Jour De Research Articles

Immunovirological Discordance and Associated Factors among People Living with HIV under Antiretroviral Treatment at Hôpital de Jour de Donka, Guinea

Immunovirological Discordance and Associated Factors among People Living with HIV under Antiretroviral Treatment at Hôpital de Jour de Donka, Guinea

Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa by Brian Valente-Quinn

Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa by Brian Valente-Quinn

The 8 April 1860 Jour de Pâques Earthquake Sequence in Southern Haiti

ABSTRACT The grave threat posed by the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone (EPGFZ) and other fault systems on the Tiburon Peninsula in southern Haiti was highlighted by the catastrophic M 7.0 Léogâne earthquake on 12 January 2010 and again by the deadly M 7.2 Nippes earthquakes on 14 August 2021. Early Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar observations suggest the 2021 earthquake broke structures associated with this fault system farther west of the 2010 event, but the rupture zones of both events are separated by a ∼50 km gap. This sequence provided the impetus to reconsider a nineteenth century earthquake that may have occurred within this gap. Though previous studies identified a single moderately large event on 8 April 1860, original sources describe a complex and distributed seismic sequence to the west of Port-au-Prince. These provide evidence for an initial event to the west of Les Cayes, on the southern coast of the Tiburon Peninsula. This was followed on the morning of 8 April 1860 by a damaging earthquake near l’Anse-à-Veau along the northern coast of the peninsula, which was succeeded 14 hr later by a larger mainshock to the east. Although locations cannot be determined precisely from extant macroseismic data, our preferred scenario includes an intensity magnitude (MI)∼6.2 foreshock, followed by an MI∼6.8 mainshock wholly or partially on the EPGFZ to the east of the foreshock. Our results suggest that, although earthquakes tend to trigger subsequent earthquakes on immediately neighboring fault segments, sequences can include gaps due to strain release by poorly characterized earthquakes in the historic past. We also document 83 aftershocks to the 1860 earthquake sequence, including a previously unknown damaging shock, estimated MI∼6.6, on 10 April 1860 near Jérémie, farther west of l’Anse-à-Veau.

A Note Clarifying the Date of the Last Will and Testament of Richard FitzAlan, earl of Arundel (d. 1397)

In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for the Appellant lord, Richard FitzAlan (1346–1397), fourth earl of Arundel and ninth earl of Surrey, the biographer asserts that the earl’s will, later proved at the court of his brother, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, was dated 4 March 1393 (emphasis mine).1 There is, however, some contention around this date due to what is likely a scribal error in the still-unedited and -unpublished register of Archbishop Arundel: early in the will, the scribe has either misidentified the regnal year or has miscopied the calendar date. The text opens: En noun de piere du fitz et de seint espririt Amen. Jeo Richard counte darundell et de Surrey le quart jour de Mars, lan del incarnation nostre seignour ihu crist mill ccc quatre vintz et douze, et lan du regne le Roy Richard seconde seszime en moun chastel philipp en bone et seine memorie face mon testament (In the name of [the] Father, [the] Son, and [the] Holy Spirit, Amen. I, Richard, earl of Arundel and of Surrey, [on] the fourth day of March, the year of the incarnation of our Saviour Jesus Christ [one] thousand three hundred ninety-two, and the sixteenth year of the reign of the king Richard II, at my castle Philipp, in good and healthy mind, make my testament).2

Wound and Travel – Sophocles’s 193 Philoctetes and Homer’s Odyssey in Inflammation du verbe vivre (Inflammation of the Verb To Live) by Wajdi Mouawad

In her article, the author analyses an example of a text and its staging brought about by the sudden death of a member of the playwright’s creative team. In his solo performance Inflammation du verbe vivre (Inflammation of the Verb To Live), created at the Paris Théâtre National de la Colline in 2015, Canadian-Lebanese playwright, director and actor Wajdi Mouawad interwove the ancient Greek literary and mythological heritage with a personal confession about the loss of his friend and professional colleague Robert Davreu, upgrading it with a socially critical depiction of the situation in today’s Greece. The performance was made as the penultimate part of a staging cycle of Sophocles’s seven preserved tragedies under the common title Le dernièr jour de sa vie (The Last Day of his Life). Mouawad had intended to direct the cycle in new translations by Davreu. Mouawad thus connected the process of mourning the death, which stopped the project, with the documentation of the writing process of the text that he later also directed and performed in the form of a peculiar theatre elegy. He fused the character of Philoctetes with the character of Odysseus; not the Odysseus from Sophocles’s tragedy who plots to steal Philoctetes’s bow, but the one from Homer who seeks his way home to Ithaca for ten years after the conquer of Troy and visits Tiresias’s shade in the underworld.

