La Maison Research Articles

« À l’exemple des Abeilles » : Daniel Thaly poète-apiculteur

The purpose of this article is to introduce the West Indian poet Daniel Thaly (1879-1950), who was both a poet and a beekeeper. In his collection of poems L’île et le voyage, Thaly devotes the Fourth Chant to "La maison aux abeilles" (The house of bees), in which he celebrates the insects he cares for, which teach him both an art of living and an art of poetry. Thaly’s example shows how the practice of beekeeping informs poetry, particularly by renewing man’s relationship with the landscape. Beekeeping and the observation of bees also led the poet to set up these insects as poetic models: the motif of the bee is frequently used in poetry to represent the practice of innutrition. Like the bee, the poet gleans inspiration from his readings to produce his own honey, the poetic result of his influences. The case of Daniel Thaly is an interesting one, since we are dealing with a French-speaking poet in a colonial situation marked by the influence of Western literature and the force of assimilation. Thaly and the apiary metaphor invite us to examine the notions of imitation, innutrition and originality in the context of West Indian colonisation. Here, the prism of beekeeping offers a fresh look at a form of writing that for too long has been relegated to the category of servile imitation and stigmatised by critics as regionalist, exotic and doudouist literature.

Literature between Collecting and Hoarding: Revisiting the Object in François Bon, Lydia Flem, and Georges Perec

Abstract Recent readings in literature stress the interdependence of the mental and the material, hence offering a bridge between material culture and literary interpretation. This article develops this line of thought using the concepts of collecting and hoarding as two configurations that undermine both the logic of the commodity and the opposition between materiality and semiotics. Specifically, it discusses these topics within the scope of French studies through a revision of the position of the object or thing in the works of François Bon (Autobiographie des objets), Lydia Flem (Comment j’ai vidé la maison de mes parents), and Georges Perec (Les Choses, Penser/classer, and Je me souviens). In the first section, Bon’s sentimental form of collecting is defined as a practice of material self-mourning. In the second section, comparative discussion of Bon and Flem examines themes of memory and mourning through the practices of decluttering and profanation of stuff. The third section of the article connects with recent theories of reading and examines Perec through a ‘surface reading’: instead of symptomatic readings, which follow the logic of the commodity to presume a hidden value behind brute materiality, this reading explores various texts by Perec in which hoarding is at the very surface, manifested in the reader’s experience.

Notice biographique sur le Dr Achille Delmas (1879–1947). Deuxième partie : la maison de santé d’Ivry et fin de carrière à la « Médico »

From 1911 to 1947, Dr Achille Delmas was the medical director of one of the most well-known mental health facilities in the Paris area, “la maison de santé d’Ivry-sur-Seine”, founded by J.-E. Esquirol. With his younger brother Paul, he treated numerous – sufficiently wealthy – patients, whose pathologies ranged from terminal forms of General Paralysis, as in the case of the writers Charles Carrington and Louis Chadourne, to perversion, as in the case of the soon-to-be infamous Dr Petiot, as well as psychosis, as in the case of Lucia Joyce, James’ daughter, who spent ten years at this facility. Achille Delmas was a bedrock of the Société Médico-Psychologique, serving as its president from 1941 to 1942. In his speeches, he remained true to his conservative positions, staying faithful to the obsolete diagnosis of Dementia Praecox, and, above all, remained steadfastly convinced that bipolar disorders (such as a cycloidal temperament) were frequently misdiagnosed. In his eulogy, Professor Minkowski implied that Achille Delmas was himself affected by such a temperament.

Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator

Luigi Donato Ventura, a Trilingual Self-translator

Childhood, Redemption, and l'écriture de soi : Colette's La chambre éclairée and La maison de Claudine

Abstract: This article examines the child figure in Colette's work, analyzed as a means to a literary redemption after Colette's initiation into literature through another work depicting a child, Claudine à l'école . The reintegration of the child figure is presaged by the appearance in early works, especially La vagabonde , of images of the archetypal "divine" child. The child figure is then integrated into stories, first featuring Colette's daughter Bel-Gazou, then the child Colette herself. The theme of play, traced in vignettes from La chambre éclairée and La maison de Claudine , reveals a process by which Colette reintegrates the child figure into her textual self. This then participates in giving voice to Colette's écriture de soi .

