French Culture Research Articles

Pandemic Response: A Reflection on Disease and Education

Pandemic Response: A Reflection on Disease and Education

Özyaşamöyküsünden Özkurmacaya

Kökleri çok eskilere dayanan özyaşamöyküsünün yazınsal bir kavram olarak değerlendirip kuramsal çerçevesinin belirlenmesi, XX. yüzyılın son çeyreğine denk gelmektedir. Yüzyıllardır varlığını sürdüren özyaşamöyküsü türü, bu uzun süreçte roman anlayışının değişiminden de payını alır ve 1977 yılında Serge Doubrovsky, ruhçözümcü söylemin ön planda olduğu çağdaş, süreksiz, kopuk, çokkatmanlı ve parçalı özellikteki benli anlatıları, kökleşik özyaşamöyküsünden ayırmak için “özkurmaca” kavramını ortaya atar. 1980-1990 yılları arasında “postmodern” olarak tanımlanan ekonomik, tarihsel, toplumsal ve kültürel olarak yaşanan çok sayıda değişim dönüşümle birlikte bu yeni kavram oldukça ilgi görür. Söz konusu kavram, öznenin metne dönüşünü ve dolayısıyla yazarın dönüşünü somutlaştırır. Bir bakıma bireyciliğin, özseverliliğin ve hazcılığın yükselişinin bir sonucu olarak ortaya çıkan özkurmaca kavramı, bir söylem olarak yalnızca yazınsal yapıtlarda değil çağdaş Fransız kültürünün neredeyse her alanında karşımıza çıkar. Bu çalışmada özyaşamöyküsünün yazınsal bir söylem olarak nasıl tanımlandığını, özkurmaca kavramının nasıl ortaya çıktığını, bu kavramı kuramcıların nasıl tanımladığını ve günümüz yazın eleştirisi alanında nasıl algılandığını ortaya koymayı deneyeceğiz.

Les Noces de philologie et de Guillaume Budé: un humaniste et son œuvre à la Renaissance. Études réunies par Christine Bénévent, Romain Menini et Luigi-Alberto Sanchi

The Renaissance humanist Guillaume Budé (1468 n.s. –1540) holds an important though uncomfortable place in contemporary French culture. Immediately evoking for many two of the fundamental institutions of the humanities in France today — the Collection Budé (the French equivalent of the Loeb Classical Library) and the Collège de France (in front of which his statue has stood since 1882) — the name Budé also evokes a vague spectre of monstrous erudition, looming out at us from the mists of early modernity. The greatest Budé scholar of the twentieth century, Marie-Madeleine de La Garanderie, formulated the bold paradox that this famous name remains that of an unknown (cited p. 7). Such obscurity seems the inevitable fate of an author whose prolific corpus was extremely influential and almost exclusively in Latin; on the map of French letters, therefore, ‘Budé’ remains for many a massy yet unapproachable terra incognita. Keenly aware of this complex inheritance, and eager to provide access to this important author, the contributors to the present volume elucidate the historical Budé through the analysis and exposition of his social context (Part One), methods (Part Two), major works (Part Three), and early modern reception (Part Four). The result is an invaluable work for early modernists interested in this multifaceted humanist. Budé is here viewed from all angles: as a courtier to François Ier; a pioneer in the fields of Renaissance jurisprudence and textual criticism; and as the author of highly original contributions to early modern Christian thought. The keyword for Budé’s significance to us today, and around which the twenty-seven contributions to this collection constantly circle, is of course ‘philology’, a word which simultaneously expresses the focus of Budé’s works and the intellectual method or approach which he pioneered. The name Budé evokes philology in a way very similar to the intimate relationship between Montaigne and the essay, standing for a form of simultaneous writing and reading inextricably intertwined, at the same time highly personal and yet also profoundly influential. Understood therefore as an ‘art de lire’ (p. 9) rather than a scholarly discipline, Budéan philologia is marked by a tension between the reader in the present and the text as a message from the past. This approach promotes reading as a never-ending negotiation between past and present, characterized by ongoing attempts to accommodate the ancient text in the world of the present and the modern reader in that of the past. The intended goal of such reading — for Budé at least — was the eventual transformation of the present through its encounter with the past. Whether or not we still believe in the transformative potential of ancient texts, we remain today just as challenged by the fundamental problem of how to read texts unavoidably tinted by their status as historical artefacts. This volume meets that challenge in a suitably Budéan manner. It delivers an intimate, multifaceted portrait of Budé squarely within his historical moment; moreover, it offers a path to finally integrating the neo-Latin humanist within a longer narrative of French culture.