World War II and its Impact on French Canadians

This research takes the perspective of a Romanian-born philologist after having lived, studied, and taught in the Quebec public educational system for nearly 12 years. The main purpose of this study is to discuss the important influences World War II had on the evolution of Quebec society. Examining Quebec's social life and culture from a historic standpoint is a primordial step for immigrants and their integration into Quebec's society. An analysis of the corpus selected for this study, namely, Roch Carrier's La guerre, yes sir!, Jean Jules Richard’s Neuf jours de haine, Jean Vaillancourt’ s Les Canadians errants, and Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’ occasion, reveals that World War II marked in different ways the disturbance of the traditional, pastoral, and agrarian life, which triggered some modernist influences in people’s lives. For instance, the war changed women’s condition. When Canadian French men were shipped out to Europe to fight in the war, women were employed in Quebec’s factories and plants. Even though they were paid less than men, they became independent and autonomous. Another example is the presence of British soldiers in Quebec, which disturbed the traditional lifestyle of French Canadians. It was difficult for English soldiers to understand the locals’ culture, who in turn, perceived them as dangerous and responsible for the war. Nowadays, Quebecers’ mentality is influenced by the various cultures they are surrounded by, yet, they still preserve some values which are originated during World War II.

Mise à jour de la situation nutritionnelle en République du Bénin

Background: Nutrition is a major determinant of health and an essential factor in the development of countries. Faced with food insecurity and malnutrition, Benin has implemented policies and programs aiming to reduce the progression of this burden. Aims: To take inventory of nutritional status and interventions implemented to reduce the prevalence of different forms of malnutrition and food insecurity in Benin. Methods: A review of nutritional and food data available at the national level and consultation of intervention management reports was carried out from May to July 2020 and then, the data were compiled and structured. Results: Even though Benin has natural resources and remarkable biodiversity, the country faces a double nutritional burden marked by undernutrition: stunting (32%), anemia (71.5%), underweight (17%), wasting (5%) in children under 5 years, exclusive breastfeeding rate (42%) and over-nutrition: obesity (7.4%), diabetes (12.4%) in adults. Food insecurity remains persistent in 9.6% of households and undernourishment concerns 7.4%. The main interventions at the community level are made by the National Integrated School Feeding Program and the Coordinated Early Childhood Nutrition and Development Project. In addition, are the implementation of essential nutrition actions and nutrition-sensitive interventions involving different sectors such as, non-governmental organizations and technical and financial partners. Conclusion: Food and nutrition situation in Benin has been slightly improved thanks to the implementation of multisectoral coordination of interventions. Nonetheless, many challenges remain to be addressed, including the scaling up of successful interventions and advocacy for a substantial mobilization of resources in order to achieve global nutrition targets and sustainable development goals. Keywords: Nutritional status, Diet, Intervention, Benin.

The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies

Reviewed by: The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies ed. by David Murphy Yohann C. Ripert The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies ED. DAVID MURPHY Liverpool UP, 2016. xii + 224 pp. ISBN 9781781383162 cloth. The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies is a collection of ten essays that investigate art performances and postcolonial practices at a major cultural event promoted by Léopold Sedar Senghor, as well as the event's influence in large-scale spectacles of culture and the role of archives and archival-making from 1966 to 2016. Edited and introduced by David Murphy, the book is the only publication dedicated to a festival that some have cited as the "apotheosis" of Negritude (vii). Its most important contribution to the fields of African and postcolonial studies, however, is to combine multifaceted readings that go beyond Negritude and question the ways in which both Cold War ideology and Pan-African ideals haunted the First World Festival of Negro Arts, including how painters, choreographers, writers, and intellectuals have used the encounter to strengthen the ties between the African "homeland" and black peoples in the diaspora—especially in the United States. Though the book does not expand on the history of preceding cultural events (such as the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists and its second iteration in 1959, as well as the 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression) to a 1966 festival (FESMAN) that aimed to create a platform for bolstering transnational blackness, David Murphy's thorough introduction theorizes the festival as "an attempt to produce a global community through a shared blackness" (5). Engaging with the most recent literature on aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial period, Murphy focuses on the political climate framing the festival's organization and stages its performance within a double bind that black intellectuals, artists, and statesmen faced after independence: between the reality of nationalism and the imagination of a postcolonial globality. To that end, Murphy questions both the "involvement of the important US delegation" in Senegal and the larger "role of culture in a post-imperial world" (9). In the volume's first part, "Contexts," each chapter engages with the double bind by offering a remarkable archival work on different aspects of the festival: staging of a "tradition" in art exhibitions (Vincent), creation of an "authentic" African ballet (Kringelbach), performance of the past in carefully programmed theatrical plays (Quinn and Bush), and coverage in popular media (Jaji). Perhaps [End Page 202] the strongest connection between these five chapters is their critical approach to the influence of and challenge to Senghor's aesthetic positions at the festival. Hélène Kringelbach not only analyzes how "the past was being reimagined in neo-traditional performance through the selection and standardization of a limited number of preforming practices" (74), she also retrieves from the archives a letter between Senghor's longtime ally Alioune Diop and Gray Cowan (Columbia University professor and future President of the African Studies Association) for academic expertise on "traditional African dances"—a request that seems to reveal an ideological contradiction between Senghor's strong sense of traditionalism and a lack of knowledge about those supposedly innate traditions. Similarly, Brian Quinn's close reading of Senghor's and Malraux's opening speeches revisits the "reworking of the relationship between culture and the State" (84) and then proceeds to analyze the behind-the-scenes of the festival's staging of Amadou Cissé Dia's Les Derniers Jours de Lat Dior to uncover a troubling instrumentalization of culture that "heads of states such as those in the audience at FESMAN" (95) can use for the mobilization of a nationalist sentiment. In the second part of the book, "Legacies," the focus turns to the festival's afterlives: from the 1969 Algiers festival conceived as a direct response to the Dakar event (Anderson) and the 1977 Lagos Festival explicitly hailed as its direct successor (Apter), to the making of the PANAFEST archive that examines the relation between those three festivals and the Zaire 1974 music festival (Vincent and Malaquais) and a more theoretical consideration of "festivalism" in Africa...

