Miroir De Research Articles

Marguerite de Navarre: A Critical Companion. By Emily Butterworth

This book amply fulfils the aims stated on its cover: ‘to offer a guide to the critical tradition on Marguerite’s work along with new readings of her texts, revealing both the historical specificity of her writing and its continuing relevance’. Distinguishing itself from the Brill Companion to Marguerite de Navarre (2013), which comprises a series of studies by different scholars of particular works, this single-authored volume is organized thematically. Emily Butterworth devotes most attention to the short-story collection, L’Heptaméron, which is brought into fruitful dialogue with other texts — plays, poems of diverse genres, and letters — discussed in relation to five major topics and in terms of historical realities and imaginary creations. Chapter 1, ‘Communities’, examines Marguerite in the contexts of family, court, and the writers in her circle, but also the communities figured in the Heptaméron and projected with a view to be enacted in her theatre. Chapter 2, ‘Religion’, discusses the ideological and political context of the Reformation and Marguerite’s support of the group known as Evangelicals, before turning to her first publication, the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, and the all-important notion of ‘cuyder’ [false pride] that runs throughout her entire œuvre. Chapter 3, ‘Politics’, deals with Marguerite’s 1525 embassy to Madrid as represented in correspondence; the politics of royal marriages; the Heptaméron’s treatment of justice and authority; and the portrayal of the author in that work as ‘an ideal overlord: the last resort of the oppressed, a conduit of justice, and a defender of the vulnerable’ (p. 96). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus in particular on the Heptaméron, discussed in relation to ‘Women and Men’, ‘Desire’, and ‘Form and Technique’. They offer illuminating readings of a number of tales, drawing on a range of critics and approaches — notably psychoanalytic — and an overview of relevant genres or literary modes, such as dialogue, conversation, nouvelle, and histoire. While inaccuracies are few, the storyteller Longarine is presented as the beloved of Dagoucin (p. 126) and Saffredent (p. 172). In fact, one of these men is the serviteur of Longarine, the other of Parlemente; the particular relationships are never specified. It is Parlemente who has two serviteurs, Dagoucin or Saffredent and Simontault. Moreover, while critics often state that the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse was ‘censured’ (p. 20) or ‘momentarily condemned’ (p. 53), the facts remain nebulous. No formal censure, it seems, was ever formulated, although, had François Ier not intervened, this might perhaps have ensued. The correct date of the second, Gruget edition of the Heptaméron is 1559 (p. 196) not 1558 (p. 177). Butterworth’s style is engaging, as numerous well-turned phrases attest: the Heptaméron is ‘life-affirming, open-ended, quarrelsome, yet conciliatory’ (p. 52). The consistent explanation of literary-historical terms — from ‘Renaissance’ and ‘Reformation’ to ‘direct/indirect discourse’ and ‘frame narrative’ — ensures the book’s appeal to a broad audience. Useful to specialists, it also offers the undergraduate or general reader with limited background knowledge an excellent introduction, scholarly yet accessible, concise yet comprehensive.

Reading Marguerite de Navarre with Psychoanalysis

Abstract: This article pays homage to Robert D. Cottrell’s significant contributions to Marguerite de Navarre studies, particularly his use of structuralist psychoanalysis, in interpreting both her spiritual and secular texts. While such an approach might seem anachronistic, Marguerite herself has been described as a fine psychologist avant la lettre . Her writings even had an influence on the seminars of Jacques Lacan, who confessed that the Heptaméron inspired him throughout his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. One of the striking aspects of Cottrell’s body of work is that, for him, reading with psychoanalysis never means reading biographically: unlike some other critics, he always focuses on analyzing texts rather than the lives of their authors. Thus, we explore some of the rhetorical strategies he underscores, such as Marguerite’s use of anaphora and chiasmus, which appear to have a kind of mimetic function in her devotional mirror-poems, Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse and Miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié . We also analyze Cottrell’s use of Lacan’s three registers—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real—to illuminate the desire for union between human subject and divine Object in these spiritual mirrors. Finally, we consider promising avenues opened up by Cottrell’s readings, namely the theatricality and performativity of Marguerite’s works, some of which he likens to spiritual exercises. Without a doubt, one of Cottrell’s greatest contributions is to have treated all of the queen’s writings not only as equally important, but also as flowing from a deeply spiritual source.

Le Miroir de Jésus Christ crucifié dans le champ des textes dévotionnels

Abstract: The Miroir de Jesus Christ crucifié , written by Marguerite de Navarre shortly before her death (1549), is a devotional text, i.e . associated with the practice of prayer and spiritual exercises. It aims at arousing the experience of an inner transformation both in its author and in its reader. In this poem, the body of the Crucified, contemplated part by part, acts as an accusing mirror in which the worshipper sees her/his own “darkness”, and at the same time as an illuminating mirror through which the soul gradually perceives the “clarity” of divine charity until it reaches the threshold of annihilation as a prelude to mystical union. The poem is therefore a meditation on the Passion and belongs to a long and dense tradition of texts, from the Bible to contemporary spiritual literature, which work on the same motifs. This study adopts the point of view of the editor of the poem, anxious to identify its sources correctly. It shows how the devotional character of the text and its belonging to a particularly rich and uninterrupted meditative tradition modify the constraints and difficulties of this work. Getting lost in a labyrinth of motifs reflected as far as the eye can see in countless texts is an indispensable step, but the search for models allowing to clarify certain choices of composition of the poem is the means to deepen the reflection on its mode of operation, even if it does not deliver the keys for its understanding.

