French Writer Research Articles

Analysis of Problems and Strategies in College French Writing

This article mainly discusses the problems existing in College French writing and the corresponding strategies. Writing is an important skill that students must master, but there are three main problems in College French teaching: limited vocabulary leading to frequent pragmatic errors; significant negative transfer from native language; and difficulties in closely adhering to the essay topic or the beginning of the paragraph. To address these issues, teachers adopt a variety of targeted teaching strategies, including task-based language teaching, intercultural communication teaching methods, and process writing approaches. The implementation of these strategies has significantly improved the students’ College French writing skills.

From the History of Soviet-French Literary Relations in the 1930s: An Unknown Letter from French Writers to A. M. Gorky about V. Serge (Based on Materials from the A. M. Gorky Archive)

The article examines Soviet-French literary contacts in the socio-political aspect on the basis of two unknown and not introduced into scientific circulation letters from the Archive of A.M. Gorky: a letter of five French writers dated June 28, 1932 A.M. Gorky and a letter from V. Serge dated September 28, 1932 to Gorky’s secretary P.P. Kryuchkov. French writers of leftist views (J.-R. Bloch, C. Vildrac, J. Guéhenno, L. Werth, F. Jourdain), who sympathized with the USSR, turned to Gorky with a request to help Serge leave the USSR. A month later, V. Serge himself turned to Kryuchkov with a request to respond to this letter. The son of Narodnaya Volya emigrants, Serge came to Soviet Russia in 1919 to participate in the revolutionary transformations of society and promote the world revolution. Sergeʼs connections with the anti-Stalinist opposition led to persecution by the GPU, two arrests (in 1928 and 1932) and exile to Orenburg for three years (in 1933). Thanks to an international campaign in the French and Belgian press launched by left-wing intellectuals, Serge left the USSR in April 1936. The still unknown first letter in his defense, sent by French writers to Gorky, is the most important evidence of the political strategies of leftist writers of the 1930s, attempts to influence socio-political processes within the leftist movement, as well as attempts to humanize the Stalinist regime.

Contact zones, affects and noeuds de mémoire: Chinese laborers on the Western Front in Martine Laffon’s Souviens-toi de moi

This article argues that Souviens-toi de moi, a novel published in 2014 by French writer Martine Laffon, reclaims the memory of travailleurs chinois on the Western Front during the First World War, at the same time exposing the deliberate agenda of forgetting in both French and Chinese memory cultures. Referring to Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of contact zone and Leela Gandhi’s concept of affective cosmopolitanism, I show how the novel creates an inclusive ethics across race, gender and species, challenging the fixed hierarchies of Western modernity. Synchronously, by applying the multidirectional framework of noeuds de mémoire, the article demonstrates how Laffon constructs war remembrance at the conjunction of anti-militarism, anti-imperialism, feminism and the struggle for animal rights. The novel thus offers a vision of the First World War that radically departs from the French récit national and the Chinese instrumentalization of the laborers’ war memory.

The study of mental disorders in visually impaired people

The purpose of this review is to highlight the history of the study of mental characteristics in persons with eye pathology and visual impairment. In the period of the Ancient World and up to the XIV century, the knowledge of the human psyche passed through the prism of mystical and religious views on the essence of the human soul. The beginning of the application of the materialistic approach to the assessment of mental characteristics in the absence of vision can be considered the work of the French writer, philosopher and educator Denis Diderot. In his "Letters" he drew attention to the need to educate the blind, which became the impetus for the activities of future specialists. In the middle of the XIX century, active work began in the field of research on the psyche of the blind. The introspective description served as the basis for the beginning of the experimental study. There is a spontaneous release of typhlopsychology, which formed the theoretical basis for the further development of science. During the 20th century, a large amount of experimental data has been accumulated in the field of studying the psyche of the blind. Modern multicenter studies of the psychological characteristics of ophthalmic patients indicate a wide prevalence of mental disorders. Scientists are currently paying close attention to specific ophthalmological nosologies and their relationship with certain mental disorders. Research is being conducted to study potential ophthalmological markers for the development of mental disorders and to find ways to diagnose them instrumentally. Despite the long and difficult path of studying the characteristics of the psyche in visually impaired people, there is still a vast field for further research. Based on past knowledge, future developments will allow us to more accurately determine the relationship between eye pathology and mental disorders.