La "Poética del agua" en Henri de Régnier

«Un paysage sans eau est comme un paysage mort, il lui manque une âme» nos dice Henri de Régnier en «Jours de pluie». Esta reflexión representa una constante en Régnier y, en esta línea, su obra está jalonada de las ciudades que le marcaron en su vida cotidiana. Desde Honfleur, su ciudad natal, hasta Venecia, su ciudad de predilección, pasando por sus lugares más apreciados: Versalles, París…Ahora bien, el agua no es en Régnier un mero decorado. Su obra literaria está impregnada de elementos acuáticos: ríos, canales, fuentes, seres mitológicos… a los que dota de un significado personal, que nos permite hablar en este autor de una «Poética del agua». En el presente estudio, repasaremos los lugares acuáticos de Régnier y sus símbolos hídricos más apreciados para mostrar hasta qué punto el motivo del agua es un hilo conductor altamente significativo en Henri de Régnier.

Sounding Funny: Sound and Comedy Cinema ed. by Mark Evans and Philip Hayward

Reviewed by: Sounding Funny: Sound and Comedy Cinema ed. by Mark Evans and Philip Hayward Jessica Getman Sounding Funny: Sound and Comedy Cinema. Edited by Mark Evans and Philip Hayward. (Genre, Music, and Sound.) Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2016. [vi, 259 p. ISBN 9781781790991 (hardback), $100; ISBN 9781845536749 (paperback), $29.99; ISBN 9781781792766 (e-book), varies]. Illustrations, music examples, index. Though music and sound are essential to the success of comedy on film, the methods employed by composers and directors to this end are difficult to pin down. Producing a compact definition of comedy itself is a slippery task, something Liz Guiffre and Mark Evans emphasize in the introduction to Sounding Funny: Sound and Comedy Cinema. Though often invoked as a generic label, comedy is better understood as a mode of expression that uses a diverse collection of techniques that vary according to context. To get around this, the essays in this book focus not on comedic theory but on texts: films and sequences in which the use of sound in the service of humor has been particularly successful. Topics addressed in this approach include influential franchises, prominent composers, and famous scene formulas and comic routines. The book has an international scope, engaging not only the dominant practices of Hollywood but also comedies coming out of Britain, Finland, Spain, Japan, and India. It reaches across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, from the Three Stooges beginning in 1934, to Yuji Nakae's Nabi no koi (Nabbie's Love) in 1999 and Philip Claydon's Lesbian Vampire Killers in 2009. Sound Funny excels at drawing out and analyzing an impressive variety of comedic and musical moments in film. In privileging text over theory, the book's authors nevertheless illuminate many comedic tools and techniques. Essays touch on parody, intertextual reference, and the interplay of aural and physical gestures. They also highlight the oft-employed tension between high and low culture, emphasized through the juxtaposition of musical styles. A recurring theme is the central role of incongruity—the unexpected collision of moods, modes, styles, and ideas that elicits surprise and delight—for which sound and music are especially effective tools. This idea is considered at length in the book's second essay, Marshall Heiser's "The Soundtrack as Appropriate Incongruity," which considers the "playful tolerance of paradox" (p. 37) in a number of films from the mid-twentieth century, including the Three Stooges' shorts (which began in 1934), Jacques Tati's Jour de Fête (1949), Michael Powell's They're a Weird Mob (1966), and several spoofs by Mel Brooks in the late 1970s [End Page 661] (including Blazing Saddles [1974] and High Anxiety [1977]). Heiser's conclusion is that that humor in these cases exhibits an "emergent property, rising from contradictory aural and visual cues to become more than the sum of their parts (p. 26). Whether by design or chance, composer Elmer Bernstein dominates the book. Ben Winters, in "The Sound of Satire; or Trading Places with Mozart," considers social commentary in the film by John Landis (1983), noting how Bernstein's score highlights the film's "overdrawn opposites" between high and low culture (and between white and black culture) by juxtaposing classical music and popular song (p. 30). In so doing, Winters demonstrates how the film more successfully satirizes the social policies of the Reagan administration than the more obvious racial issues on the film's surface. Winters reads this film as a modern-day opera buffa modeled on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro. Erik Heine's chapter, "Parody, Self-Parody and Genre-Parody: Music in The Magnificent Seven and ¡Three Amigos!," considers Bern stein's parody of his own work in The Magnificent Seven (1960) in the 1986 comedy about three hapless Hollywood actors in Mexico. Heine analyzes similarities between the films' scores and title cues, as well as the use of popular song by Randy Newman. Finally, Jon Fitzgerald and Philip Haywardtackle one of the best known and most influential of Hollywood's comedies, Ghostbusters (1984). Their essay addresses how the principle elements of the score—Bernstein's orchestral music (drawn from horror conventions), its rock-pop tracks, and the film...