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.

A History of the Concepts Experience and Experiment in Russian Culture

Why, for a long time, was there no linguistic means to distinguish between the concepts experience and experiment in many European languages, such as Italian, French, and Russian? Was the Russian case influenced by French culture? This article addresses these issues. The most important finding of the study is that no idea of personal experience existed in Russian literature before the second half of the eighteenth century, and the word opyt was later borrowed from the scientific lexicon for expressing the meaning of experience. This is the opposite of what happened in other European languages. This suggests that the concept of experiment is more basic in the Russian mentality. Experience grows from experiment but not vice versa. All these aspects of the semantic history of “experiment” and “experience” are illustrated with extensive textual citations found in the Russian National Corpus and in the electronic library of Institute of Russian Literature.

France in the Times of COVID-19

This article examines the role of the public humanities in France during Covid-19 for self-preservation, coping with isolation, understanding an upended world, creating a sense of connection and belonging, and cultivating empathy for others. For instance, in dealing with the existential angst of confinement and economic woes, one of the novels that resonated the most in France and globally was Albert Camus’s The Plague. At the very moment that France enforced measures to restrict access to places of culture, many French people turned to the humanities for comfort and perspective. The pandemic accelerated the need for libraries, galleries, bookstores, museums, concert halls, opera houses, theaters, cinemas, and nightclubs, as well as places of dialogue like cafés and bistros. Dialogue and the cocreation of physical and virtual communities were needed as the spread of false information relating to science, vaccines, and nation exacerbated pre-pandemic divisions in French culture.

Flânerie in the Time of Covid-19

Flânerie, or the practice of urban strolling described in nineteenth-century French print and visual culture, has evolved throughout modernity, expanding its reach into more global literary traditions and becoming an important topic of research in numerous fields of academic study. Various phenomena have shaped the evolution of how we walk in the city and how artists, essayists, and journalists record it, none more so than the forced lockdowns associated with the global Covid-19 pandemic. Journalists in France invented expressions like flânerie inversée, impossible flânerie, and librairie flânerie to describe new city practices. They looked to figures like the fashion flâneuse on the catwalk as a means of sublimating the stillness and monotony of the coronavirus confinement. This article traces the emergence between March 2020 and April 2021of these variations in shopping and fashion contexts, which underscore the enduring legacy of the practice and its everlasting presence in French culture.

Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder ed. by Marc Lacheny et al

Reviewed by: Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder ed. by Marc Lacheny et al Katherine Arens Marc Lacheny, Maria Piok, Sigurd Paul Scheichl, and Karl Zieger, eds., Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder. Forum: Österreich 12. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2021. 274 pp. The open-access volume Französische Österreichbilder—Österreichische Frankreichbilder, which features contributions in both German and French, is an excellent example of how francophone Austrian Studies enriches the field with theoretically sophisticated projects that transcend traditional limitations of the Austrian cultural studies. It originated in a conference held in late 2019 held at the Brenner-Archiv (Innsbruck) and organized by a team from Innsbruck (Sigurd Paul Scheichl, Ulrike Tanzer, and Maria Piok) and France (Marc Lacheny, University of Lorraine in Metz, and Karl Zieger, University of Lille). Four of these organizers edited this collection, which includes two contributions beyond the original presentations. The volume and conference were designed to counter the prevailing German point of view in considering germanophone images of France, to highlight the often very different relationship that France has with Austria, and to chart France’s understanding of Austrian culture as different from Germany’s. The volume’s “Vorwort” (in both French and German versions) outlines the theoretical premises of imageology that guided this event, “die Analyse des Bilds, das von der Kultur eines Landes, des eigenen oder eines fremden, durch die Literatur vermittelt” (6). Such images are centers for investigations of shifting power relations across time and across political realignments. They also provide evidence that (in Paris, at least) Austrian cultures were understood as different from German ones and that Austrians saw French culture as significant for their own country. These editors acknowledge a need to move beyond the limitations of research into germanophone Austrian texts and hope that the volume spurs further studies of French-Central European cultural relations—scholars of “Austrian” culture cannot only use German, and scholars of Slavic and Balkan cultures need to track influences from western Europe. The first contributions set the tone for this impeccably researched and argued and well-written volume. Veronika Studer-Kovács’s essay on “Nationale Typologien in Le Plaisir von Abbé Marchadier (1747) und Matthias Geiger (1765)” presents an early French-Austrian engagement with national stereotypes. A French play (a political allegory) originally performed at the Comédie française was adapted in French by a Hungarian Jesuit to celebrate [End Page 208] Joseph II’s second marriage and performed in Catholic Hungary. Studer-Kovács carefully compares the original and the adaptation to uncover its complicated engagement with cultural power (especially class and language). This spectacular case study models how texts respond to cultural-political networks—imageology at its best as cultural-political-aesthetic studies. The next essays address “official” representations: Norbert Bachleitner and Juliane Werner discuss “‘La grande nation’ als Exportgut: Das Frankreichbild in österreichischen Schulbüchern des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts,” surveying primary school texts produced after the 1869 school reforms, some with French authors as collaborators. These readers inculcated very specific images of a democratic France (and, unfortunately, of the glories and profitability of its colonial missions). We learn how school curricula and school systems were (re)organized, how schoolbooks created images of ethnic groups within the nation (Stämme), according to the principles of Völkerpsychologie, and how and when German and Austrian views of France diverged significantly. This essay is a model for critical text-based cultural studies. Mayer tracks Austria’s representation in the Diderot/d’Almenbert Encyclopédie. After carefully explaining all aspects of the project’s planning and execution, she uses statistical analyses of the Austria-related entries. How Mayer contextualizes entries helps to establish how and why the encyclopedia evaluated nations vis-à-vis France—a sophisticated example of what big data can show about culture. Norbert Bachleitner thoroughly outlines the activities of “Gérard van Swieten, censeur de la littérature française sous l’impératrice Marie-Thérèse.” The essay serves as a history of the censor’s office, the important players and their roles, explaining how censorship norms were established and enforced, what happened in censorship meetings, and how records were kept (including developments like the censorship...

