Une Vie Research Articles

Punctuated Lives: Abortion, Ellipses, and Parentheses in Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (2000) and Line Papin’s Une vie possible (2022)

Abstract: This article examines the representation of abortion in two autobiographical texts: Annie Ernaux’s L’événement (2000) and Line Papin’s Une vie possible (2022). Analyzing their use of punctuation, particularly parentheses and ellipses, it argues that Papin inherits an aesthetics of hesitation from Ernaux, an aesthetics that allows both writers to make space for others’ experiences of abortion.

On Listening and Failure: Roger Laporte with Marcel Proust

Abstract: This essay reads Roger Laporte’s Une voix de fin silence (A voice of fine silence), the second volume of his idiosyncratic work Une vie (A life), in dialogue with the early volumes of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu ( In Search of Lost Time ). A constellation emerges from the analysis that allows us to consider the interrelations and interdependence of Laporte’s text, his work as a critic on Proust, and the Recherche itself. The essay argues that Laporte’s textual engagement with Proust allows us to re-evaluate notions of literary failure so as to redefine what counts as the success of a literary project conceived as a writing about writing and becoming a writer. Both Proust and Laporte practice a literary writing that evokes mental experience while never being synonymous with it because, as their texts demonstrate, mental and literary experience can never coincide perfectly. Laporte labels the writer’s search a “listening,” a precarious activity which, like failure, is impossible to summon on command and which can only be recognized as such in retrospect as a motor of literary creation.

Analyzing Jeanne's Character and its Tragic Elements in Une vie from Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's 'Three Elements' Perspective

Analyzing Jeanne's Character and its Tragic Elements in Une vie from Hippolyte Adolphe Taine's 'Three Elements' Perspective

Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo by Gabriella Nugent

Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo by Gabriella Nugent

Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French by Margaret E. Gray

Reviewed by: Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French by Margaret E. Gray Jennifer Carr Gray, Margaret E. Stolen Limelight: Gender, Display and Displacement in Modern Fiction in French. UP of Wales, 2022. ISBN 978-1-78683-860-5. Pp. 257. Visual culture is increasingly ubiquitous, suffusing everything from entertainment to political rights claims staked in visibility. Meanwhile, gender studies and its disciplinary tributaries have couched our understanding of gender in terms of performativity and display, further reinforcing visuality's primacy in daily life. Against this backdrop, Stolen Limelight explores how twentieth-century French and Francophone fictions have harnessed readerly fluency in viewing practices through their narrative framings of gender, with Gray's analysis hinging on scenes of slippage, when seemingly legible instances of gendered display cede to a destabilizing hypervisibility. Gray foregrounds literary representations of excessive, even monstrous gendered display, productively complicating the tendency to conflate visibility and agency, and to reduce dynamics of spectatorship to the stable binary of observer and observed. Rather, she suggests, textual scenes of gendered display can displace both subject and object of the gaze—whether these positions are embedded in the narrative or embodied by readers—sowing epistemological doubt in their wake. Borrowing from psychoanalysis, art history, museum studies, and film theory, Gray attends to the effects of this "visuality of text" (6) in a corpus that spans the twentieth century and multiple geographies, resolutely canonical authors and lesser-studied ones. Stolen Limelight is divided into two sections of three chapters each that focus, respectively, on culminating scenes of corporeal display in Colette's Le blé en herbe, Ferdinand Oyono's Une vie de boy, and André Gide's La porte étroite, then on more abstract narrative strategies of display in François Mauriac's Thérèse Desqueyroux, Sébastien Japrisot's Piège pour Cendrillon, and Marguerite Duras's dual renderings of the same narrative: L'Amant and L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Gray acknowledges the disparate contexts that produced these fictions (and subsequent film adaptations) while teasing out their shared investment in a dynamic of display-as-displacement that is inextricable from gender politics. Incidentally, this dynamic is echoed in Gray's analytical moves, which effect their own displacements by insisting that previous scholarship has looked in the wrong places, focused on the wrong things. For instance, in the chapter on Piège pour Cendrillon, Gray identifies generic subtexts—namely, the feminine-coded love story and fairy tale—that surreptitiously displace the novel's obvious engagement with detective fiction. Reprising Shoshana Felman's analysis of Japrisot's text, Gray contends that Felman's investment in Piège pour Cendrillon's undoing of detective genre conventions neglects the love story between women that is the narrative's foundational impetus. Gray's readings of Oyono and Duras likewise refocus critical attention, in this case on gendered displays whose stakes are heightened [End Page 274] by colonial contexts of racial oppression. These chapters highlight the risks of dissonance attendant to thematically uniting a disparate corpus, as Gray's instructive insistence on racialized gendering in Oyono's text is seemingly diluted by her interpretation of L'Amant's Chinese lover as a mother-surrogate whose feminization enacts a salvatory displacement of maternal madness, its potential imbrication in racist logics addressed only glancingly. Still, Stolen Limelight consistently offers engaging models of creative close reading that will appeal to literary scholars interested in interdisciplinary analyses' capacity to locate "trans-versal connections" (177) among apparently dissimilar texts. [End Page 275] Jennifer Carr Wellesley College (MA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Gabriella Nugent