Sigmund Freud, 19 Berggasse, Vienna. André Breton, 42 Rue Fontaine, Paris

Sigmund Freud, 19 Berggasse, Vienna. André Breton, 42 Rue Fontaine, Paris

Theorising from the Land: House or Tipi of IR?

In 2004, Anna Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling wrote their important intervention, entitled ‘The House of IR: From Family Power Politics to the Poises of Worldism,’ that ordered various theories of International Relations within an analogy of a colonial household, calling instead for a Worldism that builds communities based on interests and support. One glaring omission from this analysis, however, is mention of indigeneity. Increasingly, in North America, the experiences of Indigenous peoples are shaping national imaginations and popular political discourses – take for instance Idle No More, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Standing Rock, and Mauna Kea, to name a few. These shifts seen at a national level in North America, however, are not fully reflected in the field of IR. In fact, it would be easy to conclude that the field of IR has largely ignored Indigenous lived-experience. To this, this article asks how IR theorising, practice, and pedagogy could be significantly transformed by taking seriously Indigenous experiences and knowledge? To explore this question, this article explores the two central IR concepts of power and sovereignty to illustrate how the meanings and practices of these concepts are significantly furthered by attention to Indigenous experiences, practices, and knowledge. It concludes by asserting that an Indigenous approach to IR would not only be a mechanism for incisive analysis and critique of dominant constructions within the field, but also could provide an emergent space for (re)imagining collective futures across race and difference – something sorely needed in a world of ever increasing uncertainty. Des théories issues de la terre : la maison ou le tipi des relations internationales ?

Hierarchies of Value: The Medallist’s Work in Sixteenth-Century Art

Hierarchies of Value: The Medallist’s Work in Sixteenth-Century Art

The spectator’s anxiety in film narrative: Notes on films by Bertrand Bonello

The representation of emotions and affects in cinematic narrative can participate in the construction of narration in the same way as the representation of events. Anxiety as one of the “expectant emotions” (E. Bloch) is of particular interest in this regard. By anxiety in the narrative, we mean any zone of uncertainty associated both with the field of the narrator or participant in the world of history, and with the field of the viewer. It is interesting in this regard to consider cases when anxiety ceases to be related to a specific character and is created at the intersection of the event-receptive field, referring to the entire structure of the narrative and thereby causing anxiety in the viewer. Films directed by Bertrand Bonello, regarded as an example of a special type of sensuality in contemporary French cinema, find themselves involved in the construction of this particular type of anxiety. By destabilizing the narrative, depriving the viewer of the familiar landmarks during the unfolding of the story, Bonello in every film refuses to provide the viewer with a habitually safe “place,” as happens in classic Hollywood cinema. Instead, films provoke a state of gripping, affective engagement, which arises, among other things, in a situation of failure of the usual strategies of narrative perception. This article attempts to describe the narrative strategies in three films by B. Bonello (“L’Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close” / “House of Tolerance”, 2011, “Saint Laurent”, 2014, and “Nocturama”, 2016), provoking “viewer’s anxiety” and also consider the mechanism of this anxiety, which is closely related to the experience of experiencing pain.