Reflection, Representation, Religion: André Caplet’s Le Miroir de Jésus

André Caplet’s Le Miroir de Jésus (1923), a song cycle scored for mezzo soprano soloist, women’s choir, string quartet, and two harps, has a lush sound world and dramatic vocal declamation, and it was immediately recognized as a masterpiece by the Parisian musical press. The work’s religious topic—mysteries of the rosary—has long been taken as the unambiguous sign that the piece and its composer were unapologetically Catholic, like the author of the poems, the convert Henri Ghéon. In the context of a secular French nation, unambiguous Catholicism can easily signal reactionary politics. Moreover, since it does not project images of anarchy, flappers, or committed nonchalance toward morality, when interpreted vis-à-vis the narrative of French musical aesthetics in the 1920s, the work’s status changed from masterpiece to footnote. Yet, though the work’s early reception by Catholic writers cemented its classification as a sacred work, Caplet’s own goals were less clear. Through a comparative musical analysis of characteristics that Le Miroir shares with Caplet’s secular works whose themes come from classicism or mystery, I demonstrate his agnostic aesthetic. Through an investigation of archival sources relating to Caplet’s smaller contemporaneous projects, including a 1923 setting of a poem by Baudelaire, his contribution to La Revue musicale’s 1924 Le Tombeau de Ronsard, and his response to a 1924 survey about “new music,” Caplet’s interest in classicism emerges as a salient context for understanding his largest postwar composition. Additionally Caplet’s real-time documentation of his creative process and goals in detailed correspondence with his wife, Geneviève, contributes further evidence of Caplet’s pragmatism. Rather than moralistic and reactionary, Le Miroir can be understood in the context of postwar artists attempting to render spirituality less institutional and more personal.

Deux écrits pastoraux de Jean de Varennes: L’Épître du Miroir de chrétienté et La Médecine de l’âme en l’article de la mort

An ardent reformer, known for the positions he adopted in the crisis of the Great Schism and the virulence of his personal quarrel with the archbishop of Reims Guy de Roye, Jean de Varennes was an extremely popular preacher in the later, eremitical years of his life (1392-1396?). He was also the little known author of two short vernacular works that anticipate Jean Gerson’s pastoral publications: L’Épître du Miroir de chrétienté and La Médecine de l’âme en l’article de la mort. The article analyzes his written works, which happily combine a studied style and efficiency; it then traces their tradition and reception, and proposes a first edition that paradoxically shows their perfect conformity with the most official teachings of the Church.

Ruth Thomas, At the cutting edge of ortho-typography: a partly-corrected proof-sheet of Marguerite de Navarre’s “Miroir de l’ame pecheresse” (1533), and its connections to the “Briefve d

Ruth Thomas, At the cutting edge of ortho-typography: a partly-corrected proof-sheet of Marguerite de Navarre’s “Miroir de l’ame pecheresse” (1533), and its connections to the “Briefve d

Les phraséologismes français à des composantes culinaires en tant que miroir de la mentalité

The main concepts of the research were specified: phraseology, language picture of the world, concept. The idioms with the culinary and gastronomic component were distinguished and analyzed from the collection of 1001 Favourite Expression of the by Jacques Plannel. It was found that the number of these idioms is 11%. Their thematic and phraseological semantic classifications were developed on the basis of food products (bread, wine, fish, butter, etc.), the way of their consumption (to eat, to drink, to swallow, etc.), a form of reflection of reality: nomination, action, qualitative characteristic, periphrasis, etc. There were identified and considered 62 concepts, verbalized in the studied idioms, and according to the number of idioms that contain them, their priority in the French mentality was determined.

Reinscribing the Feminine in La navire and Le miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié

In La navire and Le miroir de Jhesus Christ crucifié, Marguerite de Navarre uses a death-in-life trope to help her readers experience these texts as a personal space for acknowledging their attachment to earthly struggles. Through the debate form, she also steers her readers toward questioning conventional images of faith and striving to attain the wisdom envisioned by the Evangelical movement. The transformative power of death allows readers to link reading to silent meditation, cutting oneself off from the outside world, as Marguerite makes room for a more integrative voice that echoes her vision of a forgiving and charitable God.

