French Term Research Articles

Décrire le français en relation aux langues en contact

It is not possible to explain what happens to French syntax in a situation of close contact with one or more languages, solely in terms of French. How then can we describe French in relation to the languages in contact? We first discuss the early research of Gabriel Manessy and their development by a number of linguists, and later show the importance of exploring several properties of the constructions under study in comparing languages, in order to place them within the context of general language processes. Furthermore, we will insist on the need to go beyond the forms at issue by focusing on their behavior. The examples will be taken from Ivory Coast French, which, ever since its establishment, has been in contact with the languages of the vast Niger-Congo family, in particular Jula and Baule (which have themselves been in contact for several centuries).

Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture by Patrick Joseph Ryan (review)

Reviewed by: Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture by Patrick Joseph Ryan Joel T. Rosenthal Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture. By Patrick Joseph Ryan. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. vii + 130 pp. Cloth $67.50. From the perspective of a social historian this short study is a mixed package. The major theme is one of considerable insight, and it sheds a distinctly different light on our approach to childhood in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, Ryan is not a medieval historian; parts of the book take us into realms of theology and epistemology that seem but loosely linked to his more orthodox topic. Also, as a non-specialist he leans on some historiography that may not serve him to best advantage. But, having begun with some caveats and reservations, I want to pay tribute to the way Ryan has dealt with the topic/problem of medieval children and childhood. It is most important to recognize that this book is a “history of the idea of childhood” (my emphasis). Words as labels and symbols are under close scrutiny in the argument, and many of Ryan’s bold insights come from the way in which he traces the etymology and evolution of some key terms. It is the idea of childhood as developed and set into the context of relationships and status, not the details of young lives or quantitative data about orphans or minor heirs that he explicates, that we will explore. As Ryan tells us (on page 13, and then a number of times thereafter), “Childhood was embedded in master-servant relations but this was something more than a hierarchy of labour.” His aim is to shift our view of childhood from an age-based and stages-of-life scenario to one that emphasizes superordination and subordination. We are in the realms of language and ideas rather than of behavior. This is refreshing stuff—taking us well away from the rather tired arguments that still revolved around Philippe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life and its thesis that “childhood” only emerged as a distinct social, familial, and perhaps personal phenomenon in postmedieval European culture and thought. Ryan looks at what we can label as key words—family, matrimony, wench, master, child, bairn, among others—and argues that their early meanings and uses (in Old English and then in Middle English) had more [End Page 321] to do with status than with age as such. Wealth, power, and sexual control, not just a sum of years, was what set the table. For example, “husband” “came to mean married man first, and householder secondarily . . . a land-sex-marriage word complex” (27). The word for the man in a married couple evolved so as to reinforce the essential link between holding property and being of a status to marry and to preside over the (patriarchal) household: “patrimony conferred stewardship” (39). Similarly, in early usage “wife” was not confined to “a man’s woman” (31), and such wider usages as fishwife or ale-wyff or midwife remind us that her marital (and sexual) status was just one definition of her multiple roles. Again, matrimony came from a French term that meant property inherited from one’s mother, an insight into a process of linguistic generalization and of socioeconomic institutionalization (and male appropriation). Drawing on literary materials and (selected) record sources that run into the sixteenth and even the seventeenth centuries, Ryan recognizes the “shift toward age sensitivity” in usage (49). The Bible is a canonical source for this sort of investigation, as in such tales as that of the Holy Family—traced through various versions and then translations—we can follow this theme of the evolution of words and, consequently, of social relationships. Fourteenth century legislation, designed to suppress social unrest unleashed by the decimation of the plague, sought to impose sumptuary legislation and edicts against gaming, among others, “all [of it] designed to support the existing master-servant hierarchy” (56). The importance of asserting a hierarchy of power, wealth, authority, and inherited status was supported by the terminology of...

