Nouvelle Revue Research Articles

Strange Fruit & Other Plays by Harold Jaffe

Reviewed by: Strange Fruit & Other Plays by Harold Jaffe R. Sebastian Bennett (bio) strange fruit & other plays Harold Jaffe Black Scat Books https://blackscatbooks.com/2021/10/#:~:text=Harold%20Jaffe's%20new%20collection,we%20find%20ourselves%20in%20today. 144 pages; Print, $14.95 Harold Jaffe's latest volume, Strange Fruit & Other Plays, is a compelling exploration of Art and History. The work comprises a selection of dramatic texts, a new literary form for Jaffe, author of more than thirty books. The title of the book derives from Billie Holiday's anthemic song, "Strange Fruit," about the horror of a lynching in the South. The song was written by a Jewish high school teacher from the Bronx, who was also a writer and activist. He handed it to Billie Holiday after a gig in a Greenwich Village club. The song immediately moved her. Jaffe's dramas, which themselves expose racial issues and endorse humanistic cooperation, explore sociocultural and political themes and trends through a combination of character analyses and macroscopic investigations of cultural moments/shifts over the past century. The net result is a fresh, acute rendering of and commentary on artistic dimensions—especially as they relate to cultural crises. Jaffe's dramas can be divided into those that are primarily diagnostic representations and those that are aspirational representations—in the latter case pointing to aspects of society that could or should be ameliorated. As Jaffe has done so well in many of his other texts, his dramas diagnose issues that live at the core of current and historical conflicts, including racism, gender inequality, excessive commercialism (i.e., excessive selfishness). Other dramas include more aspirational themes, such as the function of art as a dream [End Page 155] that releases us from the confines and restrictions of our materialistic world; and the theme of return to innocence—a return to our purest, most spiritually complete form as children, a motif that expands on similar dynamics in the works of Blake, Whitman, and Wordsworth. From the basal position, Jaffe explores the art-making process, including consideration of the enigmatic question of whether the goal of art is fully met in its creation, or whether art is epistemologically furthered, in an augmented observer effect, via its distribution, acclaim, or status. This juxtaposition is seen most pointedly in the drama Artaud/Bataille, wherein Antonin Artaud "is writing to Jacques Riviere, literary editor of the important journal Nouvelle Revue Francais," after Artaud's work is rejected. Artaud queries, What if I were to inform you that … the so-called literary world, such as you have devoted your professional life to, means to me nothing. Less than nothing. It is precisely the "bleeding out into the absolute" which alone compels me. Jaffe expands his inquiry into status to include consideration of the commercialization of brands, or quests for brand awareness; and astutely connects this brand-questing to many individuals in our new technocracy who strive to create their own "brands," in essence selling themselves—which can be seen as a form of prostitution, although not necessarily sexual, wherein the ultimate goal is monetary gain, or somewhat less frequently, narcissistic satisfaction or ego enhancement. In Shredded Wheat, Jaffe vividly renders humans in the act of commercializing themselves through a conversation between an "Actor" and a "Brand": actor: Why are some humans called brands, Brand? brand: Humans are called brands because they market and whore themselves. actor: Why are some humans called actors? brand: International bad humans are called actors because they play the roles laid out for them. actor: Who uses the term actor and brand? brand: Fools and mofos who themselves are brands and actors use the term actors and brands. [End Page 156] At times, some of Jaffe's dramas morph into "meta-dramas," dramas within or about dramas, as in Jimi/Janis/JM, where Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin are simultaneously portrayed through their music and offstage commentary and through actors rendering the musicians' would-be personae onstage. This disconnection, explicitly manifest in the stage directions, represents the musicians' private and public images as well as the jagged gap between the public's view of a "celebrity" and that person's true "self." The...