Body Language

Name: Charlotte Houberg Main Subject: Classical Singing Research Supervisor: Gerda van Zelm Title of Research: Body language of a singer on stage Research Question: How can a singer on stage use his body language to support his expression? Summary of Results: By the use of different research methods, there have been created ideas and strategies to become aware of your body language and how to use it in a confident way on stage. Body language is, next to singing, an equally important communication tool for singers on stage. It shows knowledge of the movements of the body and understanding of the role or character. The libretto can be translated into body language, so the audience can understand it without knowing exactly what text is sung. It can be concluded that all body parts can be chosen to show a certain mood which fits within the role or character. Gestures do not have to be over- exaggerated, because the audience is able to see and interpret small signs, even from a distance. Consciously chosen body language is easier to decode than spontaneous body language and can be more convincing, even though the singer is not in that certain mood. Body language is part of the luggage of a singer and a tool for showing his expression and intentions. I chose for the form of a research paper, because I would like to share new or expanded knowledge with my colleagues by doing an in-depth research. Biography: Charlotte (1991) takes part in Studio 32, an opera studio of her teacher Henny Diemer. She sang the roles Amor (Cadmus et Hermione), Zerlina (Don Giovanni) and Bess (Porgy and Bess). She had a tour with Sinfonia Rotterdam and sang solo with several Dutch orchestras. In Jordan she performed Miroir de Peine of Andriessen with the Amman Orchestra. She has been invited for chamber concerts and has given song recitals on several stages of the Netherlands. From the oratorio repertoire she sings regularly the Matthew Passion (Bach) and the requiem (Fauré and Mozart). She will sing the role First Witch in the new opera of Andriessen (The Theatre of the World) in LA and Amsterdam.

A mística como crítica nas narrativas de mulheres medievais

O místico afirma a presença de Deus pela experiência que o alcança a partir de um processo de negação que possibilita a ele se libertar de todas as afirmações que pretendem enquadrar a Deus. Os textos místicos vão se constituir por narrativas de processos, caminhos, itinerários onde se fala do trabalho humano de busca desse Deus absolutamente transcendente que vindo a eles num encontro surpreendente, se revela muito maior do que seu pensamento é capaz de pensar e do que sua vontade é capaz de querer. Essa dialética que é fundamentalmente crítica - vai demonstrar a grande tradição mística que se desenvolve ao longo da história do cristianismo - faz ver o limite da condição humana e a impossibilidade que ela tem de abarcar o mistério inconcebível e “indisponível” que é Deus. Chama a atenção para a importância da humildade, virtude que é percebida como garantia de nobreza. Faz perceber que sem o reconhecimento da própria miséria não se abre espaço para a penetração de Deus. Essa crítica leva a uma grande liberdade e uma disposição livre ao amor. Entre os melhores testemunhos dessa vivência mística estão as narrativas de mulheres medievais, relatos apaixonados desse processo crítico de ascese para o encontro direto com Deus.Essa comunicação é um estudo, realizado através de metodologia bibliográfica e exploratória, sobre a potencialidade crítica da mística a partir das narrativas de mulheres medievais: Marguerite Porete e Mechthild de Magdeburg. Essas mulheres fazem parte do agrupamento espiritual das Beguinas. Movimento que se desenvolveu como alternativa de vida religiosa leiga na Renânia e Países Baixos. Marguerite Porete, mística e teóloga medieval, viveu entre a segunda metade do século XIII e início do século XIV. Procedente do Condado de Hainaut, cidade Valenciennes, região do Reno. A grande herança deixada por Marguerite Porete foi um livro, Le miroir de âmes simples e anéanties. Mechthild de Magdeburg, mística alemã, da Baixa Saxonia, nascida em 1210, entra na Beguinagem de Magdeburg em 1230. Desde criança é favorecida por revelações divinas e entre os anos 1250 e 1264, a conselho de seu diretor espiritual, escreve suas revelações, a obra que chega até nós com o seguinte título: Das fliebende Licht der Gottheit.

Jean Baudrillard: cynism or truth?

Baudrillard: a journey through his worksJean Baudrillard was one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century.Baudrillard, who died on 6th March 2007 in Paris, conceived an acute observation and, on many occasions, complex, ambiguous and difficult interpretation of contemporary society for him (and us). Reassuming the observations that revolve around the French philosophy's simulacra concept during the 1960's1, Baudrillard focused his attention on the relationship which is established between this concept and the vast, symbolic horizon produced by the simulative condition present in society.Considered as being the father of the simulacra concept and according to this author, postmodern society is differentiated from the previous period, the modern age, because of its being organised in compliance with a new, simulation logic and on the continuous interchange of images and signs. Differently, in fact, from modern society, which was structured according to the linear and precise production logic; current society is based on the proliferation of codes, models and signs and the new rules dictated by simulation.Some, important thematic nucleuses and perspectives emerged from his analysis and shall be expanded upon below.1. Illusion1.1 The value - signBaudrillard penetrated into a reality, which is like simulation, dominated by the sign, emptiness and nothingness, with the supremacy of bodies as appearance. Society is a game of appearances and signs, which creates artfulness and illusion, through a journey, which likens it to magic and make-believe.Baudrillard's analysis begins with an observation on the birth and development of consumption, as being an important, social language (Le Systeme des Objets, 1968), like something that pushes the continuous birth and growth of individual desires, in a never-ending vortex. Baudrillard studied how individuals perceived and consumed objects, according to a new language created by the consumer goods, themselves.In his observations, he classified objects into three different systems.1. The functional system that includes things with a univocal and immovable purpose, which includes furnishing. In fact, in the case of furnishings, items of furniture are set out according to strict directives, each item is placed in a precise position and defined on the basis of the human relations symbolising it.2. The marginal or non-functional system, containing collection, design and antique items. The latter is a system in which consumer goods stop being exclusively tangible goods, but represent a mental space, with a value established by the relationship of this object with the individual himself.3. The meta and dysfunctional system, which includes gadgets and robots. In this case, the function of the object is concluded through the automatism, which defines its degree of perfection. This system represents the object's dreamt personalisation: the most beautiful object to imitate.This perspective focuses attention on the objects' sphere of relations, consumer goods, which represent a coherent system of signs, which weakens, little by little, the material nature of primary needs. The new opaqueness of production and consumption social relations is thus materialised in the goods that, due to this reason, may become a sign.Accusing Marxism of placing production at the heart of social analysis and, in this way, not fully reflecting middle-class society (Le miroir de la production, 1973; Oublier Foucault, 1977), Baudrillard introduced the value-sign, which takes the place of use value and exchange value (Pour une critique de l'economie politique du signe, 1972; Le miroir de la production, 1973). As occurs in the present-giving system, the exchange object has now a value that is removed from its functional matrix and exchange value, but which is established by the object's symbolic value. In relation to the gift, in which its value is established by the relationship between the individuals, in the consumer society, the good's value is the result of the individual's relationship with the object and the object with all the other objects. …