Peace and Conflict in Two Friends: A Naturalistic Short Story

As a mover and shaker man of letters, the French short story writer Guy de Maupassant penned hundreds of groundbreaking stories, yet sundry of them are still eclipsed owing to the rarity of reviews. Two Friends (1882), one of his eloquent works, is a pertinent case worth reading and analyzing. As a corollary, this article comes to terms with Two Friends to uncover the story’s narrative structure, point of view, setting dimensions, historical context, style, and symbolism to cognize readers about the significance of this piece of work that comes to grips with two dialectical phenomena which are peace and brutality. This juxtapositional datum in human nature echoes how realistic literature in the 19th century represented societies by shedding light on divergent issues in Two Friends and conversing about the impulse that thrusts Guy de Maupassant to tell about the faith of two commoners living in Paris. This investigation indulges realism in Maupassant’s work through the projection of commoner characters entangled with the dire reality of armed conflicts. Besides, naturalism discloses the reasonable forces of the environment and innate heredity that navigate the characters' actions. This will inform us about how war sometimes has the repercussions of foolish decisions or human greed, out of which innocent human beings are the overt victims who pay a heavy price.

Research on Camus' Philosophy of Rebellion

The thoughts of the famous French writer and philosopher Albert Camus are profound. His literary works, imbued with his philosophical ideas, are embodied in characters like Meursault from "The Stranger" and Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill. Camus seeks the meaning of life through the "rebellion" against the absurd, which is fundamental to his philosophical significance. Camus' philosophy of rebellion is influenced by Christian existentialism and Nietzsche's "superman philosophy," among other thoughts. "Absurdity" is the target of Camus' philosophy of rebellion; it is omnipresent and unavoidable. People should acknowledge the "absurd." Camus' philosophy does not aim to prove the absurdity of the world through philosophical speculation but rather to address how one should respond after recognizing the absurd. Evaluations of Camus should consider the century-long debate between Camus and Sartre, Sartre's criticism of Camus, and the subsequent scholarly "rehabilitation" of Camus. These discussions highlight the uniqueness and influence of Camus' philosophy and provide us with valuable insights.

The Question of Blanchot in Beckett’s Three Dialogues and The Unnamable

Abstract While the possible influence of the French writer Maurice Blanchot on Samuel Beckett’s writing has long been one of the more vexing questions in Beckett scholarship, textual echoes, thematic correspondences and circumstantial clues now make it likelier than not that Beckett encountered Blanchot’s writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The personal documents of Georges Duthuit—Beckett’s close friend in this period, during the writing of both Three Dialogues (1949) and the ‘Trilogy’ of novels (1951–1953)—shed further light on this connection. They suggest that Three Dialogues is a continuation of Beckett’s decades-long thought on habit, as first articulated in Proust (1930), and that Duthuit (re)introduced Beckett to Blanchot’s work at the time of writing Three Dialogues. This article explores connections between Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur (1941) and ‘De l’angoisse au langage’ (1943), and published and manuscript versions of Beckett’s Three Dialogues and L’Innommable, as well as between the problematics posed by the latter two texts. Finally, it suggests that L’Innommable is not a reflection but a radicalization of Blanchot’s thought, such that Blanchot missed the full extent of its radicality in his own review of the novel.

Off the charts: the whiteness of bestsellerdom in French publishing

While much of current scholarship on best-selling novels explains this corpus’s singularity as being found within the text at the level of form, this article postulates that whiteness is a major yet unspoken criterion for inclusion on French betseller lists. In order to make visible the salience of whiteness in French publishing, the article first presents four sets of data on recent French bestseller lists. It then provides a case study of the novelist Douglas Kennedy as evidence of whiteness as the essential ingredient of bestsellerdom. In this article, I analyze Kennedy’s critical reception in order to show how whiteness functions in the French literary field. White authors are given full latitude to write about any topic they want, they are perceived as neutral, even apolitical experts, and do not have to negotiate editorial labels the way non-white writers must. Analysis of Kennedy’s journalism and most recent novel Et c’est ainsi que nous vivrons argues that both set up the white writer as the victim of Black social movements and far-right politicians. Ultimately, the article contends that Kennedy’s writing reifies the often tacit but nonetheless powerful image of the French writer as white.