Sentenced! Writing it Differently: “Life” and Death Row in Catherine Mavrikakis’s Les Derniers jours de Smokey Nelson

With a title closely recalling Victor Hugo’s Le Dernier jour d’un condamne (1829) and its nineteenth-century attack on the death penalty, Les Derniers jours de Smokey Nelson (2011) might appear at a cursory glance as merely a twenty-first-century replay of a debate that still rumbles on in western societies as a suppressed element in the popular mindset, even fifty years after the widespread abolition of capital punishment. This reflection is certainly carried forward as one aspect of Catherine Mavrikakis’s 2011 novel. More fundamentally, however, she presents the life and death of Smokey Nelson as tied to – and indeed symbolic of – the life imprisonment/death-row existence that we all, as human beings, inevitably inhabit. Locked each in his or her own ‘cell’, the four protagonists of the novel offer, turn by turn, their individual versions of their incarceration, an incarceration transcended for the reader by Mavrikakis’s virtuoso orchestration of the multiple voices of their predicament. Articulating di...

France Divided: The French and the Civil War in Spain par David Wingeate Pike

Reviews 249 avec le déroulement linéaire des événements liés à la Révolution, plusieurs d’entre ces événements ayant d’ailleurs pu servir de point d’origine de la nouvelle ère. Perovic étudie minutieusement la dimension symbolique de la volonté de rupture qu’exprimait ce nouveau calendrier (un moyen pour la Révolution de faire table rase du passé). Cependant, il aurait été utile d’apporter plus de précisions quant aux effets pratiques de cette transformation radicale des rythmes de la vie quotidienne. Par exemple, quelles furent les réactions des paysans et des employés à l’innovation des mois divisés en trois décades, innovation qui, suivant le principe décimal, instaurait un jour de repos tous les dix jours, au lieu du dimanche hebdomadaire traditionnel? Pourquoi la division décimale de la journée (il était initialement prévu que chaque jour serait divisée en dix heures) n’a-t-elle jamais été appliquée? Si les lecteurs risquent de rester sur leur faim en ce qui concerne les conséquences matérielles et sociales de l’instauration du calendrier républicain, ils n’en trouveront pas moins dans ce livre une étude de grande envergure sur les conceptions fluctuantes du temps et de l’histoire durant la période révolutionnaire. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin Pike,DavidWingeate. France Divided: The French and the CivilWar in Spain.Brighton: Sussex AP, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84519-490-1. Pp. 433. £80. The bloody Spanish Civil War between Republicans and Nationalists (July 1936– April 1939) can be considered as a dress rehearsal for World War II. Not only did it pit future allies, such as democratic England and France and the Communist Soviet Union, against the fascist powers of Germany and Italy, it also initiated the disastrous Western policy of appeasement of dictators that fed Hitler’s ambitions. Civil war broke out in Spain when a number of generals, among them Franco, staged a coup against the democratically elected Popular Front government and quickly took control of the south and west. However, for much of the war a stalemate prevailed with neither side able to win a decisive victory. In France at the very same time (July 1936), Léon Blum’s Popular Front government came to power but, although it would have liked to assist the legitimate republican government of Spain, could not or dared not for fear of upsetting a delicate balance of power in France, possibly igniting a French civil war and maybe even provoking an international incident. France and England cautioned the Axis powers not to intervene either; but they did nevertheless. France occasionally looked the other way when it came to letting supplies or soldiers from the International Brigades into Spain, but remained reluctant to openly send aid to the Republicans. Both France and England belatedly began to rearm, finally realizing that war with Germany was fairly certain but by then it was too late to stop the Nazi juggernaut. Ironically, Franco’s