This captivating book explores the links between art and temporality. Analysing artworks by Congolese figures such as Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga, and the artist collective Kongo Astronauts, Gabriella Nugent demonstrates how this generation of photographers and video artists — all born well after the independence of the Democratic Republic of the Congo — have creatively reassessed the after-effects of Belgian colonialism. One of the most distinctive features of these artists is their tapping into the stylistic possibilities offered by video and photography to disrupt teleological ideas of chronology, create transhistorical connections, and produce collages in which (neo)colonial archives are invited to cohabit, and dialogue, with the here-and-now of the DRC. Chapter 1 focuses on Baloji’s Mémoire (2006) and examines how this artwork explores the commodification and consumption of black bodies by colonial mining industries and the factors that have perpetuated imperial extractivism in the Congolese present. Whilst arguing that the material explored by Baloji forces us to take stock of what Achille Mbembe has famously called ‘necropolitics’, Nugent convincingly highlights the shortcomings of this theoretical approach because Mémoire also sheds light on less documented but equally powerful small acts of resistance which have the ability to rewrite history and ‘complicat[e] conceptions of temporal progress’ (p. 44). This focus on overlooked voices and everyday figures also informs Chapter 2 and its close reading of Magema’s double-screen video installation Oyé Oyé (2002), in which Congolese gender politics during the Mobutu-led ‘authenticity’ era is shown to replicate colonial patriarchal models ambivalently. Here, too, Nugent challenges a tendency amongst commentators, for example Thierry Michel, to focus on Congolese violence and grand politics at the expense of ‘small details of the everyday’ (p. 84). By examining the state-sponsored cultural policy of ‘animation politique et culturelle’, and the role played by female singers and dancers at public events organized to honour Mobutu, Nugent contends that these women’s ‘minute actions’ render visible hitherto unseen aspects of Congolese political life (p. 84). Chapter 3 examines Senga’s photographic diptych series, Une vie après la mort (2012), in which Senga couples historical press images of Patrice Lumumba with colour photographs of Kayembe Kilobo, a Lubumbashi-based schoolteacher who since the 1950s has consciously lived his life as a Lumumba lookalike. In addition to examining the role of Lumumba in Congolese iconography since independence, this chapter explores how Kayembe Kilobo used his appearance and sartorial style during Mobutu’s reign to subtly critique ‘authenticity’. Chapter 4 engages with Kongo Astronauts’ brand of ‘artivist’ (and situationism-inspired) performances in Kinshasa, arguing that the collective’s focus on the space age and digital globalization fosters a much-needed sense of optimism and ‘Kongofuturism’ (p. 121), by which the capital city reappropriates its cultural agency. Nugent shows here that their ‘playfulness’ brings about ‘another vision of the city’ and one that resolutely breaks away from the idea about ‘the omnipresence of death in Kinshasa’ (p. 126). This book constitutes an outstanding contribution to the study of contemporary African art and historiography of the DRC. In its painstaking analysis of past and present images, it offers a timely analysis of Congolese culture and politics.

La condition féminine dans Une vie hypothéquée d’Anne-Marie Adiaffi

This article aims to study the condition of African women in Une vie hypothéquée by Anne-Marie Adiaffi. In a predominantly patriarchal Ivorian society, this Francophone African novelist highlights certain alienating practices that subjugate African women, especially forced marriage and widowhood in Ivorian and African society. Given the above, the researcher wonders why the condition of African women is in a state of exploitation, oppression and overwhelming violence. What are the solutions to stop these problems? To effectively carry out the study, the researcher adopts the African womanism theory. The study recommends that the sensitization and formal education of African women is the key to their development and emancipation in society.

Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism by Hannah Freed-Thall

 Reviews critical incident’ (p. ), on the other. Lloyd prefers ‘Boule de suif’ to ‘La Parure’, praising the former’s complexity of character portraits and downplaying the eponymous prostitute’s victimhood. e latter he calls ‘a rather unedifying lesson about social pretensions and self-deception’ (p. ). Meanwhile, Maupassant’s fantastic fiction is examined in the light of his  essay ‘Le Fantastique’ on the genre; both the fiction and the essay stress the dissolution of the self rather than the supernatural itself. A brief reading of ‘Le Horla’ shows this emphasis in action. Maupassant’s novels are read through the familiar lens of contraction as we move chronologically from Une vie to Notre cœur. Lloyd does not dispute the consensus that the author’s final two novels are inferior to their predecessors, despite glimmers of proto-Proustianism in the latter; yet, unlike most critics, he is also severe in commenting on Pierre et Jean, accusing Maupassant’s narrative voice of losing objectivity and unduly siding with the protagonist. Mont-Oriol, in contrast, has been unfairly overlooked; it has a ‘balanced outcome’ (p. ) that reflects its interweaving of transactional business and romantic dealings. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive treatment of Maupassant in this format. To the experienced reader, little of this material will be new, yet that is not the function of this book or indeed of the series as a whole. Lloyd expertly condenses a maximum of content, about both Maupassant’s own writing and the responses it has elicited, into around two hundred pages. As a result, Guy de Maupassant will no doubt serve as both a helpful teaching aid and an introduction to Maupassant for interested amateurs for years to come. V U R C Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism. By H-  F-T. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  (pbk ). viii+  pp. £. (pbk £.). ISBN –––– (pbk ––– –). In a rare instance of incoherence, the narrator of Proust’s Recherche expresses his first aesthetic judgement as a spluttered string of outbursts. Encountering an everyday scene of a splotch of light reflected between a pond and a chicken-topped tool-shed roof, he is so delighted that he can only brandish his umbrella and exclaim ‘Zut, zut, zut, zut’. For Hannah Freed-all, this unsophisticated moment of aesthetic experience and disorientation unlocks the apparent contradiction in French modernism between high style and inarticulacy. By examining what she evocatively terms ‘beauty’s aerlives’, Freed-all seeks to prove that ‘the aesthetic is nothing special’ (p. ). Her book comprises two parts, the first of which theorizes an underexplored aesthetics of ordinariness in Proust’s novel via ideas of prestige, babble, and nuance, while the second offers a survey of post-Proust literature, examining mid-century experimental aesthetic encounters in the prose poetry of Francis Ponge, the novels of Nathalie Sarraute, and the contemporary theatre of Yasmina Reza. Concisely erudite and clearly MLR, .,   written, Spoiled Distinctions marshals an impressive range of secondary literature from Immanuel Kant to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in its exploration of the ordinary from the vantage point of aesthetic theory. In the first half of her monograph, Freed-all argues that moments of ineloquent astonishment allow the Proustian beholder to enjoy ‘the world in its common, undignified singularity, rather than as a mineable source of secret treasure’ (p. ). She then turns her attention to authors who have expanded Proust’s minor mode of spoiled distinction such that it becomes the entire substance of aesthetic experience in their work. In elaborating new ways to delineate and parcel up the phenomenal world, Spoiled Distinctions argues that French modernism ‘does not simply reinforce the high–low, distinguished–vulgar codes of taste, but makes us aware of the classification-thwarting margins of both aesthetic experience and literary critique’ (p. ) Ultimately, for Freed-all, the aesthetic in French modernism is bound up with all it purportedly eschews: ‘quotidian commodity consumption; the labour of making and perceiving; and the vulnerable finite body, with its unruly pleasures and displeasures’ (p. ). Each chapter offers perceptive close readings of scenes of beholding. e first focuses on Proust’s early pastiche accounts of a diamond the in the style of...

"Blindness Gain" as Worldmaking: Audio Description as a New "partage du sensible"

"Blindness Gain" as Worldmaking:Audio Description as a New "partage du sensible" Marion Chottin and Hannah Thompson IN THIS ARTICLE we use our experiences of co-creating creative audio descriptions at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris to suggest that the worldmaking practices of challenge, collaboration, action, and dialogue offer a means to call into question the traditional ways of accessing museum and gallery content that still prevail in (French) society.1 We define "disability's worldmaking" in the museum or art gallery as a two-part process. First, we challenge the 'givenness' of the hierarchies, relationships, and assumptions that govern visitor experience in the museum. Second, we offer an alternative model of visitor engagement where active and dialogic co-creation provides an inclusive alternative to ocularcentric museum experiences. Together, these acts of worldmaking promise an alternative mode of being in the museum that suggests a new politics of access. By going beyond current understandings of 'inclusion,' our project does not limit itself to giving disabled people a museum experience analogous to that of non-disabled people. Instead, it explores and celebrates alternative modes of engaging with art that do more than merely echo normative museum experiences and which, more broadly, open up a new way of making society. Our definition of worldmaking is a counterpoint to Jacques Rancière's concept of "le partage du sensible" and is informed by the concept of "blindness gain." In Rancière's words, le partage du sensible as a political concept is "ce système d'évidences sensibles qui donne à voir en même temps l'existence d'un commun et les découpages qui y définissent les places et les parts respectives."2 Elsewhere, he elaborates on this definition, describing it as "la façon dont les formes d'inclusion et d'exclusion qui définissent la participation à une vie commune sont d'abord configurées au sein même de l'expérience sensible de la vie."3 In other words, according to Rancière, there is "une esthétique de la politique": the assignment of a place to each person in society is manifested through the sensory experience itself, and, for him, particularly in a division between visibility and invisibility; audibility and inaudibility: those who participate in public life are visible and audible, while those who do not are invisible and inaudible (kept hidden and silent within the private sphere). Given that, for Rancière, the realm of art is a privileged place of sensory experience, it is therefore also a privileged place for le partage du sensible, which expresses who has a place in society and who does not. We argue that, nowadays, it is in the museum [End Page 32] or art gallery that the dynamics of social inclusion and exclusion are most starkly played out. But Rancière does not include disabled people among the categories of people—like workers—who, according to him, are excluded from society by the very fact of their invisibility and inaudibility. Neither does he discuss how painting, an art considered supremely visual, produces invisibility, that is, the absence of blind or partially blind people from museums, nor does he consider how the other senses might play a role in reducing blind people's exclusion from art and society. The reasons for these various silences are obvious: by ignoring the domain of disability, Rancière does not perceive its invisibility, and hence the exclusion of disabled people; he thinks of le partage du sensible mainly in terms of visibility and invisibility, without thinking of moving beyond the presumed primacy of sight.4 In our work, we ask how people who are blind or partially blind gain access to the politically and culturally charged space of the museum or art gallery, so that they too can participate in acts of multi-sensory worldmaking and thus undermine le partage du sensible between those who are invisible and inaudible because they are blind, and those who are visible and audible because they are sighted. The theory of "blindness gain" is a reimagining of the notion of "deaf gain" theorized by Bauman and Murray.5 "Deaf gain" is a critical position and...