Portrait of the transclasse as a White man: class and race in French contemporary literature

This article examines unacknowledged influence of “ beur literature” (literature produced by second-generation French writers from North African descent) on Hexagonal literature. Whereas at the time of their publication in the 1980s works by authors such as Azouz Begag or Abdellatif Chaouite were dismissed as ethnographic texts largely devoid of artistic value, their autofictional status being invoked as an argument against their literary worth, since the turn of the century, White writers such as Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis have exemplified and championed the formal significance and political relevance of auto-ethnographies associated with the major new trend of “littérature de terrain” or “littérature d’intervention” in French literature. The article unpacks the changes in critical discourse attendant to the different types of reception afforded texts written by beur authors against those signed by their “French” peers. “Autosociobiographies” enjoy tremendous success when they are published by writers who identify as belonging to the ethnically White majority, thus subtending the dominant ideology of French Republicanism predicated on class matters and “la fracture sociale” to the detriment of the debate around racial and ethnic issues stemming from “la fracture coloniale.”

A Tribute to Professor Leon Yudkin (1939–2013)

Abstract This is a tribute to the Jewish literary critic Professor Leon Yudkin, who died in 2013. He was a prolific writer: the author of more than a dozen works and editor and co-editor of another five books. The range of his interests was prodigious, from individual writers like Shmuel Agnon, Joseph Roth and Else Lasker-Schüler to the Prague Circle, French feminist writers, German Expressionism and, above all, a series of authoritative surveys of Hebrew, Yiddish and Israeli literature. Much of this article focuses on his last book, posthumously published, Fiction Derailed: Form for the Modern (2020), an exploration of the modern novel. His greatest legacy was as a pioneer, someone who opened up the study of Jewish and especially Hebrew and Yiddish literature in the academy.

“Art Is the Armchair in Which the State Sits for Its Own Pleasure”

Abstract In mid-January 1925, André Breton published an editorial, “La dernière grève” (The Last Strike) in the opening pages of the second issue of the new Parisian journal he helped produce, La Révolution surréaliste (Surrealist revolution). Breton’s essay discusses the tentative economic value of cultural and intellectual production in the capitalist economy and calls for artists, philosophers, and scholars to undertake a general strike for a period lasting between several nights to one year. Breton’s “Last Strike” essay influenced another and much more well-known call for an art strike by a French writer who was closely aligned with surrealism, Alain Jouffroy. The purpose of this essay is to analyze Breton’s 1925 “Last Strike” essay in relation to Jouffroy’s late 1960s statements on the art strike and the revolutionary abolition of art, in order to determine the differences and similarities between their approaches, and to demonstrate how surrealism is essential to Jouffroy’s theories about the abolition of art as a key aspect of anticapitalist culture.

„Dzisiaj wymiotowałam po raz ostatni”. Zaburzenia odżywiania w Sobibor Jeana Molli

This article discusses the problem of eating disorders in Sobibor, a Young Adult novel by the French writer Jean Molla in the light of illness narrative studies, the sick body aesthetics and physical sickness. The article goes over the narrator’s list of possible causes of her psychosomatic condition, i.e. family tensions, social pressure to conform to the prevailing beauty canon, and her own rebellion against the female identity. Emily’s narration combines two strands, a struggle with adolescent personal problems and the discovery of a nasty family secret. An analysis of her experiences and reflections reveals the connections between the anorexia/bulimia syndrome and the effects of a generational trauma. Her condition is complicated further by the revelation of her late grandfather’s Nazi past, an exemplary case of post-memory trauma. The article suggests that her anorexic vomiting is a an iconic gesture corresponding to the writing (i.e. getting something off one’s chest) of the story of her traumas (both her own and inherited from an earlier generation).