Leyes contra el maltrato animal en Francia y España

The present article has been originally published by the Animal Legal & Historical Web Center, as part of the Animal Legal Defense Fund Summer Research Grant 2013. In terms of animal protection, French and Spain legislations are based on the Roman law tradition and encounter difficulties to detach themselves from the concept of animal-object. The penal protection was initiated in both countries on the ground of the protection of public morality. Later on, the criminal provisions relating to intentional cruelty towards animals have been shaped around the notion of maltreatment. Society ended up acknowledging the right for animals to not be maltreated. Therefore, France and Spain increased the scope of animals protected, going from exclusively domestic animals to certain types of wild animals. The scope of human deeds has been also extended, introducing with each reform new concepts. Case law kept on bringing new challenges regarding the interpretation of often-vague provisions. At the same time, obvious cruel practices, related to tradition, have benefited from derogations to the criminal provisions, weakening the legal value and coherence of anti-maltreatment laws.

Ricœur’s Hermeneutics of the Self

This paper focuses on the hermeneutics of the self in Paul Ricoeur's Oneselfas Another and on the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary in his early work. By revisiting Ricoeur's analysis, my goal is to play the devil's advocate and to raise some questions about the in-between of the voluntary and the involuntary, which seems to be often put in brackets in contemporary philosophy, even when the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary is willingly blurred. Contemporary philosophers, including Paul Ricoeur, often insist on two opposite aspects of the self: on the one hand, they emphasize the intentional act, the deliberated action, and responsibility; on the other side of the spectrum, they also acknowledge the opacity of the self, son alterite, its alterity, its otherness. To say it right away, in spite of the richness of Ricoeur's analysis, one of the puzzles is his neglect of voluntary actions that can be concealed to us by habits. Another problem arises with the theme of narrative identity, which too often is interpreted as equating with identity, or even with the self. The danger of such interpretations is that they tend to neglect the importance of involuntary actions, bad luck and unfortunate events which can shape the story of one's life but which perse do not tell us who the self is. These questions force us to come back to Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the self and consideration of oneself as both acting and suffering.The OpacityRicoeur is careful not to forget the opacity of the self. He wants to counter the idea of the self-possession of the subject. The self is not the cogito ergo sum of Descartes, since for Ricoeur the cogito is broken,1 but yet not forfeited as it is for the master of suspicions. In order to insist on the plurivocity of the self in contrast to the univocity of the self, he continuously insists both on the difference between sameness and selfhood, and on the otherness at the core of selfhood. Indeed, Ricoeur tells us:The fact that otherness is not added on to selfhood from outside, as though to prevent its solipsistic drift, but that it belongs instead to the tenor of meaning and to the ontological constitution of selfhood is a feature that strongly distinguishes this third dialectic from that of selfhood and which maintains a pre-eminently disjunctive character. (OA 317)The question that directs the course of Oneself as Another, recalled in Ricoeur's article,Approaching the Human Person, concerns the theme of identity: What remains identical through the course of a human life?2 However, when Ricoeur asks about what remains the same in the span of a lifetime, he is more interested in the following question: what individuates that person? He is aware of the ambiguity in the French terms identite and identique, and careful to avoid any amalgamation. He has recourse to the Latin pronouns ipse and idem in order to bring out an opposition, which will become a dialectic, between an identity of the self understood as idem, sameness, and identity understood as ipse,selfhood ( ipseite]. Selfhood and idem-identity occupy a major place in the Ricoeurian itinerary. In Oneself as Another,he adds to this opposition the notions of, on the one hand,character, placed on the side of and, on the other hand, proper to selfhood, and paradigmatically illustrated by the promise. Sameness and selfhood represent two different modalities of permanency in the course of time. To say it differently, it is not the character, the that helps me to answer the question, Who am I?, but selfhood, self-maintenance, where I am faithful to who I am because you are counting on me or to say it differently in a moment of crisis: Who am I, so inconstant, that notwithstanding you count on me? (OA 168).For Ricoeur, the self is primarily a self that acts. Agency is the most remarkable category of the personal condition. …

Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry

The major claim of Cinepoetry is that French poetry since roughly the end of the nineteenth century ‘has been thoroughly and continually impressed with and imprinted by cinema’ (p. 1). This principle does not, however, limit the status of cinema to a thematic concern of literary, written works, but demands the invention of a new ‘cross-medial’ (p. 1) term — ‘cinepoetry’, designating works in which, for example, ‘the screen becomes the page’ (p. 3). The implications of this claim are carried through to the historical and theoretical level; the extent to which cinema has influenced and inflected literary and textual practices constitutes a challenge to the canonical privileges of high modernism and the divisions between high and low cultures with which they went hand in hand. Christophe Wall-Romana thus appends a social and a historical critique to the formal agenda of his study. The corpus examined is, accordingly, ‘eclectic’, featuring writers who ‘flicker at the edges of the canon’ (p. 6). Two key terms in the negotiation of the cross-medial influence and practice Wall-Romana pursues are the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘cine-graphic’. The thesis is that theories of the imagination, and indeed the currency of the term ‘imaginary’ as a substantive, were indebted to the new technologies of cinema. In parallel, the cinema raised the profile, in poetry, of the visuality of words and letters — the cine-graphic. Here, despite a wealth of theoretical points of reference, the theoretical core of the argument is, perhaps, less substantial than the historical detail that the book offers. Without a convincing argument concerning the relation between images and words, language and the visual, linguistic cognition and visual perception, it is difficult to grasp exactly how cinepoetry is more than a mimetic writing practice that intends a parallel with film, or to be ‘like’ the cinema in its disposition, its effects, and its apprehension. This said, the book proposes a dazzling array of intriguing contributions to a different history of French and francophone poetry of the twentieth century, venturing also into the contemporary and including detailed analyses of poetic and critical texts by Mallarmé, Roussel, Apollinaire, Jarry, Cocteau, early film theorist Jean Epstein, Breton, and the Surrealists. The chapters on the figure of Chaplin and on lettrism give a sense of the wide scope of the account, and a flavour of its cultural breadth. The fifth and final part of the book focuses on less well-known and more recent writers such as Max Jeanne, Maurice Roche, and Nelly Kaplan. Through these focal points Wall-Romana accumulates a very substantial and exhaustive account of an important seam in French poetry, accompanied by a rich illustrative apparatus and tending often towards very fine analyses of the figural and spatial intricacies of the texts. Here it has to be said that the book would have benefited from the inclusion of the original French for the longer quotations; although subsequent analyses specify the original French terms, the nature of the cinegraphic demands the prominence of the letter.

Reuse of termino-ontological resources and text corpora for building a multilingual domain ontology: An application to Alzheimer’s disease

Ontologies are useful tools for sharing and exchanging knowledge. However ontology construction is complex and often time consuming. In this paper, we present a method for building a bilingual domain ontology from textual and termino-ontological resources intended for semantic annotation and information retrieval of textual documents. This method combines two approaches: ontology learning from texts and the reuse of existing terminological resources. It consists of four steps: (i) term extraction from domain specific corpora (in French and English) using textual analysis tools, (ii) clustering of terms into concepts organized according to the UMLS Metathesaurus, (iii) ontology enrichment through the alignment of French and English terms using parallel corpora and the integration of new concepts, (iv) refinement and validation of results by domain experts. These validated results are formalized into a domain ontology dedicated to Alzheimer’s disease and related syndromes which is available online (http://lesim.isped.u-bordeaux2.fr/SemBiP/ressources/ontoAD.owl). The latter currently includes 5765 concepts linked by 7499 taxonomic relationships and 10,889 non-taxonomic relationships. Among these results, 439 concepts absent from the UMLS were created and 608 new synonymous French terms were added. The proposed method is sufficiently flexible to be applied to other domains.

