And rightly so. Striking a note of defiant provocation, the authors—Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant—sought to reckon in a sympathetic yet critical way with the profound inheritance of Negritude, its almost overwhelming authority as a cultural-intellectual frame of engagement and identity embodied in the towering (if not unambiguous) presence of Aime Cesaire, then of course still very much alive. Crossing out without negating la presence africaine with the poetics of antillanite, the authors were concerned to forestall—even subvert—the drive toward an external identification with a mythological Africa as the consoling counterpoint to an external identification with a mythological Europe. “Nous sommes fondamentalement frappes d’exteriorite,” they asserted with exuberant disaffection, we are fundamentally stricken with exteriority. It is against this orientation that they formulated their idea of creolite, “une vision interieure,” as they called it, the interior vision of a hybrid world made up of disseminated and recomposed fragments.2

Rhys's Pieces: Unhomeliness as Arbiter of Caribbean Creolization

Any attempt to trace many resonances that historically have been attached to creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture will be inflected by long and pervading presence of colonialism in region and its attendant corollary of hierarchical social separation and difference based on perceptions of race. Indeed, ambivalent desire and subjective misrecognition that lay at heart of historical writing about colonialism and racism have tended to frame issues of monstrosity and exclusion that produced creole as part and parcel of wider colonial discourses. Thus, shifting and increasingly unstable inscription of creole figure echoes, in a certain sense, certain critical ambiguities of politics and temporality that color colonial encounter and its aftermath. Specifically, in contemporary Englishand French-speaking multiplicity, displacement, and creative instability that undergird creole-driven theories of postcolonial performance have supplanted this category's suspect beginnings as colonialism's model for fearfully unnameable and unplaceable hybrid monstrosity, and now increasingly shape substance of much of artistic and creative work emerging from region. The French Caribbean has been birthplace of two dominant cultural theories promulgated in this field in recent years: antillanite, or Caribbeannness, first broached by Martinican author and theorist Edouard Glissant in Le discours antillais in 1981, takes a geopolitical as well as a discursive approach to contesting ongoing pattern of island dependence and metropolitan domination engendered in French Caribbean by now half-century-long practice of overseas departmentalism. By taking cognizance of multi-relation that undergirds region, Glissant writes, a new creative and cultural framework for Caribbean identity can be effectively constructed. In coming to terms with the constantly shifting and variable process of creolization in Caribbean (15), he writes, its intrinsic doubleness will reveal not only distress and loss but also opportunity to assert a considerable set of possibilities ... no longer in absolute terms but as active agents of synthesis (16). The principles of creolite, on other hand, were first elaborated in Eloge de la creolite by Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant in 1989; although roundly critiqued for valorizing position over process, and for sometimes broaching slippery terrain of essentialism, it has quickly become a literary movement [that] has been for past ten years only noteworthy one in entire Caribbean, as

In the Name of the Father Chronotopia, Utopia, and Dystopia in Ti Jean l’horizon

In the Name of the Father Chronotopia, Utopia, and Dystopia in 77 Jean Vhorizon Clarisse Zimra Nous sommes tous les descendants de Colon. —Tzvetan Todorov F IVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO (plus one), a bold voyager from Genoa sailed west into modernity by “ discovering” a new conti­ nent. Five centuries later (give or take a few years), looking west from Europe in a blur of ethnocentric and phallocentric myopia, Tzvetan Todorov still pronounces “ us all” heirs to Columbus—even though gallantly dedicating La Conquête de l’Amérique “to the memory of a Mayan woman devoured by dogs.” Looking east from America, Edouard Glissant had already bypassed Europe whence, according to Todorov, all originated (their books were published within a year of each other by the same press). Searching for alternative beginnings, Le Dis­ cours antillais glimpsed an African history at once denied and erased.1It would seem that the oppositional reading of the collision of two worlds was fated to continue indefinitely. However, similarities are often more telling than differences: both the scholar from the Old World and the scholar from the New World defined “the question of America” as a circular quest that doubles back upon itself in time and space simultaneously. This movement constitutes the narrative “ chronotope” of our thinking about the continent.2To the historian of ideas, the voyage leitmotiv that marks our contemporary meditation on the “ New” World comes as no surprise; the mysterious (is)land to the west has been a common topos from the Greeks onward. For the Ancients, this locus classicus reenacted radical beginnings in the characteristic gesture of Myth, Ur-time enfolding and enfolded into Ur-place.3 In its modern variations, the quest for the perfect place (Eu-topia) has uncovered either its non-existence (U-topia) or its trans­ formation into the regimented structures of dystopia, unfolding a textual drama of containment played upon an obviously ideological stage. The modern Utopia, argues Fredric Jameson, is an attempt at circumventing Vo l . XXXIII, No. 2 59 L ’E spr it C r éa teu r the totalizing drive of History.4It is the motif that I propose to examine in Simone Schwarz-Bart’s 77 Jean l’horizon (Paris: Seuil, 1979), a work published at about the same period, and one that excavates much of the ground that Todorov and Glissant sought to cover. Denied a reality of their own making in the grand Hegelian scheme, the non-Europeans in the Americas were refused the right to their own historicity. It is therefore not surprising to see their writers coming back to the need, time and again, of repositioning the fractured self on the psychic map of the past—the Caribbean version of the “ return of the repressed” as it were. Negritude upended the fact of discovery and conquest, refiguring the Noble Savage and inverting the triangulation of the Middle Passage; to wit, Césaire’s Une tempête. Was Negritude a utopia, the prophetic dream of the oppressed, as Cahier d ’un retour au pays natal would have it? Or would it eventually self-destruct on its own repressed dystopia, as Caliban’s increasing cruelty seemed to imply? Broached in Negritude’s master-text, Et les chiens se taisaient, the question raises the specter of evasive textual strategies, a displacement constitutive of the Caribbean corpus for which the Bakhtinian chronotope serves as a structuring meta­ phor.5This is the question Schwarz-Bart’s last novel to date addresses. The new generation of Eloge de la créolité now joyously claiming to be “tous fils de Césaire,” an obvious response to Todorov’s “ tous descendants de Colon,” does so without the reluctant ambiguity once exhibited by Glissant’s first charting of “ antillanité” in L ’Intention poétique, or the gleeful causticity of Maryse Condé’s shot across the ancestral bow in “ Négritude senghorienne.” 6 This is not to imply that créolité could not have come about without Schwarz-Bart, but simply to observe that, primum inter pares, Ti Jean l’horizon signals a turn in the collective literary project that, in the French Caribbean, has recast all ideological moorings. The novel seems to be a perfect illustration...

Dix conferences sur Erasme. Eloge de la Folie—Colloques, collected by Claude Blum, preface by Léon Halkin, conclusion by Jean-Claude Margolin. Paris and Geneva: Champion-Slatkine, 1988. 178 pp.

Dix conferences sur Erasme. Eloge de la Folie—Colloques, collected by Claude Blum, preface by Léon Halkin, conclusion by Jean-Claude Margolin. Paris and Geneva: Champion-Slatkine, 1988. 178 pp. - Volume 44 Issue 1