Des revues et des femmes: la place des femmes dans les revues littéraires de la Belle Époque jusqu’à la fin des années 1950 by Amélie Auzoux, Camille Koskas et Elisabeth Russo

Reviewed by: Des revues et des femmes: la place des femmes dans les revues littéraires de la Belle Époque jusqu’à la fin des années 1950 by Amélie Auzoux, Camille Koskas et Elisabeth Russo Hope Christiansen Auzoux, Amélie, Camille Koskas, et Elisabeth Russo, éd. Des revues et des femmes: la place des femmes dans les revues littéraires de la Belle Époque jusqu’à la fin des années 1950. Champion, 2022. ISBN 978-2-7453-5676-5. Pp. 305. This fine collection analyzes the presence (and absence) of women in a wide range of literary journals published during the first half of the twentieth century. An overview by Jean-Yves Mollier lays the foundation for a chronological treatment of the subject, with sections on the Belle Époque, the period of La Nouvelle Revue française (“citadelle masculine s’il en est” [11]), l’entre-deuxguerres, and the post-World War II era. The material devoted to the Belle Époque is particularly cohesive, thanks to the solid work of Diana Holmes, Martine Reid, and Rachel Mesch on Femina and La vie heureuse, topped off by Wendy Prin-Conti’s intriguing piece on the representation of women poets in Les annales politiques et littéraires. If the journal was at first uniformly condescending toward women’s poetry (juxtaposing lines from women’s and men’s poems in order to highlight the former’s technical inferiority, for instance), it would eventually not only publish poetry by women but publicize and pre-publish excerpts of their forthcoming collections. In the section devoted to the NRF, François Bompaire offers insights on Anna de Noailles, Jean-Kely Paulhan on Élisabeth Porquerol, and Hélène Baty-Delalande on how women fared under Jean Paulhan. Of particular note is Camille Koskas’s discussion of Dominique Aury who, in addition to being the only female member of Gallimard’s comité de lecture for twenty-five years, was instrumental in drawing attention to writers such as Colette, Violette Leduc, and Simone de Beauvoir. The book’s third section looks at women’s involvement in journals specifically through the prisms of politics and cosmopolitanism. Under scrutiny are figures such as Dick May (Mélanie Fabre), Ludmila Savitzky (Amélie Auzoux), Aline Mayrisch (Paola Codazzi), Georgette Camille (Marie Cléren) as well as less well-known publications (La Revue du monde noir [Andy Stafford] and Mesures [Clarisse Barthelémy]). Auzoux paints a vivid picture of a France that felt threatened after World War I by the importation of foreign literature, making Savitsky’s opposition to the francisation of other languages in her translations and her desire to “laisser l’étranger dans toute son étrangeté” (157) all the harder to accept. The four essays in the final section explore the increased visibility of women in literary journals after the second World War. Éric Dussert discusses Marguerite Grepon, champion of the journal intime, while Élisabeth Russo investigates the first fifteen years of Les Temps [End Page 253] modernes, warning readers against simply assuming that Simone de Beauvoir “par une quelconque solidarité ou soif de justice éditoriale, favorise les femmes plus que leurs homologues masculins” (236), when in fact she showed little interest in the idea of une littérature de femme or in promoting women writers. Laurent Gayard showcases Nathalie Henneberg, who gradually gained autonomy as a science fiction writer after participating in l’écriture à quatre mains with her husband, paving the way for other women to make a name for themselves in the genre. Michel Murat’s analysis of Tel Quel (with particular emphasis on Julia Kristeva) brings this important contribution to scholarship on women’s writing and feminism to a close. [End Page 254] Hope Christiansen University of Arkansas Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

Proust sous le regard de Jacques Rivière

Jacques Rivière is undoubtedly one of the most intelligent and admiring readers of the Recherche. However, his correspondence with Proust shows how - while sensing the extraordinary novelty of his work - he sees it as the most successful and advanced outcome of the French tradition of the analytical novel. The publication of extracts from the Recherche in the “Nouvelle Revue Française” proved to be a real battleground between Rivière and Proust. While the first would like to make, of these extracts, miniature novels, coherent and perfectly concluded, so as to reveal to the public their author’s extraordinary capacity for psychological introspection, the second aims to give readers of the magazine an insight into the complexity of his work, which develops on several planes simultaneously, incorporating dissonant motifs and different registers.

