French Scholars Research Articles

From Contention to Engagement: French Social Science and the Politics of HIV/AIDS

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has had a devastating impact, challenged the capabilities of state actors, and empowered a new transnational movement. While the various phenomena linked to the disease too often have been overlooked by American political science, French scholars have responded to the politics of AIDS as it related to contestation over the direction of the state and as it has yielded new opportunities for engaged theory building and empirical exploration.

Marcel Mauss: In Pursuit of the Whole. A Review Essay

Emile Durkheim assembled a team to promote his vision for sociology, but he and Mauss were in many ways a double act, like Marx and Engels. There was room for only one leader of the movement, so we speak of the Durkheimians and the Marxists. Mauss and Engels each assumed leadership of the movement they jointly founded after their partner's death, but the intrinsic inequality of the partnership was made worse in Mauss' case by age difference, kinship seniority, and his inability to write books of his own. The publication of an abridged English translation of Marcel Fournier's Marcel Mauss: A Biography (2006 [1994]) allows us to reconsider his historical relationship with Durkheim, as well as his legacy for anthropology, history, and the social sciences today. French scholarship on Mauss is, of course, much more advanced than its Anglophone counterpart and it is less confined to academic anthropology. Fournier's 800-page collection of Mauss' Écrits politiques (1997) remains virtually unknown to English-speakers and the collective organized in his name, the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales (with its journal, revue du MAUSS), continues the eponymous founder's commitment to integrating progressive politics and intellectual work over a wide range of issues. In both cases, The Gift (1990 [1925]) has iconic significance as Mauss' most discussed work; but, as Sigaud (2002) has already pointed out, the Anglophone academy, with assistance from one or two leading French anthropologists, has taken up its message in ways that depart seriously from the author's original intentions.

La Normandie et l'Angleterre au Moyen Age

IN 1992 there took place at Reading a conference the proceedings of which, edited by David Bates and Anne Curry, were published as England and Normandy in the Middle Ages (1994) (rev. ante, cxii (1997), 437–8). These consisted of 21 papers, three by French scholars playing away, all published in English. Very broadly, the subjects covered included aspects of the history of Normandy, the effects of the conquest in England, a solid core of papers on aspects of ecclesiastical history, another group on the art and architecture of the period up to 1200, as well as papers on the role of the aristocracy in Anglo-Norman life, and a group on Normandy during the wars of the late middle ages. In all, however, some two thirds of the papers centred on the effects and results of the events of 1066. The collection under review, the proceedings of a conference (the return match, one might call it) held at Cerisy-la-Salle in 2001, is differently formed. Half the papers are by the English ‘visitors’; does this suggest that, for the French, Norman history is ‘regional’, while it is more ‘central’ to the history of medieval England? Comparing the programme of 2001 with that of 1992, we find only one paper touching the history of the Church (its economic history, in this instance) and only a single contribution on the arts (on manuscripts in this case). Has some wind of change been at work here? On the other hand, three papers dedicated specifically to the post-1204 century happily redress an almost total lack of attention paid to this period in the earlier volume. The late middle ages are given about equal weight and attention in the two volumes.

Preface

Born in New Zealand, Brian Merrilees completed his B.A. (1960) and M.A. (1961) at the University of Otago. Like many other aspiring scholars of French, he then went to the Sorbonne, graduating as Docteur de l’Université de Paris in 1964. His thesis, an edition of Le petit Plet, later published as volume 20 (1970) by the Anglo-Norman Text Society, launched his academic career as a scholar of Anglo-Norman, editor of texts and philologist par excellence. In all, he has edited or co-edited six editions of Anglo-Norman texts. All bear the hallmark of his meticulous scholarship, based on a sound knowledge of the grammar and philology of Old French and of the specificity of Anglo-Norman. In recent years, his research has taken a different course as he has pursued his interest in lexicography. Out of this interest has come a substantial body of work on medieval glossaries, lexicons, and dictionaries, including three collaborative editions of Latin-French dictionaries and many articles and conference papers. Lexicography is the current focus of his work, with editions of two further dictionaries underway.

