French Fiction Research Articles

I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's Writing by Kathryn Robson

Reviewed by: I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's Writing by Kathryn Robson Dominique Carlini Versini Robson, Kathryn. I Suffer, Therefore I Am: Engaging with Empathy in Contemporary French Women's Writing. Legenda, 2019. ISBN 978-1-78188-675-5. Pp. ix + 140. As Robson observes, empathy is central in contemporary debates and particularly in liberal discourse (4), whether it is through regular calls for empathy in political leaders, or through emerging social movements demanding a more compassionate relationship to our planet and all its inhabitants. Robson investigates the concept in the work of contemporary French writers such as Marie Darrieussecq, Chloé Delaume, Camille Laurens, Véronique Olmi, and Delphine de Vigan. Reflecting on narratives of eating disorder, the loss of a child, the killing of one's child, and autofictional accounts of trauma, Robson asks: "[W]hat is at stake in reading narratives of other people's pain?" (1). Laurens's accusation of plagiarism against Darrieussecq provides the title of the book—through an allusion to Darrieussecq's certificat doloriste—as well as the basis for the interrogation of the ethical position of the reader engaging with these texts (1–4). Laurens's argument, according to which one cannot write about what one has not experienced, is extended here to the reader: How can we read suffering that is alien to us? How can we understand what makes us uncomfortable, and even distressed? To answer these questions, Robson reflects on the difference between empathy, compassion, and sympathy, drawing on a wide range of theories from Dominick LaCapra's "empathic unsettlement" (16) to Judith Butler's notion of framing. She reveals the limits of empathy, which might come at the risk of preventing a politicized response to or of consuming the narrative subject's suffering (13). The discussion on the unimaginable in the following chapters is particularly fascinating. [End Page 288] In the second chapter, which focuses on autobiographical accounts of the loss of a child by Laure Adler, Sophie Daull and Laurens, Robson shows that the reader's empathy is "rejected from the start" (49) by the writers-narrators, as the texts underline the impossibility for the reader to know what a bereaved mother experiences. At the other end, the third chapter reflects on maternal filicides, looking at real-life cases that have taken place in France in the last decades, and their exploration in the literary works of Sophie Marinopoulos, Mazarine Pingeot, Olmi, and Laurence Tardieu. Robson shows the problematization of empathy in such narratives, where readers' empathic response can work to reinforce "dominant cultural ideas of maternity" (87). Robson suggests to redefine empathy—not as a way to "stand into someone else's shoes," which implies a stable definition of the self and of the other—but to rethink it "in and through the impossibility of reconciliation between self and other" (123). In interrogating our response to challenging texts that take us out of our comfort zone, Robson invites us to reflect on our reading practice and engage in more ethical empathetic reading. This book is essential for readers interested in contemporary French fiction and specifically the work of women writers, trauma studies, and readers' response, but also for any reader who would like to reflect on more ethical reading practices. Dominique Carlini Versini Durham University (UK) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977–2014)

Comparing Grief in French, British and Canadian Great War Fiction (1977–2014)

Review: Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-thinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction, by Ruth Cruickshank

Review: <i>Leftovers: Eating, Drinking and Re-thinking with Case Studies from Post-war French Fiction</i>, by Ruth Cruickshank

Gatekeepers of Noir: The Paradoxical Internationalization of the French Crime Fiction Field

The French noir tradition is supposed to dominate the French market of crime fiction, regardless of the growing success of French and non-French thrillers in France. Yet in the last two decades, the French literary crime fiction market has been marked by the arrival of non-French European authors. By combining a quantitative and qualitative approach to publishing series, translations, prizes and festivals, this article highlights the transnational dimension of the French market independently from a spontaneous methodological nationalism encouraged by the reception discourses.

Некоторые вторичные междометия французского языка как один из способов выражения адмиратива в реактивной реплике и способы их перевода на русский язык

Using the French fiction texts of the XX century as the research material, the author analyses responsive remarks with secondary interjections from the viewpoint of admirative semantics and identifies peculiarities of their translation into Russian. Scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that for the first time the researcher examines the admirative as a linguistic category by the material of the French language and proposes a part-of-speech classification of the identified secondary interjections of admirative meaning. A comparative analysis allows concluding that bearers of the Russian and French languages use similar means to express amazement. The second conclusion is that translators use a variety of translation techniques to translate secondary interjections with admirative semantics.

