Le Pere De Research Articles

William Faulkner : le père du texte

The international conference “‘The Father of the Text’: Continuities and Ruptures of Faulkner’s Legacy in Contemporary Literatures” was organized by Frederique Spill and Solveig Dunkel from EA4295 CORPUS (Universite de Picardie Jules Verne). It took place in Amiens on September 27-28, 2019. The title of the conference, borrowed from the 1999 essay “Le pere du texte” by Pierre Michon, set the tone: the purpose of those two days of discussion was to examine the various forms taken by William Fa...

Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanität von Lessing bis Büchner by Helmut J. Schneider (review)

Helmut J. Schneider, Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanitat von Lessing bis Buchner. Berlin: Berlin UP, 2011.475 pp.Helmut J. Schneider's Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie presents a series of incisive analyses of dramatic texts from a formative period in the history of German drama. The chapters, all but two of which have previously appeared in essay form, make evident the thematic and conceptual continuity of Schneider's reflections on literature over the past two decades. The point of departure in this study, as in many of the most distinguished histories of German drama, is G. E. Lessing's theoretical and literary projects. The remaining essays trace a formidable path that includes the champions of Weimar classicism and concludes with discussions of two of the great literary outsiders of the early nineteenth century, Heinrich von Kleist and Georg Buchner.The readings that make up this volume share a loose thematic interest in a single issue, which, as Schneider carefully and convincingly demonstrates, brought forth dramatic configurations as varied as they were original. Schneider indicates in the introduction that the book focuses on a historical moment characterized by the competition between two models of social organization: on the one hand, the genealogical family and, on the other, a new concept of the universal family. Schneider draws on well-established literary and sociological research when he asserts that thinkers and writers of the Enlightenment challenged traditional patriarchal models of kinship, which deployed marriage for the formation of alliances across otherwise rigid family boundaries. In a veritable sexual revolution, as Schneider following Michel Foucault claims, the eighteenth century made the freely chosen emotional bond between individuals into the foundation for the family and, by extension, for society. Because the purview of this emotional bond is not defined by a social or political alliance, the new model of the family casts a more inclusive net. As Schneider astutely points out, one of the central desires of the age of Enlightenment is the achievement of an all-inclusive notion of the family-a family defined not by ossified cultural or political boundaries but instead aspiring to the inclusion of every human being. The tension between these two rudimentary models of the family appears with varying degrees of prominence in the chapters that follow. When historical and sociological themes forfeit immediate relevance, Schneider turns instead to the related theme of birth and generation as central metaphors in aesthetic thought and classical drama. His essays do not unearth long-forgotten texts or locate familiar ones within unusual discursive contexts but instead address, with unwavering focus, core thematic and formal issues in many of the most important dramas written in the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century.The book falls into three parts, each of which deals with a different historical moment and conceptual frame. While the first part begins with a sharp analysis of Denis Diderot's theoretical and dramaturgical disavowal of the paterfamilias, most of the section is devoted to the major plays by Diderot's greatest German admirer, G. E. Lessing. Many of the most compelling moments in these chapters are when Schneider combines his thematic interest with an investigation of formal arrangements. These two perfectly align when Schneider shows the interconnections between Diderot's concept of the tableau and the culminating appearance of the father in Le pere de famulie. …