Spain remained neutral during the war and survived the demise of both Hitler and Mussolini. Pike’s book presupposes some knowledge of the Spanish Civil War because it focuses almost exclusively on the war of words in France, in the press, between supporters and opponents of intervention, showing how French journalists and writers—some admirably objective, others violently partisan—at once expressed but also manipulated public opinion to suit their ideological purposes. Through the lens of French newspapers, the reader is treated to op-eds, reports from Spain (including from the battle front), outright propaganda, and current events (frontier incidents,the delivery of arms,the arrival of foreign volunteers,and espionage activities). However, it remains uncertain to what extent public opinion was swayed by the press since opinion polls had not yet become the norm to gauge it. In all likelihood the press is still the most reliable barometer of public opinion—though we should note that the truth is usually the first victim of war. This original, meticulouslyresearched , and well-written study features several useful appendices, including an annotated list of important personages and a brief history of the French press. It will...

The Sound of Silence, the Space of Time: Monsieur Hulot, Comedy, and the Aural-Visual Cinema of Jacques Tati (An Essay and an Interview)

Jacques Tati (1908–1982) was the great comedian of French film, probably the greatest movie mime and visual comic since Chaplin and Keaton. Like them, Tati played essentially the same character in each of his pictures: Monsieur Hulot, a loner, an outsider, a charming fool whose human incompetence is preferable to the inhuman competence of the life around him. Tati worked slowly, controlling every detail of his films himself from script to cutting; he also refused to compromise with either technicians or producers. As a result, Tati made only six feature films: Jour de fête (The Village Fair, 1949), Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot's Holiday, 1953), Mon Oncle (My Uncle, 1958), Playtime (1967), Traffic (1970), and Parade (1974). In their blend of social satire, wry charm, visual humor (often in the form of imaginative physical gags), and ingenious aural devices, these movies have not been surpassed by those of any other postwar cinematic comic. Moreover, they deserve to be ranked with the greatest of silent film comedies. In the following interview, preceded by a prefatory survey of his career, Tati discusses his films, his concept of the comic, and his views on moviemaking.

French Fiction, Empathy, and the Utopian Potential of 9/11

In From Solidarity to Schisms, Cara Cilano conceptualizes September 11 as a moment “characterized by unfathomable vulnerability and the possibility of a better future.” She argues the event, while traumatic, might have served as an impetus to reconfigure American self-perceptions and thoughts about its place in the world. Instead, she contends, the United States squandered the utopian potential of this moment. Cilano remains optimistic, however, because she sees European fictional discourse on 9/11 as emblematic of a desire for a melding of divergent perspectives. Their critique aims to keep America’s sense of itself unbalanced, thus providing fuel for self-reflection, analysis, and, most important, renewal. Taking the measure of current Franco-American relations, this essay tests the validity of this contention by examining works of French fiction published in the five years after the attacks. Four of these texts—Christian Garcin’s La jubilation des hasards, Didier Goupil’s Le jour de mon retour sur terre, Luc Lang’s 11 septembre, mon amour, and Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World—will be the focus of this essay. Are they being written to take advantage of the cosmopolitan potential of the moment, or grasping the opportunity to criticize a (weakened) nation, and thereby expressing uniquely French concerns? The essay contemplates the extent to which self-interest and questions of identity—personal, political, national—interfere with empathy, thus posing a considerable challenge to the utopian dream of a cosmopolitan world.