Views of the city in French sci-fi comics and graphic novels

This article looks at important French comics and graphic novels from the small but highly influential tradition of French science fiction in order to assess their distinctive formal and narrative contributions to the genre. Taking cues from theoretical definitions of bandes dessinées formulated by Thierry Groenstein and Thierry Smolderen, it identifies specific ways two major works, Futuropolis and L’Incal, reshaped the narrative range and scope of French sci-fi comics and graphic novels and recast their artistic possibilities. We also draw comparisons to Valérian et Laureline. The ways in which cityscapes are depicted in each serve as the privileged focus for measuring the similarities and differences among these works, both ideologically and formalistically.

Духовно-смислові та жанрово-стильові аспекти«Меси миру» К. Дженкінса

Research objective is to identify the poetic and intonational features of the “Mass of the World” by K. Jenkins in the context of the specifics of the existence of spiritual genres in the cultural and historical realities of the twentieth century. The methodology of the work is the intonation approach in musicology, successive from B. Asafiev and his followers. At the same time, historical, cultural and interdisciplinary approaches proved to be very significant for this work, allowing one to study the features of the interpretation of the mass genre in the postmodern ecumenical space of the turn of the 20–21st centuries. The scientific novelty of the work is due to the fact that it presents for the first time analytical generalizations regarding the “Mass of the World” by K. Jenkins, revealing not only the genre-style specifics of the composer’s work, but also its spiritual and semantic component, refracted in the mainstream of the “neocanon” of the 20th century mass. Conclusions. The poetry of “Mass of the World” by K. Jenkins, created at the turn of the 20–21st centuries, reflects the original symbiosis of the spiritual and musical traditions of the past and the present, East and West and genetically goes back to the pacifistecumenical concept of the “religion of the world”, appealing to the spiritual unity of mankind. The foregoing determines the multi-genre nature of the composition, formed on the basis of the interaction of the traditions of the mass and its genre modifications in the 20th century, and the requiem, which also reveals its liturgical and memorial character. The multicultural specificity of the “Mass of the World”, due to its multilingual textual basis, the range of which covers a wide range of sources from the ordinar of the mass, Bible books (Psalms, Revelation of John the Evangelist), Muslim azan and “Mahabharata” up to poetry of the twentieth century (R. Kipling, D Dryden, A. Tennyson, T. Mallory, Toge Sankiti), uniting the East and the West, is also manifested in the intonational language of the work, synthesizing cultic life and spiritual choral creative practice of the past and the present. The symbol of the latter is the old French fiction “L’homme arme”, the figurative, semantic and intonational language of which unites the entire work in affirming the relevance of the idea of a spiritually armed person.