Editorial Introduction. Margaret M. McGowan: Pioneer of Academic Dance Research

Editorial Introduction. Margaret M. McGowan:Pioneer of Academic Dance Research Margaret McGowan has been closely associated with all editorial aspects of the scholarly journal Dance Research almost since its first issue in 1982. For most of the life of the journal she has served as Assistant Editor, involved in the development of its editorial policies, the establishing of its reputation for high standards, and its gradual encompassing of the full range of dance research activity. The years of the journal have been years of considerable expansion within dance studies and research, throughout which Margaret has remained a highly respected and stable point of reference to scholars from widely differing backgrounds. In recognition of her contribution to the journal in its twenty-fifth year and her contribution to dance research more generally, this special issue has been planned to reflect the range and quality of her work, and that of others working in the early modern period – both dance scholars and specialists in cognate disciplines. The principal focus for the issue is the period with which Margaret has been professionally concerned, French culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is ironic that this work – with all that Margaret and her professional career has stood for – has done so much to support the development of dance studies in Britain: a development that has not been found in France itself. This is not to say that the quality of her research has failed to attract the admiration of French scholars – or their formative support. André Chastel (a Professor at the Sorbonne), in introducing the 'companion study' to Margaret's first book, Marie-Françoise Christout's Le Ballet de cour de Louis XIV (published in 1967), showed a very keen appreciation of the respective and very different strengths of these two works. For in her work, published three years earlier, Margaret had evinced an interest in the political context of dance, in seeing ballet as the product of a culture, an interdisciplinary form that resonatedwith the political aspirations of the time; she was less interested in dance as spectacular entertainment, and the production side of ballet. The roots of this precociously modern emphasis in her work are, doubtless, partly innate and partly the result of early influences upon her. The young Miss McGowan was an undergraduate at the University of Reading, which, at that time was distinguished by the presence of such important scholars as Frank Kermode, J. B. Trapp, and Donald Gordon, at an early stage of their academic careers; there, she developed an interest in interdisciplinary approaches, and in [End Page 87] looking at the connections between painting, music, theatre, dance and décor. These interests were encouraged further by her experiences at the University of Strasbourg, where she spent a year of her university course and took a French degree. She found this vibrant and forward-looking border city, imbued with both French and German culture, a place of stimulation and varied artistic and intellectual activity. The lively atmosphere of Strasbourg assisted her in widening her sympathies and seeing connections between the visual and performing arts and between them and the culture from which they arose. She thought carefully before deciding where to apply her scholarly attention, identifying two periods that lent themselves to her interdisciplinary and politico-cultural approach: the transitional period at the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the fin-de-siècle period at the end of the nineteenth century. She chose the earlier option: in this period, French literature had absorbed the classical heritage 'but was not sure where it was going' – it was a 'melting pot' – the arts were in transition before they found their 'pure' form. Margaret McGowan embarked upon her doctoral research under the supervision of Frances Yates, the formidably learned grande dame of the Warburg Institute (University of London). Frances Yates initially proved to be a rather idiosyncratic supervisor. Given her scholarly predilections, Miss Yates would always be seeking to find cabbalistic mysteries – 'unseen meanings' – concealed in the material being investigated by her student, who would have to insist, repeatedly, that there was 'nothing there'. But once Miss McGowan startedto produce...

The Art of Commedia: A Study in the 'Commedia dell'arte', 1560-1620, with Special Reference to the Visual Records by M. A. Katritzky