Analysis of Jazz: A Comprehensive Approach by Laurent Cugny

Reviewed by: Analysis of Jazz: A Comprehensive Approach by Laurent Cugny Eunmi Shim Analysis of Jazz: A Comprehensive Approach. By Laurent Cugny. Translated by Bérengère Mauduit. (American Made Music Series.) Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. [x, 384 p. ISBN 9781496821881 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781496821898 (paperback), $35; also available as an e-book, ISBN and price vary.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Laurent Cugny is a French musician and musicologist who collaborated with Gil Evans in the late 1980s. His previous books on jazz include Las Vegas tango: Une vie de Gil Evans (Paris: P.O.L, 1989), Électrique Miles Davis, 1968–1975 (Marseille: A. Dimanche, 1993), Une histoire du jazz en France (Paris: Outre mesure, 2014), and Hugues Panassié: L'œuvre panassiéenne et sa réception (Paris: Outre mesure, 2017), none of which is available in English translation. This volume, a translation of his Analyser le jazz (Paris: Outre mesure, 2009), is an ambitious venture to create a comprehensive system of analysis by encompassing a wide range of subjects that the author considers relevant in jazz analysis, many of which are not usually found in the standard literature on jazz theory and analysis. Comprehensiveness is reflected in its three-part structure: the first part engages in conceptual explorations, including the definition of a "work of jazz" and related concepts; the second part focuses on musical elements, such as harmony, rhythm, form, sound, and melody; and the third part discusses [End Page 432] various subjects, including the history of jazz analysis, transcription, and an overview of analytical approaches. In the first part, Cugny takes pains at defining various concepts and terms, devoting the first two chapters, for example, to the idea of a "work of jazz." He explains that "a work of jazz could only be a performance" (pp. 36–37) and distinguishes it from a composition, whether written by jazz musicians or not: "a composition remains a work in general and becomes a work for jazz in the moment that a jazz performance uses it as a starting point" (p. 37). He also distinguishes a "work of jazz" from Western classical music, which he calls "art music": "A jazz performance is an object that conceals a composition as it creates a new version of it, whereas a performance of art music reveals the written work" (p. 36). Interestingly, he often uses the term object in his discussion: "[A composition] cannot manifest itself in a (jazz) sound object outside of a performance, which, as it is being carried out, becomes a real object in its own right. This real object is different from the composition, which remains an unexpressed 'ideal' object" (p. 36). It is certainly important to emphasize the performance aspect of jazz, especially involving improvisation, but it is not clear why he focuses so much on what a "work of jazz" is. Although he sometimes uses examples (like Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight") to make his point, his discussions often become as vague as some of his terms. For example, he defines the term moments as "segments in the continuous sound that are characterized according to factors that the analyst decides on (amount of improvisation, parameters, etc.)" (p. 52). Intent on establishing a comprehensive system, Cugny also heavily engages in classification systems that divide things into categories and subcategories and then further subdivide them into more subcategories. Although it is important to demonstrate the relationships between various concepts and elements, this endeavor often results in a series of catalogs that seem excessive. In distinguishing between "what is composed and what is improvised," for example, he suggests that it "is possible to create a more precise tool with six notions articulated in two categories: the modes of elaboration on the one hand (fixing process, codes of play, improvisation) and the modes of exchange (instruction, cue, interplay) on the other hand" (pp. 55–56). He then divides one of the six notions, the "fixing process," into two categories, a "fixed text" and a "written text"; the former is then further "classified in three types of elements: the composition, the fixed fragment, and the harmonic changes" (p. 56). This type of multilevel categorization, combined with vague terms, often...