PERCEPTION OF THE VALUES OF THE PREVIOUS ERA IN THE PARADIGMS OF « PROMINENT PHILOSOPHERS AND WRITERS

Disputes about the “uniqueness” of one’s era in comparison with the achievements of previous ones have always been a “cornerstone” in the perception of past concepts regarding the values of the achievements of predecessors. However, at one time, Confucius said his world-famous phrase that if you don’t look back, there is no way forward. But many people are not interested in their past. That is why the “Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes” in the form of a literary debate, centered on a comparison of the value of the contributions of ancient authors and French authors of the 17th century, and which was widespread at the time, is still relevant today. The purpose and objectives of the article. The purpose of the article is to highlight the perception of the values of previous eras in the paradigms of “non-contemporary” prominent philosophers and writers. The tasks of the article are to reveal the reasons for the primordial disputes about “ancient and new”, a natural return to ancient literature and ancient philosophy. Research methodology. The leading research methods were: content-comparative - to analyze the reliability of judgments of French writers of the 17th century; retrospective, which helps to investigate the phenomenon of the value of “the ancient in the new” in the century-old controversy, the method of personalization, which ensures the study and understanding of the works of S. Perrault and his contemporaries. The results. It’s no secret that the tasks of art in the Antiquity, Middle Ages and Modern times differed greatly. For Antiquity, every craftsman was an artist, while the activity of a painter and sculptor was a more complex craft. It is typical for that time that there was almost no idea about creativity and the creative act, but despite this, the ancient Greeks were able to create immortal examples of art. The art of the Middle Ages was supposed to embody a moralistic character and remind of the eternal, the art of romanticism saw godlike creativity as its goal. The art of the 20th century presented its ideal in the denial of everything that the previous era saw as its goal, periodically declaring the death of art. Based on the fact that today there are many different ideas about the goals and tasks of modern art, we cannot say with full confidence what is the common goal of the art of our days, and it is even more difficult for us to imagine how art will live, for example, through a hundred years. Conclusions. So, we can come to the conclusion that in the era of the early Enlightenment, the attitude to the ancient heritage, in particular in France and England, was not unambiguous even among the educated aristocracy or university professors who knew Greco-Roman works well enough. This is clearly evidenced by the century-old dispute “about ancient and new”, which caused a lot of auxiliary discussions. Undoubtedly, even today arguing and debating about the art of previous eras and our own has a place in philosophy and literature, and they continue to do this with success for more than one hundred years. But to prove the rightness of one of the sides of these disputes is a sufficiently dubious matter for science.

Charcot and Léon Daudet and Charcot: A missed love story?

ABSTRACT Biographies, articles, and meetings devoted to the founder of modern neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot, are typically dithyrambic, if not hagiographic. It seems that the striking professional and familial qualities of Charcot have erased any other characteristic of the person, and scratches on the Master image commonly have not been well accepted. With this in mind, it is interesting to present and evaluate the rather negative opinions on Charcot by the famous French writer Léon Daudet, who initially was very close to the Charcots through his father, Alphonse Daudet, and who wrote rather extensively on Charcot in his diary and memoirs. Our point is not to underline these writings as the “truth” about Charcot’s personality and life (Daudet, who was a prominent extreme right-wing figure, was known to exaggerate and play with his sharp opinions), but Daudet’s criticisms paradoxically provide a fascinating perspective, which may help to reconstruct better who Charcot really was in counterbalancing a bit the overcrowded, politically correct, praising group.

Interpretations of the existentialist ideas of Albert Camus in the film adaptations of the novel «The Plague»

The article presents an analysis of screen interpretations of the ideas of one of the most important representatives of existentialism, the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus, set out in his novel «The Plague» (1947). The situation of recent years, associated with a number of catastrophic events on a global scale, has actualized the ideas of philosophical existentialism. Using the example of several films embodying the ideas of A. Camus's novel «The Plague», the article shows the possibilities of their interpretation.

