French Friends Research Articles

Edith Wharton in France

Edith Wharton in France

Jefferson’s unknown informant on Necker in 1789: an episode of diplomatic history involving Condorcet

ABSTRACT The American envoy in Paris, Jefferson, sent on 17 June 1789 to Jay, the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, an assessment of Necker, then at the apex of his political fortune, provided by an informant whose name was not disclosed by Jefferson. This paper intends to show that the author of this report was the philosopher, mathematician and economist Condorcet – certainly the French friend who had with Jefferson the most intense intellectual intercourse – and sketches a history of the relationship between Condorcet, Necker and Jefferson from which the report arose. While the friendship of Jefferson and Condorcet has been studied extensively, the report on Necker was never investigated in depth.

Living in limbo: Economic and social costs for refugees

AbstractOur paper tests the hypothesis that living in limbo could have negative consequences for the socio‐economic integration of refugees. We define limbo as a protracted period when asylum seekers are waiting for the decision concerning their permanent refugee status. Relying on the French survey of migrants, France's longitudinal survey of migrants (ELIPA), we measure integration by labour market participation, fluency in French, finding new French friends and studying. To account for the endogeneity of limbo, we instrument it with the administrative backlog. We find that living longer in limbo during the asylum‐seeking period slows down future integration of refugees, but results differ with respect to gender and educational attainment. While having lived longer in limbo slows down most aspects of socio‐economic integration for refugees with no degree or a high school degree, those with a bachelor's degree do not experience negative effects. Male refugees who had lived longer in limbo have a lower likelihood of being employed and studying in France, while similar females make fewer French friends.

“I Landed in France with the Century”: An Excerpt from François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800–1815

In the spring of 1800, François-René de Chateaubriand sailed from the cliffs of Dover to the headlands of Calais. He was thirty-one and had been living as a political refugee in England for more than seven years, at times in such extreme poverty he subsisted on nothing but hot water and two-penny rolls. As a nobleman and a veteran of the counterrevolutionary Army of Princes (in which he had briefly laid siege to Thionville before contracting smallpox), he was down on the Republic’s blacklist of émigrés, which meant he could be put to death if he set foot in France. Thus it was not exactly François-René de Chateaubriand who made the trip south across the Dover Strait; it was, according to the passport he obtained from the Prussian ambassador to England, a fictional Swiss subject named Monsieur Lassagne. Despite the dramatic circumstances, there seems to have been little passion behind Chateaubriand’s decision to return incognito to his native land. His brother and sister-in-law had been guillotined in 1794; his mother and one of his sisters had died in 1798 from the poor treatment they received while in Republican prisons. “Although I remembered my country,” Chateaubriand writes in his epic-length Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, “I felt no desire to see it again. [It] had become for me a stone bosom, a breast without milk.”1 Only when his French friends began to leave England for the continent—after Napoleon had declared himself First Consul and loosened the restrictions against émigrés returning—did Chateaubriand reluctantly make up his mind to head homeward. He packed up some manuscripts and the unfinished proofs of a book called The Genius of Christianity, crossed to Calais with his friend Madame d’Aguesseau, and by stages made his way to Paris.