Rousseau’s Hand: The Crafting of a Writer par by Angelica Goodden

Reviews 217 philosophers and thinkers (especially Guillaume Briçonnet and, more cautiously, Marsilio Ficino) on the queen’s verse and prose. Ford underscores images that reflect neo-Platonic ideas but also coincide with the writer’s evangelical religious views. Isabelle Garnier and Isabelle Patin thoroughly trace the publication and development of Marguerite’s poetry from its“militant”beginnings in the Miroir de l’âme pécheresse to the self-reflective text of the Miroir de Jésus-Christ crucifié. Reinier Leushuis’s article also emphasizes Christian self-consciousness in the Dialogue en forme de vision nocturne and La Navire. Though the comparisons with Petrarch are not as useful as his actual analysis of Marguerite’s poems, Leushuis exquisitely nuances our understanding of human agency in the queen’s work. The next chapter dealing with Les prisons builds on the theme of literary influence. Cynthia Skenazi points to reflections of courtly and philosophical literature in Les prisons and argues that Amy’s conversion in the narrative demonstrates “the power of literature to engender the reader’s quest for God’s love” (214). Skenazi interprets the polyphonic nature of the central story as urging readers to (re)consider key theological questions of grace, free will, faith, and love while realizing that human knowledge is incomplete at best. Similarly, Jan Miernowski elucidates the Chansons spirituelles’ transforming power on the enlightened and humbled hearer. He draws out significant themes and images across the songs that point to the contrition of soul necessary to receive the gift of divine grace. Olivier Millet’s treatment of the biblical and non-biblical plays situates them in relation to each other and summarizes their plots and the major tenants of evangelical and mystical spirituality that are also present in these dramatic works. Millet concludes that the plays prefigure the Heptaméron. The editors close the collection with an excellent synopsis of the similarities and differences in theme, genre, and subject matter between Marguerite’s most widely read prose work and her poetry. This volume gives historical, theological, and literary context to a wide range of works often neglected in editions dedicated to the queen’s better-known texts. Along with the extensive footnotes and bibliography, these refreshing studies are essential to any critic interested in this woman of letters. Virginia Military Institute Jeff Kendrick Goodden, Angelica. Rousseau’s Hand: The Crafting of a Writer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. ISBN 978-0-19-968383-3. Pp. 238. £55. Meting out the contradictions in both Rousseau’s life and oeuvre is a Herculean task, yet given its central place in the history of the Enlightenment, his puzzling relationship to the arts is one that demands further inquiry. Rousseau’s Hand reconciles Rousseau the artisan with Rousseau the author by demonstrating why the reluctant philosophe perceived a certain manner of writing as a useful craft and thus not incompatible with his worldview.As Goodden aptly argues,Rousseau sought to only write for the moral benefit of humanity, rather than publishing for money as many professional writers did. In the first chapter,“The Business of Making,” she provides a survey of Geneva’s tradition of craftsmanship, with a particular emphasis on horology and Rousseau’s family’s contribution to it. In the next chapter,“Writing (Down) Music,”she notes that his preoccupations with craft during his boyhood, along with his artisanal training, allowed him to get by financially later on in life when the written word fell short. His artisanal leanings also gave him the peace of mind to stop writing when it suited him, instead pursuing what he viewed as more worthwhile endeavors. Copying music in the 1760s in Paris, for example, and the automatism it entailed, provided him with great relief from the ordeals to which he was subjected as a writer and creator. In the following two chapters, “Art or Craft” and “Drama and Life,” the author elegantly shows how Rousseau was at times contradictory and at others consistent in his stance on the arts.She provides a rigorous chronological and formal analysis of his writings on the arts and craftsmanship and an overview of his activities as an artisan. The inclusion of Gravelot’s illustrations from Julie ou...