Djamileh: opéra-comique en un acte: op. 24 by George Bizet

Reviewed by: Djamileh: opéra-comique en un acte: op. 24 by George Bizet Ralph P. Locke George Bizet. Djamileh: opéra-comique en un acte: op. 24. Critical edition by Hugh Macdonald. Norwich, England: Fishergate Music, 2020. (Bizet’s Other Operas; v. 1) [Preface and critical report in English. Paperback. ISMN 97909002245403. £95 ($132.75).] THE SERIES Georges Bizet is a composer whom, until recently, the music-publishing industry has largely failed. One of his operas (La maison du docteur) has never been published, and the others have often circulated in editions that are seriously flawed (and, in most cases, were released solely as piano-vocal scores). In the 1960s, Carmen was treated to a supposed critical edition by Fritz Oeser that, confusingly, inserted into the main text certain passages that Bizet himself demonstrably rejected. (To its credit, Oeser’s edition helped many opera companies reinstate the work’s spoken dialogues and remove the recitatives. The latter were composed by Ernest Guiraud—after Bizet’s early death—for the benefit of international opera houses where spoken dialogue was never used, such as in Vienna or indeed at the Paris Opéra. Still, the recitatives are effective and helpful because singers know them and can often sing more convincingly than speak. As a result, the recitatives are still widely used today, in whole or part.) Similarly, The Pearl Fishers is widely published and often performed in a version whose final trio may not be by Bizet and whose most famous duet (for Nadir and Zurga) uses an inauthentic ending. This ending, which is still heard at the Met and elsewhere, brings back a tune one final time that all opera lovers rightly adore. In the process, it sacrifices the dramatically more appropriate let-us-be-friends-again cabalette with which Bizet himself (and his quite capable librettists) closed the number. The Carmen situation has been alleviated in recent years by more capable critical editions from the hands of Robert Didion (1992), Richard Lang-ham Smith (1999, with a revision in progress; full score currently available only on rental), and Michel Rot (2009; it includes, like Oeser, some rejected material). And I hear that Bärenreiter is preparing its own critical edition. The Pearl Fishers situation is stymied by the fact that the original manuscript remains in private hands and inaccessible. Still, Hugh J. Macdonald, the renowned authority on nineteenth-century French music, has made a [End Page 122] critical edition that comes much closer to what Bizet intended. The score and parts that he prepared can be rented, and have been used by numerous opera houses (though some still insist on ending the men’s duet by bringing back that gorgeous big tune). Macdonald has now undertaken to make critical editions of the six other operas by Bizet that survive in a form complete enough to be staged. Two of the operas are short enough to be included in a single volume, making five volumes in all. Macdonald wittily (ruefully? invitingly?) entitles the series “Bizet’s Other Operas.” Here we have the first of the five volumes: Macdonald’s edition of the one-act Djamileh, on a delightful text by Louis Gallet. Djamileh (the character’s name is roughly equivalent to Jamila in English spelling) was first performed, with mixed success, at the Opéra-Comique in 1872. This was nine years after The Pearl Fishers and a scarce three years before Carmen. So we are dealing here with a work by a fully mature master. (Bizet would die at thirty-six, three months after the Carmen premiere.) The subsequent volumes are to include: vol. 2: Don Procopio (on an Italian libretto), vol. 3: La jolie fille de Perth (of which there is a fine recording with June Anderson), vol. 4: La maison du docteur and Le docteur Miracle, and vol. 5: Ivan IV (which Bizet completed except for the orchestration of the final two numbers; several recordings exist, featuring such major singers as tenor Henri Legay). THE WORK The fullest and most up-to-date accounts of Djamileh and its history are to be found in Hervé Lacombe’s magisterial biography, Bizet (Paris: Fayard, 2000), and Macdonald’s recent...

Pamięć i rzeczy

Memory and Objects. About the Autobiographical Narratives Written by Lydia Flem and Marcin Wicha The aim of paper is to discover traces of the deceased and recreate bonds between a human and an object (objects). In the narrative two autobiographies were analysed: Lydia Flem’s ‘How I emptied my parents’ house’ (‘Comment j’ai vidé la maison de mes parents’) and Marcin Wicha’s ‘Items I didn’t throw away’ (‘Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem’). Both authors mourn their mothers. According to the specific Jewish ‘idiom’ they run a post-cmemorial thread related to their mothers’ origins and historical implications (post-memory is understood, after Marianne Hirsch, as a specific kind of transfer of some traumatic experience).

Against Nature? Vigny’s Stones

ABSTRACTVigny’s major poem, ‘La maison du berger’ (first published in 1844), has long been seen as a celebration of the provinces and a denunciation of the alien setting of the modern city. But his relationship with the characteristic spaces of modernity, including land that he himself owned in the countryside, is more complex. Here, we map how Vigny’s shifting assessment of boundaries, including those marked out by stones placed in the ground, can shed light on his unsettling reappraisal of the the human relationship with nature and in turn on the emergence of an acute, if troubled, ecological awareness.