« Sur la banquise qui fond, formation d’un genre littéraire » : Mystique et esthétique de la catastrophe dans l’œuvre de Philippe Vasset

Considering the theme of catastrophe in the works of Philippe Vasset entails encountering a paradox: almost all of his texts gravitate around various disasters affecting the contemporary world (from global warming to armed conflicts), and yet the author does not theorize this fact, nor do his texts contain an explicit denunciation of these catastrophes (with only one exception). This article examines theoretical and literary works by Vasset, and refers to critical studies of his texts (by Églantine Colon, Éric Trudel, and Pascal Mougin), to propose an explanation of this paradox. The absence of a condemnation of contemporary disasters in this author’s works is interpreted as the result of his idealization of a mystical type of ecstasy which possesses catastrophic features. I analyze the main thematical and formal aspects of this mysticism and of the literary aesthetics it generates (such as the erasure of the narrator and the use of parataxis) in “L’Exofictif,” Carte muette, Exemplaire de démonstration, and Un livre blanc. Based on the notion of parataxis as defined in Jean-François Lyotard’s Le Différend and on references to La Conjuration and Une vie en l’air, the article ultimately suggests a political function for the ecstatic experience of catastrophe elaborated by Vasset.

Un discípulo oulipiano de Pierre Menard

Pierre Menard, el personaje del cuento de Borges posteriormente reelaborado por Michel Lafon en su novela Une vie de Pierre Ménard, se encuentra agazapado detrás de algunos de los procedimientos compositivos empleados por los autores del OuLiPo, como el «plagio por anticipación» o las técnicas de escritura restrictiva como forma de expansión textual. Basándonos en una concepción dinámica y paródica de la literatura, en la noción de intertextualidad y en la capacidad de proyección del personaje en otros textos, en el presente estudio analizamos uno de sus más peculiares desdoblamientos, el que se produce en el relato de Georges Perec Le voyage d’hiver. Partimos de las afinidades tanto formales como conceptuales que presentan las tres obras para finalmente asistir a la paulatina disgregación de los dos personajes en la propia narración, revelando así su condición de mero artificio textual.

Hildegarde de Bingen, une sainte post-séculière ? La Clôture des merveilles de Lorette Nobécourt

HILDEGARD OF BINGEN — A POST-SECULAR SAINT? LA CLÔTURE DES MERVEILLES BY LORETTE NOBÉCOURT Lorette Nobécourt, belonging to the group of contemporary French writers who re-read biblical and hagiographical myths, may be regarded as one of the authors realizing to a greater or lesser extent the foundation of the post-secular thought. As Nobécourt’s novel entitled La Clôture des merveilles. Une vie d’Hildegarde de Bingen 2013 can be seen as a representative example of a post-secular text, it has been analysed in the present paper. The aim of the article is to seek answers to the following questions: why has the contemporary French writer decided to present St Hildegard and how has the eponymous heroine been delineated in the novel? What is the relation between the Hildegard created by Nobécourt and the female narrator or, to take the argument one step further, what kind of spirituality do they represent? Finally, what does the word clôture used in the title mean to the contemporary laic reader? The present analysis of the novel, being an attempt to give answers to the above-mentioned questions, has been conducted on the basis of Charles Taylor’s theory of “the place of fullness” and John A. McClure’s concept of “new monasticism.”

Mourir n'est pas de mise by David Hennebelle

Reviewed by: Mourir n'est pas de mise by David Hennebelle Alain Ranwez Hennebelle, David. Mourir n'est pas de mise. Autrement, 2018. ISBN 978-2-7467-4773-9. Pp. 148. Although his name is not mentioned in the title and not until page 28, it nevertheless becomes quickly clear, through biographical and geographical data, that this delightful novel deals with the final years of Jacques Brel's life in the Marquesas. In this creative work, all factual elements are based on several biographies of this most highly admired Belgian singer, songwriter, actor, and film director. The novel begins with Brel's departure from Anvers on his 42-ton yawl named Askoy. He sails with his companion Maddly Bamy, who will stay with him until his death, Monday 9 Oct. 1978, at the age of 49. Their project is to tour the world but they will eventually come across Atuona Bay at Hiva Oa the morning of 20 Nov. 1975, where they make their home. It is in this paradise that Brel discovers peace and happiness in a world which does not seem to recognize him and far away from the paparazzi. Prior to his arrival, however, his peace is tragically interrupted by the death of his best friend George "Jojo" Pasquier and Brel's own discovery of lung cancer. But life in this tropical place of bliss is enriching for both Jacques and Maddly: "Les jours passaient. Ils vivaient une vie libre et authentique. Leurs êtres se décantaient" (73). In this new life Brel abandons the sea in favor of aviation. He purchases a Beechcraft 50 Twin Bonanza, which he names Jojo, and runs errands to and from Tahiti to help out the Marquesans. He purchases a large electronic organ, too, and the Marquesans hear him sing for the first time. He also rediscovers a lost childhood not unlike what Paul Gauguin had experienced: "Brel évoquait souvent Gauguin. Il disait que seule l'âme de l'enfant qui reste dans l'adulte est capable de peindre un cheval en vert ou en rouge" (97). In June 1977, Brel sings a newly written song to a local young blind girl who hoped to meet the singer after having heard about him during her short stay in Paris. The song was Les Marquises, which makes her cry of joy. Later in Paris, Brel incorporates this song as the last of the twelve in his final album. The beauty of Les Marquises reverberates throughout this poetic and dreamlike novel and its first line: "Ils parlent de la mort comme tu parles d'un fruit" echoes the novel's title. This indeed is a novel bound to please our professional readers. Hennebelle's literary style touches and moves the reader beautifully, and the reader discovers a reinvented happiness hopefully experienced by Brel and Bamy. Mourir n'est pas de mise was designated as a Rentrée littéraire book for Fall 2018. Alain Ranwez Metropolitan State University of Denver, emeritus Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