Becoming a Francophile: A Half-Century Love Affair by Leonard Rosmarin

Reviewed by: Becoming a Francophile: A Half-Century Love Affair by Leonard Rosmarin Alice J. Strange Rosmarin, Leonard, Becoming a Francophile: A Half-Century Love Affair. Mosaic, 2019. ISBN 978-1-771614344. Pp. 241. In this memoir, a Canadian professor of French, retired from Brock University in Ontario, sets out to identify the forces that contribute to his identity as a Francophile. He spent extended periods in France as a student, director of a study abroad program, and visiting professor at Université de Perpignan. His descriptions of life in France are interesting but scarcely original. Conventional points are covered: first impressions, student life, French bureaucracy, housing issues, French friends, cultural sites, and, especially, his love of French history and literature. As an educator, he frequently compares French and Canadian educational institutions, illustrating his impressions with anecdotes. Unlike Canadian students, French university students like to present a challenging attitude toward a new professor. He enjoyed a sense of professional triumph when he gained their respect and became a popular professor. His command of French opened doors to friendships, often with teachers and administrators at his or his daughters' schools. He interacts with a privileged, educated segment of French society and rarely refers to larger social or political issues. French friends, whom he describes in detail, figure greatly in his positive memories. The most appealing sections of the work are his excursions into the Pyrénées-Orientales. This southeastern-most [End Page 250] department of France, nestled between the Mediterranean and the Spanish border, abounds in cultural interests. The French Catalan region is especially beautiful and rich in popular traditions. On the other hand, at several points in the text, Rosmarin abruptly switches his focus away from lived personal experience to insert basic historical facts and summaries of literary works with which he has a special connection. These digressions consist of information familiar to Francophile readers and seem at odds with his announced project. For example, he includes a digression on the life and achievements of Charles de Gaulle. At Versailles, he expounds on the life of Louis XIV. At a dramatic performance in Perpignan, he recounts in detail the plot of Corneille's Le Cid. In each case, these digressions disrupt the flow of his personal memories and seem detached from his undertaking. In addition, the Francophile reader may also feel startled when Rosmarin translates even the most basic French expressions into English. His concluding chapter is an analysis of love à la française, in the form of an academic discourse. Rather than refer to any personal experiences, he devotes the final chapter to an investigation of a French belief that passion and marriage are irreconcilable. To support this theory, Rosmarin summarizes La princesse de Clèves, Manon Lescaut, and Les liaisons dangereuses as examples of his view. Although the connection is not clear, the reader is left to assume that this belief contributes to his identity as a Francophile. Overall, this memoir seems intended for the author's family and associates, and readers unfamiliar with the basics of French language and culture. Some Francophile readers may enjoy comparing Rosmarin's experiences to their own, but they will find few original insights. Alice J. Strange Southeast Missouri State University, emerita Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Vrienden van vroeger

Abstract Time-honoured friends. French influence on the formation of the princely court of Louis Bonaparte, king of Holland In 1806, at Napoleon’s behest, Louis Bonaparte suddenly became the foreign king of a former republic. Confronted with the problem of finding competent and trustworthy senior court dignitaries in this alien environment, he initially resorted to appointing French friends and confidants. Louis’ choice was far from unique: his crowned relatives elsewhere, by necessity, opted for the same solution. This article reconstructs the early household composed by Louis and compares it to the households in the other satellite states. The juxtaposition not only highlights Napoleon’s constant interference in nominations, but also reveals some inconsistencies in the Emperor’s attitude. In addition, it emphasizes the marked impact of local conditions. Contrary to the situation in the other Napoleonic kingdoms, no Frenchmen entered the government posts in Holland, yet they dominated in senior court office. The comparison also helps to explain the remarkably rapid disappearance of French court dignitaries from Holland, prompting the ‘Dutchification’ of the king’s entourage familiar from earlier historiography.

Revelation in Troyes

Revelation in Troyes Ron Wilkins (bio) Saying goodbye at the train on his last visit to BrisbaneI remember my father fixing me with steely eyes, as if he wereabsorbing all detail, confirming each aspect,committing my every movement to his memory.With that stare one reserves for precious objects like parentor partner briefly seen before for ever being sealed away. Now at this same age I say goodbyeto French friends I have known for half a lifetime,seen two generations pass, one colleague dying.We abandon the gentility of kissing cheeksand take to hugs, rocking back and forth,some kisses, too, for it is certain, this is the last timein this life that we will meet. Travelling aloneacross half the world is now for me too much a burden. And so I stand under an umbrella besidethe covered market, deserted now, while they adjust their GPS,all wave, the car moves off, and I stand watchingflaming taillights being slowly extinguished by the rain.Then suddenly, the realization that I wear my father's steely stare,and I'm aware I am no longer of the exuberant agewhen all seems possible, but now have reachedthe age my options fast diminish, and darkness closes in. Troyes, France, Sept. 2018 [End Page 60] Ron Wilkins Ron Wilkins was educated at the universities of Melbourne, Cambridge, and Harvard and was, until recently, a chief research scientist at CSIRO Petroleum in Sydney. He has had poems published in Quadrant, Cordite Poetry Review, The Best Australian Poems, and other Australian and American journals. A collection of poems and drawings, Fistful of Dust, was published in 2012 (Delphian). This is his first appearance in Antipodes. Copyright © 2020 Wayne State University Press

Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File by John Edgar Wideman

Reviewed by: Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File by John Edgar Wideman Stephen Casmier John Edgar Wideman. Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File. New York: Scribner, 2016. 208 pp. $25.00. In his most recent work, Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, John Edgar Wideman tackles the deeply unsettling story of the father of Emmett Till as part of his ongoing struggle with the relationship between African American fathers and sons, men and women, innocence and guilt, history and myth, art and propaganda, and, above all, being and nothingness. Now seventy-five, Wideman presents the structuring consciousness of an aging writer, mulling over an inchoate work on Louis Till while walking his “older man’s walk” along the seashore of Brittany, France, aware that his once finely tuned, athlete’s body experiences its “deepest, purest pleasures” in “a state of rest with no desire to move” (157). He is living on borrowed time (having surpassed his biblically allotted three score and ten), communing with the ghosts of fiction’s and history’s past, and still grappling with the same “brutal, ugly shit” (103) that has agitated his career for nearly five decades. [End Page 71] In Writing to Save a Life, readers won’t find an easy, plot-driven novel, a chronologically coherent history, a neat explanation of events, or simple moral vindication of the acts of Emmett Till’s father, Louis Till. An American soldier during World War II, Till was executed by the military for war crimes: the murder of an Italian woman and the rape of two others in Civitavecchia, Italy in 1945. “No doubt about it, “the writer cryptically observes. “Some brutal, ugly shit went down in Civitavecchia” (103). This not only includes the original crimes, but the deeply disturbing actions of kangaroo military courts that could so cavalierly and inexorably repeat the injustices of Southern lynch law through the radically disproportionate execution of African American soldiers. So, the text pits its own capturing of the story—its own aesthetic organization—against that of the suspect and deadly power of the official narrative represented by Till’s legal military file, which was once leaked in the 1950s as a way to smear the son and justify his brutal lynching. The writer figure requests and receives a copy of this file in the mail. The deliberate, overt and fetishistic structure of the file overwhelms him. He describes it as “a hodgepodge of this and that, making sense sometimes, sometimes not. . . . Power importantly clearing its throat, Hrrrrhumph, as it delivers the last word on Louis Till” (97). Writing to Save a Life counters this aesthetic organization of power—a devastating archive—through its own aesthetic organization. Wideman describes this organization as “an amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination” on the book’s copyright page. As a self-conscious “amalgam,” Writing to Save a Life unveils the influence on its form and function of the pâte de verre art objects made by the writer figure’s French friend, Antoine, who owns the quaint cottage in Brittany that sets much of his ruminations about Till. This artwork—“Transparent cubes, globes, chunks of glass with all sorts of unpredictable things displayed inside” (174)—doubles that of objects crafted by the actual French plastic artist Antoine Leperlier. The writer figure gazes at them as he struggles to breach the barrier between the ephemeral, representational decadence of writing and the concrete functionality of plastic art. Stalled in his work, he covets Antoine’s success. “Heart too full of things I wasn’t prepared to deal with, including ungenerous envy of any art’s success while my Louis Till project falters” (176). For readers of Wideman’s work, the French objects conjure a familiar magic that bridges the divide of time and space that the writer seeks to defy and capture in his emergent work on Till. “I’d always been intrigued by my friend’s work,” the writer admits, “its roots in ancient Egypt, necromancy, alchemy, and family tradition. The best of the new pieces continued an investigation of time. . . . Lives encased in glass doomed to repeat and suffer history. Bearing witness again...