Missing Links: Digital Cinema, Analogical Archives, Film Historiography

The sudden and permeating rise of digital technologies has been widely investigated by film critics and scholars. However, most studies tend to focus on the impact of digital technologies on contemporary film production, distribution, exhibition and the finished products it brings forth, reserving too little attention to the massive digitization of born-analog films. The production of digital motion pictures marks an unprecedented breaking point in history, putting the very nature of “film” and “cinema” at stake, while the digitization of film prints risks having an irreversible feedback effect on cinema's technological history. Focusing on two case studies—the 1995 restoration of the 1949 color version of Jacques Tati's Jour de fête and the discovery of some 16mm reels on nitrate stock in a collection deposited with the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Torino, Italy—we illuminate the importance of technology for film historiography and reassert the need for a joint effort on the part of archives and academic institutions in the preservation of film memory for future generations.

Reading Postponed: Hesitating on Hélène Cixous’s Or, les lettres de mon père

Reading Postponed: Hesitating on Hélène Cixous’s Or, les lettres de mon père Elizabeth Berglund Hall (bio) Hélène Cixous’s 1997 fiction, Or, les lettres de mon père, begins with a description of reading, or of rereading, to be more precise. The narrator states in the first sentence, “Je vais relire Le Joueur […] encore une fois. C’est peut-être la septième fois que je relis c’est-à-dire que je lis, car à part le titre, je n’en sais plus rien sinon qu’il m’a déjà donné la vie six fois” (11). But this could just as well be the sixtieth time, she continues. Reading and rereading are synonymous to her, and each reading gives her life. It is, then, each time, a new beginning, even a resurrection. This act of reading and rereading depends also on the act of forgetting. “Oublier fait partie de lire,” the narrator explains (11). We forget and therefore each time the emotion and the joy of reading a particular book returns in its purity. Books die and are resuscitated in the narrator’s home day and night, she explains (12). The book that the narrator rereads comes and goes, and thereby remains a promise: “Tu m’oublieras encore je te le promets,” the book tells her (16). For the narrator, reading is also analogous to writing. Both acts depend on beginning repeatedly, and both are a promise to be fulfilled at some later date. This is not new to Cixous’s writing. In Jours de l’an, for example, published in 1990, she depicts an author who is in the middle of writing a book at the point at which Jours de l’an begins, and for this book the fictive author rewrites the same sentence, “l’écriture était revenue” multiple times (5, 6), each time with a slight variation. The effect is such that the beginning of the book—the fictive author’s as well as Cixous’s—is difficult to identify. The fictive author’s book, unfinished at the end of Jours de l’an, eventually flies away from the author, taking its own course. The repetition of the first sentence and the book’s repeated flight and return to the fictive author reflect also the narrator’s experience both rereading and rewriting in Or, les lettres de mon père. The book that the narrator writes is “celui qui promet” (14), coming and going for years at a time. In her article, “Oublire: Cixous’s Poetics of Forgetting,” Mairéad Hanrahan shows that this to and fro [End Page 184] movement may also mimic the movement of the reader of Or and the text itself. Considering the relationship of the opening passage to the rest of the text, she explains that, “[W]riting in general functions like letters, as a dialogue at a lag between writer and reader. Reading Or, in other words, involves a process of shuttling back and forth between the two parts of the text, as the correspondences between them appear—and disappear” (Hanrahan 88). In her exploration of the function of memory in the process of reading and writing, Hanrahan also focuses on Cixous’s conscious conflation of the verbs oublier and lire. Cixous creates the term oublire to describe the dual process of reading and forgetting. In her essay “Le livre nié” in the collection L’Amour du loup et autres remords, Cixous applies this term to her process of writing: L’oubli est le gardien de l’œuvre. Si je n’oubliais pas je n’écrirais pas. L’oubli est à l’œuvre dans l’œuvre dans l’écriture comme dans la lecture. J’ai inventé le mot oublire pour décrire le merveilleux mystère de la lecture : chaque année j’oublis. Dostoïevski, Stendhal, Proust, Rousseau : je lis, j’oublis. Chaque année je reviens dans leurs villes, leurs rues, leurs scènes et c’est une autre œuvre qui naît sous mon autre lecture. (165–66) Likewise, the narrator of Or describes the term: “Relire, c’est-à-dire, lire, c’est-à-dire effacer-ressusciter, c’est-à-dire, oublire” (16). Were reading...