“Come-no-go/l’ennemi…dans la maison”: Reflections on the Lingoes of Conflict in Cameroon’s Urban History

The re-introduction of multi-party politics and the liberalisation of politics in Cameroon during the 1990s unleashed a venomous language of conflict in some cities. In the coastal region, the expression of “come-no-go,” synonymous to a dreaded skin disease, was/is frequently used to denigrate people from the grassfields of the country. Many were descendants of migrants to the commercial plantations established by the Germans. Meanwhile, the archbishop of Yaounde at the time called Anglophones “l’ennemi dans…la maison” or “enemies in the house.” This followed the launching of the Social Democratic Front (SDF) party in Bamenda against a government ban. This article examines the power of derogatory language in Cameroon’s urban space. Lingoes of conflict and segregation have denigrated some people and remain a challenge to national unity and integration in Cameroon since the reunification of 1961.

Apresentação do Dossiê

Lugar de habitação e de abrigo, a casa, na contemporaneidade, vem desempenhando uma série de novos papéis que ultrapassam o universo privado de indivíduos e grupos, em cenários nacionais e transnacionais de deslocamentos. Ela acompanha as transformações cotidianas e estruturais da vida social e se reinventa ao sabor de novas exigências materiais e simbólicas.Dessa forma, se pensarmos no conjunto de estudos nas Ciências Sociais que remetem à casa, não estamos diante de tema inexplorado. Nesse campo de produção, na etnologia francesa são bem conhecidos os trabalhos de Claude Lévi-Strauss (1957), ao analisar a casa Bororo em Tristes trópicos, de Marcel Griaule (1966), que estuda a casa Dogon em Dieu d’eau: entretiens avec Ogotemmêli, de Pierre Bourdieu (1980), ao interpretar a Maison Kabyle em Les sens pratiquee François Ruegg (2011), que estudou as habitações camponesas em La maison paysanne: histoire d’un mythe.Neste campo do conhecimento, somados aos trabalhos na seara da Antropologia, também verificamos, em outros domínios das ciências sociais, igualmente uma tendência a criticar os estudos que seguem apenas uma perspectiva ergológica, (aqueles que restringem a casa aos aspectos como matéria-prima, forma, tamanho e técnica de produção de um artefato, sem analisar seus significados e funções na sociedade que os produziu). A busca de superação deste enfoque, tem gerado novas perspectivas de pesquisa em âmbito interdisciplinar tais como o trabalho do filósofo Michel Serres, Habiter, publicado em (2011) e Chez soi: une odyssée de l’espace domestique, da jornalista Mona Chollet (2015), na seara dos estudos culturais.Neste dossiê, apresentamos um conjunto de artigos que enfocam, a partir de diferentes perspectivas teórico-metodológicas das Ciências Sociais, estudos sobre habitações/casas em distintos contextos socioculturais. São contribuições significativas para o entendimento das casas porque revelam as particularidades do habitar, destacando as múltiplas configurações da casa/lar/abrigo/refúgio em relação às formas de habitar e suas representações, aos consumos domésticos, às memórias e trajetórias dos grupos e pessoas, ao pertencimento étnico e nacional, dos que habitam/ocupam as casas, entre outros.