The "Queer Shadow" of Ogden Codman in Edith Wharton's Summer

The "Queer Shadow" of Ogden Codman in Edith Wharton's Summer Emily J. Orlando (bio) "I have had a long letter from Coddy about Jean-Marie, of which I had sent him a [post card]. He knows it, & once tried to buy it; thinks its possibilities endless—& understands it better than any of the French friends who have seen it. What a queer stick!" —Edith Wharton, Letter to Minnie Jones, 1918 (Letters 407) "a queer stick is generally one who is not to be relied upon." —William Dickinson, A Supplement to the Glossary of the Dialect of Cumberland, 1905 One year after the publication of her novella Summer (1917), Edith Wharton intimated in a letter to Mary Berenson that the secret to a full life is "to decorate one's inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome any one who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same in the hours when one is inevitably alone" (Lewis 413). Although she likely would not have relished the comparison to her transatlantic modernist counterpart, Wharton thus anticipates Virginia Woolf 's assertion that the "room of one's own" that is a woman writer's birthright "has to be decorated" (247).1 A number of scholars have elucidated what architecture and house decoration meant to Edith Wharton.2 Wharton certainly proposes a way for women to claim authority in the domestic sphere in her account of the "perilous coquetry" with which Lizzie Hazeldean arranges her New York drawing room in "New Year's Day" (305). But what of the Wharton fiction that is not centered on decorated drawing rooms? The only drawing room described in Summer, for which Wharton returns to the rural Massachusetts setting of Ethan Frome (1911), is that [End Page 220] which is presided over by Miss Hatchard, an ineffectual, aging spinster who is no aspirational peer for Charity Royall, the "ruler" of the modest home of her guardian and eventual husband Mr. Royall (88, 15, 11). Unlike the showy Fifth Avenue mansions of The Custom of the Country, Summer depicts residences called simply "the faded red house" (sometimes "sad house"), "the brown house," and "the abandoned house." Yet, as this essay seeks to demonstrate, the impact of architecture—and especially the fraught collaboration with an architect that yielded Wharton's first book, The Decoration of Houses (1897)—is nonetheless pivotal to the novella, which ultimately reveals much about Wharton's fluency with, and searing critique of, the effete male subculture of late nineteenth-century architects and designers. The under-class, under-educated Charity Royall, bereft of a drawing "room of her own" to decorate and govern, is at the center of Wharton's critique of this subculture. The young and worldly Lucius Harney, Charity Royall's love interest and the catalyst for her sexual awakening, is, after all, a New England architect. The lack of architectural context offered in the scholarship on Summer is surprising for a novella in which architecture brings together the protagonists.3 It is "the architect's passion for improvement" that lures Harney to the sleepy village of North Dormer, whose name at once invokes the architectural term for a type of window and signifies the dormant sexuality he arouses in the novella's protagonist. It is there that Harney encounters and slips into an affair with Charity that is, at least for her, transformative. In a particularly telling moment, the handsome cosmopolitan, scanning the holdings at the Hatchard Memorial Library where Charity serves as librarian, leans in and tells her, in a remark that flags him as patronizing, "You don't seem strong on architecture" (8). Edith Wharton was, of course, very strong on architecture, despite its being a male-dominated profession in her time.4 As Richard Guy Wilson has noted, by 1890, the young, married Wharton had acquired an impressive knowledge of architecture and decoration "through her father's library, her travels, and [her mentor and friend Egerton] Winthrop" (138). Composed in France some twenty years later, and staged in houses far less grand than the Gilded Age "cottages" that Wharton disparages in The Decoration of Houses, Summer speaks to the author's career-long...

Living in Limbo: Economic and Social Costs for Refugees

Our paper tests the hypothesis that living in limbo could have negative consequences for socio-economic integration of refugees. We define limbo as a protracted time period when asylum seekers are granted only a temporary residence permit linked to the asylum application, waiting for the decision concerning a permanent refugee status. To quantify the impact of limbo, we rely on the data from the French survey of migrants, ELIPA. We measure integration by labor market participation, fluency in French, finding new French friends and studying. We first demonstrate that limbo is exogenous as it is not related to the ability of refugees to fulfill administrative procedures. Then, we show that a higher share of the time living in limbo slows down all aspects of socio-economic integration, except fluency in French. The chances of a given refugee being employed are 1.2 times higher than for a refugee that spent one standard deviation more time in limbo, while the odds of having French friends and studying in France are 1.7 times higher, respectively. There are little gender differences.