BLANCHOT IN THE NRF, 1960–63

In essays written between 1960 and 1963, Blanchot embarks on a new line of thought, beginning with fundamental philosophical division between language and vision. The contrast between the two domains is possible to the extent that they constitute two distinct modes of manifestation, each with its own space and its own conditions. The implications of this division emerge more clearly if one follows its elaboration through the column that Blanchot wrote for the La nouvelle revue française (NRF) during these years. Working through the essays in the sequence and the context of their original production, one can recognize how the thesis of a discontinuity in the relation to the world, given only in language, and not in perception, is formulated as a response to the intellectual and social environment of his time.

Biographie de biographies : une passion contenue ou une histoire de rencontres

Since the first edition in 1843, the Annales Médico-Psychologiques have published reviews, biographies of the life and works of alienists, resumés of those applying for membership of the medical-psychological society, and obituaries…: a whole collection of documents which provide rich resources for biographical research. The biography of an alienist is constructed around their university and hospital qualifications, their scientific work (theses, research papers, and publications), their contribution to learned societies, their service in institutions and commissions, and their overseas assignments, etc. As such, an alienist's professional achievements form the canvas upon which a life portrait is painted. In this article, which draws upon ‘Aspect de la biographie’ by André Maurois (1885–1967), the reader is invited on an unusual biographical journey which was first taken following our encounters with Joseph Biéder (1923–2017), psychiatrist and former president of the Société Médico-Psychologique (1992), and with André Berne-Joffroy (1915–2007), literary and art critic, essayist, and contributor to La Nouvelle Revue Française. This journey has led the reader to other virtual encounters, which over the course of time, have shone a light on the lives of lesser known or more discreet alienists. Biographical accounts of alienists have an important contribution to make in advancing knowledge in the field of psychiatry especially in relation to issues of generational transmission and transformation, but also in reviving and commemorating forgotten life stories.

Лев Шестов во Франции: рецепция идей русского философа (первая половина XX в.)

The article is devoted to the acquaintance of French critics with the philosophy of Lev Shestov, who emigrated from Russia in 1919. Shestov’s ideas almost im­mediately resonate with French readers and over the course of several years the philosopher gains some fame; he is perceived as one of the most important fig­ures of modern original Russian thought, comparable in importance to M. de Un­amuno in Spain and J. de Gaultier in France. Shestov makes acquaintances with French and European intellectuals (J. Rivière, J. de Gaultier, L. Levy-Bruhl and others), collaborates with reputable French magazines “Mercure de France”, “La Nouvelle Revue française”, “La Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger”. Shestov has disciples and followers: B. de Schloezer, G. Bataille, B. Fondane, R. Bespaloff, A. Lazarev etc. The most important for his followers is the philosopher’s appeal to the personalities of thinkers and writers, and not to their ideas; “peregrination through the souls” as a philosophical method; the inextricable link between philosophy and life; criticism to reason and mora­lity; religious orientation and others. Shestov’s ideas become one of the sources of existentialism of A. Camus, works of A. Malraux and G. Marcel. Shestov and Fondane separate the philosophy of tragedy, identified with religious existential philosophy in the spirit of S. Kierkegaard, B. Pascal, F.M. Dostoevsky and M. Luther, from the existentialism of M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers and others.

Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918–1941

Great Expectations and Interwar Realities: Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy, 1918–1941

Against haute littérature? André Gide's Contribution to the World Literature Debate

In 1909 André Gide published three short articles in the journal La Nouvelle Revue française, subsequently grouped under the title ‘Nationalisme et littérature’ (Nationalism and literature). They were written as his response to a survey by the young French journalist Henri Clouard, ‘Enquête sur la littérature nationale’ (Survey on National Literature), in which contemporary writers and critics answered questions regarding possible definitions of French literature. Gide questions the value of the term ‘national literature’ and objects to the view that haute littérature (good literature) is synonymous with neo-Classical values, arguing instead for a conception of literature that embraces curiosity and innovation. For Gide the term haute littérature is problematic because it implies a hierarchical, regimented and limited view of both literature and culture tout court. The first part of this article argues that Gide's critique of both national literature and haute littérature can be read as a preference for a literariness that is liberated from the constraints of balance and imitation. The second part reads Gide's agronomic metaphor for literary innovation through the lens of Alexander Beecroft's theory of overlapping literary ecologies. Beecroft's model of different ecologies of world literature helps us to locate what I propose to be Gide's own contribution to the world literature debate: an emphasis on literariness that transcends the national-literature ecology and reclaims the notion of haute littérature for a different aesthetic.