Scattering Being: Leo Bersani and Diasporic Modernity

Scattering BeingLeo Bersani and Diasporic Modernity Mikko Tuhkanen (bio) In The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Transnationalism, Brent Hayes Edwards introduces a term to diaspora studies that has since the book’s publication gained considerable traction: décalage (2003). Borrowing it from Léopold Sédar Senghor, Edwards mobilizes the French term to render visible the varied practices that African-descended intellectuals, activists, and artists deployed in the 1920s and 1930s, a period of effervescence in black trans-national activity. For him, décalage offers a way to consider the negotiations, encounters, translations, and misunderstandings that constitute black transnationalism. It designates a mode of movement in a diasporic world fractured by disparate histories, languages, and national ideologies. Rather than focusing on the most familiar genres, Edwards excavates an archive of “minor” modernisms in letters, anthologies, journals, and newsletters published across the diaspora. The uneven circulation of these [End Page 53] texts across national borders and languages reveals the diaspora as a system of multiplicity. Variously translated as a “gap” or “hiatus” or “jet lag,” décalage allows Edwards to theorize diaspora as a field whose functioning is premised on a constitutive incompleteness and instability. As he explains, the term refers to the removal of a prosthesis that has supplemented a structural insufficiency: The verb caler means “to prop up or wedge” something (as when one leg on a table is uneven). So décalage in its etymological sense refers to the removal of such an added prop or wedge. Décalage indicates the reestablishment of a prior unevenness or diversity; it alludes to the taking away of something that was added in the first place, something artificial, a stone ort a piece of wood that served to fill some gap or to rectify some imbalance. (2003, 13–14) The chronotope suggests a damaged structure, an entity whose movement is predicated not on the perfection of its system, but on that which is constitutively missing from it. In denoting “jet lag”—décalage horaire—it evokes the temporal dislocations that have frequently attended representations of modernity, of a world whose speedy technologies confound the body’s adaptive capabilities. This is a world whose central dilemma Pauline Hopkins and Richard Wright—diasporic intellectuals whose work immediately antedates and succeeds the period that concerns Edwards—suggest is condensed in the query “What’s the time?”1 As it happens, the term with which Edwards asks us to reconsider modernist diasporic practices plays a crucial role in certain psychoanalytic ontologies. In The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, his study of the aporetic structure of psychoanalytic thought, Leo Bersani claims: “Sexuality is a particularly human phenomenon in the sense that its very genesis may depend on the décalage, or gap, in human life between the quantities of stimuli to which we are exposed and the development of ego structures capable or resisting or, in Freudian terms, binding those stimuli” (1986, 38). Bersani borrows the term from Jean Laplanche, whose reading of Freud inspires what may be called “the psychoanalytic turn” in Bersani’s earlier studies A Future for Astyanax (1976), “The Other Freud” (1978), Baudelaire and Freud (1977) and—less explicitly—The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (1982). [End Page 54] In The Freudian Body, Bersani alludes to the theory that he draws from Laplanche, according to which sexuality names a mode of survival in which the hilflos organism turns overwhelming excitations into an experience of jouissance, a pleasurable undoing of the incipient egoic structures. For Laplanche, and Bersani after him, the temporal delay of décalage precipitates hominization, becoming-human, in several senses. It names the missing foundation, in deconstructive terms the aporia, of the structures that are called human. The constitutive difference that Freudian psychoanalysis locates in the self suggests that (human) being— rather, (human) becoming—must be thought in terms of a belated accounting of an originary dispersal. The repetition of the term across a number of intellectual traditions invites us to approach décalage as a “keyword” for thinking about the investments involved in twentieth-century conceptualizations of modernity’s ontologies.2 Ann Cvetkovich suggests we understand...

The Acéphalic Stage

Social groups potentially enter an acéphalic stage in which the group ‘annihilates’ the leader as a prelude to an unmediated experience of community. Borrowed from social theorist Georges Bataille, the French term ‘acéphale’ signifies the headless, both figuratively and literally, and is invoked to accentuate the disproportionate power relations between our elevated faculties of thought and our base aptitude for sensation and feeling. The identification and discussion of this proposed stage is embellished by case examples of two groups.

A constrained cellular automata model to simulate the potential effects of high-speed train stations on land-use dynamics in trans-border regions

This research addresses a modelling approach that combines land use and a high-speed train (TGV1Throughout this paper, we will use the French term TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) and TGV stations to refer to high-speed train stations in France to be consistent with the French definition of high-speed trains.1) network in a constrained cellular automata (CA2Throughout this paper, we will use CA to refer to Cellular Automata. The model used in this paper is also defined as the constrained cellular automata model (e.g., CA-Based Model).2) model. CA are used to model the dynamics and growth of the trans-border region of France, Monaco and Italy (Côte d’Azur-Riviera). The main objective of the study is to understand the impact of TGV stations on land use changes within the border region. This contribution provides specific and detailed map representations of future land development. In addition, based on the TGV feedback, the research highlights factors that are not included in the model that also influenced regional development. A substantial part of the work is therefore devoted to discussing and analysing these factors and the manner in which they provide an interpretative framework for the modelling exercises. The results are realistic and indicate that CA models can be used to assess this important topic even though they have not previously been used for this purpose.