La narrazione dell’Oriente e la svolta letteraria di Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso: il testo-laboratorio dei "Souvenirs dans l’exil"

L’articolo analizza la svolta letteraria di Cristina Trivulzio Belgiojoso individuando nei "Souvenirs dans l’exil" (1850) il testo di transito che documenta una tappa fondamentale nell’evoluzione della scrittura dell’autrice. L’opera, che nasce come una raccolta di lettere inviate dall’esilio all’amica francese Caroline Jaubert, esibisce una scrittura ibrida, contrassegnata da una commistione di generi sapientemente organizzati all’interno della cornice formale della lettera privata, e si configura come un vero e proprio testo-laboratorio che presenta manifestamente al lettore il processo 'in fieri' di avvicinamento alla scrittura narrativa. L’analisi della costruzione del libro dei "Souvenirs" mette in evidenza come per la scrittrice l’atto della narrazione sia intimamente vincolato al colloquio con un lettore assente che, prima di identificarsi con la figura impersonale del pubblico, deve essere individuato nei destinatari di elezione delle lettere private attraverso le quali l’autrice matura un’abitudine alla narrazione che solo in un secondo tempo aspira a una dimensione pubblica. Il passaggio dalla dimensione privata della lettera a quella pubblica del testo narrativo, che avviene solo all’altezza dell’esilio orientale, è concomitante con lo spostamento a est della location della scrittrice e con la narrazione dell’Oriente, alla quale la scrittura letteraria di Cristina Trivulzio è indiscutibilmente legata. Sebbene la forzata lontananza dalla scena politica e le difficoltà finanziarie correlate all’esperienza dell’esilio abbiano favorito l’adozione di una scrittura letteraria 'tout court', l’incontro con il 'monde nouveau' dell’Oriente, del quale vengono qui analizzate le prime impressioni riportate nei "Souvenirs", risulta determinante. La novità rappresentata dal mondo orientale, che la scrittrice indaga in maniera autonoma, evadendo in parte il canone orientalista, si traduce infatti sul piano della scrittura nell’assunzione di un inedito registro espressivo unitamente a una diversa consapevolezza della propria identità di autrice.

The Cancer Diagnosis, Surgery and Cause of Death of Ivan Turgenev (18181883)

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) was a Russian novelist, poet and playwright born in Oryol, Russia, the second of three sons (Fig. 1). Only French was spoken at home, so he learned Russian mainly with family servants. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian Realism ; this work takes aim at the cruelties of a serf society. Actually, his mother controlled over 500 serfs with strict demeanor and ran her family as despotically as she did her estates. Nevertheless, at the time he attended preparatory schools in Moscow, the young Turgenev was already rebelling against his aristocratic background ; his fellow students, struck by his democratic leanings, called him “the American”. His most famous and enduring novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction, that include themes such as the beauty of early love, and failure to reach one’s dreams. However, the leading character in this novel, Eugene Bazarov, considered the ‘first Bolshevik’ in Russian literature, was in turn heralded as either a glorification or a parody of the ‘new men’ of the 1860s. Indeed, Bazarov illustrates the conflict between the older generation, reluctant to accept reforms, and the nihilistic youth. From the central character of Bazarov, Turgenev drew a classical portrait of the mid-nineteenth-century nihilist movement (derived from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing”). This Russian movement rejected all authorities and can be summarized by Mikhail Bakunin’s famous dictum : “Let us therefore trust the eternal Spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unfathomable and eternal source of all life. The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too !”. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the Nihilists were known throughout Europe as proponents of the use of violence in order to bring about political change. Fathers and Sons was set during the first nihilist period of social ferment, from Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War to the Emancipation of the Serfs. Hostile reaction to Fathers and Sons and his personal stand as a liberal between tsarist autocratic rule and the spirit of revolutionary radicalism prompted Turgenev’s decision to leave Russia. Turgenev wrote on themes similar to those found in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but he did not approve of the religious and moral preoccupations that his two great contemporaries brought to their artistic creation. Turgenev was closer in temperament to his French friends Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola and Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev’s artistic purity made him a favorite of novelists of the next generation, such as Henry James and Joseph Conrad. James wrote no fewer than five critical essays on Turgenev’s work and considered him as the Acta Chir Belg, 2015, 115, 241-246