„Godot, love and loss”

This is the fi rst Polish translation of the full chapter of the only authorized biography of Samuel Beckett entitled Damned to Fame (originally published in English in 1996). The text concentrates on the publication details of Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s private life in the early 1950s. For example, the details concerning building the house in Ussy sur Marne in 1953 are revealed and Beckett’s cooperation with the magazine „Nouvelle revue française” and the publishing house „Merlin” is discussed. On private ground, the origins of Beckett’s intimate relationship with Pamela Mitchell are of much importance at the time.

Translation and Translatio in the New Rhetoric Project’s Rediscovery of Rhetoric

ABSTRACT This article, an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, traces the surprising role of translation and of translatio (the medieval trope referring to the transfer of knowledge across time and space) in the story of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s turn to rhetoric. Neither Perelman nor Olbrechts-Tyteca were well versed in the French tradition of rhetoric as poetics. However, in two lectures Perelman gave late in his life, he offered a surprising description of the influence of Jean Paulhan, the French literary critic and long-time director of the Nouvelle Revue française, and of thirteenth-century Italian author and notary Brunetto Latini, on the turn to rhetoric. In addition, this essay situates these lectures as a critical response to the claim made by three important French thinkers, Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette, that they had recovered rhetoric for the study of expression and thus as poetics.

Translation and Translatio in the New Rhetoric Project’s Rediscovery of Rhetoric

ABSTRACTThis article, an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, traces the surprising role of translation and of translatio (the medieval trope referring to the transfer of knowledge across time and space) in the story of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s turn to rhetoric. Neither Perelman nor Olbrechts-Tyteca were well versed in the French tradition of rhetoric as poetics. However, in two lectures Perelman gave late in his life, he offered a surprising description of the influence of Jean Paulhan, the French literary critic and long-time director of the Nouvelle Revue française, and of thirteenth-century Italian author and notary Brunetto Latini, on the turn to rhetoric. In addition, this essay situates these lectures as a critical response to the claim made by three important French thinkers, Paul Ricoeur, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette, that they had recovered rhetoric for the study of expression and thus as poetics.

The Reconstruction of the European Mind: T. S. Eliot’s <i>Criterion</i> and the Idea of Europe

T. S. Eliot was the founder and editor of the Criterion, a literary and cultural review with a European focus that was published during the interwar period. The Criterion functioned as a platform for intellectuals with a shared perception of European culture and European identity. It was part of a network of European periodicals that facilitated an intellectual exchange between writers and thinkers with a common orientation. Examples of other reviews in the Criterion network were the Nouvelle Revue Française from France, La Fiera Letteraria and Il Convegno from Italy, the Revista de Occidente from Spain (edited by José Ortega y Gasset), and Die Neue Rundschau, the Europäische Revue, and the Neue deutsche Beiträge (edited by Hugo von Hofmannsthal) from Germany. In this article, I investigate the specific role the Criterion network of reviews and intellectuals played as an infrastructure for the dissemination of ideas about European culture during the interwar period. I also discuss the content of these ideas about the ‘European mind’. As to the latter, I suggest that Eliot positioned himself as well as his magazine in the European tradition of humanist thinking. Unfortunately, the Criterion’s ambition for a reconstruction of the European mind would dissipate as the European orientation of the 1920s was displaced by the political events of the 1930s. Eliot and his Criterion network expressed a Europeanism that has often been overlooked in recent research. The ideas discussed in this network remain interesting in our time, in which discussions about European values and European identity are topical. What is also highly interesting is the role cultural reviews played during the interwar period as a medium for exchanging such ideas.