Tangas of the Marajó (Brazil): ornamental pubic covers, their typology and meaning

Tangas are small convex triangular pottery covers found in large numbers in the Amazon delta. Their suggestive shape has long been attributed to use as a cover or shield for the female Mound of Venus, for protection, modesty (‘cache-sexe’ is the French term) or embellishment. Here the author offers a typology and searches for correlations between the shapes, sizes and patterns of the tangas and the date, location, purpose and status of the women who wore them. He emphasises that in spite of this advance, better understanding requires new information from properly designed excavations; 85 per cent of known tangas have been acquired by looting, purchase or low-precision digging.

Césaire and the Challenge of Translation: The Example of “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown

Césaire and the Challenge of Translation: The Example of “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown

Who is Relocating Whom in the Renovation of Shanghai’s Old City?

The aim of this article is to describe the various actors who intervene in the renovation (and therefore relocation) projects that have been proliferating in Chinese cities for several years. The term “relocation” is a translation of the French term “delogement,” which was coined by the author to refer to the specific process that brings together urban renovation, destruction of housing, and displacement of occupants in China today. Based on a field study conducted in Shanghai between 2003 and 2008, this paper intends to reveal the diversity of actors involved in such projects and the varied relationships they maintain with the official sphere, which directly influences the course of negotiations regarding compensation and rehousing.

Introduction

Introduction Todd W. Reeser ARTICULATING A VARIETY OF GENDER presentations that have become visible in recent years, the term “transgenre” is now widely used in France. In Changer de sexe, Augst-Merelle and Nicot define the term: “Personne dont le genre ne concorde pas avec son sexe, au regard des stéréotypes imposés par une culture donnée.”1 Although this definition positions the term as culturally specific, the question of its relation to the Anglo-American context cannot remain unasked. Citing Wiktionnaire, the recent reference work La Trans-yclopédie explains that the French term is an “[a]daptation de l’anglais Transgender de trans- et gender.”2 A recent coinage, the English umbrella term “transgender” incorporates a range of practices and constructs that resist sexual or gender stability or normativity, and, as a result, overlaps with terms such as “queer,” “gender fluidity,” “transvestism,” “trans-sexuality,” “butch,” “effeminacy,” and “androgyny.”3 If the French term is adapted from English, what of the largely Anglo-phone field of transgender studies? How has it been adapted to the French context? By comparison with ground-breaking work in Anglophone literary/cultural studies, French studies has been relatively slow to intervene into the bourgeoning discussion, even though a strain of transgender studies relies on theoretical models rooted in French thought. Foucault serves as a key theoretical substratum in Stryker’s delineation of the field in her introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader, Merleau-Ponty grounds considerations of corporality in Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (reviewed in this issue), and Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of bodies without organs and of productive becoming have lent themselves to thinking about transgender as movement.4 Having been placed into dialogue with transgender phenomena, such theoretical models are ripe for juxtaposition with French texts and contexts. It may be surprising that French trans studies has not become a more widespread field since French culture has traditionally had close connections to transgender. Georges Burou (1910–87), a doctor who worked in Morocco, was a major figure in sexual reassignment surgery and in transsexual history. The 80s saw the publication of a number of French transsexual texts. Coccinelle (1931–2006), a transsexual performer well known across and beyond Europe, composed an autobiography titled Coccinelle (1987). Doucé’s La Question transexuelle (1986) in many ways foreshadows the current field of [End Page 1] transgender studies, with contents including témoignages, studies on la personne transsexuelle, cultural constructs, cross-cultural differences, and “normes pour les soins du changement chirurgical de sexe et l’hormonothérapie hétérogène.”5 Maxime Foerster documents the rich history of modern transsexuality in Elle ou lui?: une histoire des transsexuels en France (reviewed in this issue). A number of earlier trans figures or characters can be located, such as the abbé de Choisy in the seventeenth century, the Chevalier d’Éon in the eighteenth century, and dandy figures in modernism. Colette has much to say about transgender as well, even if she avoids sexual taxonomies per se. Montaigne discusses the sex change of Marie-Germain, and the Middle Ages provide stories of figures who might be tagged transgender.6 And, of course, Joan of Arc has been taken as a key figure in transgender history.7 As Karine Espineira points out, however, it is really in the twenty-first century that there is an explosion of trans groups, even as transgender becomes substantially more visible in the 90s.8 Alain Berliner’s film Ma Vie en rose (1997), about a boy who wants to be a girl, took the queer transnational world by storm. French films such as Change-moi ma vie (2001), Thelma (2002), Chouchou (2003), Tiresia (2003), Wild Side (2004), and Tomboy (2011) depict a variety of trans characters. Most recently, Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways (2012) focuses on the love relation between a French transwoman and a Québécoise. The twenty-first century has seen a proliferation of widely available published narratives, including Axel Léotard’s Mauvais Genre (2009), Amanda Lear’s Je ne suis pas du tout celle que vous croyez (2009), Alexandra Cerdan’s prococative Transsexuelle et convertie à l...