Narrations d’un nouveau siècle: romans et récits français (2001–2010) éd. par Bruno Blanckeman et Barbara Havercroft

Trauerspiel—the“mourning play”—and tragedy. Recognizing the divide between the genres, and, by extension, the gulf separating the shadowy German Baroque from the brilliance of French Classicism,is of particular importance to the volume’s contributors since they will endeavor to draw out how the Trauerspiel, as a genre, idea, or configuration , resides in celebrated texts of the grand siècle, and especially in the tragedies of Corneille and Racine. The editors gesture toward the imaginary: “We suggest paying attention to things that are not written, to the mourning drama of the unfinished project” (8). Valuing what academia habitually disdains—flights of fancy, blurred chronologies,and unfinished work—the study acknowledges how deducing,surmising, and hypothesizing are elemental practices of literary scholarship. Despite the repeated evocations of the nonexistent text, each contributor is a careful and knowledgeable reader of Benjamin’s existing text and aptly draws on the defining characteristics of the Trauerspiel to illuminate its presence in Pascal (Emma Gilby and Hall Bjornstad), Corneille (Claude Haas, Timothy Hampton, Katharine Ibbett, John D. Lyons, Hélène Merlin-Kajman),and Racine (Christopher Braider,Susan Maslan,and Éric Méchoulan). Although they focus on repetitive elements—“creatureliness,”a vision that“knows no eschatology,” melancholy princes, crooked crowns, intriguers and tyrant-martyrs— the readings are inspiring and innovative; they productively upset the“myth of French national exceptionalism that classicism sustains” (96). It is a pity the volume neglects to consider works that might genuinely have constituted a French Trauerspiel, i.e., the melancholy worlds of Hardy, de Viau, Tristan L’Hermite, or Rotrou. In ignoring these authors in favor of canonical ones,the contributors replicate a vision of the seventeenth century they have condemned. If Benjamin extensively read the“minor”authors of the German baroque, why would he not also have been drawn to the French ones? Still, rather than write off the categories of the baroque and the classical as reductive nonsense, the volume, capped off by Jane O. Newman’s“Afterword,”effectively models how to draw on these divisions to overcome entrenched chauvinistic barriers and envisage valuable correspondences between them. Wellesley College (MA) Hélène Bilis Blanckeman, Bruno, et Barbara Havercroft, éd. Narrations d’un nouveau siècle: romans et récits français (2001–2010). Paris: PSN, 2013. ISBN 978-2-87854-576-0. Pp. 320. 24 a. The 2011 Cerisy colloquium on the early twenty-first-century French novel resulted in this volume of twenty-three essays contributed by academics from Europe, Canada, and the United States. Beyond the editors’prefacing overview of the contributions , the opening essay reminds readers of a generic given of the novel: its inescapable negotiation with the “real.” The essay sets up useful categories in order to measure subtle but real innovations in twenty-first-century French novelistic production: 252 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 253 “le rapport au réel (référentiel, historique), le rapport au réel (autobiographique, biographique) [...] et enfin le rapport aux récits antérieurs, qui aboutit peut-être à une mise en question encore plus radicale du réel et du genre”(17). Five more sections of essays offer numerous examples of these negotiations with the so-called real.A first section, “Au regard du temps,” acknowledges novels with a relationship to history, especially recent history (World War II and Algeria, for instance). But unlike the novels of the 80s and 90s that accepted these histories as orthodoxy or reference, these newer narratives interrogate history, eschewing certainty in favor of ellipsis and even invention. The section titled “L’appel de la cité” stretches its thematic designation in order to accommodate essays on issues of individual and society, of “engagement”— including a more nuanced approach to the political and social responsibilities of the writer, of national identity (for pieds-noirs, for instance), and of human relationship to an increasingly alienated natural world. “Au miroir de soi” drills down on the question of intimacy revealed in autofictions; a polemic against exhibitionism is countered by other appreciations of the transformations of the“récit de soi”as it writes its own body. “Au miroir des livres” looks at quirky and erudite works in which the mind practices encyclop...

L’écrivain et son critique: une fratrie problématique éd. par Philippe Chardin et Marjorie Rousseau