The Ghosts of World War II: The Year in France

The Ghosts of World War IIThe Year in France Joanny Moulin (bio) France is no country for grand old men. The first remarkable event of the year in France in the field of life writing was no doubt the publication of Alain's diaries: Journal inédit 1937–1950. Alain is the pen name of Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868–1951), a French philosopher who has become less well-known in recent years, but who had been a role model of sorts for intellectuals like Raymond Aron, Georges Canguilhem, Julien Gracq, André Maurois, or Simone Weil, and who remained a favorite of lycée classes in philosophy and literature until the 1980s at least. The discovery of his diaries came as a shock, because in them Alain very frankly reveals his anti-Semitism: on January 28, 1938, he wrote, "Je voudrais bien, pour ma part, être débarrassé de l'antisémitisme, mais je n'y arrive point" [As far as I am concerned, I would like to be rid of anti-Semitism, but I cannot] (63). On August 3, 1940, he wrote: "On verra peut-être si, les juifs éliminés de tout pouvoir, les choses vont mieux. Il se peut mais je n'en sais rien" [Perhaps we shall see if, once the Jews have been eliminated from all sort of power, things go better. It may be, but I don't know] (432), while on July 23 of the same year, he expressed anti-patriotic opinions and wished for the victory of Nazi Germany: "J'espère que l'Allemand vaincra; car il ne faut pas que le genre de Gaulle l'emporte chez nous" [I hope Germany will prevail, for the De Gaulle style must not be allowed to prevail in this country] (420). The posthumous damage done to his reputation that followed was all the more painful because Alain had so long been considered a wise man. In retrospect, by the damning aspects of the man's private thoughts revealed by this volume, his works suddenly appeared undeserving of being read. A sense of shame was added to this disappointment for those who had admired the philosopher and would certainly not have had they known these repugnant sides of him. Shortly after Alain's diaries came out, Michel Onfray published Solstice d'hiver: Alain, les juifs, Hitler et l'Occupation, one of those half-critical, half-biographical essays, for which he has a predilection, that clearly aims at finishing the work of destroying the former intellectual icon. Onfray, a media-savvy maverick [End Page 49] philosopher who prides himself on speaking outside the university, pounced on Alain as another of those great men of the past, like Freud or Tocqueville, whose statues it is his trademark to pull down. Onfray insists on Alain's acceptance of the Vichy regime, his condemnation of the Résistance, his condoning of Gobineau's racial theories, and his silence on these issues once World War II was over. However, Onfray is not averse to great men as such, as his prefacing of a French translation of Ralph Waldo Emerson's work, Representative Men [Hommes représentatifs], seems to indicate. In fact, he tends to play the part of a moral umpire, damning some figures of the past and lionizing others. Thus, his biographical essay on Henry David Thoreau, Vivre une vie philosophique: Thoreau le sauvage, is a panegyric, although it cannot avoid demonstrating that Thoreau's life was in accordance with his philosophical principles only up to a point. "À quoi sert le grand homme?" [What is the use of the great man?] Onfray asks. He continues: À être un modèle—il nous faut le suivre; à contaminer par son expérience; à générer de nouveau de grands hommes; autrement dit, à assurer le progrès de l'humanité qui, péché contre le marxisme, ne s'accomplit pas avec les masses, mais avec les individualités d'exception. (l. 196) [To be a model that we must follow, to influence through experience, to generate other great men, thus insuring the progress of mankind which, notwithstanding Marxism, is not brought about by the masses, but by exceptional individuals.] French biography, it...