ii66 Reviews and thewoods. A chapter on Chronique des septmiseres explores thecrucial, Glissant inspired distinction between 'territoire' (a fixedand closed space, tobe dominated and defended) and 'lieu' (amore dynamic and unstable entity), arguing that themarket exemplifies the qualities of the latter. In another convincing reading,we see how the tropes of settlement, love, andwriting are interrelated inTexaco, while the concluding chapter on themost recentnovel, Biblique des derniers gestes, shows how themantle of writer (rather than transcriber or witness) has finallybeen assumed by the authorial alter ego,Oiseau de Cham. While each section ispacked with richmaterial, thehigh lights, for this reader at least, are Chapters 2 and 5. The formerexplores the notion of the abyss, an imagewhich recurs throughout Chamoiseau's work and which Milne brilliantly links via associated references to the 'matrice', to the foundational Antil lean experience of the slave ship. This vessel, asMilne argues, is also associated, via Cesaire, with literaryorigins, and is inChamoiseau's writing indelibly imprintedwith theprimal scream of negritude. InChapter 5 Milne argues thatL'Esclave vieil homme, ostensibly a novel about a runaway slave's attainment of subjectivity, is also an alle gory of theevolution of theAntillean writer. In another highly original argument, she traces four stages in this trajectory, moving from theexplicit references to the conteur, to the intertextual allusions toCesaire and Glissant, and ultimately she demonstrates how theprotagonist's discovery of the forest space can be readmetaphorically as the Martinican writer's eventual connection with his own local culture. Taking her cue from thewriting itself, and refusing to 'read back' from the ory (creolite or postcolonialism) to fiction, Milne provides meticulous close readings which open Chamoiseau's work up to a range of well-chosen approaches. It is to be hoped that her choice to publish in French will similarly expose thiswriter to a wider audience, given theEnglish-language bias ofmuch of thework being done on francophone postcolonial writing. QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST MAEVE MCCUSKER The Art of Commedia: A Study in the 'Commedia dell'arte', I560-I620, with Spe cial Reference to theVisual Records. ByM. A. KATRITZKY. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2006. 625 pp., incl. 340plates. ei8o. ISBN 978-90-420-I798-6. Commedia dell'arte studies, in thepast threedecades, have been moving in revisionist directions. In particular, Italian theatre historians have mounted a sustained cam paign todivorce perceptions of thegenre from images formed by nineteenth-century French scholars, startingwith Maurice Sand: toomany of these relied uncritically on inaccurate legendswhich theacting profession had created for itselfby theeighteenth century. The emphasis of research has been pushed back towhat was certainly the seminal creative period of Italian improvised theatre, and what some also see as its 'golden age', starting in themid-sixteenth century and ending around I630. It is on this period that the book under review also concentrates. M. A. Katritzky has for a long time been recuperating and publishing surviving visual images of comme dia dell'arte, pictures often previously unknown to text-oriented scholars. Many of them originate inGerman- or Dutch-speaking countries; so Katritzky has utilized her competence inboth those languages tobroaden the spectrum of evidence for the dissemination of Italian masks and troupes innorthern Europe. The Art ofCommedia is to some extent a retrospective of herwork, rewriting and combining inone volume a number of previously discrete discoveries and reflectionson this subject. In her opening section, introducing and explaining commedia dell'arte, Katritzky chooses tohighlight a particular body of evidence from the 1560s. She quotes docu ments relating to Italian performances inBavaria, and the diaries ofBavarian aristo crats visiting Italy; and spends some time on theparticipation in improvised theatre MLR, I02.4, 2007 I I67 ofmusicians, some of them Italian but others immigrants from the north such as Roland Lassus. The point being made is presumably the chronological priority of such information over much purely Italian material. Certainly ground is also laid for the quantity and importance of relevant visual images which come from north of theAlps. When Katritzky thenmoves to a summary account of the arte genre, her listof 'stock types and players' omits any discussion of theDottore, ofmale In namorati, and of female servants. However, she offers a timely corrective treatment of the figureofHarlequin/Arlecchino. The centrality...