La Langue d'oc telle qu'elle se parle. Atlas linguistique de la Provence by Jean-Claude Bouvier et Claude Martel

Reviewed by: La Langue d'oc telle qu'elle se parle. Atlas linguistique de la Provence by Jean-Claude Bouvier et Claude Martel Louise Esher Jean-Claude Bouvier et Claude Martel , avec la participation de Guylaine Brun-Trigaud. La Langue d'oc telle qu'elle se parle. Atlas linguistique de la Provence. Forcalquier: Les Alpes de Lumière, 2016. xii+ 322 pp. ISBN 978-2-919435-07-4. €50 This fourth volume on the speech varieties of Provence completes publication of the lexical material gathered for the Atlas linguistique et ethnographique de la Provence (ALP). The volume is authored by Jean-Claude Bouvier and Claude Martel (authors and fieldworkers for the three previous volumes); cartography is by Guylaine Brun-Trigaud, and the volume is illustrated with images provided by the cultural association Les Alpes de Lumière. The data presented in this volume cover the same geographical area as the first three volumes, and for the most part were elicited during the same fieldwork interviews, conducted for 170 survey points between 1960 and 1990 using the technique of bilingual elicitation. For each survey point, the atlas records the local terms for over 300 questionnaire items, grouped into the following lexical areas: "la maison," "les meubles," "la cuisine et le ménage," "le linge," "les vêtements," "la famille et l'enfance," "le corps humain, la maladie et la mort," and "la religion." The original ALP material has been supplemented by additional fieldwork conducted in 2015(iii); this fieldwork is presumably the source of data for a number of lexical items presented in list rather than map format, without an ALP question number. Information on the fieldworkers, the informants and the dates of fieldwork is not provided in the atlas volume, but is to be made available online via the Thesoc portal (iv). While aiming for continuity between this volume and its predecessors, the authors have made a number of welcome innovations in presentation, designed to facilitate access to the data. The A4 softcover is more manoeuvrable than the traditional atlas format, while the provision of an alphabetical index of questionnaire items, in addition to the usual list by order of map number, allows more efficient consultation. The data are transcribed according to the International Phonetic Alphabet (as opposed to the Rousselot-Gilliéron alphabet used for the first three ALP volumes and for [End Page 116] other atlases covering the Occitan-speaking area), a choice which aligns this atlas with current practice in descriptive linguistics, and makes it readily accessible to a wider audience. Indeed, the chart listing the IPA symbols and their Rousselot-Gilliéron equivalents (viii) serves as a useful aide-mémoire for those familiar with one alphabet who wish to consult materials written in the other. The maps, too, have been designed for ease of consultation and thus minimise the potential for reading errors such as overlooking information. Contrasts in colour and font are judiciously used to give greatest prominence to the linguistic data while facilitating localisation of individual survey points and reference to geographical features. No isoglosses are drawn in, leaving readers free to make their own analysis; however, where a given form occurs across many survey points, without variation, a system of symbols and defaults is used to create a sharper visual impression of the distribution than would be gained by simply reproducing the transcription at each point (see, e.g., items 1141 huile and 1142 poivre, 97). Symbols are also used to flag survey points for which additional lexical information (e.g., concurrent forms, gender, semantic specialisation) is listed in a corner of the map. In addition to the maps showing linguistic forms, the atlas includes twelve schematic maps illustrating the geographical distribution of different etyma, expressions, or derivational strategies for a single concept (e.g., reflexes of hospitale(m), mansione(m), casa(m) for 'house, home,' 4; deverbal suffixes used to form 'drawer' from tira, 62), or the distribution of different lexical meanings found for reflexes of a single etymon (e.g., 'vault' and 'cellar' for croto, 10). A map of the physical geography of the area is also given (vi), allowing comparison of linguistic distributions with geographical features potentially relevant to...

On Unusual Librarians, Good Readers, and a Confusion of Literary Characters Who Finally Find Their Stories

This paper introduces a selection of children’s literature which features the library as a literary setting and as an important repository of knowledge in human history. Libraries are directly related to books, which are directly related to writing: the development of writing systems, writing materials, the printing press and books is outlined in a work by Aksinja Kermauner, Modrost starodavnega anka [The Wisdom of the Ancient Ank] (2000). The study further focuses on the literary works that share a common theme, i.e. the theme of literary characters who come to life and emerge from books, creating a confusion. The basic element of these literary works is intertextuality, since it is familiarity with the literature referred to that brings resolution to the chaos and restores the initial order. Such works, classified as fantastic literature, require a good reader who can assign the characters to their respective narratives and thus solve the problem. The study focuses on the following texts: Neobična knjižničarka [Adventure in the Library, lit. An Unusual Librarian], a fantastic short story written by Kašmir Huseinović and illustrated by Andrea Petrlik Huseinović (Slovene trans. 2011); Kérity, la maison des contes [Eleanor’s Secret], a fantastic short story written by Anik Le Ray and illustrated by Rébecca Dautremer (Slovene trans. 2012); and 49:03:39, a fantastic novel by Neli Kodrič Filipić (2008). Another important aspect besides intertextuality is the cultural and historical context of the primary referential books. The setting in the three books analysed is a library, either public (Neobična knjižničarka, 49:03:39) or private (Kérity).