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim

Reviewed by: Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions by Annabel L. Kim Raquelle K. Bostow (bio) Annabel L. Kim. Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions. The Ohio State UP, 2018. 263 pages. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1384-1. Annabel Kim’s book Unbecoming Language breathes new life into French feminist theory and fiction. While labeling the book as “theory” is a misnomer, Kim’s argument that the writers and novels studied present a poetics of “unbecoming” not only re-endows literary narrative with the stimulating power to generate theoretical ideas, but also allows literature to energize French feminism and theory with the politicized charge of “anti-difference,” long neglected in American studies of these traditions and movements. Kim defines “anti-difference French feminism” as a rejection of the idea of sexual difference as essential and argues instead that such difference is constructed (2). While some strands of differentialist French feminism also argue that difference is constructed, Kim’s anti-difference French feminism imagines the possibility of leaving the idea of “difference” behind altogether. In Unbecoming Language, Kim unveils anti-differentialist thought that presents subjectivity without subjecthood, what Kim calls unbecoming, by reading together for the first time the works of Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig, and Anne Garréta. Collectively, Kim claims that their works “hollow out difference and rework our subjectivity” by resisting the literary fabrication of identity (4). This process of unbecoming is stimulated by these authors’ common belief in “language’s potential to transform a reality marked by compulsory identification and seemingly inescapable difference” (84). Kim establishes an anti-differentialist feminist poetics through this thorough study and places it firmly on par with differentialist French feminism. Unbecoming Language makes a valuable contribution to the field of French Studies, and to its branches of French feminisms and contemporary French fiction, but also to the study of contemporary literature more broadly. The book’s introduction provides a presentation of the main argument as well as a helpful biography of each writer studied before moving on to definitions of terms and methodology. Working with the claim that difference is built on sameness––that is, that identity categories require collectives of “sameness” that bind individuals within an identity category––Kim argues that Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta instead forego the idea of difference, which, the author powerfully asserts, has practical applications. In the introduction and elsewhere, Kim interrogates the ways in which engaging with “unbecoming language” might influence the way we unknow ourselves and thus others. This becomes an underlying goal of the book: to propose a radical disarmament that makes “difference” easier to bear, or at the very least, to remember that our world based on difference is a fictive fabrication. The project is admittedly utopian (34), but refreshing and welcomed. The introduction presents ample evidence to demonstrate the relationship between these three authors and the book’s organization and methodology are major strengths. Unbecoming Language is organized into four chapters: the first three examine each writer’s corpus independently through the lens of “unbecoming language,” [End Page 996] while tending to their overlaps, and the fourth constructs a feminist poetics inspired by the combined study of Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta. Another strength in Kim’s approach is the choice to read these authors outside of a theoretical framework. While the reader may expect to engage with “French theory” or “queer theory” in a book that argues for the disintegration of identity, Kim’s work insists rather on these novels’ capacity to fashion theory on their own, thereby resisting the division between “narrativity” (or literature) and “theory.” This approach seems appropriate given that reading these authors through a pre-existing theoretical framework would not correspond with the book’s project to shed identity labels, as Kim explains. Instead, these authors generate a new relationship with language that allows for a “subjectivity without subjecthood,” or “a non-delineated subjectivity” (32) . . . a framework that could very well become a “theory” itself. In Chapter 1, “Sarraute’s Indeterminacy,” Kim rejects the traditional reading that categorizes Sarraute as a New Novelist or as a woman writer. Instead, Kim asks about the possibilities that arise when Sarraute is read alongside Wittig and Garr...

Ruminations on Defeat: A Conversation with Antoine Volodine

Antoine Volodine (b. 1950) does not exist, not exactly. He is one of the authors and the self-titled spokesperson of postexoticism, a movement that comprises 49 authors to date, with a total production of 343 texts. What makes this a unique feat in contemporary French fiction is that all 49 authors are also heteronyms of a singular author: the same Antoine Volodine. Other writers before Volodine have explored heteronymic fiction, Fernando Pessoa among the most famous, but Volodine has most likely taken this literary experimentation to its limits. In postexoticism, heteronymy deploys itself as a complex literary montage, halfway between schizophrenia and artistic grandiose, and exists outside of traditional literary conventions, with its own codes and aesthetics. It is both everywhere and nowhere, and we, readers, are nothing more than occasional drifters there, our relation to its texts being, in the best of times, fraught with uncertainty. As such, postexoticism stands undoubtedly as one the most poignant and compelling literary movements of the age.

Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction by Lucas Hollister

Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction by Lucas Hollister

Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France by Edmund Birch

 Reviews extraordinary theory of ocean currents and tides. ese phenomena he attributes (originally in the Fourth ‘Étude’ of ) to the alternate melting and refreezing of the icecaps at the North and South Poles. Adducing particular maritime and other observations laboriously compiled, he develops a vast imaginative construct—at once ideologically progressive (global currents bring humankind together) and poetically powerful (currents are to the globe ‘comme la sève dans les végétaux, et le sang dans les animaux’: quoted by Joël Castonguay-Bélanger, p. )—which animates Nature and vindicates Providence. No less typically, he inexhaustibly defends it against what he perceives as a conspiracy against him by the academies and the elites. B, U  L R H Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France. By E B. (Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature) London: Palgrave Macmillan. . ix+ pp. £. (ebk £.). ISBN –––- (ebk ––– –). ‘Newspapers are an evil,’ says the world-weary author Claude Vignon in Balzac’s Illusions perdues (–). at comment is typical of pervasive hostility towards journalism in nineteenth-century French fiction. ‘And yet,’ as Edmund Birch notes of Vignon’s remark in Fictions of the Press in Nineteenth-Century France, ‘newspaper and novel become inseparable in this period’ (p. ). Novels, including Illusions perdues, were frequently serialized in newspapers; and most novelists, chief among them Balzac, doubled as newspaper critics and columnists. In the words of Marie- Ève érenty, who has led a recent wave of scholarship in this area, the rapidly expanding press became ‘the laboratory of literature’ (‘Pour une histoire littéraire de la presse au e siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France,  (), – (p. )). Given the disparity between that creative ferment and the vitriolic portrayals of journalism found in nineteenth-century French fiction, érenty and her collaborators have tended to pay only secondary attention to the latter, which they view as an unreliable guide to literary and journalistic history. By contrast, Birch places the ‘novel of journalism’ at the centre of the frame in Fictions of the Press, which, along with Kate Rees’s e Journalist in the French Fin-de-siècle Novel (; reviewed in MLR,  (), –), is the first book in English to take its lead from their research. Beginning with a theoretical overview that situates érenty and her collaborators ’ work within broader debates about realism’s mimetic function and journalism ’s claims to epistemological authority, Birch devotes his subsequent chapters to readings of Illusions perdues, the Goncourts’ Charles Demailly (), and Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (). Echoing Balzac’s Vautrin, Birch argues that these works of fiction offer insights into a volatile secret world of journalistic skulduggery that nineteenth-century journalists generally passed over in silence. In Illusions perdues, Lucien de Rubempré’s entry into the Parisian press becomes MLR, .,   ‘a rite of passage’ (p. ) that allows him to see through and manipulate the ever deceptive public record created by the newspaper. But that journalistically mediated education in social realities proves to be inadequate as the novel’s hero is overwhelmed by the nefarious forces he unleashes. As Birch points out, that failure is paralleled in two of Balzac’s less familiar works from the late s, Les Employés and Une fille d’Ève, which similarly dramatize struggles for mastery of the press. In Charles Demailly, the corrosive power of the press seems stronger still as the eponymous hero is driven insane by a scurrilous campaign waged against him by his erstwhile journalistic colleagues. Birch offers a nimble interpretation of the Goncourts’ story as emblematic of pervasive anxieties about the erosion of privacy during the Second Empire, when censorship pushed newspapers to forsake political news in favour of society gossip. Political concerns again come to the fore in his reading of Bel-Ami, which traces dense connections between Maupassant’s journalism of the early s about French colonialism in North Africa and the novel’s critique of the press’s complicity in colonial expansion. Here we see a clear example of érenty’s ‘laboratory of literature’ in action. Birch’s account of Bel-Ami, which was serialized in the newspaper Gil Blas, also shows how the press could accommodate works of literature that went against the grain of...

Jason James Hartford, Sexuality, Iconography, and Fiction in French: Queering the Martyr: (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 243 pp.

Jason James Hartford, <i>Sexuality, Iconography, and Fiction in French: Queering the Martyr: (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 243 pp.</i>

French Beliefs: Walter Pater and Contemporary French Fiction

Cet article examine les comptes rendus de Walter Pater portant sur les ecrits d’auteurs francais contemporains parus en periodiques entre 1886 et 1890 afin de montrer que le choix des periodiques, des titres recenses obeit aux contraintes journalistiques et sociales de l’epoque marquee par des debats sur la morale et des campagnes mediatiques ciblant essentiellement la litterature francaise d’avant-garde et certains auteurs (Flaubert, Zola). Toutefois Pater se montre habile en rendant compte d’auteurs controverses et d’auteurs reconnus (Feuillet, Lemaitre, Filon, Fabre, Amiel) qu’il oppose subtilement afin de rendre son opinion plus indefinissable mais surtout de mediter sur la question de la croyance puisque tous les textes et les auteurs mentionnes partagent la caracteristique de se confronter a la question de la croyance en des temps de secularisation. Cette habile negociation des contraintes journalistiques et culturelles permet a Pater de presenter sa propre conception de la croyance.