Cosmopolitan Connections: Yevgeny Onegin as realist drame lyrique in Nice

In the build-up to the French premiere of Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin in Nice in 1895, critics, speakers and writers on music were declaring the opera a masterpiece of psychological realism. Such a reading seems to resonate more with recent assessments of the opera; but in 1890s France, a combination of interest in the Russian realist novel and new trends in realist opera had led critics to make the literary link already. With the Franco-Russian Alliance recently finalized and hostility towards the Triplice mounting, many even suggested that the opera might form the lyric equivalent of the Russian realist novel and, in so doing, offer a morally and politically superior alternative to the so-called verismo operas of the new Italian school.The optimism surrounding Onegin, I'd like to show, was part of a broader move in late nineteenth-century France to celebrate cosmopolitanism, if not in the sense one might expect. Tchaikovsky and Onegin were very much deemed representatively Russian. What was cosmopolitan, and in turn modern, was the act of cultural transfer – exploiting international personal networks – and the opera's realism: its evocations of ordinary life and of the contemporary psychological condition. As such, a Russian opera like this could be applauded not for its revelations of an exotic or disconnected country, but for the potential it posed to integrate with and revitalize French culture.

Picturebooks in New Caledonia

New Caledonia is a French overseas territory in the South Pacific with a long history of differing attitudes towards independence (Fisher, 2019). The local government aims to challenge French cultural hegemony by building a “New Caledonian School” (Gouvernement de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, 2016). That is, a school in which students are exposed to resources that reflect the realities of the country and allow for marginalised groups to become more visible in the curriculum. It is through this context that this article investigates how children’s literature, in particular picturebooks, began developing in New Caledonia. Children’s literature in New Caledonia is a relatively new phenomenon. Using Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, the paper explains the history of picturebooks in New Caledonia and their role in the curriculum. The official language of New Caledonia is French, but there are also 28 Kanak languages. Surrounded by Anglophone nations, such as Australia and New Zealand, education policies were put in place on this island to introduce English to students from primary school (Bissoonauth-Bedford, 2018). As a result, this article describes and analyses a bilingual picturebook written in French and English by Stephane Moysan (2017), entitled Yana’s Treasure: An Amazing Trip in New Caledonia. In particular, it reviews how this picturebook provides opportunities to bring to consciousness essential elements of Pacific French culture and identity both within and beyond the New Caledonian context.