Rousseau's Knees

Rousseau's Knees Peggy Kamuf It may seem a little perverse to address the topic "Rousseau and emotion" through what seems, at least on its most evident surface, such an unemotional text as Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. In its 100 Pléiade pages the word "émotion" occurs but three times. Indeed, this text is the record of a willed flight from emotion, which is all but banished from the ambling thoughts strung together in the reveries. The experience the text aims to record is the "sentiment de l'existence depouillé de toute autre affection."1 Emotion is associated with agitated movement and random reactions of a kind the writer-walker wants to avoid. But precisely because the work is in flight from emotional agitation, it keeps emotion's image in its rearview mirror, so to speak. Looked at from this angle, one may see how a certain idea of emotion is being repeatedly defined by this text. We can begin to discern that image by looking at the three occurrences of émotion. The first is from the Fourth Promenade, when Rousseau is recalling how a friend almost knocked the young Jean-Jacques's brains out: Je ne vis de ma vie une agitation pareille à celle de ce pauvre garçon voyant mon sang ruisseler dans mes cheveux. Il crut m'avoir tué. Il se précipite sur moi, m'embrasse, me serre étroitement en fondant en larmes et poussant des cris perçans. Je l'embrassois aussi de toute ma force en pleurant comme lui dans une émotion confuse qui n'étoit pas sans quelque douceur. (OC 1:1037, emphasis added) Despite the gruesomeness of the accident, this is a sweet memory, associated with the uncertain emotion "qui n'étoit pas sans quelque douceur." It is sweet to recall how the poor perpetrator manifested sincere affection toward me, Jean-Jacques. At the thought I might be dead, he almost went mad. In its next occurrence, émotion is likewise associated with a child's spontaneous show of affection toward Jean-Jacques, now a lonely old man: Je marchois distrait et rêvant sans regarder autour de moi quand tout à coup je me sentis saisir les genoux. Je regarde et je vois un petit enfant de cinq ou six ans qui serroit mes genoux de toute sa force en me regardant d'un air si familier et si caressant que mes entrailles s'émurent. [...] [J]e suis repassé plusieurs fois par Clignancourt dans l'espérance d'y revoir cet enfant, mais je n'ai plus revu ni lui ni le pere, et il ne m'est plus resté de cette rencontre qu'un souvenir assez vif, mêlé toujours de douceur et de tristesse, comme toutes les émotions qui pénetrent encor quelque-fois jusqu'à mon cœur. (OC 1:1089-90, emphasis added) [End Page 132] Like the preceding anecdote, this one recounts a chance event as the occasion for émotion. Both are sweet memories insofar as the other's affection for the subject was made manifest by unmistakable signs: actions, gestures, and bodily eruptions like cries or tears. They also share a particular trajectory, which is most apparent in the scene between the old man and the child. The dreamy walker has been startled out of his reverie by the shock of an outside force, the child's impulsive embrace. Seeing the benevolent face of the boy, he is moved, "mes entrailles s'émurent." The movement of émouvoir draws the subject out of himself into a social space where he becomes an object for others. There he is seized by the knees, by the genoux, that is, also by the jenous, where the singular I and the plural we gap into each other and leave a trace of inappropriable otherness. Later on, we'll come back to this recollection so as to read there a scene of Rousseau seized by writing in his body. The space of the je-nous is always potentially the danger zone for the walker-writer, the agitated zone of plural passions he has fled. In the encounter with the child, this dangerous move is compensated by the face "me regardant d'un...

Marie-Joseph Lagrange: Une biographie critique (review)

Late Modern European Marie-Joseph Lagrange. Une biographie critique. By Bernard Montagnes. (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf. 2004. Pp. 625. euro49 paperback.) Through his publication of correspondence, related documents, his own interpretive writings, Bernard Montagnes has augmented appreciably our understanding of the Dominican biblical scholar, M.-J. Lagrange (1855-1938), the Ecole biblique the Revue biblique he founded (in 1890 1892 respectively), the ecclesiastical climate in which he worked. Lagrange not only founded a school at Jerusalem; he became head of a school of whose methodological orientation he shaped:the joining of the observation of the land to the study of texts, co-ordinating historical method to the rule of faith, while practicing a theological-critical exegesis (p. 11). This was not an easy program to execute, even under Leo XIII. Under Pius X it became increasingly difficult, complicated on the one hand by the assimilation of Lagrange's approach to Alfred Loisy's (the proximity in publication of the Dominican's La Methode historique [1903] to that of Loisy's L'Evangile et l'Eglise [1902] gave Lagrange's book the appearance of a manifesto rather than the assessment of the current state of he intended). On the other hand, the critical evaluation of archaeological sites in the Holy Land complicated relations with Franciscans who had vested interests in maintaining traditional attributions, while Jesuit efforts to establish extend their Institut biblique at Rome led to rivalries with the Ecole biblique. An ecclesiastical climate that subjected writings on scripture to close surveillance judged some of Lagrange's writings on Genesis other sensitive topics inopportune and therefore unpublishable, also affected accounts of the Dominican's life work. In 1953 a life of Lagrange authored by his close associate Pere Louis-Hugues Vincent, was denied authorizatiion for publication by Dominican censors superiors. Lagrange's Souvenirs personnels, written over the 1920's 1930's, did not appear until 1964. In the original text Lagrange had positioned himself: Incontestably, in the last twenty years of the XLXth century, a renewal, a modernization-the term is Loisy's-of was desired. In this sense, was a Modernist, and, dare say, with the encouragement of Leo XIII (p. 450). The censor substituted a bland I was modern, substantially altering the sense. This biography represents an expanded version of Montagne's earlier effort, Le pere Lagrange, 1855-1938. L'exegese catholique dans la crise moderniste (1995), augmenting that study by several chapters that incorporate material apparently deemed too delicate for earlier accounts, including discussion of unpublishable writings difficulties with Franciscans, Assumptionists, Jesuits. …