Between two rights: Julien Freund and the origins of political realism in France

ABSTRACTJulien Freund (1921–93) was a French sociologist and political theorist who taught at the University of Strasbourg in the 1960s and 1970s. Although he is the author of over two dozen books, Freund remained throughout his lifetime something of a marginal figure in his own country. Yet, strangely, Freund is now receiving more scholarly attention in France than ever before. The question is why? This paper attempts to provide an answer by looking at Freund's attempt to establish an alternative intellectual canon in France that was heavily indebted to the German tradition of political realism. The story begins with Freund's early relationship with Raymond Aron, and suggests, perhaps provocatively, that Freund is responsible for luring Aron back into his studies on Max Weber dating from the 1930s. It then moves on to explore Freund's relationship with Carl Schmitt. Freund became Schmitt's closest French friend and, for forty years, exhibited a veritable obsession with disseminating Schmitt's work in France. Finally, it suggests that recent attempts by those who wish to place Freund within a current tradition of French liberalism are mistaken. Instead Freund must be placed within a German Neue Rechte context, and specifically his desire to introduce the German tradition of political realism into France. In the end the article argues that the French Nouvelle Droite—with its stress on the cultural and ethnic foundations of the nation-state—pushed Freund's political thought in a decidedly anti-liberal and seemingly pseudo-fascist direction.

La deuxième vie d’Aurélien Moreau par Tatiana Arfel

Reviews 253 notice throughout is that this work bears witness to the process of learning a foreign language.We smile as the child tells of her preparation for departure and we empathize as she struggles with the French vowels that she has to pronounce “sous mon nez” (11). The challenges of learning French drive this novel and we who have had this experience will readily understand the phases of frustration and of joy, including that moment when, like the narrator, we heard the new language“pour de vrai”(19). Once in France, she knows that language sets her apart, but with great determination she goes to school, watches television, makes French friends and even borrows a book by Queneau from the library. Her desire to learn is strong and her passion for the language is palpable: “Que les voyelles sous le nez finissent par me révéler tous leurs secrets” (54). Little by little, she feels the language becoming a part of her, and the glorious day arrives when she says: “J’ai pensé et parlé en français en même temps” (117).An additional pleasure for readers is that we see, through the poetry of Alcoba’s writing, that many secrets of the French language have, in fact, been revealed. This novel is built of anecdotes; chapters have titles and stories pop up in what might seem to be random order but this device is very effective in showing how our lives are organized around narratives that coalesce to form the person we become. We hear how she and her father read Maeterlinck’s La vie des abeilles so as to share a topic in their censored letters. We also know that this reading touches her in other ways, enriching her French and giving her tools to help her live in a new culture. That she dares to ask how Maeterlinck can state that blue is the favorite color of bees shows our narrator as an active participant in her reading and her life and here, as in other stories, we are reminded that she is a little girl trying to find herself and her place. Whether she is telling about her mother’s job, the cafeteria, the class bully, or wallpaper, our narrator provides a glimpse of her world. Blanc-Mesnil and its poverty may be far from the Paris she had imagined but her experience is rich. Her love for French is contagious and her journey, we know, is far from over. Students reading this novel will find a kindred spirit and readers who have learned to live in another culture will see parts of their stories in Le bleu des abeilles. Metropolitan State University of Denver Ann Williams Arfel, Tatiana. La deuxième vie d’Aurélien Moreau. Paris: Corti, 2013. ISBN 978-27143 -1115-3. Pp. 317. 20 a. Aurélien Moreau stands accused of a crime against“Faites Comme ChezVous,”the company he managed until his“arrest.”Of the testimonies comprising the novel’s first section, one comes from Alphonse Lambert, company owner and Aurélien’s father-inlaw . He mainly touts the company’s innovation in security programs that ward off potential intruders with elaborate illusions of presence (i.e., sounds of a dinner party, a couple’s argument) when no one is home. Of Aurélien, he says little except that his son-in-law’s lunacy shows in the only idea he ever had,which was to develop a program for generating the illusion of absence when people are at home. Other“witnesses”also have much to say about themselves but little for Aurélien, immediate family members being no exception, with his oldest son saying sarcastically:“Aurélien Moreau. Je ne l’ai jamais rencontré”(32).A former psychiatrist sees not a lunatic but a“normopathe”in Aurélien, too normal to be normal perhaps, but “[c]orrecte” (35) like a robot. Thereafter , only Aurélien’s words appear in ever-evolving journals from the six months prior to and the nine months following his crime. At first, his entries are like lists, each headed by month, date, and saint’s name, followed by familiar people (or occasional...