Vaccination des parents contre la coqueluche : proposition et évaluation de 2 pratiques professionnelles en maternité

Despite good rates of immunization among children, an apparent increase in the incidence of pertussis disease in infants in France has been observed, mainly because of low vaccination coverage among adults. Guidelines drawn up in 2004 recommend a vaccination strategy called cocooning for parents, but those guidelines are rarely followed by the medical community. Raising the vaccination rate among parents to 65% and the extension of pertussis vaccine booster for people between 26 and 28 years old could help control the disease. In a primary healthcare setting in 2009, we studied 2 groups of 188 and 190 parents of newborns in a maternity unit. We proposed 2 strategies: information and vaccine prescription for both parents (if eligible) at the time of discharge from the maternity unit (group 1) or vaccination proposed to both parents during hospitalization in the maternity unit (group 2). After 6 weeks, the vaccination rates of both groups were compared. Analysis shows that parents had insufficient knowledge of the disease. Parents were often unaware of their vaccination status. Hence, objective data concerning the vaccination status was quickly available for only 42% of the population, making determination of eligibility unreliable. Only 8% of the parents were up to date for pertussis vaccination in the last 10 years, whereas 90% of the parents had the opportunity for vaccination and 37% of them had been eligible before the pregnancy. At the end of the study, 53% of the parents in group 1 were vaccinated, showing the positive impact of the medical encounter and vaccine prescription. During the study, 40% of the parents in group 2 who were proposed immediate vaccination in the maternity unit accepted it. This increased to 43% of group 2 parents being immunized by the time they had left the maternity unit. Proposing the vaccination at the maternity hospital was the more effective of the 2 strategies (P=0.03): at the end of the study, the objective was nearly reached with 64% of the parents being vaccinated. The promotion of parental vaccination by the pediatrician in the maternity ward is simple and effective. Medical encounters resulting from prescriptions made during hospitalization could raise awareness in general practitioners and enable them to identify eligible adults for pertussis vaccination and vaccinate themselves. There is a need to discuss the complementarity and interactions between perinatal teams and general practitioners within the community healthcare network.

C’est maintenant du passé by Marianne Rubinstein

RUBINSTEIN, MARIANNE. C’est maintenant du passé. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. ISBN 978-207 -012698-9. Pp. 163. 14 a. Researching one’s ancestry often entails exhilaration, false leads, contradictions , and ambiguity, and when one knows that the results can only add to sadness and pain, one examines the motives of the researcher. Marianne Rubinstein in this short and very engaging memoir feels the need to understand herself better , her looks, feelings, fears, intuitions, indeed her being, by looking into the short lives of her paternal grandparents who perished in the Holocaust. Initially, against the wishes of her father who rarely mentioned his parents, childhood, and war experience, preferring that all be du passé (hence the title), Rubinstein convinces him to allow her access to the contents of the blue steel box containing the few letters, postcards, receipts, certificates, and other modest relics that make up remaining possessions of Henri and Regina Rubenstein. Thus, she begins her research. Over two years and with quite a bit of effort and frustration, which she chronicles, the author makes contact with a few survivors who can shed light on the lives of her Polish-born grandparents. She discovers an optimistic and ambitious young couple, quick to adapt to Paris, quick to adopt the French language, of course studded with Yiddish expressions and intonation. Rubinstein quotes from their letters, spelling mistakes and all, which brings a smile to the reader as it must have to the author during her research. She discovers a vivacious, intelligent , and very attractive grandmother who abandoned her studies in Poland to follow her husband to France, a scolding older uncle, selfless acquaintances, and finally a member of the family that sheltered her father during the war, and with whom the latter had long lost (cut?) contact. The tragic is always in the background of this memoir, but that is not to say that it is a morbid saga or tale. In fact, a saga does not really emerge, but rather a story made up of fragments. There are twenty or so pages of illustrations (mostly of items in the blue box), transcriptions of conversations and phone calls, short meditative chapters, interspersed translated haikus by Sei Shonagan, and vivid portraits of family, both departed and alive. Rubinstein herself uses the English word patchwork to qualify this memoir, and I would go further. C’est maintenant du passé is an accomplished literary patchwork quilt, a labor of love, an heirloom to be passed on. Rubinstein, who teaches economics at Université Paris-VII, has also authored three novels to date, the most recent being Le Journal de Yaël Koppman (2007), and an inquiry (Tout le monde n’a pas la chance d’être orphelin, 2002) on the grandchildren of deported children during World War II. Phillips Exeter Academy (NH) Joseph A. Reiter SEBBAN, OLIVIER. Le Jour de votre nom. Paris: Seuil, 2009. ISBN 978-2-02-099963-2. Pp. 405. 21,50 a. Ce sombre roman en gris et noir continue la lignée des œuvres fortes sur l’une des périodes les plus sinistres de l’histoire de France: l’Occupation. Il se déroule dans un cadre peu habituel, le nord de l’Espagne et le sud de la France, où se mêlent les affres de la Seconde Guerre mondiale à celles de la guerre civile d’Espagne. L’action se passe en grande partie dans l’abominable camp de Gurs, Reviews 867 ...