Reviews 253 “le rapport au réel (référentiel, historique), le rapport au réel (autobiographique, biographique) [...] et enfin le rapport aux récits antérieurs, qui aboutit peut-être à une mise en question encore plus radicale du réel et du genre”(17). Five more sections of essays offer numerous examples of these negotiations with the so-called real.A first section, “Au regard du temps,” acknowledges novels with a relationship to history, especially recent history (World War II and Algeria, for instance). But unlike the novels of the 80s and 90s that accepted these histories as orthodoxy or reference, these newer narratives interrogate history, eschewing certainty in favor of ellipsis and even invention. The section titled “L’appel de la cité” stretches its thematic designation in order to accommodate essays on issues of individual and society, of “engagement”— including a more nuanced approach to the political and social responsibilities of the writer, of national identity (for pieds-noirs, for instance), and of human relationship to an increasingly alienated natural world. “Au miroir de soi” drills down on the question of intimacy revealed in autofictions; a polemic against exhibitionism is countered by other appreciations of the transformations of the“récit de soi”as it writes its own body. “Au miroir des livres” looks at quirky and erudite works in which the mind practices encyclopédisme, criticism or even erasure as it confronts texts ranging from library tome to tweeted ephemera.“À l’encre de la création”reports on renewed challenges to narrative authority, some offering a different approach to the écriture blanche of the last century, others exploiting the a-(chrono)-logical possibilities of electronic technologies. A final section, “Au (bon) vouloir des autres” offers a report on French texts translated and sold in the United States as a measure of literary reputation abroad followed by a second, somewhat playful essay: a “self-portrait” by Les particules élémentaires (Houellebecq’s 1998 novel) that comments self-knowledgeably and unapologetically on its own meanings. As the opening essay suggests, narrative is no simple matter when its relationship to the “real” cannot be pinned down, when authority is indiscernible, when the place of speaking is compromised, when“knowledge”is mediatized and digitized and de-categorized, and when familiar genres are cross-bred beyond recognition. If readers have doubted that the French novel has anything new to bring after the Nouveau and even the Nouveau Nouveau Roman, this collection will easily dissuade with its testimony to the scope, vitality, and intellectual challenges of the novel of the new millennium. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Chardin, Philippe, et Marjorie Rousseau, éd. L’écrivain et son critique: une fratrie problématique. Paris: Kimé, 2014. ISBN 987-2-84174-650-7. Pp. 567. 35 a. This massive collection of forty-one articles discusses attempts by literary critics to influence creative writers; the actual influence of critical theory on literary production; and creative writers who have also functioned as critics. In principle, this set of subjects certainly merits serious attention; in practice, however, it seems overly ambitious. Unfortunately, the brevity of the chapters (nine to fifteen pages) precludes any substantial development,and most of them create the impression that Comparative Literature is an activity in search of a method. Contributions predominantly treat authors from the eighteenth century to the present. They touch upon novels, theater, poetry, and essays, mainly from Western Europe and Latin America. Quite a few of them are influence studies by comparatists. Among the highlights are Daniel-Henri Pageaux’s contrast of impressionistic and proscriptive criticism, focused on the Geneva School; Jean-Louis Hoquette’s survey of the influence of English authors on eighteenth-century France, emphasizing Voltaire, Milton, Shakespeare, and Dryden; and Catherine Dumas’s contrast between theater in France and Spain from 1620–40, leading, respectively, to the triumph of Neoclassicism or of the Baroque, despite Corneille’s tragicomic masterpiece, Le Cid, misjudged as a failed pure tragedy. Emmanuelle Kaës offers an insightful analysis of how Claudel portrays burlesque critics in Le soulier de satin, as a riposte to the literary establishment’s hostile,uncomprehending judgments of Tête d’Or, while contrasting the sea as a...

Peinture et bibelot: prégnance du pictural dans l’œuvre de Joris-Karl Huysmans par Jérémy Lambert

the topics that interest them are treated elsewhere. For example, although there are only two essays in the chapter on the danse macabre, it is discussed in other chapters. The Parisian Cemetery of the Holy Innocents has no single chapter devoted to it, but figures prominently in several essays. A broad spectrum of genres including epic and lyric poetry, Arthurian literature, beast epic, and romance share space with chapters organized around lies and suicide, laughing at death, and image and text. Carlos Clamote Carreto investigates the spilling of the martyr’s blood and the dismemberment of the epic hero. Vicenta Hernandez Alvarez ponders the cortege of words (38) announcing epic deaths. Pierre-Gilles Girault, observing death is everywhere in the Middle Ages (62), focuses on the pilgrim and the warrior, both journeying towards salvation.Agnès Echène considers the fatherless hero. Laurence Cousteix notes Merlin’s dis- and re-appearance in Arthurian literature. Lydie Lansard addresses the Passion of Christ in vernacular versions of the Gospel of Nicodemus. Jean-Louis Benoit expertly considers miracle stories, which are didactic but teach literarily rather than directly, and in which death lies on the path to eternal salvation.Alexandra-Kathrin StanislawKemenah provides close readings of Eustache Deschamps’s poems on senescence, wisdom and the ubi sunt motif. Caroline Denhez investigates the strange links between dance/(life) and death in the danse macabre. Karin Becker reads Martial D’Aubergne’s neglected Danse de femmes, based on an exhaustive tracing of the development of the danse macabre. ZoéVerveropoulou traces death’s cathartic working out in farce, a genre predicated on all death destroys: the body and its functions. Martijn Rus argues that in the Renaissance, death lost its absolute horror. Natalie Vrticka ponders post mortem silences and speech as signifiers of consolation and dis-illusion. Ji-Hyun Philippa Kim also examines stillness whether suicide or swoon. Ian Laurie stretches the death motif to argue compellingly that Eustache Deschamps suffered a double death, corporeal and literary.The Miroir de mariage,possibly three different works,may have been smoothed into cohesion by the poet himself, though interrupted by his death. Julie Singer locates Pierre de Hautville in indestructible loci, the cemetery, the poet’s own work, and the reader. Caroline Denhez returns the reader to the danse macabre and the inescapable connections between death and suffering, depicted satirically as the reader is asked to consider making his own good end. The volume concludes with Jean-François KostaTh éfaine’s own edition of Isabeau de Bavière’s will.This document lets us hear the voice of a medieval queen, who recognizes the diverse and deadly perils of her century. Stevens Institute of Technology (NJ) Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi Lambert, Jérémy. Peinture et bibelot: prégnance du pictural dans l’œuvre de Joris-Karl Huysmans. Paris: Champion, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7453-2495-5. Pp. 227. 25 a. Contemporary interest in exploring ways in which text and image are linked should make this careful study of the close relationship between Huysmans’s writing 276 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 277 and the art of painting of interest to many. Lambert describes and analyzes what he calls the pictorial esthetic that organizes Huysmans’s life and oeuvre, beginning with a short chapter on Huysmans’s genetic and esthetic heritage. Born into a family of painters, the young Huysmans visited his father in his studio every evening until he died when Huysmans was only eight. Lambert interprets Huysmans’s life—and work—as a quest for meaning inspired by idealization of the lost father. Substituting the pen for a paintbrush, perhaps, Lambert posits, due to a lack of confidence in his own talent for painting, Huysmans sought Baudelairean correspondences between word and image, literature and painting, this world and another, in all he did. He often portrayed aspects of his life and self-image in his characters, confirmed aesthetes (and bachelors) who sought to become their own creators by making of their lives original and unreproducible works of art. This compelling story gets somewhat lost as Peinture et bibelot progresses. Lambert offers a highly structured, carefully documented, and extremely dense study of various images, influences...