Victorian Studies in France

Victorian Studies in France Alain Jumeau University of Paris-Sorbonne It is one thing to say that Victorian Studies are thriving in France. It is quite another to prove it. Perhaps a few facts and figures are necessary. Most French scholars involved in Victorian Studies belong to a society known as the SFEVE (Société Française d'Études Victoriennes et Édouardiennes), to which I have belonged ever since its creation in 1976, and whose chairman I have been since 2001. Of course, there may be a few exceptions, but practically all French Victorianists have chosen to belong to this society. Our two annual conferences (one in January and another in May) give them the opportunity of meeting colleagues and presenting papers, which, after a selection has been made bythe editorial board, are published in Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, a journal printed by Montpellier University Press. The titles of both our society and our journal show that Victorian Studies in France are closely linked with Edwardian Studies, for we believe that, as far as cultural trends are concerned, there is no clear-cut division between the end of Queen Victoria's reign and the beginning of King Edward VII's. Nor do we start with the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign in 1837. For reasons of historic continuity, we consider the nineteenth century in general, which, for many historians, begins in 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars, and ends with the First World War. Recently, we have even accommodated scholars working on Jane Austen and the Regency, which tends to demonstrate that our field is indeed the 'Long Nineteenth Century'. During much of the remainder of this presentation of 'Victorian Studies in France', which, as I have just shown, could be called, rather, 'Nineteenth-Century Studies in France', I will use the latest list of members of our society (October 2006) as working material. Our society boasts a total of 191 members, i.e. approximately 8 or 8.5% of all university teachers of English in France. Junior Members: 117 Senior Members: 33 Retired Members: 35 Foreign Members: 6 Total 191 (male: 76, female: 15) Most members specialize either in literature or in 'civilization' (or cultural studies), but there is no real borderline between the two fields of research and a few members manage to bridge the gap between the [End Page 292] two. The fact that, when they specify their own particular interests, they often mention several fields accounts for the difference between the total number of members and the number of special interests. Let us start with literature, which is still more popular than cultural studies, for that is a field that was introduced into the French curriculum more recently (in the 1960s and the 1970s). Here is a list of authors and literary topics mentioned: Austen: 3 Braddon: 1 Brontë sisters: 10 Browning: 2 Carlyle: 2 Carroll: 3 Chesterton: 1 Collins: 2 Conrad: 3 Dickens: 16 Disraeli: 1 Doyle: 1 Eliot: 10 Forster: 3 Gaskell: 7 Gissing: 2 Hardy: 8 Hopkins: 2 James: 3 Kipling: 4 Vernon Lee: 1 Maugham: 1 Meredith: 1 Moore: 1 Morrison: 1 Newman: 3 Pater: 3 Ruskin: 3 Rutherford: 1 Shaw: 2 Stevenson: 3 Tennyson: 1 Thackeray: 2 Trollope: 6 Wilde: 1 Anglo-Indian literature: 5 Children's literature: 2 Detective novel: 2 Edwardian drama: 1 Edwardian fiction: 2 Fantastic literature: 4 Gothic literature: 1 Imperial literature: 2 Literature and science: 1 Literature of the 90s: 6 Neo-Victorian novel: 2 Scottish literature: 1 Sensation novel: 2 Victorian drama: 1 Victorian poetry: 8 War poets: 1 Women's fiction: 1 Women in literature: 1 Women's poetry: 1 This tabulation shows quite clearly that fiction is more represented than poetry and even more than drama, most probably because of the triumph of the novel in England in the nineteenth century. Amongthe novelists, it comes as no surprise that Dickens is given pride of place. [End Page 293] It should be noted that one Dickens scholar works on 'Dickens on screen', a...

Marlène Laruelle, Mythe aryen et rêve impérial dans la Russie du xixe siècle

What is the intellectual genealogy of Eurasianism, the notion that Russia is separate from Europe and Asia yet combines elements from both continents? This is the question Marlene Laruelle, a prolific young French scholar of Russian national identity, currently at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, considers in her provocative new book, Mythe aryen et reve imperial dans la Russie du xixe siecle. Laruelle’s curiosity was piqued as she wrote an earlier work, L’ideologie eurasiste russe ou...

Introduction

Questions about space and place have occupied successive generations of historians in a variety of ways. If the horizons of historians were once somewhat delimited by a focus on the nation-state and the sphere of high politics, French scholars of the Annales school were among the first to challenge these parameters, mapping out social, cultural and economic spaces that did not necessarily correspond with national boundaries. Even today, the subjects of history and geography are taught together in France, the temporal and the spatial being seen as two facets of the same social scientific endeavour. In the English-speaking world, the tradition of social history has been characterized by a strong sense of place, enriching our understanding of France with a wealth of local and regional studies. Moreover, the growth of social and then cultural history also served to redefine the arena of the political, prompting historians to ask questions about...

French Political Science and European Integration: The State of the Art

The study of the European Union has attracted growing attention in France since 2000. European integration is now a mature field of research within French political science. But the visibility of French scholarship remains modest in international debates. This review article sketches a panorama of European studies in France and describes the prominent themes, theories and methods. It discusses the contribution of the ‘French touch’ in contrast with international mainstream European studies.