Material Girl: Becoming and Unbecoming in Marie Redonnet's Forever Valley

Marie Redonnet's Forever Valley (1986) poses numerous riddles, many of which are never fully resolvable. The first puzzle is surely title itself. The fact that novel is named after village where first-person narrator lives fails to clarify why either name is in English, when text itself is written in French. The location of village is unclear, although it appears to be situated in some part of Western world, or at least in a Westernized area, given institutions that are found there: a presbytery, a church and a brothel (previously school and town hall). The geographical details are no more helpful in placing Forever Valley. The region is dry and mountainous, but lower valley supports dairy farms; it is located near a border. The temporal setting is similarly vague, although, again, there are clues: brothel has electricity, but presbytery and lower valley do not (Forever Valley [FV] 19); plumbing at presbytery is primitive (FV 74). Jean-Claude Lebrun and Claude Prevost have described Redonnet's novels as curieuses regions, mi-reelles mi-irreelles: [O]n se croit 'chez soi,'tout en etant quelque peu ailleurs (194, 195). Katharine Gingrass-Conley speaks of [t]he time-space dimension [... that] belongs more to realm of mythology than to an historical (51). Other elements of text are equally elusive. The novel presents itself as a first-person account, and it reads something like a journal. The reader understands that time passes between chapters, as indicated by ongoing developments in plot. Nevertheless narrator insists repeatedly that she is illiterate. She only recognizes one word at beginning of novel: Le pere [...] a essaye de m'apprendre a ecole et mairie, mais je melange les deux mots. Je melange tous les mots. [...] dancing [...]. C'est bien seul mot que je peux lire (FV 12-13). By end she has learned only one other word, barrage (FV 124). The fact that narrator never assigns herself either a first or last name is also highly provocative, and accords her an ambiguity consistent with that of other characters. She lives in presbytery with le pere, and it is impossible to know if he is a father (a priest), or her father (Van Der Starre 60). The other characters are identified only by their profession (le douanier en chef, les filles de la laiterie, les bergers), or are given only a first name--and an unusual one at that, at least in French: Massi is proprietor of brothel; Ted, Fred and Bob are among its clients. The story-line is also disconcerting, to say least. The narrator, who we learn is a prepubescent sixteen-year-old girl, goes to work at Massi's brothel, with father's blessing. But this eerie world possesses an accelerated temporality. Within just four weeks, her career as a prostitute will come to an end, and soon after Forever Valley will be flooded when a dam is built to provide hydroelectric power to what is only called the lower valley. In spite of passing of time and many developments in plot, however, narrator will never mature physically. Redonnet's corpus has been aptly compared to fairy tales, myths, fables, allegories, Biblical parables and dreams, both because of its indeterminate landscapes and characters, and because of archetypal kinds of quests in which protagonists are engaged. These characterizations are all more appropriate given Redonnet's startlingly plain, even inelegant language. Seemingly mundane sentences are built from an extremely ordinary vocabulary: Les phrases courtes se succedent (sujet, verbe, complement), en suivant exactement cours non-discriminatoire des choses (Went-Daoust 388); [s]es phrases sont courtes, les subordonnees et meme les adjectifs sont rares, les verbes sont uses avant d'avoir servi: etre, avoir, dire, faire ... (Lebrun, Prevost 193). The same nouns are, frequently and almost clumsily, repeated in close proximity to each other. …

Le père Eugène Prévost (1860–1946), Fondateur de la Fraternité Sacerdotale et des Oblates de Béthanie (review)