Hakky-Bey and His Journal Le Miroir de l’Art Musulman, or, Mirʾāt-ı ṣanāyiʿ-i islāmiye (1898)

A bilingual periodical published in 1898, titled Le Miroir de l’Art Musulman for its French audience and Mirʾāt-ı ṣanāyiʿ-i islāmiye for the Ottoman one, introduced its readership to the world of Islamic art in two idiosyncratic issues. A certain Hakky-Bey, the sole author behind these issues and a well-regarded antiques dealer in Paris, intended to introduce his vast collection to readers through meticulously arranged lithographs of his objects. In other words, he told the story of Islamic art through exemplary items from his collection. In parsing the contents of the journal, this article attempts to construct Hakky-Bey’s biography and reveal the sociopolitical and cultural routes, as well as the cosmopolitan networks, that shaped the unexpected trajectory of his career. As an independent Ottoman scholar, Hakky-Bey played a crucial role in the emerging field of Islamic art at the end of the nineteenth century, for which scholarship has given undue credit to European “Islamophiles.”

French Women Authors: The Significance of the Spiritual (1400–2000) ed. by Kelsey L. Haskett, Holly Faith Nelson

manuscript or a narrator who witnessed personally the events portrayed, bolstered by constant “attestations de véracité du narrateur” (107). She points out repeatedly the (well-known) use of these techniques by all of the novelists in her study and finishes by attempting to demonstrate, rather unconvincingly, that Diderot uses similar strategies in his art criticism. Hakim tries, moreover, to persuade the reader that the blatant incoherence and the incompletion of Sandras’s novels, as well as minor inconsistencies and chronological mistakes in the other novels, are actually done on purpose to let readers know they are reading a work of fiction.Although pure conjecture , this is the principal theoretical contribution of her study. In a rather short final chapter, Hakim discusses the metaleptic character of these works, which all blur the line between fiction and reality,and suggests that this“remise en question des frontières entre les deux mondes” (236) produces extreme anguish in the reader. Hakim’s study is well written and contains a good summary of some of the best thought on the body of fiction presented here. It offers, however, few original insights and proposes a highly fragile thesis that she herself is moved to put into question in her conclusion, suggesting that what she has presented (at great length) as signs of fiction might in fact be, on the contrary, proof of historical authenticity (258). This rather nonchalant pirouette at the end seems to be an attempt to short-circuit highly foreseeable criticism of her thesis, but it only serves to make her critical position more tenuous. Davidson College (NC) Alan J. Singerman Haskett, Kelsey L., and Holly Faith Nelson, eds. French Women Authors: The Significance of the Spiritual (1400–2000). Newark: UP of Delaware, 2013. ISBN 978-1-61149-428-0. Pp. xiii + 208. $70. This collective work traces the enduring presence of spirituality in the lives and writings of a selection of French women authors, as well as its evolution across the centuries.The spiritual journeys and writings of the authors included in these essays are firmly located in their social, cultural, and political milieu. Holly Faith Nelson and Katharine Bubel describe the complex interdependence of the spiritual and the worldly in Christine de Pizan’s writings. They maintain that Pizan’s religious convictions are manifested even in her ‘lighter’ works, and that the central concern in the major part of Pizan’s writings is ethics. Sinda Vanderpool examines Marguerite de Navarre’s devotional poem,“Le miroir de lame pecheresse,”situating the poem within Marguerite de Navarre’s reformist vision, revealing her reflections on her own sinfulness and spiritual transformation,and her desire to teach and evangelize.Mme Guyon forged her own spiritual path in seventeenth-century France,and described that path in her prayer manual, Le moyen court et facile de faire oraison, in order to guide her readers. Deborah Sullivan-Trainor describes Guyon’s life and her commitment to quietism, as well as the turmoil in which she became involved by her public and published commitment to 232 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 233 this form of mysticism. Hadley Wood considers spirituality in Mme de Lafayette’s Princesse de Clèves, and sees the novel’s central concern as the tension between virtue and the court. She contends that the Princess’s struggle and its resolution would have a clear religious resonance for Lafayette’s contemporaries. Joanne M. McKeown considers four novels by eighteenth-century female authors, whose characters face overwhelming problems on the domestic front. Those who are able to bear their situation do so by turning to God, either through what McKeown calls ‘home-based spirituality,’or by entering the religious life.These authors thus refute Diderot’s reliance on reason. Kelsey L. Haskett examines two of George Sand’s novels in which religion plays a transformative role in human affairs. She demonstrates Sand’s search for spirituality in Indiana and her quest for social reform in Le compagnon du Tour de France. In another essay, Haskell focuses on the spiritual undercurrents of Marguerite Duras’s works.She observes the longing for spiritual transformation that inhabits many of Duras’s characters, which is manifested in personal transformation and...