Weaponization of French and Rejection of Maghrebi Arabic in a French High School

This article draws on a four-month ethnography in a rural French high school. Through analysis of ten Franco-Maghrebi students’ communicative resources, experiences of schooling, and narratives, along with educators’ perspectives, the study shows that the students’ home languages were rejected and perceived as a threat to France’s hegemony. At the same time, French was weaponized and imposed as the legitimate language. However, the results indicate that these youths had a desire to maintain a link with their heritage language and culture, and that Islam, with its related socioliteracy practices, could represent an alternative discourse. Through a postcolonial lens, the article examines how policies to ensure the dominance of French culture and language have delegitimized the cultures and languages of its minorities, of which immigrants from the Maghreb constitute the largest and most marginalized non- European minority. Further, it demonstrates how institutional practices and sociopolitical discourses contribute to discrimination, inequity, and an exclusive school environment.

La fabuleuse aventure des Bleus par Dominique Georges

Reviewed by: La fabuleuse aventure des Bleus par Dominique Georges Jessica L. Sturm Georges, Dominique. La fabuleuse aventure des Bleus. CLÉ International, 2019. ISBN 978-209-031717-6. Pp. 64. Teaching language through a specific context or cultural lens is an excellent way to get students engaged with the material, since it creates natural occasions for communication in the L2. La fabuleuse aventure des Bleus provides both a context for the presentation of new vocabulary and a cultural lens for students to compare French soccer, or sports in general, to their own country's focus on sports. With the immense worldwide popularity of soccer, and the sport's growing popularity in the United States, many students at the elementary, secondary, or university/college level would enjoy reading the story of the 2018 Men's World Cup Champions, les Bleus. Sports as a cultural lens is quite promising in the French language classroom. First, it is quite easy to draw parallels between the United States and France, in how their citizens practice and consume (watch) sports. Second, as teachers it is to our benefit to expand students' vision of French culture beyond food, fashion, art, architecture, etc. This book facilitates that expansion by recounting the team's path to the 2018 Men's World Cup while including mini-biographies of several players. Third, social issues such as immigration have a definite place in any discussion of sport. Talking and writing about soccer in the Francophone world and immigrant players in France is an approachable way to address a complicated topic in class. In addition, La fabuleuse aventure des Bleus is a highly accessible reading text, designed for the A2 level and accompanied by both a series of helpful footnotes and a soccer vocabulary list at the end. Students who are soccer fans or players will be able to intuit much of the vocabulary from reading in context, but the provided list will aid any with technical soccer terms. This book also contains a series of reading comprehension questions for each chapter, generally true/false, fill-in-the-blank, or multiplechoice. Beyond the reading activities and questions, this book can serve as a jumping-off point for class discussions, writing assignments, and making comparisons and connections between soccer or sporting culture in general in the students' community and in France. After reading this A2-level text on French soccer, students may feel better able to read authentic texts in French or Francophone newspapers on soccer. Another direction to take from this text is to investigate soccer in other Francophone countries, or to discuss immigration in the context of sports teams. Beyond being an appealing text on its own, La fabuleuse aventure des Bleus creates opportunities to explore numerous issues in France and the Francophone world, providing students with something to talk and write about, as well as a fascinating lens by which to examine the target culture(s) in French class. [End Page 275] Jessica L. Sturm Purdue University (IN) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

CULTURAL INTERACTION BETWEEN EGYPT AND FRANCE

Since thousands of years, ancient Egyptian civilization grows on the banks of the Nile and Egypt remained with the pharaonic heritage, its warm climate and fresh air, the luxury of its ancient palaces is the center of attraction for the whole world. Egypt aroused the greed of many countries, including France which was among this country colonizing the land of the pyramids. English and French culture interpenetrated on the level of the social life and in the field of literature, arts, architecture and economy. How did grow this interaction? This is what we will try to clarify in this research. In the first part, focus is to show cultural interaction between the two countries via literary and artistic works on the land of pharaohs and we care in the second part on the economic, architecture, arts, transportation and society fields. We teach in wide range linguistic expressions and methods in tourism, guidance and hotelery. At the end we explain the importance of the cultural interaction between the two countries. Key words: Cultural interaction, Egypt and France.

Nadia Boulanger and Her World, edited by Jeanice Brooks

<i>Nadia Boulanger and Her World</i>, edited by Jeanice Brooks

Understanding French Culture in French Civilization Subject Using Adobe Captivate Software

This study aims to increase understanding of French Culture in French Civilization subject at French Language Education Study Program, Faculty of Language and Arts at one of state Universities in North Sumatera using Adobe Captivate Software. A classroom action research design was implemented in this study to find out the understanding increase of french culture of 48 students. There were two cycles in process ofcollecting the data with four steps in each cycle: observation, planning, action, and reflection. The pre test results show that the number of students who got A (90 – 100) as much16.7%, B (80-90) as much 31%, C (70-80) 45,8%, and D (60-70) as much 6,3%. In the first cycle, the number of students who got A (90 – 100) amount31%, B (80-90) amount 45,8%, C (70-80) amount 23%. The second cycle, the number of students who got A (90 – 100) as much42%, B (80-90) as much 58%. In the post test, the number of students who got A (90 – 100) amount 79% and b (80-90)amount 21%, it means that declined 100% who got C, D, or E. Therefore, this study show that Adobe Captivate Software was very effective to use in increasing student’s understanding in french culture. Therefore, Adobe Captivate Softwareis highly recommended using in any subjects, and it can be applied to other research.