Le pere Eugene Prevost (1860-1946), Fondateur de la Fraternite Sacerdotale et des Oblates de Bethanie. By Jean Hamelin. (Sainte-Foy, Quebec: Les Presses de l'Universite Laval. 1999. Pp. xv, 647. Paperback.) At first sight, it might appear odd that the renowned Quebec historian Jean Hamelin would choose, for his swan song, the genre of commissioned biography. Yet writing this life of Father Eugene Prevost, the founder of the Sacerdotal Fraternity and the Oblates of Bethany, allowed Hamelin focus on spiritual questions in his last years, and do so without sacrificing any of his extraordinary intellectual rigor. He was charged produce an objective, scholarly biography in the event of beatification proceedings, and he acquitted himself brilliantly of the charge. Although he died before completing the final version of the manuscript, he entrusted the revisions his wife and fellow historian, Huguette Filteau. Clearly, Hamelin was both fascinated and troubled by Pr6vost, whom he represents as the product of a particular time and place. Prevost's family history is that of the nineteenth-century Quebec bourgeoisie: grandfather a Patriot in the Rebellions of 1837-38; father and uncles drifting gradually from Rouges moderate liberals alliance with conservatives at the time of Confederation; convent-educated mother too preoccupied with rearing fifteen children be overly zealous. The society in which he came of age was modeled on medieval Catholicism, the extent that religion was the basis for all interpersonal relations (p. 32). Prevost's Sulpician education culminated in his conversion at the age of seventeen and his determination, as he put it in a letter his parents, to become a great saint (p. 31). In 1881 Prevost entered the Society of the Most Holy Sacrament, founded in Paris in 1856. He discovered, his horror, that in France his world view was embattled rather than dominant. He had do his novitiate in Brussels, the order's novitiate outside of Paris having fallen victim the Third Republic's first wave of anticlerical laws in 1880. He then pursued his studies in Rome, received ordination there in 1887, and returned Paris plunge into the fray. He had a gift for fund-raising in the city's Catholic and aristocratic milieux, as well as for publicity and propaganda. In 1889 he collaborated with the Assumptionists in organizing a veritable counter-centennial in the form of a spectacular pilgrimage Lourdes. It took place on the Feast of the Assumption, one month after the insane exaltation of the rights of man (p. 81) on July 14. Curiously, Prevost was virtually oblivious public affairs in the 1890's, when France was torn apart by the Dreyfus Affair. He was apparently preoccupied by power struggles within the order, which he left in 1900 found a new community for men and for women. The Sacerdotal Fraternity, which received papal approval in 1901, combined contemplation with an active ministry in support of priests. Its sister order, the Oblates of the Most Holy Sacrament, supported this mission by performing household and secretarial chores. Provost's first female recruit was his younger sister Ninette, whom he had been grooming for religious life since the age of eight. …

Tableau and Coup de Theatre: On the Social Psychology of Diderot's Bourgeois Tragedy

T-*_ HE BOURGEOIS DRAMA is the first which developed out of a conscious class conflict. It is the first which aimed at giving expression to the ways of feeling and thinking of a class struggling for freedom and power, and at showing relationship to the other classes. It follows, therefore, that in general, both classes must appear in the drama, the class which is struggling as well as the one against which the struggle takes place.' This view was advanced by Georg Lukacs in 1914, in an essay entitled On the Sociology of Modern Drama. Forty years later, Arnold Hauser wrote in his Social History of Art and Literature that bourgeois drama is the first which makes social conflict its explicit subject matter and which openly places itself in the service of the class struggle.2 These observations are contradicted in an unsettling manner by the works which introduced the new genre in England, France, and Germany in the eighteenth century: Lillo's London Merchant (1731), Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson (1755), and Diderot's Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Pere de famille (1758). None of these plays depicts the conflict between the middle class and the nobility. Lessing's and Diderot's heroes, Sir William Sampson and M. d'Orbesson, belong to the aristocracy, not the bourgeoisie. To be sure, there are plays which conform much more closely to the descriptions given by Lukacs and Hauser, for example, Lessing's Emilia Galotti and Lenz's Hofmeister; however, as both of these were written in the 1770s, they can hardly reflect the conditions under which the genre first emerged. And an older bourgeois

Diderot's Own Miss Sara Sampson

SCHOLARS familiar with the details of Lessing's enthusiasm for Diderot's theories concerning the middle-class drama and for his serious comedy, Le Pere de famille, have always had to conclude regretfully that Diderot did not reciprocate with any tangible interest in Lessing. There have been some attempts to identify Diderot as the author of an anonymous article in the Journal Etranger of December 1761, which favorably reviewed Lessing's Miss Sara Sampson, but the assumption has never had general credence.1 Yet there is now proof from another quarter that, even if Diderot was unaware of Lessing's more masterly productions, he was at least actively interested over a period of years in this very play, Miss Sara Sampson. He was, in fact, planning to return the compliment which Lessing had paid him (whether Diderot knew of the compliment or not) in presenting Das Theater des Herrn Diderot to the German public in 1760. It was in connection with this plan that Diderot acquired his personal translation of Miss Sara, which until now has lain in obscurity.2 In the early 1760s, not long after the appearance of Lessing's Theater translation (although I do not want to stress this coincidence overmuch), Diderot had in mind to publish a number of bourgeois tragedies. His purpose, aside from that of acquainting the French with some foreign examples of the new domestic style in drama, was to point out that a bourgeois tragedy had been written in French already and that this could be done again with profit. He listed the titles of the plays in a little essay3 which he meant to put as a preface to his publication: Sylvie by Landois,4 The London Merchant by Lillo, The Gamester by Moore, and Miss Sara Sampson. At one time he also contemplated adding