Miroir des Antilles: Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé—Francofonia 61 ed. by Catherine Maubon, Sara Tagliacozzo

production that move seamlessly from landscape to poem and back again. Mackenzie’s reconsideration of Du Bellay’s L’Olive shows how the poet hijacks the Petrarchan love lyric in order to celebrate the rivers of his Angevine homeland. In the later Regrets, however , the poet translates the trauma of the Roman landscape as well as the mundane economic concerns facing him upon his return to France into a volume documenting the limits of idealization. Mackenzie shows that the poets Pontus de Tyard and Belleau were similarly conscious of the gap between ideal and real, and emphasized the constructed nature of their poetic landscapes in order to point to the impossibility of achieving pastoral, classical peace in their world. In the fifth chapter, Mackenzie calls attention to growing environmental threats to the French landscape during this period, suggesting that the Pléiade poets addressed the alarming problems of water pollution and deforestation.Her fascinating examination of Ronsard’s complex relation to Bernard Palissy, a self-made Protestant who recommended the cutting of trees as a means of increasing national wealth, sheds new light on the poet’s blend of nostalgia and selfglorification . In the sixth and final chapter, Mackenzie examines Vauquelin’s Foresteries and Jacques Peletier’s La Savoye, in which both authors attempt to construct poetic refuges of hope against growing consciousness of the violence of history, refuges that are increasingly difficult to locate inside of France. Indeed, as Mackenzie notes in her conclusion, the religious wars that nearly tore the nascent country to pieces would put an end to poetic efforts to construct and critique the ideal nation, and “mere landscape description”was supplanted by efforts to discern divine favor and intent through the study of the world (183). Mackenzie’s original study brings a fresh perspective to French Renaissance poetry, allowing specialists and non-specialists alike to appreciate the complex relationship between the work of the Pléiade poets and the forces shaping the French landscape. Her readings are never reductive; rather, they demonstrate a rare attention to detail and nuance—very much in keeping with her intent, stated in the introduction, of producing a“situated and specific study: a generational moment during which poetry, consciously contrasted with other cultural discourses, staged a particular landscape in a particular way” (12). The result is a book that opens new avenues not only for the study of the French Renaissance but, through its careful specificity , for ongoing efforts to appreciate the complex and fascinating intersection between literature and material culture. University of Illinois, Chicago Ellen McClure Maubon, Catherine, et Sara Tagliacozzo, éd. Miroir des Antilles: Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé—Francofonia 61. Florence: Olschki, 2011. ISSN 1121-953X. Pp. 243. 44 a. This volume features papers from a 2010 University of Siena conference on the legacy of Aimé Césaire and négritude in Antillean literature. The editors maintain that 236 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 237 despite the créolistes’polemic about their filiation to Césaire, his legacy as“un héritage d’insoumission” continues, as found in Maryse Condé’s work (4). Jacques Coursil’s linguistic review of the neologism elucidates what is at stake (“La grammaire de Caliban”): the root “nègr-” posits “la race comme essence,” as celebrated by Léopold Sédar Senghor and foundational in mythic perceptions of Africa; the suffix “-itude” implies narrative, seen in Césaire’s portrayal of “la condition nègre” (17), the history of the effects of colonialism worldwide. Rather than a cry of racial pride, Césaire’s négritude is an act, the act of writing (15). As Bénédicte Monville De Cecco and Antonelle Emina elaborate, his work, whether poetry, theater, or the letter to Maurice Thorez resigning from the French Communist Party, performs a cry for liberation. Legacies and influences run both ways: the volume’s title pays homage to Michel Leiris (Au miroir de l’Afrique), a rebel in ethnography. Catherine Maubon explores Césaire’s influence on Leiris, while Lilian Pestre de Almeida reads Le roi Christophe in dialogue with theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Writers of the next generation deconstruct Senghor’s racialized négritude and carry on...

Wayward Sons and Failing Fathers:

It has been a long time since anyone has taken seriously the possibility that a literary source might ever be identified for Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale. The reason for this is not simply that this tale has been preserved only in what appears to be an accidentally truncated form.1 Even at fifty-eight lines long, it remains a substantial “stub,” and it provides a number of potential clues to the nature of the story that Chaucer probably intended to tell.2 Indeed, it defines its dramatis personae and its thematic concerns so fully as to create what is actually quite a detailed profile for the identity of its source, and it is perhaps precisely because this profile is so detailed that it has always seemed so difficult to find an exact enough match for it among all the classical or medieval stories that Chaucer is likely to have known. In other words, it is not an absence of

The Juvenile Translations of Elizabeth Tudor

The translations made by the Princess Elizabeth between 1544 and 1547/8 were undertaken as New Year gifts for members of her family. This article analyses the contexts of, and choices made in, the surviving productions. All are translations of religious texts: her stepmother Katherine Parr's Prayers or Medytacions, Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir de l'âme pecheresse, Jean Calvin's Institution de la religion chrestienne (Chapter 1), and a sermon from the Italian of Bernardino Ochino. In their different ways, all can be seen as reflecting the distinctive pressures brought about by Henry VIII's personalizing of political and religious issues.