The Langue of the Damned: Fanon and the Remnants of Europe

The essay suggests that Frantz Fanon’s French term damnés has very different existentialist and political meanings than those conveyed by the English word wretched. Fanon’s conception of the damned was highly influenced by the revolutionary modernist political imagination of black militant poets such as Jacques Roumain and Aimé Césaire, especially by Roumain’s poem “Sales négres.” Fanon’s damned hence cannot be considered as a mere sociological category. Reading The Wretched of the Earth through Giorgio Agamben’s ideas on the modernist meanings of the witness and the remnants, I finally argue that what is lost in translation is the apocalyptical, messianic, and redemptive langue of Fanon’s damned.

Glossary of Haitian Creole and French Terms

Glossary of Haitian Creole and French Terms

The Tendencies of Technical Terminology Development in Modern German: (The material of electric and technical terms in German, French and Russian)

The article studies the important issues of Modern Linguistics in lexicographical aspect, particularly the problems of systematization and unification of technical terminology in Modern German.Internet technologies in all fields of science and technology, the updated results in microelectronics and micro process technology, developments in nanotechnology enhance the penetration of great quantity of foreign words (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish etc.) as terms into Russian and this fact caused the problems of correct translation and interpretation of scientific and technical terms. The importance of this investigation is in working out the interdisciplinary bank of data on the electronic careers with the set of entries into the Dictionary. As a result, the variant of automation Dictionary (question-answering system) is worked out and it contains the standard symbols and terms and functions in the dialogue mode. These types of systems are the necessary part of standardization in the field of international agreement, and this issue is of great importance in accordance with the fact of ratification the Customs Union among the following countries: Kazakhstan, Russia, and Belorus.

2712 – Boufée délirante in the contemporary psychiatric nosology: a case control

Introduction The French nosological concept of bouffee delirante (literally “delusional flush or rush”) may define a subgroup of non-affective, acute remitting psychoses with an especially favourable prognosis. To date, relatively little published literature is available about this entity. Objectives To discuss the concept, nosological status, diagnostic features and associated clinical characteristics of bouffee delirante. Aims A case report of bouffee delirante is described. The concept and clinical features of the condition are reviewed. Methods A case report is presented in detail and a literature review of the theme is surveyed. Results The authors report a case of a 48-year-old woman with no psychiatric background until November 2011 when she developed a sudden onset of persecutory delusions concerning her colleagues and boss. She believed computers and televisions were under their control and that her daughter and husband were in danger. This information was given by the voices she believed to hear. During one week, she developed behavior disturbance that motivated her urgent evaluation. As she was admitted to our department, she showed herself defensive and hostile. During the first day in our ward she described a delusion of Capgras, but the symptoms were rapidly overtook with low doses of antipsychotic. Conclusions Bouffee delirante is a historic French diagnostic term used in the past to describe a short-lived psychosis. The term was substituted differently in ICD-10 (described as acute and transient psychotic disorders) and DSM-IV-TR (brief psychotic disorder). The key diagnostic features are acute, floridly psychotic symptoms with complete remission.

Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative by Phyllis Gaffney

Reviews 227 increase difficulties; it does not simplify but complicate. Yet interpretation paradoxically also nourishes a work: “Une œuvre a besoin de l’interprétation pour rester vivante”(91). In this light, essayistic interpretation must be seen as an act of generosity, responding to this demand of the text—sustaining rather than foreclosing (which would be tantamount to killing the œuvre) its semantic openness. The issue of partial truths—as opposed to allegorical truths or transcendental certitudes—becomes more than an epistemological matter; interpreting is a form of life (“L’interprétation est la vie de l’esprit humain”[115]); it necessarily evokes ethical and aesthetic registers. The force of Foglia’s book lies in this powerful and timely reminder. Whitman College (WA) Zahi Zalloua Gaffney, Phyllis. Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Old French Narrative. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7546-6920-3. Pp. viii + 236. $99.95. Gaffney’s book includes a preface, three sections divided into six chapters,‘Works Cited,’ and an index. The preface introduces Philippe Ariès’s 1960 study of childhood, now largely discredited. Gaffney proposes to add to evidence about cultural ideas of childhood in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Northern France through imaginative literature, since “a culture’s fables and stories can unlock what it thinks and feels at a deep level”(vii). The first two chapters summarize Ariès’s argument together with contrary historical and archeological evidence. Gaffney begins with a résumé of literary and linguistic analyses of Old French terms for childhood and youth, and suggests that the type of text influences how childhood is represented, though she acknowledges overlap in the two genres (epic and romance), and the lack of precision for dating texts and mapping terms. Gaffney hypothesizes that epic shows nature whereas romance illustrates nurture. Part two treats childhood in chanson de geste, then in romance, and examines enfances poems (those narrating the childhood of a hero) specifically, contrasting representations in the different genres. In the chanson de geste, Gaffney finds male youths tasked with helping their lineage “in ancestral feuds, avenging wrongs perpetrated against their kinsmen”(99) versus romance youths who seek to find their history, and whose education may be specifically defined in the text; where young women appear, they are wiser than male counterparts, but are few (126). Chapter 4 concludes that, in romance, protagonists become narrators since they must discover their own childhood (158). Finally, Gaffney addresses the question of enfances as a genre and the relationship between epic and romance; she clearly notes the difficulties in distinguishing epic from romance, and how the two grow together at the end of the period considered. She carefully avoids most stereotypes that have tainted contrasts of epic and romance, though the mention of a chanson de geste heroine who “lacks plausibility”(132) is bothersome, for plausibility (or what we call realism), is not the goal of the chanson de geste. Gaffney, however, carefully notes “implausibilities” (132) also in the romance heroine to whom she compares the epic figure. She suggests that romance influenced epic. Here she reinterprets the longstanding tendency to discuss epic as expanding backwards to include the childhood of a hero in the larger narrative context,biography and genealogy increasingly forming parts of adult identity. Examples are wide-ranging, including well-known and lesser-known works, with careful contrasts of epic and romance characters (for example, Guillaume d’Orange and Gauvain). Part three,“A Slow Conversion of Sensibility,”illustrates the cultural changes of the twelfth century concomitant with change in literary taste, from noble women’s roles and instruction to marriage laws and changes in the administration of the sacraments , arguing convincingly for a“shifting change of direction in the history of mentalities ” (195) that endures today. “Works Cited” are divided into “Primary texts,” “Secondary Sources,”and“Reference Works.”Gaffney has read widely, and intelligently includes both collections of essays by title and by articles cited. There was a missing reference, Harf-Lancner 1994 (153, n145), but other items were present. Not only is this volume wide-ranging and thoughtful, it is also extremely readable. Though Gaffney carefully introduces her arguments and reviews her findings, she does so...

Following the Roots of Oregon Wine

Terrior is a French term widely used in wine circles to mean “the taste of the place.” The terroir of Oregon wine combines environmental and human elements to produce distinguishing flavors and reveals the histories of grape growers and winemakers in the state. A new archive at Linfield College, the Oregon Wine History Archive (OWHA), collects that history and makes it available to researchers and the public. Library professionals Rachael Cristine Woody and Rich Schmidt tell the story of OWHA's origins and mission, which is to document all aspects of the wine industry by collecting and preserving historical materials such as photographs, diaries, planting and tasting notes, wine recipes, legislative records, and even bottles of wine. Over a dozen wineries, vineyards, individuals, and organizations have contributed to the collection —many of the area's winemakers are committed to ongoing contributions to document Oregon wine's past, present, and future terrior.

Flogging a dead horse

Flogging a dead horse