ГЕНДЕРНА ІНТЕРПРЕТАЦІЯ ЗАПАХІВ ПРИРОДИ У ТВОРАХ ФРАНЦУЗЬКОЇ ПРОЗИ

The article is dedicated to an actual linguistic problem: peculiarities of gender comparison of the olfactory information interpretation based on the material of French belles-lettres prose of the late XIX – the first half of XX century. The investigation aim is to analyze gender interpretations of scents by male and female authors, depicting nature phenomena, through paysage contexts, found out in French fiction. In order to achieve the aim, a complex of analytical methods has been used: contrastive, contextual, structural, descriptional, lexical, and stylistic as well as quantitative. 27 male and 7 female text fragments have been analyzed, referring to the olfactory information of objects/phenomena of nature. The most widespread methods of scents nomination are immediate description of smell source and application of stylistic devices (epithets, similes, metaphors, synectic metaphors etc.). It has been identified that male olfactory images are more vivid, comparing with female ones. French authoresses almost avoid scents descriptions, naming them accidentally. Therefore, their interpretations are rather sketchy. The research results disprove the accepted stereotypes on social roles of men and women, in which male behavior is associated with reason and rationality, whereas female – with emotionality and certain expressivity in actions and words. The stylistic analysis of the sorted out lexis revealed a completely opposite tendency, where an author is more expressive in scents interpretations. Thus, belles-lettres texts contain valuable empirical material, accumulating peculiarities of writers’ perception processes, nuances of the worldview and gender characteristics of language/speech (similarities and differences) of men and women.

Starring Hitler! Adolf Hitler as the Main Character in Twentieth-First Century French Fiction

Starring Hitler! Adolf Hitler as the Main Character in Twentieth-First Century French Fiction

КОНЦЕПТ ОДИНОЧЕСТВО ВО ФРАНЦУЗСКОЙ ЯЗЫКОВОЙ КАРТИНЕ МИРА

The article is devoted to analyzing the linguistic means representing the LONELINESS concept in the French fiction. The cognitive-semantic and contextual analysis has identified the concept’s basic features characteristic for the native French speakers’ cognitive consciousness. The authors discover the specificity of the concept’s figurative component characterized by the high level of abstractness, analyze the peculiarities of the structural space of the investigated conceptual sphere. Special attention is paid to describing the concept’s evaluative zone characterized by the prevalence of negative emotional and hedonistic features.