Le Jour de votre nom by Olivier Sebban

RUBINSTEIN, MARIANNE. C’est maintenant du passé. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. ISBN 978-207 -012698-9. Pp. 163. 14 a. Researching one’s ancestry often entails exhilaration, false leads, contradictions , and ambiguity, and when one knows that the results can only add to sadness and pain, one examines the motives of the researcher. Marianne Rubinstein in this short and very engaging memoir feels the need to understand herself better , her looks, feelings, fears, intuitions, indeed her being, by looking into the short lives of her paternal grandparents who perished in the Holocaust. Initially, against the wishes of her father who rarely mentioned his parents, childhood, and war experience, preferring that all be du passé (hence the title), Rubinstein convinces him to allow her access to the contents of the blue steel box containing the few letters, postcards, receipts, certificates, and other modest relics that make up remaining possessions of Henri and Regina Rubenstein. Thus, she begins her research. Over two years and with quite a bit of effort and frustration, which she chronicles, the author makes contact with a few survivors who can shed light on the lives of her Polish-born grandparents. She discovers an optimistic and ambitious young couple, quick to adapt to Paris, quick to adopt the French language, of course studded with Yiddish expressions and intonation. Rubinstein quotes from their letters, spelling mistakes and all, which brings a smile to the reader as it must have to the author during her research. She discovers a vivacious, intelligent , and very attractive grandmother who abandoned her studies in Poland to follow her husband to France, a scolding older uncle, selfless acquaintances, and finally a member of the family that sheltered her father during the war, and with whom the latter had long lost (cut?) contact. The tragic is always in the background of this memoir, but that is not to say that it is a morbid saga or tale. In fact, a saga does not really emerge, but rather a story made up of fragments. There are twenty or so pages of illustrations (mostly of items in the blue box), transcriptions of conversations and phone calls, short meditative chapters, interspersed translated haikus by Sei Shonagan, and vivid portraits of family, both departed and alive. Rubinstein herself uses the English word patchwork to qualify this memoir, and I would go further. C’est maintenant du passé is an accomplished literary patchwork quilt, a labor of love, an heirloom to be passed on. Rubinstein, who teaches economics at Université Paris-VII, has also authored three novels to date, the most recent being Le Journal de Yaël Koppman (2007), and an inquiry (Tout le monde n’a pas la chance d’être orphelin, 2002) on the grandchildren of deported children during World War II. Phillips Exeter Academy (NH) Joseph A. Reiter SEBBAN, OLIVIER. Le Jour de votre nom. Paris: Seuil, 2009. ISBN 978-2-02-099963-2. Pp. 405. 21,50 a. Ce sombre roman en gris et noir continue la lignée des œuvres fortes sur l’une des périodes les plus sinistres de l’histoire de France: l’Occupation. Il se déroule dans un cadre peu habituel, le nord de l’Espagne et le sud de la France, où se mêlent les affres de la Seconde Guerre mondiale à celles de la guerre civile d’Espagne. L’action se passe en grande partie dans l’abominable camp de Gurs, Reviews 867 composé de “trois cent quatre-vingt-deux baraques identiques, réparties en treize îlots désignés par une lettre allant de A à M” (137), ayant “une capacité d’accueil de 18 000 hommes, 1 800 mètres d’égouts, 1 700 mètres de route carrossable [...] 250 kilomètres de barbelés” (138), “où l’on avait rassemblé les prisonniers: anciens brigadistes, réfugiés espagnols, juifs autrichiens, juifs allemands qualifiés d’indésirables par les autorités françaises” (137). Le camp est géré d’une main de fer par deux infâmes tortionnaires, le lieutenant Francis Davers et son supérieur le colonel Raymond Buisard. Au cours de son effroyable errance, le personnage principal au nom incertain —tantôt Alvaro, Alvares...

Leopardi in scena. Appunti sparsi sui travestimenti di un personaggio performativo

Under the form of notes, the text proposes a reflection about the literary transformation of Giacomo Leopardi in a performative character, choosing four preferential tracks. Firstly through the piece of Camille de Bainville, Le dernier jour de Leopardi (1894), it is suggested an example of the value of the performance as a way of diffusion and reception of literature abroad. The second and more deepened point regards the manners of representation and disguises of Leopardi’s character, referring to the centrality of the body’s theme in the drama of Giuseppe Manfridi, Giacomo, il prepotente (1989). Then it is shown the imaginary letter of Leopardi to Roberto Benigni (2010), written by Perle Abbruggiati, proposing a cinematographic transposition of the Operette morali. The fourth and last “annotation” is devoted to a documentary realised about the famous and bashful poet, in which Vittorio Gassman is the performer.