Propaganda and Memory in Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié’s 'A Chinese Life'

A Chinese Life is a graphic autobiography first published in France as Une vie chinoise in three separate volumes between 2009 and 2011. With a single volume English translation appearing in 2012, the work has reached a global audience and speaks to a growing interest in the graphic narrative form as a mode through which comics artists are able to explore questions of identity, politics, and memory. Documenting the life of a Communist Party member who faces severe personal adversity and struggles to maintain his faith in Party ideals, A Chinese Life is a work that addresses issues of history and memory on both personal and political levels. The result is a provocative, sometimes unsatisfying, account that speaks to larger underlying problems of cultural memory and narrating Chinese history, particularly as this history is translated and negotiated across national and political borders.

The Struggle of Others: Pierre Vallières, Quebecois Settler Nationalism, and the N-Word Today

Une vie de ne[···] n'est pas une vie. Et tous les Quebecois etaient (et sont) des ne[···]s.A n[····]r's life is not a life. And all the Quebecois were (and are) n[····]rs.-Pierre VallieresAt any rate, I had missed a vital connection to the present. I had honored the past, but the past was not history.-Michel-Rolph TrouillotIn The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe states that [t]he affirmation of the desire for is so inhabited by the of its conditions of possibility, that every narrative articulation of is haunted by its burial, by the of forgetting.1 She explains that and gender become the traces of such humanist forgetting-a modern humanism whose conditions, she explains, were created by New World people for whom the production of freedom was first predicated on the creation of the racialized category of the unfree and the enslaved, next to whom it was then possible to racialize otherwise those liminal or transitional subjects in between as well as those thought to be on their way toward freedom. My research builds on such critical intuition in order to illuminate such violence of forgetting in the desire to produce freedom in the context of the doubly complex coloniality of French Canada once it became a British space. In this particular essay, I focus on the use of racial analogies and the production of the paradigm of the French Quebecer as a ne··· blanc (or N-word) in the 1960s Quebec literature of decolonization, most influentially in Pierre Vallieres's celebrated and influential 1968 book-length manifesto/autobiography Negres blancs d'Amerique (NBA). Despite the sympathies expressed by prominent figures of the Black Power movement (such as Stokeley Carmichael) toward Vallieres's political activism and his legal struggles,2 I argue that Vallieres's racial analogy, and most notably his misguided conflation of exploitation and slavery, has the effect of de-racializing colonial history, of turning race into a politically insignificant (and acquirable) category within the colony, and of obfuscating the fact that national liberation for Quebecers (Quebecois) is itself predicated on the pursuit of a peculiarly malleable project of native dispossession and political co-optation. In conversation with Mark Rifkin's recent analyses of what he theorizes as settler common sense,3 I explain that Vallieres's loose theorization of a race-neutral, global village of all exploited underclasses under the rubric ne··· provided new orientations for an emergent of feeling in Quebec, one that would easily be incorporated within the hegemonic because it already spoke (and still speaks) its language: it effectively assumed forms of dwelling and personhood predicated on the geopolitical self-evidence of sovereignty and occupancy while exculpating the implied whiteness of the Quebecois national reference and disengaging it from a history of Western coloniality. Such a project, I explain, is embedded in complex political strategies of remembrance that are building upon perceived historical injustices [as a people abandoned by France and colonized by the British] and consequently constructing a politically useful collective identity.4 These strategies of remembrance are often oriented by governmental acts and policies that provide shape and structure to everyday experiences and inhabitances for settlers. In the context of Quebec, the becoming-given5 of stable and lawful identities and modes of occupancy is constantly and peculiarly felt and reenacted away from the exculpatory discursive strategies that have otherwise become crucial to governmental strategies and sovereign narrative in other white states such as Australia and English Canada- states that have cunningly6 been trying to reimagine themselves as belonging to an after (as opposed to an aftermath) of colonialism. …

In their front yard: deconstructing masculinities in Bahaa Trabelsi's novels

This paper reads Bahaa Trabelsi's three novels Une Femme Tout Simplement (Trabelsi, Bahaa. 1995. Une Femme Tout Simplement. Casablanca: Eddif.), Une Vie à Trois (Trabelsi, Bahaa. 2000. Une Vie à Trois. Casablanca: Eddif.) and Slim, les Femmes et la Mort (Trabelsi, Bahaa. 2004. Slim, les Femmes et la Mort … . Casablanca: Eddif.) and her collection of short stories Parlez-moi d'Amour (Trabelsi, Bahaa. 2014. Parlez-Moi d'Amour. Casablanca: La Croisée des Chemins.) as examples of a renewed feminine consciousness that subverts the patterns of Moroccan masculinity. Trabelsi positions herself as a unique writer whose interest in and critique of the male discourse puts her at odds with other contemporary female writers. Her novels explore complex identities, deconstructing the myth of masculinity where male characters are fragile victims of an oppressing social order that predetermines what it means to be a man. Her female characters, on the other hand, emerge as autonomous and powerful despite being oppressed by a patriarchal culture. With this fascinating feminist momentum, her stories offer a social therapy transcending moral values, where the boundaries fixed by religion, class, and gender are blurred in the name of difference and coexistence.