Décibel par M. Butzbach, et al

Reviews 197 directly connected to three Ps thus requires careful planning from instructors. They will need to evaluate how to integrate language learning in a way that demonstrates best practices and responds to ACTFL guidelines for each of the selected readings. Nevertheless, the strength of La culture francophone can be seen in the quality selection of its cultural components as well as its variety. This focus, in turn, provides more freedom to instructors to structure their classes around the essential questions on which they would like students to reflect. University of Wisconsin, La Crosse Virginie Cassidy Butzbach, M., C. Martin, D. Pastor, et I. Saracibar. Décibel. Paris: Didier, 2015. Méthode de français A1. ISBN 978-2-278-08107-3. Pp. 95. Cahier d’activités A1. ISBN 978-2-278-08120-2. Pp. 66. Méthode de français A2.1. ISBN 978-2-278-08336-7. Pp. 106. Cahier d’activités A2.1. ISBN 978-2-278-08347-3. Pp. 66. Méthode de français A2.2. ISBN 978-2-278-08337-4. Pp. 106. Cahier d’activités A2.2. ISBN 978-2-278-08350-3. Pp. 95. This three-part series is designed for middle school but could be used at the secondary level as supplementary resource. It is leveled A1, A2.1, and A2.2 under the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which correlates to the ACTFL Novice Low through Intermediate Mid proficiency levels. Décibel’s goal is to prepare students for the DELF certification. Materials include the Méthode de français, Cahier d’activités, teacher resources (DVDs and CDs), and online access to a Guide pédagogique. In the first two books, traditional topics such as “Les commerçants de mon quartier”and“À la maison”dominate. In level A2.2, students interact with more current topics such as social justice and ecology. Unit objectives include vocabulary and grammar topics, perfunctory culture, and DELF test preparation. Teachers accustomed to the ACTFL“Can-Do”statements and proficiency goals will find that the unit goals are designed for test performance. Herein lies the conflict for United States teachers looking for more “authentic” materials from a French publisher: The objectives and exercises do not match the ACTFL National Standards. The program was designed mainly for Europeans preparing for the DELF exam. The textbooks and ancillary content focus mainly on vocabulary and grammar while setting aside engaging communicative activities. The weak coherence between unit lessons is distracting. In an A2.1 unit,“Les quatre saisons,”the introduction presents a review of basic weather phrases. Lesson one discusses savanna animals, speed records, and comparisons. Lesson two introduces predictions about future life on the planet with the future tense. Lesson three revisits superlatives and comparisons with recordbreaking places in France. The writing activity returns to describing an animal. There is a short bande dessinée that combines weather and physical comparisons of humans. Finally, in the “Bilan oral,” a drawn scene of a protest for the protection of bees provides a series of six short exercises that award points for describing the weather, circumlocution, describing an animal, making comparisons, and understanding conversation about the weather.While each of these topics was touched on in the unit and in the workbook, the summative exercises do not provide a pedagogically-sound assessment of students’linguistic progress. The workbook proposes mainly busy work including crossing out a nonsense word in a string of words and writing the dialogue that remains, matching pictures to numbers or filling in verb forms or vocabulary terms. These types of exercises harken back to a more traditional, non-communicative style of language acquisition that emphasized task completion, not progress toward proficiency. Metropolitan France dominates the ancillary resources, and the DVD vignettes (available with subtitles in French) present adult-focused geography and cultural information that does not always relate to the unit objectives. While Décibel is not an ideal text for the United States system, one may keep in mind that it is the teacher, not the textbook, who sets the curriculum. The provided materials could support teachers who have access to more communicative interpersonal and presentational activities, but who...