Changing perceptions of life in Algeria, as seen in the work of two nineteenth-century writer-painters: Eugène Fromentin and Gustave Guillaumet

ABSTRACTLike Eugène Fromentin, Gustave Guillaumet, his junior by 20 years, was a distinguished Orientalist painter and writer. Fromentin, in some of his major paintings, revisited themes that he had treated earlier in his travel writings, Un été dans le Sahara (1854) and Une année dans le Sahel (1857). Conversely, Guillaumet revisited some of his earlier paintings in serialised essays, published as “Tableaux algériens”, in La Nouvelle Revue of 1880; these texts were republished posthumously in book form, with illustrations, in 1888. The differing approaches of these two peintres-écrivains are central to the evolution of word–image relationships in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their work, at one level, was intended to track the military progress of the French colonial army in Algeria and, at another level, to evoke details of daily life in the sedentary and nomadic peoples of that country. In so doing, they testify to the greatness of nineteenth-century French Orientalist painting, in terms of visual perspective, while, at the same time, heralding its decline, inasmuch as excessive accuracy of representation came dangerously close to ethnography, as opposed to art – a danger signalled by Duranty, in La Nouvelle Peinture (1870), and later by Fromentin, in Les Maîtres d’autrefois (1876).

The “Franco-Russian Marseillaise”: International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France

The “Franco-Russian Marseillaise”: International Exchange and the Making of Antiliberal Politics in Fin de Siècle France

Letters on Loan: Antonin Artaud's Correspondence with Jacques Rivière?

This article is centered on Antonin Artaud’s Correspondence with Jacques Rivière (1924). At the beginning of his career, Artaud submitted a few poems to the leading French review of literature of the time, the Nouvelle Revue Française. Jacques Rivière, the editor of the review, politely refused them, but expressed a desire to meet him. This initiated an exchange of letters between the two men that eventually became Artaud’s first publication. Drawing on the concept of the potlatch—defined by Marcel Mauss as an agonistic gift-giving relationship structured around the need to signify one’s power over the other—I argue that Artaud conceives of the letter as a means to provoke an ever-increasing response from his correspondent. Using letters that Artaud wrote at key moments of his career, I show that the gift-giving relationship culminates in Rivière’s offer to publish their exchange. In this way, Artaud establishes himself as an author at the expense of his symbolic first reader and editor.

The Tortoise and the Corpse: Two Excisions from Maurice Blanchot’s ‘Les Deux Versions de L’imaginaire’

Maurice Blanchot’s ‘Les Deux versions de l’imaginaire’ was first published in Les Cahiers de la Pléiade in 1951 and was subsequently revised as an appendix to the classic volume of 1955, L’Espace littéraire, in which Blanchot discusses the experience of literature through readings of Heidegger, Kafka, Mallarmé and Rilke.1 In ‘Les Deux versions’, Blanchot outlines his concept of fascination which throughout his oeuvre he argues is central to literature. Les Cahiers de la Pléiade were launched by Jean Paulhan in 1946 and ran for 13 issues until 1952. ‘Les Deux versions’ was Blanchot’s final of five contributions.2Les Cahiers were set up partly in the wake of the ‘littérature engagée’ of Sartre, publishing authors such as Breton, Céline, Artaud, Char, Ponge and Kafka.3 In contrast to Blanchot’s later, regular publications in La Nouvelle Revue française, those produced for the more expensive, less frequent and less widely circulated Cahiers appear to be primarily occasional or irregular pieces.4 While there are several apparently minor changes made throughout the text (all but two of the original’s 21 paragraphs are modified in L’Espace littéraire), most significantly two key passages are excised. In this piece, I shall set out and explore these cuts.