Les barrages de sable par Jean-Yves Jouannais

Reviews 273 the reader in all this? Far from being a self-indulgent self-exploration, this récit highlights the importance of literature in our lives. It shows us with elegance and gentle humor how we construct stories to make sense out of chaos and how this helps us chart our course. Metropolitan State University of Denver Ann Williams Jouannais, Jean-Yves. Les barrages de sable. Paris: Grasset, 2014. ISBN 978-2-24685197 -4. Pp. 204. 17 a. A long meditation about building sand castles and their analogy to military defense, the narrative moves amoeba-like into various genres. It represents serious inquiry, using citations of writers from ancient, medieval to modern times. The book reads at times like a personal journal, at times like a treatise, and at times like a novel. The text begins like a novel in which a father is supervising the playtime of his two young children on a beach as they build a dam in the sand against the Atlantic. Explaining the movement of tides, his thoughts wander to ancient writers and to Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Later, when remembering this evening, he recalls telling his children the story of the King of Sparta during his siege of Mantinea. It was the proposal to block the flow of a river that caused flooding in this town and made its capture feasible.His children learned that they too were playing at subjugating the waters to meet their own ends. The childhood practice of making sandcastles is thus connected to the strategies of waging war. Connections are also made to writing and literature in an analogy between the activity of writing and the building of blockades. Concurring with Alfieri, the author believes that writing poetry is similar to the building of a barrage. While a barrage may let water pass through its tiny openings, a poem by its arrangement of blocks of words has spaces through which other voices are allowed to pass. Unique events that changed military outcomes are presented such as the defeat of the German forces at the Battle of Yser in Belgium during the Second World War. On the march toward Dunkirk, the Germans were able to push back the Allied forces. A simple lockkeeper, Hendrik Geeraert, proposed to open the floodgates of the dams and all the weirs. This maneuver surpassed all his expectations. The entire area was inundated and transformed into a lake. The Germans thus confounded, were forced to retreat. Sand structures can metaphorically serve as monuments to soldiers missing in action. One such case is that of Japanese soldier Hiro Onoda, charged to serve on the Philippine island of Lubang in 1944, during World War II. Onoda hid in the hills, faithfully defending his post until 1974. The Japanese government had to locate his original commander, Major Taniguchi, to order him to surrender. The text moves in and out of amazing ruminations: letters to Proust; the Song of Roland; the story of Alexander the Great, whose coat of arms showed a sand fortification facing the tide; the etymology of the word infantry; all flow one after another. The word infant links to foot-soldier taking us back to the earliest methods of war. Readers who enjoy military planning, strategies of defense, recondite and surprising facts, literary or historical reflections from diverse epochs and nations, will savor this book. It provides moments of wonder; one reading will not suffice to justly assimilate this composite of styles. Neumann University (PA) Maria G. Traub Laroui, Fouad. Les tribulations du dernier Sijilmassi. Paris: Julliard, 2014. ISBN 9782 -260-02141-4. Pp. 324. 20 a. Ce roman est un pur joyau dont il faut saluer la truculence de la première partie, car les choses se gâtent dans la seconde. Adam Sijilmassi, jeune ingénieur marocain, mène une vie très pleine, qu’il décide de changer radicalement pour se replonger dans sa culture. Le personnage est, pour son malheur, le fils d’une famille connue qui se retrouve pris dans les mailles d’un filet, entre l’État omniprésent et une non moins pesante secte islamiste dont il n’a que faire. Quoique souvent juste...

Agency in translating "Une Vie de Boy" into English: Exploring translator identity and translation strategies

Recent research in translation studies has underscored the role of translators as agents. This implies that a translator is not just a neutral conduit of a message from one language to another, but someone who is very much involved in the power interplay that determines the decision making leading to the translation product. It is within this context that this paper seeks to analyse the concept of ‘agency’ in translation, with specific focus on African literature in European languages. It is worth mentioning that while this type of literature has been the subject of much research, less attention has been given to it in terms of translation. Focusing on a translation by the late John Reed of Ferdinand Oyono’s Une Vie de Boy , this paper seeks to show how an understanding of the identity of the translator can lead to an appreciation of his/her translation strategies. It should be noted that translating African culture from one European language to another can be quite a challenging task – especially if the culture is foreign to the translator – due to the fact that cultural value systems are difficult to grasp as they are intricately woven into the texture of the native languages (Bandia 2008). Such a task is even more intriguing since the original text is in itself a form of translation, initially conceived in the African language of the author before being rendered into a European language. In this case, the agency role of the translator would therefore be more significant given that s/he is dealing with a peculiar source text that is different from most source texts which are translated between relatively close or non-distant cultures. Through an ethnographic study involving an exploration of the context of the translation production, as well as an interview with Reed, this paper posits that the translator’s socio-cultural background tends to influence the nature and extent of his/her intervention in the translation process. This will contribute in shifting the focus of translation assessment from solely the end product to an inclusion of the translator’s identity.