Fairy Poetics: Revisiting French Fairy Tales as (Post)Modern Literary Machines

Jean-Paul Sermain, Le Conte de fées du classicisme aux Lumières (Paris : Desjonquères, 2005). Pp. 286. €24 paper Jean-Paul Sermain, Métafictions (1670–1730) : la réflexivité dans la littérature d'imagination (Paris: Champion, 2002). Pp. 461. €70 cloth Régine Jomand-Baudry and Jean-François Perrin, eds., Le Conte merveilleux au XVIIIe siècle: une poétique expérimentale (Paris: Kimé, 2002). Pp. 434. €29 paper Donald Haase, ed., Fairy Tales and Feminism. New Approaches (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004). Pp. 268. $28 paper Féeries, annual journal, published by Ellug, €19. (Subscriptions with past issues available full-text online at http://www.u-grenoble3.fr/lire/feeries/index.html) Over the past four or five years, a number of important publications in French have revisited a corpus of texts which are simultaneously world-famous and underrated. Everybody "knows" Beauty and the Beast, Blue Beard or Little Red Riding Hood. Many scholars have studied them from an ethnological or psychoanalytical point of view. Cultural Studies scholars have enjoyed tracking down, under their various and unsuspected guises, the narrative patterns and gender roles characteristic of the fairy tale. Yet, until now, few literary scholars have attempted to assess the literary stakes of this body of texts in terms of poetics. As a matter of fact, because of their very popularity, these tales have paradoxically often been excluded from the canon of 17th- and 18th-century French literature. In a deep misunderstanding of their true nature, the fairy tales have been portrayed as a leftover of pre-Enlightened mental frameworks. Such prejudices were shaken by several pioneers of the 1970s and 1980s (like Jacques Barchilon, Raymonde Robert, Jack Zipes or Ruth Bottigheimer), or by closer readings of exceptional authors (like Crébillon fils) and texts (like Diderot's Bijoux indiscrets). They are now about to be dramatically reversed by a new generation of French scholars, who manage to reinscribe the works of Perrault, d'Aulnoy, Hamilton, Gueulette, Moncrif, Pétis de La Croix, Voisenon, Bibiena or Le Prince de Beaumont not only within a rich, clever and highly self-conscious theoretical reflection on literary poetics, but also within an astute and timely dialogue on the promises, limitations, and stakes of Modernity. For the fairy tale, far from being a relic from the Dark Ages, is a quintessentially modern genre—one of the rare genres that could claim no paternity among the Ancients, and therefore had to invent its own rules and agenda. It is the unfolding of this highly modern literary project, "the most advanced literary venture of the period" (8), which is described in Jean-Paul Sermain's latest book, Le Conte de fées du classicisme aux Lumières [The French Fairy Tale from Classicism to the [End Page 549] Enlightenment]. The opening chapter provides the reader with a neat periodization of the "Literary Revolution" brought by the fairy tale. When it emerges and meets instant success between 1690 and 1705 through the work of Charles Perrault and a group of mostly women writers, the conte de fées, baptized as such in 1698, can be described as a typically (post)modern remix of various pre-existing materials, sampling bits and pieces taken from folkloric elements, from the literary tradition of short stories (and their various framing techniques), from the newer genre of the novel, as well as from the meta-discursive poses popularized by Don Quixote. A second wave, between 1705 and 1730, is marked by Galland's translation-adaptation of the Arabian Nights, and by the Oriental craze it generates among French writers, who color their fictions with characters, beliefs and fantasies imported from the Arab world, Persia, India, or China. The last phase, between 1730 and 1756, is one of diversification: countless writers from all horizons find in the now well-established but ever-scandalous genre of the...

Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda: Entsiklopediia (review)