Physical activity differences between two European countries: does motivation matter?

This study has two main goals: (a) to compare whether objective and self-reported PA levels, and motivational regulations were similar among European adolescents with different cultural norms, and (b), to analyse whether the associations between those motivational regulations towards objective and self-reported PA levels vary across Spanish and French cultures. Data were collected from 637 adolescents (50.9% Spanish, 40.8% girls). Participants completed questionnaires on motivational variables and subjective PA. Objective PA was assessed by accelerometer. Data were analysed by structural equation modelling and invariance tests. Cross-country differences were found in objective PA levels and motivational factors, with Spanish obtaining higher values than French adolescents. Association of motivational factors with PA was similar regardless of the cultural origin of subjects. This study reinforces the premises of SDT according to cross-country validity. Intervention strategies should focus on encouraging the most self-determined motivational forms regardless of the culture of origin.

Canadian Occupational Performance Measure: Benefits and Limitations Highlighted Using the Delphi Method and Principal Component Analysis

Introduction The objective of this study was to establish a baseline of current use in practice of the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM) by consulting 33 expert French occupational therapists, who trained in this method between 2012 and 2017 and use of the COPM with their clients. The areas of health intervention are pediatrics, psychiatry, neurology, and geriatrics. An email invitation to participate in the research was therefore sent to 113 occupational therapists. We received 33 responses. Methods A novel mixed method study combined a Delphi method with a lexical analysis of experts' responses and principal component analysis (PCA). Results In the last Delphi round, the consensus of the expert group was attained on 31 benefits and 1 limitation, confirming the generally positive influence of the COPM in French health services. Discussion. The COPM was clearly identified as a tool that supports occupational therapy clinical reasoning, facilitates team decision-making for care pathways, and enables people with disabilities and health conditions to make decisions for their care. Conclusion The Delphi study revealed that the COPM appears to be well adapted to French culture and should be widely incorporated into preregistration training.

Contributors

Contributors

APPLYING CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS FOR ELUCIDATING CERTAIN FEATURES OF CULTURAL FOREIGN WORDS

Understanding verbal art is a complicated and multifarious phenomenon. The present paper is devoted to the study of some problems related to certain cases of using cultural foreign words, which are revealed due to the application of the contrastive method of analysis. By the application of the method of linguopoetic confrontation of the original and the translated versions of a work of verbal art an attempt is made to identify transliterations of cultural foreign words not having their equivalents in English or French cultures. The usage of cultural foreign words in a work of fiction ensures a global aesthetic impact on the reader.

Discursive creativity as a way of constructing a stereotype of a female politician (using the example of American and French media)

The research is devoted to the study of the discursive construction of gender from the standpoint of linguocreativity. The subject of the study is the linguocreative means of constructing a stereotype of a female politician in the American and French media. The object of the study is the mass media discourse of the USA and France, represented by electronic versions of national publications. The aim of the work is to compare the discursive means of constructing a stereotype in the mass media discourse of the USA and France and to identify the socio-cultural aspect of linguocreative transformations. The research methods are a combination of discursive, contextual and content analysis. The analysis reveals the linguocreative techniques of constructing a stereotype at the lexico-grammatical and pragmatic level of the language. В The author's contribution to the research of the topic is the establishment of linguistic patterns and models in the construction of the stereotype of a female politician. In particular, a pattern in the use of verbal predicates and role grammatical models was revealed. The author also formulated and compared the identification features of gender stereotypes of the USA and France. The research may be of interest to specialists in the field of discursology, gender studies, linguoculturology, and intercultural communication. The revealed patterns and techniques of constructing stereotypes can be used in the interpretation of English- and French-language literature to identify the gender component of culture. The study makes a conclusion about the stability and reproducibility of gender stereotypes in the media, about the pragmatic potential of linguocreative discourse, about the presence of a gender shift in American and French cultures and about the mutual influence of gender stereotypes.