Place des Vosges par Michel Braudeau

Reviews 247 Braudeau, Michel. Place des Vosges. Paris: Seuil, 2017. ISBN 978-2-02-134295-6. Pp. 152. The beautiful, once-royal square invoked in Braudeau’s title points less to a classy neighborhood than to a crucible in time and place that contains many of the basic elements that made of the author a writer, and a prolific one at that. The era in question is the 1970s, a period deeply marked by May 68, but somewhat directionless in its aftermath. The author, clear-eyed and articulate, documents his own weaving path through the decade and among the famous inhabitants of the comparably famous place. Thus the young writer that he was experiments randomly with alcohol and the drugs of that decade’s choice; he travels, sometimes to exotic destinations, but without experiencing any profound epiphanies; and he dabbles in a number of light-hearted sexual relationships, grazing the possibility of genuine intimacy only a very few times. The descriptor of this text as a récit could not be more perfect: Braudeau recounts story upon story, as though paging through a photo album. His connections at the time to Jean Cayrol, chief literary consultant at Éditions du Seuil, gave him additional access to a constellation of the intellectuals of that age: Sollers, Barthes, Lacan, Sarduy. The cameo portraits he offers reveal a keen eye for character-revealing detail: William Burroughs had “un rire très court, un hoquet sarcastique, comme du gravier dans un arrosoir, et un haussement d’épaules [...] de tous les maîtres à dé-penser [...] il était l’un des plus mystérieusement sages”(48–49). The young writer also gets caught up in the aura of one extravagant and unpredictable Thomas, who he later learns is the son of Veit Harlan, creator of the infamous Juif Süss, anti-Semitic film of the 1940s. This lifemaiming accident of Thomas’s birth gives Braudeau insight into “sa personnalité si forte et malheureuse” (92). For this reader, the most touching admission of the book comes as the young writer fears that writing novels after the two great wars seems a naïve and potentially bootless enterprise, that the French language of novelists is archaic, useless, and forgettable. That Braudeau defied the literary Zeitgeist of the 1970s by writing more than twenty novels and that he made a career of defending literary language (not the least as editor-in-chief of the Nouvelle Revue Française) is a fitting postscript to Place. As for the book itself, situated in a pre-history of formative encounters with a vibrant generation of thinkers, it combines the uncertainty of an age with the sure writing of a master. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Bruneau,André. Sourde rancœur. Québec: Apothéose, 2016. ISBN 978-2-89775-0329 . Pp. 406. Julien Poirier is a dedicated Montreal police investigator whose meticulous approach to crime-solving usually allows him to forget the frustrations that gnaw at ...

Le cas Goethe

This paper discusses the reasons for which Goethe’s work, especially his aesthetic thought, struggled to be acknowledged in France. Drawing on a critical analysis ranging from the 1932 issue of the journal Nouvelle Revue Francaise entitled ‘A Tribute to Goethe’ to 1960s and 70s French thought’s position on German Romanticism, this paper points out two decisive and related reasons: the question of classicism – of our classics – that hinders a proper understanding of German Klassik and the French reception of Nietzsche that favours the Dionysian, ignores its close relationship with the Apollonian, and misses Nietzsche’s Goethean descent.

The New Resistance? French Intellectual Realignments after the Liberation: the Case of Armand Petitjean

The chaotic aftermath of the war in France conceals a complex range of intellectual positions, conditioned by the Épuration, a purge of those who had to one degree or another collaborated with the Nazi Occupier after July 1940, and well as the onset of the Cold War. Armand Petitjean, who had been one of the young hopes of the liberal cultural review, the Nouvelle Revue française (NRF), before the war, was one such writer to be purged in September 1944. Following the advice of Jean Paulhan, his former mentor at the NRF, he re-joined the army to help mitigate his case. However, embittered by his treatment at the hands of the communist-dominated Writers' Committee, the Comité National des Ecrivains (CNE), he, Paulhan, and others were rapidly mobilized in favour of the anti-communist cause, as the Cold War gathered momentum in 1947. This paper, using unpublished papers in the Petitjean archives — including book-publishing projects and unpublished correspondence with that guru of anti-communism, Arthur Koestler — will offer a case study on what was conceived as the ‘New Resistance’.

Dancing the Redemption of French Literature: Rivière, Mallarmé, and Le Sacre du printemps

Just below the surface of his 1913 review of Le Sacre du printemps, French literary critic Jacques Rivière issued a manifesto against the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé and his purported corruption of French literature. Mallarmé's late-nineteenth-century writing on the ballet pantomime and Loie Fuller, which positioned dance as a symbolic écriture corporelle, represented an erasure of the linguistic purity that Rivière and his colleagues at the Nouvelle Revue Française prized. Rivière's review challenges Mallarmé's conception of both dance and writing, presenting the jolting clarity of Nijinsky's choreography as a crucial recovery of literary precision.