Reviewed by: Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda: Entsiklopediia Dominic Lieven V. M. Bezotosnyi et al., eds., Otechestvennaia voina 1812 goda: Entsiklopediia [The Great Patriotic War of 1812: An Encyclopedia]. 878 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2004. ISBN 582430324X. This remarkable and splendid volume is divided into four very unequal parts. The first is a brief history of the 1812 campaign. The third section is a 15-page chronology of the European wars between 1812 and 1815. The fourth and final section is a glossary of military terms in use in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, with particular reference to the Russian army. Since many of these terms are obscure and not to be found even in large Russian–English dictionaries, this section is invaluable. With a thoroughness typical of this volume, many line drawings are provided to illustrate the terms. Since one is frequently dealing with details of uniforms, weapons, and equipment, these illustrations are priceless in explaining precisely what the term means. The core of the volume is the second section. This is 811 pages long, and each page has three columns. The book could very easily have been produced as a two-volume edition, with each volume 1,000 pages long. This comment may give the unfair impression that the work is squashed, produced in small print, or hard to follow. None of this is true because the volume is of larger-than-normal size. The many illustrations are an excellent accompaniment to the text: they really do help to illustrate and explain the entries. The one area where a little more space would have been valuable are the maps, but this is true of every work of military history published in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. I dream of the day when someone reproduces Bogdanovich's superb maps from his seven-volume history of the wars of 1812–14. 1These are much better than anything published in the West in the last 50 years, including even the large-format atlas of Esposito and Elting. 2 [End Page 133] The core second section of the volume contains thousands of articles by a wide range of experts, who are overwhelmingly from Russia or the former USSR but include some French scholars. Most of the articles cover events of 1812 (battles, skirmishes, sieges, treaties, camps), generals as well as key political and diplomatic figures, and military units ranging from regiments to corps and armies. There are, however, a large number of articles on other matters. To note them all would be impossible. They include military pieces on plans, intelligence-gathering, staffs, and other operational matters; on logistics, including arsenals, arms factories, requisitioning, and food supply; on such personnel issues as recruitment, officer training, cantonists, ranks, and rewards; and on many other aspects of the campaign. They also, however, cover politics—government institutions, peasant disturbances, state finances—and diplomacy (policies, treaties, subsidies, etc.). Beyond these essential topics there is also a range of articles on monuments and archives and even some specific key documents relating to 1812. The latter include laws such as the Statute on the Field Army, plans (e.g., the important analysis of April 1812 by Army Intelligence Chief Colonel P. A. Chuikevich) and General Barclay de Tolly's thoughts both in preparation for the 1812 campaign and in retrospect. One outstanding piece in the encyclopedia is an eight-page (i.e., 24 columns) entry on the war's historiography. This piece provides an excellent example of the volume's main qualities. It is extremely thorough and comprehensive in its coverage. It has long sections on Russian, French, German, Polish, Italian, British, and American literature on the war. Nothing of significance is omitted. In addition, however, the interpretation of this historiography is balanced, fair, and full of insight into the contemporary political and other pressures which influenced—even sometimes dictated—approaches and judgments. The change since Soviet times is immense. The Russian scholars know about foreign scholarship, have absorbed its views into their own academic mainstream, and have thrown naively nationalist and parochial judgments overboard. But they remain immensely knowledgeable about 1812, far superior to almost anyone in the West. It is more than time for their knowledge and...

Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism and “Exorbitant” Jewish Memory

This article analyzes how the perceived problem of a "surfeit" of Jewish memory of the Holocaust in France has emerged in the context of a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism among French historians, journalists and intellectuals in the 1990s. It explores the way in which many French scholars across a wide range of ideological positions agree that Jewish memory of genocide has obscured the recognition of other crimes against humanity, and in particular the recognition of Stalin's crimes. The article asks how and why the memory of crimes against Jews and Stalin's victims has been constructed rhetorically as a zero-sum game in which Jews have unjustifiably claimed to have suffered the most of all.

Recent French Discourses on Stalinism, Nazism and "Exorbitant" Jewish Memory

This article analyzes how the perceived problem of a surfeit of Jewish memory of the Holocaust in France has emerged in the context of a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism among French historians, journalists and intellectuals in the 1990s. It explores the way in which many French scholars across a wide range of ideological positions agree that Jewish memory of genocide has obscured the recognition of other crimes against humanity, and in particular the recognition of Stalin's crimes. The article asks how and why the memory of crimes against Jews and Stalin's victims has been constructed rhetorically as a zero-sum game in which Jews have unjustifiably claimed to have suffered the most of all.

Space, Signs and Artaud's Hieroglyphic Body

Every language is a parallel universe. Henri Michaux (2002: n.p.) Another French scholar has more or less shown that the geography of the Odyssey is correct geography; not as you would find it in a...

Sommeils et Veilles dans le Conte Merveilleux Grec (review)