Vocabulaire essentiel du français par Gaël Crépieux et al

Reviews 199 teacher may want to modify the details of a number of activities in the textbook and workbook to keep the content relevant to her class. Narrowing our focus to this content, and to the interpersonal level of Saison 3, the S’exprimer and Atelier créatif sections of each unit ensure interaction among learners. While the activity scenarios seem at times overly fanciful for a textbook targeting adults and real life language use, teachers will nonetheless appreciate the systematic capping of grammar expositions with the chance to practice and produce new structures in different communicative contexts. Finally, the (intra-)personal level deals with how learners are led to understand and engage with new material.On this micro-level especially,Saison 3 is compelling. All units begin with a full six pages with at least one aural, visual, or written text on each page inviting learners to reflect on a single theme under multiple lenses. Learner motivation is triggered by the varied contexts and contemporariness of the texts, while the flood of input is sure to contain at least some jewels each individual learner will take pleasure in uncovering. Provocative and rich, the unit themes themselves (“Décrypter ses identités,”“Vivre une révolution”) are welcome reprieves from topics guiding more traditional American foreign language textbooks (“La maison et la ville,” “L’école,” and so on). All in all, I encourage teachers to explore Saison 3 for compelling source material paired with explicit, contextualized presentations of language structures and lexicon that may complement existing curriculum, if not serve as primary text. Middlebury Institute of International Studies (CA) Clarissa C. Eagle Crépieux, Gaël, Lucie Mensdorff-Pouilly, et Caroline Sperandio. Vocabulaire essentiel du français. Paris: Didier, 2016. ISBN 978-2-278-08340-4. Pp. 252. This volume is part of the updated texts in the 100% FLE series written mostly for the A1/A2 learner. The content of the book is much like what the title suggests, as thirteen units cover common vocabulary themes that students need at this level to interact and communicate appropriately with French speakers. The volume begins with lessons on identity by introducing activities of diverse nature that integrate realia like examples of identity cards and applications for long stay visas. Other topics such as health, education, work, housing, dining, and the environment are presented as thematic units and provide a variety of activities such as puzzles, matching, and riddles. At the end of each section, there are prompts to promote skits and pair activities. The exercises provided in the volume make for excellent preparation before coming to class. The answers to the activities are published in one of the appendices as well as the answers to the bilan activities for each few chapters.As such, students can complete the exercises, check their work, and come to class prepared having done some autonomous learning. This work provides students with a solid base on which to build for activities that go beyond mechanical exercises to allow for practice in the classroom, making class time more productive for communicative learning. It would be easy to expand on the activities in the volume and have students produce dialogues and conversations that will give them practice for situations they are likely to encounter. The volume concludes with a section that presents contrastive vocabulary working from English and Spanish to the French equivalents. Appendices containing the answers to all the activities proposed in the volume as well as a list of the vocabulary for each chapter listed in French, English, Spanish, German, and Italian round out the volume. This makes the work text universally accessible and appealing to a wider audience. This book is part of a series by Didier that includes grammar, phonetics, vocabulary, and communication volumes. They are, for the most part, geared toward the A1/A2 level; but the grammar texts count two volumes that expand to the B1 learner. Combining the vocabulary text at the appropriate level with its complement from the grammar texts could work well to complete a program allowing for work on structures and the vocabulary to build them relative to daily tasks. Another option would be to pair the vocabulary...

Assia Djebar and the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria: mimicry and subalternity in Nowhere in my Father’s House

ABSTRACTAssia Djebar’s autobiographical Nulle part dans la maison de mon père (2007) portrays a conflicting relationship with her father which breaks with the sympathetic image in her early L’amour, la fantasia (1985). This paper examines their complex relationship by exploring the main character’s sense of place, represented by the home and the school, where dominates the authoritative figure of her father. The latter’s identity emerges as that of the assimilated native, constructed by the ideological forces of French colonialism and fostered by its state-controlled education. The conclusion shows that the protagonist’s feeling of female invisibility, spelt in the very title of the novel, and her discomfort at her father’s subaltern and mimic identity underline the historical, political, as well as cultural impasse of the French colony in Algeria, and function as an indirect indictment of the presumably positive legacy of the colonial past.