French Friends, American Allies: Ethnic Dynamics in the Writing of Jack Kerouac

The way the scroll text of Kerouac’s On the Road creatively manifests the writer’s unconscious concerns about his dichotomous hybrid French– Canadian–American heritage is analysed. The characters of Gabrielle Kerouac, Henri Cru and Neal Cassady are shown to operate metaphorically to symbolize Kerouac’s tumultuous relationship with the various elements of his genealogy. How the writer’s depiction of, and the protagonist’s allegiances with, these characters, who, respectively, represent French– Canadian maternity, European respectability and American unreliability, betray Kerouac’s covert attempts to reconcile his autobiographical feelings about the dualities implicit in his identity and mirror his efforts to navigate disparate cultural ideologies is examined.

The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West (review)

Reviewed by: The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West Nicolas S. Witschi The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West. Ed. Lawrence I. Berkove. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2006. xiv + 394 pp. Cloth, $39.95 ; paper, $19.95. Beginning in the 1860s and lasting for roughly four decades, an unexpected but highly influential literary movement arose along the far-flung edge of Nevada's Great Basin desert where it meets the Sierra Nevada. Or so the story goes. Loosely defined by the inventive, often satirical writings of a motley group of journalists, memoirists, and fiction writers, this so-called Sagebrush School (first labeled as such in the 1890s) is most frequently invoked whenever the antecedents of and early influences on Samuel Clemens come under discussion. And yet relatively little is known about the actual writings of those who worked in Virginia City and its environs. Lawrence I. Berkove's new anthology admirably redresses this shortcoming, presenting for the first time in half a century an up-to-date, well-researched, and engaging collection that surveys the literary production of the place that first saw the name of Mark Twain in print. Familiar gems such as Twain's "A Bloody Massacre Near Carson" and Dan De Quille's "Solar Armor" are included. Also present are lesser-known but equally compelling pieces such as Sam Davis' "Typographical Howitzer," which imagines Twain and De Quille's launching of racks of typeset prose and poetry from a cannon to repel a group of "unlettered" marauders; Rollin M. Daggett's moving recollection in "My French Friend" of the emotional costs of the mining life; Joseph T. Goodman's charmingly evasive "That Affair at Pollard's"; and the latter author's measured and partially sympathetic telling of the tale of Conrad Wiegand, the scandal-ruined and ultimately suicidal assayer whom Twain had mercilessly skewered in appendix C of Roughing It. In an introduction that is sure to renew discussion about how one might define literary regionalism, Berkove offers a taxonomy of sagebrush literature's defining characteristics: it "tends to favor personal narrative"; it is "thoughtfully moral," even philosophical at times, and "manifests a fierce love of the Nevada experience"; and it reflects its contributors' complete mastery "of both formal and informal style," of both classical literary techniques and the more vernacular style of an emerging regionalist movement. Above all, "the Sagebrush authors did not invent the literary hoax, but they [End Page 87] did nurture it into a high art." Thus, the anthology opens with a section on "Humor and Hoaxes," which, given the familiar but hardly isolated examples of Twain and De Quille, certainly represents a central defining characteristic of late-nineteenth-century Nevada literature. This longest and most entertaining section is followed by "Short Fiction," "Memoirs," "Nonfiction," a handful of letters, and "Poetry," each with a separate introduction in which Berkove further glosses the distinguishing features of Sagebrush writing. As a whole the anthology favors a broadly introductory or survey model and thereby avoids making a more explicit entry into recent debates about literary regionalism's ideological functions and transnational contexts. Nevertheless, at the core of this book lies an assumption about the necessity of identifying the formal and thematic terms by which readers might discern and describe the literature of a specific region, an idea that is still very much worth debating. Moreover, Berkove's selection of texts affords readers the opportunity to assess the cultural impact of one of America's earliest instances of massively mechanized and dehumanizing modernization. Despite being subtitled "Literature from the Silver Age of the Old West," it could just as easily be described as a collection of literature from the new industrial blast furnace. The inclusion in the "Nonfiction" section of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's "The Pah-Utes," published in the Californian in 1882 and the anthology's only woman-authored piece, raises a question too important to ignore: are there other women writers from this place and period whose works have thus far been overlooked or are still awaiting discovery? The California Gold Rush era had legions of women contributors to local periodicals and women authors...