French Novels and the Victorians, by Juliette Atkinson

Reviewed by: French Novels and the Victorians by Juliette Atkinson Christopher M. Keirstead (bio) French Novels and the Victorians, by Juliette Atkinson; pp. x + 426. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017, £85.00, $100.00. Juliette Atkinson's French Novels and the Victorians illustrates the ways in which the abiding Victorian appetite for contemporary French fiction provided the basis for a critically engaged, self-reflective debate on evolving literary and cultural controversies over the period 1830 to 1870. Judiciously covering a large, even enormous literary field, Atkinson's study aims to provide a more complete picture of what has been coming into focus only through more isolated critical efforts focused on individual authors or subgenres. Blending the approaches of book history, reception studies, and comparative criticism, French Novels and the Victorians establishes itself as the authoritative source on its subject and one that should prove highly accessible to students or readers with little familiarity with nineteenth-century French literature. The first two chapters of the book, forming a section on "Disseminating French novels," are in many ways its most exciting and innovative. Publishers' records and advertising provide one window into this topic, but Atkinson devotes equal attention to libraries, especially the London Library, founded in 1841, for which issue records for most of its first decade survive. Patrons such as the Carlyles, John Stuart Mill, the sculptor Susan Durant, and the queen's physician Dr. William Baly were regular borrowers of French fiction. Their records, Atkinson acknowledges, provide insight into only a small, elite segment of London society. She fortifies this research by comparing it with titles available through circulating libraries such as Mudie's, where "the sheer volume of French novels to be found . . . do[es] much to question the enduring use of Mudie as a symbol of Victorian prudishness" (46). London booksellers also readily provided cheap editions of the latest fiction through established contacts on the Continent. The roles of translators, editors, and reviewers both English and French—who contributed often to English journals, sometimes posing as English reviewers—complete this picture of the ways in which French novels were introduced to and framed for English consumption. Atkinson also reminds us of the rapid, transnational context of periodical publication at the time, [End Page 475] where English reviews of French novels and vice versa were available to readers across the channel within a day or two of publication. How does one square the apparent popularity of French fiction across a broad demographic of readers with the mostly hostile tone one sees in contemporary reviews, or the typically negative portrayal of readers of French fiction in English literature at the time? The book's next section, "The dangers of French novels," unpacks the complex, often performative nature of this response in public and private discourse. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1840s correspondence with Mary Russell Mitford, for instance, who herself served as a translator and reviewer of French fiction, formed a virtual epistolary salon where they traded opinions on the works of George Sand, Paul de Kock, Honoré de Balzac, and Eugène Sue, among others. Defending the free range of her tastes, Barrett Browning grouped herself with that "small class of persons who can abstract the art of books from their moral expression," thus anticipating similar moves made by aesthetic-minded authors later in the century (qtd. in Atkinson 172). Public commentary on French fiction was slower to come around to this way of thinking, but it should not be regarded as uniformly negative, Atkinson cautions. Even John Wilson Croker's 1836 Quarterly Review essay "French Novels," which has since served literary historians as a synecdoche of Victorian moral outrage at the French, must be understood "as the produce of a transnational critical discourse coming to terms with an explosive and provocative French literary generation" (163). Croker echoes similar reservations from French critics, Atkinson points out, and they were both soon opposed by other influential essayists offering a more appreciative understanding of French fiction, including Charles Sainte-Beuve and George Henry Lewes. This section of the book also examines the many guises assumed by fictional readers of French novels, most notably in works by William Makepeace Thackeray...

Le Monde selon Google dans le roman d’Aurélien Bellanger La Théorie de l’information

As an echo to Michel Houellbecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island and Greg Egan’s novel Permutation City, in his first science fiction novel, Information Theory, Aurélien Bellanger features a fictional biography of a computer scientist and businessman named Pascal Ertanger, partially inspired by the true-life story of the French Internet provider Xavier Niel. Google plays a key role in this fictional work that depicts the power of the earth conceived as a super computer and how human beings can be hacked. Finally, based on the views exchanged by Sergueï Brin—the cofounder of Google—and Pascal Ertanger, a post-humanist project is inspired in which human data stolen from Facebook are used to create an insectoid humankind. Given that in the novel the last characters think of themselves as a “corpus” and as being written/coded, this article focuses on the mythologies of writing as a key component of French science fiction imagery and as an illustration of the concept of technological singularity.

Nymph, Scarab, Butterfly: Figures of the Dancer in Mérimée, Flaubert and Proust

Abstract This article examines dance episodes from three works of French fiction written between 1860 and 1920: the roussalka dance from Mérimée’s Lokis, Salomé’s performance in Flaubert’s Hérodias, and the description of an unnamed ballet dancer in Proust’s Le Côté de Guermantes. The texts, in contrasting ways, explore networks of power and desire, as well as the relationship between the aesthetic sphere and the world of social conventions and interactions, thus reflecting the thematic significance of dance in the literary culture of the period. It would be hard to justify constructing a grand narrative that maps the history of dance on to that of its literary representations on the basis of three texts; nevertheless, in the interplay of narrative and metaphor and the portrayal of the dancer’s multiple personae, we can find traces of some major shifts in the evolution of dance from the romantic ballet of the mid-nineteenth century to the coming of modernism at the start of the twentieth.

The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French, by Oana Panaïté

The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French, by Oana Panaïté