DIALOGICAL MODALITY AS A BASIC DISCURSIVE CATEGORY (BASED ON THE NOVEL “99 FRANCS” BY FREDERIC BEIGBEDER)

The given article which is based on the work of the French writer Frederic Beigbeder “99 francs” examines the features of the linguistic expression of dialogic communication having a different vector orientation, including intracommunication. The authors of the article show how the novel implements the writer’s intentions associated with demonstrating a negative attitude towards the modern state of society. The authors show how the novel implements the writer's intentions associated with demonstrating a negative attitude towards the modern state of bourgeois society. Methods of contextual and categorical analysis, comparative studies and others were used.

Unveiling Victor Hugo through Critical Race Theory Feminist Lens: A Social Constructivist Approach

This study re-examines the life and works of Victor Hugo, one of the 19th century's most influential French writers, through the integrated lenses of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and feminist theory, employing a social constructivist approach. By analyzing Hugo's significant works, including "Les Misérables" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," this research explores how his narratives address the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. By critically examining characters such as Fantine, Cosette, and Esmeralda, as well as the depiction of marginalized groups, the study uncovers Hugo's critique of his time's social constructs and power dynamics. This analysis highlights Hugo's progressive empathy for the oppressed and discusses the contemporary relevance of his work in understanding and addressing ongoing social injustices. By situating Hugo's literary contributions within the frameworks of CRT and feminist theory, this research offers new insights into the enduring significance of his critique of systemic inequalities, emphasizing the importance of intersectional perspectives in literary studies.

Analysis of the Narrative Style of Modiano from the Postmodernism - Through dans le Caf de la jeunesse perdue

Patrick Modiano is a highly regarded French writer known for his talent. His work, Dans le caf de la jeunesse perdue, has been extensively studied, but its postmodern aspects have often been overlooked. Modiano employs postmodern narrative techniques such as fragmentation, irony, and the blending of virtual and real in his writing. The success of Dans le caf de la jeunesse perdue is closely tied to Modiano s recurring theme of Paris and loss, which aligns with his exploration of life and postmodernist tendencies. This article aims to analyze how the narrative style of this work showcases the postmodern elements of Modiano s writing, using the theories of postmodernism by Ihab Hassan. The analysis will establish the correlation between Modiano and postmodernism, contributing to the scholarly understanding of his work.

The Fantasy of Anorexia: Historical Entanglements of Evolutionary Thought, Food Restriction, and Curative Imaginaries

There has been a recent increase in literature that critically engages how anorexic people experience their symptoms and challenges the current approaches to recovery in treatment centers. Yet, this work does not grapple with transnational scientific histories of the medicalized construction of eating disorders that affect who is able to be legible as eating disordered. Doing so (re)naturalizes anorexia as a disease that predominantly affects white girls and women, reinforcing erasures of those not easily interpellated into anorexic subjective positions. I address this gap through a disability studies and queer science studies grounding. I analyze early French writings on anorexia’s emergent forms, US dietetics in the burgeoning domestic science movement, and the differential pathologization of body size in the context of evolutionary thinking on capacity, debility, and nervousness. In doing so, I argue that anorexia nervosa emerges through racist sciences that spread and transformed across US-Euro imperial medical geographies, effectively functioning as a curative approach to the contradictions between white supremacist securitization of whiteness and its reproductive futurities. This paper highlights implications for present eating disorder diagnostic norms, re-situating them in a broader geohistorical context during which hierarchies of ability and personhood were organized through race, gender, and capacity.

FEATURES OF CHRONOTOPE IN “THE WORDS” BY JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

The article analyzes the features of the chronotope in the autobiographical novel “The Words” by the famous French writer Jean-Paul Sartre. The center of the analysis is the ways in which Sartre creates a complex and multi-layered domain of actions for his heroes, where time and space become not only physical but also philosophical realities. Particular attention is paid to how Sartre uses the chronotope to develop ideas of freedom, responsibility and existence. Through the analysis of everyday situations and the inner monologue of the main characters, the article reveals how the chronotope becomes an integral part of the concept of human existence in Sartre’s world. The article also analyzes the transformation of the classic chronotope in an autobiography, new manifestations of the spatiotemporal concept, as well as the chronotope of retrospective depiction through the author’s personal memories.