"Who We Are": Lawrence Levine as William Jamesian Pragmatist and as Gustave de Beaumont

First of all, I wish to thank Roy Rosenzweig, Lawrence Glickman, James W. Cook, Olivia Ryan, and Mike O'Malley, organizers of this conference to honor a historian of enormous import, a brilliant scholar of intellectual generosity and personal warmth. Although I was neither student nor colleague of Larry Levine's, as a historian I grew up under the sign of his early work. As a member of the professoriate, I have shared his views on the need to open the American mind and his commitment to diversity in American student bodies and faculties. For some thirty years I have loved his writing, laughed at his jokes, appreciated his wife, and, in China in the mid-1980s, accompanied him on his travels. His illness saddens me deeply, even as I hope for his recovery. I know that as serious as is his cancer, healing remains possible. I take great pleasure in the opportunity to think aloud about one part of Larry Levine's provocative oeuvre. At least since the 1980s and surely since long before then, Levine has focused on, in his words, “who we are”: what it means to be an American, as manifested in conceptions of the shape and meaning of the past.1 I want to relate his long-term preoccupation with American identity to the work of four of his predecessors: two aristocratic French friends and fellow travelers, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and Gustave de Beaumont (1802–1866), the American philosopher William James (1842–1910), and, of course, the contemporary who inspired Levine, Allan Bloom (1930–1992). Like Levine and Bloom, born about a century after the French aristocrats' visit to the United States, Tocqueville and Beaumont explored the nature of American identity. They wrestled with many of Levine's and Bloom's issues, matters now falling under the rubric of multiculturalism. Just as Levine saw himself as James's intellectual descendant, so Bloom harked back to Tocqueville.

Africa Confidential. Volume 46 Number 10. Published 13 May 2005

Africa ConfidentialVolume 46, Issue 10 p. 1-8 Africa Confidential. Volume 46 Number 10. Published 13 May 2005 First published: 12 May 2005 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6338.2005.00210.xCitations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Contents 1 Britain/Africa: The big push comes to shove 2 Zimbabwe: The dam bursts 4 Sudan: Seizing the day in the South 5 Sudan: From the ground up 6 Togo: Faure's French friends 6 Tanzania: Storm warning 7 Kenya: Ship ahoy! 8 Pointers: UK-Africa, Mali, Rwanda & Zimbabwe Citing Literature Volume46, Issue10May 2005Pages 1-8 RelatedInformation

Newsletter European Paediatric Surgeons' Association (EUPSA)

The 5th European Congress of Paediatric Surgery in Tours (France) was a great success with nearly 600 participants and a significant number of high quality presentations. The Congress was excellently organized by Yann Revillon and Yves Aigrain and we are grateful for the enormous work done by our French friends and their helpers.

An American Writer Born in Paris: Blaise Cendrars Reads Henry Miller Reading Blaise Cendrars

Research Article| March 01 2003 An American Writer Born in Paris: Blaise Cendrars Reads Henry Miller Reading Blaise Cendrars Jay Bochner Jay Bochner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2003) 49 (1): 103–122. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2003-2006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jay Bochner; An American Writer Born in Paris: Blaise Cendrars Reads Henry Miller Reading Blaise Cendrars. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2003; 49 (1): 103–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2003-2006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2003 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.