Reviewed by: Sommeils et Veilles dans le Conte Merveilleux Grec Isabel Cardigos (bio) Sommeils et Veilles dans le Conte Merveilleux Grec. By Marilena Papachristophorou FF Communications 279 Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2002. 337 pp. This work taps into two impressive sources of folktale scholarship. First, the main source of Greek collected material is the note cards of the G. A. Mégas archive of twenty-three thousand classified items. Gaining access to this archive is difficult, but fortunately FF Communications has agreed to publish an English version of A. Angelopoulos and A. Brouskou's catalog of Greek Magic Tales, based on the archive. Second, this is the revised version of a doctoral thesis written in 1997 at L'École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris), under the supervision of Nicole Belmont, one of the most remarkable and inspired fairy-tale scholars in France. In Papachristophorou's bibliography (237–46) we find confirmation that her academic background is mainly grounded in Greek and French scholarship. This double legacy should stir the interest of the mainstream English-based community of folktale studies. The main body of this book (55–234) deals with seven folktale types as they appear in Greece, more or less linked to the themes of sleep and vigil (sommeils et veilles; please note that from now on quotations are the reviewer's translation from French). The first part consists of two introductory chapters: a presentation of the themes of sleep and dream (the latter is discarded, as it does not seem to appear in fairy tales connected with sleep), and a work plan, [End Page 109] as well as a general view of folktale studies and collecting in Europe, leading to the Aladdin's cave of Greek folktales. In the last section of this introduction the author offers the names of M. Lüthi, M. Eliade, and V. Propp of The Historical Roots of the Folktale as a panel grounding her purpose to study fairy tales from an initiatory perspective (50–52). The three remaining parts of this study—"Slumbers," "Leisure Vigils," and "Work Vigil"—are taken up by the analysis of seven fairy tales. In the first category we have "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty" for women's slumbers, and for men's slumbers we have two little-known subtypes of The Search for the Lost Husband: the Greek-Turkish ecotype of The Disenchanted Husband (AT 425B) and The False Bride Takes the Heroine's Place (AT 425G). "Leisure Vigils" include The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife (AT 400) and The Danced-Out Shoes (AT 306). Finally, a curious Greek ecotype, King Slumber (*514C), is the "Work Vigil." The first two fairy tales are daunting because they have been the object of so much attention. The section dedicated to Snow White is named "la beauté ensommeillée." The transcribed version presented as a starting point for analysis was collected by the author. In it the stepmother addresses her mirror as "my sunshine," with the sunshine being addressed as a mirror in other versions also quoted and considered. In the forest the heroine takes refuge in the house of forty ogres. The prince who finds her shining coffin hanging over a stream hides it (with the girl inside) under his bed and spends most of the time looking at her. His intrigued mother finds her and brings her back to life. Chionati, a name also connected with snow and appearing in many Greek versions, was selected to refer to the Greek Snow White. The motif of blood on snow as the origin of the heroine's beauty (following "a heedless wish from her mother" [61]) is interpreted as a fatal conjunction between the vital force of life with the whiteness and coldness of death. Chionati would then "be linked with Goodness absolute coming into contact with Evil, also absolute." She would "belong to a Manichaean world, becoming the victim of a series of fundamental contradictions" (62–63). The theme of blood is picked up again in a version in which the stepmother intends to drink the girl's blood: the stepmother would then be a "double-negative of the mother" (who had spilled her own...

Franco-Serbian relations within the Armée D'Orient 1915-1918

The paper offers an atypical approach to the Franco-Serbian collaboration on the Salonica Front in that it seeks to view it from the perspective of participants rather than to base itself on reports submitted by the respective military commands. Interesting and frequently contradictory personal experiences drawn from the encounter of two culturally and geographically remote worlds reflect the daily life of French and Serbian soldiers. Observing Franco-Serbian relations at three parallel levels everyday contacts on the front, support of French scholars and intellectuals to Serbia, and diplomatic relations between the two countries - the paper builds an argumentation for the process of establishing French influence in Serbia and the Balkans.

Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power and Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Literacy and literacies: Texts, power and identity by James Collins and Richard Blot Peter Unseth Literacy and literacies: Texts, power and identity. By James Collins and Richard Blot. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xx, 217. ISBN 0521596610. $21.95. Collins and Blot write as part of the new literacy studies (NLS), the movement that rejects literacy as a set of ‘autonomous’ skills and stresses the varying uses and practices of literacy situated in different cultures and eras. It must be kept in mind, however, that in NLS ‘literacy’ has been broadened to include much more than decoding strings of symbols comprising texts, a step that is both its strength and its weakness. C&B’s contribution to NLS is the study of how ‘texts, power, and identity’ can inform the search for ways to wrestle with both local and global aspects of literacy; they devote a chapter to each, followed by a chapter of synthesis. C&B bring a significant amount of French scholarship to the attention of English readers, which is a positive step if one agrees with Jacques Derrida. Those who do not follow postmodern and poststructuralist ways of thinking will find much that makes them uncomfortable, including the strong focus on power and balkanized identities. But all will find a rich variety of case studies and analyses to ponder. C&B spend much time arguing against the idea that literacy leads toward certain predictable results, such as economic development, higher cognitive functions, and ‘civilization’. But they seem to lump together those who hold these dubious assumptions with those who hold to the idea of a narrow definition of literacy as ‘language-writing’. They leave no room for those who believe that there is a need for a definition of literacy that focuses on decoding (the symbols of a text to understand the words that the author intended), but who do not believe that literacy predictably leads to certain results, individual or societal. C&B wrestle with what constitutes ‘literacy’. They seem to be driven to identify something in every culture as a form of ‘literacy’. Amerindian picture-writing, rejected as ‘writing’ by such scholars as Florian Coulmas (The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), represents the practice of literacy to C&B, which is not surprising. But they go much further and speak of ‘a conception of writing that would include ritual insignia, ritual artifacts, and the prayers and songs attached thereto’ (160). But, if everything is literacy, then nothing is literacy. Certainly there is a great need for ethnographies of literacy and for a sensitivity by outsiders to the situated practices in which people employ reading and writing, but this still requires a narrow concept of literacy which refers to understanding the words of the author. This is not an elitist position, but rather a call for returning to a specific concept allowing us to speak of people learning the skills needed to read their language in a way that allows them to comprehend the intended message of the author, typically propositions. This should be differentiated from how people use print media. First-graders may interact with a variety of media, but they still have to learn to read (whether by phonics, whole language, or some other method). We need to distinguish between this traditional view of ‘literacy’ and the NLS view. Until this is clarified, NLS writers will continue to confuse, maybe alienate, those who teach people to read their languages. Peter Unseth Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics and SIL Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

Duverger and the Study of Semi-Presidentialism

Maurice Duverger must be credited with the invention of the term semi-presidentialism. Although his conceptualization has not always been precise and impeccable, his analyses of semi-presidentialism in several political systems have been very influential. Interestingly, however, the French community of political scientists and constitutional scholars has substantially rejected semi-presidentialism as the definition to be applied to the Fifth French Republic. In this article, first, I review the statements and the interpretations given by the most important French scholars. Then, I give an account of the reasons why Duverger's semi-presidentialism has received a by far better audience in Italy and why French-type semi-presidentialism remains alive as an institutional option for the reform of the Italian political system.

The Distinction between Obligations de Résultat and Obligations de Moyens and the Enforceability of Promises

The distinction between obligations de résultat and obligations de moyens was proposed at the beginning of the last century by Demogue, a famous French scholar. According to the distinction, while an obligation de résultat is directed at guaranteeing the attainment of a specific result, an obligation de moyens consists of the employment of the duty of care in performing a contractual obligation. Such distinction gained some success and was transplanted in many jurisdictions. This contribution considers the distinction between obligations de résultat and obligations de moyens as a juridical epiphany of those conceptions of contract law founding the enforceability of promises on the mere will of the parties. In this contribution two questions are posed: the first concerns the conditions under which responsibility for breach of contract is triggered and the second deals with the extent to which the promisor shall be bound to the given promise. By providing an answer to these questions, this contribution reveals that the distinction between obligations de résultat and obligations de moyens is logically based upon a questionable method of abstraction rooted in the evolution of the law towards the abandoning of the traditional ideas and concepts having characterized contract law for centuries. The historical process of abandonment of the criteria of enforceability of promises, with particular regard to the subjectivization of causa, has provided the conceptual grounds for the coming into existence of the distinction between obligations de résultat and obligations de moyens. The distinction between obligations de résultat and obligations de moyens is based upon the reduction of causa to any subjective reason or motive for contracting. Precisely, the distinction between obligations de résultat and obligations de moyens holds and presupposes causa as the promisor?s subjective motive to which the obligation tends and which shall be realized by the promise. This process is however flawed since causa in its objective meaning represents something unavoidable for the enforcement of promises. The existence of causa (intended as the contractual exchange) represents a juridical necessity in contracts. Although shaped into different forms, the objective contractual exchange represents the same entity for every obligation; thus, in every obligation the requirement of an objective causa must exist to make it enforceable. As the necessity of the existence of an objective causa is ascertained, the validity of the distinction between obligations de résultat and obligations de moyens is strongly challenged.