Histoire d’S: ou le participe passé au Rasoir d’Ockham by Fabrice Marsac

Reviews 223 to develop their language skills through interactive radio formats like debates and interviews with people in the street, expanding not only their linguistic repertoire but also their cultural integration into the host community (Abgrall). In educational settings, the perception of the French language as an unattainable ideal frustrates the efforts of students and instructors. Several contributions suggest alternate educational methods, such as contextualized instruction in language contact situations such as the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa (Miled), increased focus on vocabulary for young learners (Anctil), and even an overhaul of language education (including orthographic reform) in Francophone contexts (Chartrand). Focus is also drawn to the difficulties inherent in the linguistic system of French, and language reform is a suggestion that arises in several of the contributions (Chartrand; Van Raemdonck). In an early presentation , Bouillon offers advice for those who would undertake spelling reform, based on his experience working on German orthographic reform. Hambye’s conclusion, meticulously drawing from the previous works, offers an excellent overview of the themes that link the various contributions, and his thoughts on the politicization of linguistic policy leave the reader with food for thought. The volume concludes with a convenient list and description of the organizing bodies from each country. On the whole, this collection offers insight into a number of contemporary Francophone situations and internal and external factors relevant to the appropriation of the language. University of Louisiana, Lafayette Tamara Lindner Marsac, Fabrice. Histoire d’S: ou le participe passé au Rasoir d’Ockham. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016. ISBN 978-2-343-08287-5. Pp. 210. 22 a. The ins and outs of past participle agreement are discussed in this volume, whose overarching goal is to untangle and simplify the current minefield of nearly 50 rules, exceptions, and cas particuliers. Marsac qualifies this current state of affairs as abracadabrantesque , a term that most speakers (and probably all instructors) of French will agree with. Adopting the principle of Occam’s Razor, the author aims to replace these sometimes incoherent accretions resulting from centuries of prescriptive endeavors with a unified, streamlined, and linguistically valid rule. Although the early sections sometimes verge on the alarmist—including a generous list of errors from educated sources, taken as evidence of a general relâchement grammatical—many of Marsac’s later criticisms ring true.Take for example the familiar règle de position: a past participle with avoir as its auxiliary agrees with the direct object when the object precedes the past participle, but not when it follows (les pommes que j’ai mangées but j’ai mangé les pommes). As it turns out, no other agreement relations in French (e.g., subject-verb, noun-adjective) evince this (artificial) sensitivity to position. Marsac emphasizes the inconsistency in proscribing agreement with en (des pommes, j’en ai mangé), even though en pronominalizes a direct object and precedes a past participle auxilié by avoir. Likewise, why does faire causatif block agreement (la maison qu’il a fait faire)? Pronominal verbs are similarly thorny, requiring agreement with direct objects (elles se sont vues) but not indirect objects (elles se sont parlé), despite the strong tendency elsewhere for agreement in the context of être. A further criticism of the règle de position is that, although ostensibly formulated for auxiliary avoir, it is extended to auxiliary être in cases like ils se sont acheté de coquettes maisons (no agreement; direct object follows the past participle) versus ils se les sont données eux-mêmes, la liberté et la démocratie (agreement required; direct object pronoun precedes the past participle). Marsac’s proposal would treat past participle agreement as simple verbal agreement and essentially do away with the règle de position, recommending for example cette visite que j’avais projeté; past participles of pronominal verbs would agree with the subject (rather than the direct object) across the board, thus le premier ministre se les est attribué (masculine singular subject) or les deux premiers ne se sont pas plus (masculine plural subject). Although Marsac’s proposal is elegant in relying only on preexisting principles such as subject-verb agreement, it disregards how past participle agreement arose naturally in French prior to...