French Writer Research Articles

Quantifying the Gap: The Gender Gap in French Writers’ Wikidata

One of the recurring questions of world literary history is how to ensure that marginalized writers are represented. The advent of a data-driven literary history has made this question even more pressing, as collaborative and distributed projects like Wikidata have been shown to exhibit large gaps between groups, despite the diversity of topics and contributors represented. In order to get an idea of how entrenched the gender gap is within literary Wikidata, I will examine the representation of male writers versus writers who are women or other genders using Wikidata. Since the data are vast and complex, I will particularly focus on the subset that is related to French and Francophone writers in Wikidata with an eye to how the gender gap evolves across nations, geography, and time. I will show that the gender gap is less significant in recent periods and in smaller Wikidata communities and that the largest Wikidata communities with the longest histories have larger gender gaps. As in other subject fields, literary topics in Wikidata are disproportionately linked to male authors. Finally, I consider some ways that the gender gap intersects with linguistic justice movements and how the gender gap can be reduced in literary Wikidata. The patterns in the data and procedure may be generalizable to literary Wikidata as a whole, especially larger Wikidata communities, because the gender gap in both the French and the Francophone subsets of the data is close to the global average; there is also a higher-than-average representation of writers of other genders that resembles other large Wikidata communities.

Identity Politics and the Decolonization of the Western Mind: The Intellectual Resilience of Alain de Benoist and the Nouvelle Droite

Abstract This article argues that parallel to and accompanying the populist backlash tormenting Western democratic societies, a new discourse has emerged to compete with liberal pluralism, progressive multiculturalism, and the ideology of universal human rights. It is a discourse running contrary to the positions expected of the exclusionist right. Rather than originating in a vulgar national-populist reaction against liberal democracy and minority rights, this competing perspective comes from an almost paradoxical synthesis of prefascist ideas developed in the early 20th century and current pro-diversity and anticolonialist theories. In attempting to understand this perplexing ideological conjuncture, it can help to follow the ideological evolution of the French writer and ideologue of the French and European new right, Alain de Benoist. The ideas he developed in the 1980s and 1990s, and expanded in recent years, have contributed to synthesizing an ideological trend that is becoming central in the current debate on the populist backlash in Western democratic societies – right-wing postcolonialism. While de Benoist was not alone in this, he was one of the first to introduce and weaponize the discourse of the Weimar Conservative Revolution as a theory of emancipation for both Western repressed identities as for Third-World ones.

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier

Reviewed by: The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier Thomas Nolden LAURENT MAUVIGNIER The Birthday Party Trans. Daniel Levin Becker. Oakland, California. Transit Books. 2023. 444 pages. LAURENT MAUVIGNIER'S 444-pagelong novel is a painfully slow burn, and yet it provides for a most compulsive read. Mauvignier, the prolific French author of a dozen novels, has chosen a remote hamlet in the French provinces for the setting of his thriller, revisiting a setting of which French writers are quite fond. While Mathias Énard introduced the readers of his novel The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild to the quaint sides of country life, largely from the perspective of a young Parisian anthropologist striving to translate the mores of the provinces into a dissertation, Mauvignier's humorous depiction of life in the French boonies does so entirely without the wink of the eye. Instead, he pulls out the gun of psychological scrutiny and puts four inhabitants of a small hamlet into the crosshairs of a relentless tour de force of narrative reckoning. Mauvignier finds them in the geographical isolation of a few houses ominously called "Three Lone Girls"—a setting that slowly but surely will be revealed as a trap. Patrice Bergogne, an overweight and underappreciated farmer, tries to make a living off the little land he has inherited, lovingly devoted to his young daughter, Ida, and to his mystifyingly indifferent wife, Marion. With her fortieth birthday advancing, Marion for her part had never succeeded in reciprocating her husband's patient advances and innumerable attempts at creating a marital life that may meet even the lowest of expectations. The reader learns that Patrice's sexual and emotional frustration are hardly a recent twist in the story of their marriage. From the beginning of their relationship, Patrice was painfully yet acceptingly aware of the mismatch between him, the bumbling peasant, and his much more mundane wife who returns from her office jobs late in the evening. In contrast to her meek husband, Marion is not one to accept any crap from her male colleagues and supervisors at work. Instead, she calls them out for their misogynist attitudes and pursues them with an unrelenting drive, to the admiration of her female colleagues with whom she likes to party after work. Initially, the couple's neighbor, an older painter who had left Paris to resettle in the quietude of the Three Lone Girls, appears to be the narrative's target: Christine has been receiving threatening letters, which she reports, to little avail, to the police. The [End Page 73] artist is close to the young child of their busy neighbors, friendly with Patrice, and heedful of withdrawn and inaccessible Marion, who remains a mystery to her just as much as to the readers. With the pace, the persistence, and the sheer power of a cutterhead drilling a tunnel through the darkness of a mountain, Mauvignier penetrates the past and the present of his characters' private lives and feelings. The slow motion of his narrative may at first annoy his readers who, several chapters into the novel, have become most intimately acquainted with a set of characters without being afforded even a hunch of what this all will lead up to. Only when the preparations for Marion's fortieth birthday slowly but finally come into focus do they get a grasp of what's to come. Without increasing what students of cinema call the frames-per-second technique, Mauvignier has a new set of characters join the preparation for the celebration of Marion's birthday. With the unexpected arrival of three violent young men, the readers feel almost relieved as the portentous mood that has been evoked in an almost suffocating manner gets lifted at last. Of course, when the heavy clouds that have been hovering so low over the hamlet lift, it is not for the better. On the contrary. Following the meticulously prepared introduction of the setting and the characters, Mauvignier redirects the drill head of the novel to take aim at Marion's life before entering this marriage of unequals. Her past catches up with her in the form of three violent brothers who are out to get her, to get even...

Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory by Oana Panaïté

Reviewed by: Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory by Oana Panaïté Kaliane Ung Panaïté, Oana. Necrofiction and the Politics of Literary Memory. Liverpool UP, 2022. ISBN 978-1-802-07717-9. Pp. 208. This rich comparative analysis of literary works on death delves into the performative act of writing death, first as an act of remembering turned to the past, then as an intimate trajectory turned to the future, by installing a post-mortem textual monument, à la Mallarmé. When writing is rendered visible as a process rooted in the present, the text is revealed as an "act of mourning, not a fiction of mourning" (3). The French and Francophone writers chosen by Panaïté as case studies—Linda Lê, Patrick Modiano, Assia Djebar, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Maylis de Kerangal—form a literary canon investigating death as an event to be reactualised by the literary text, creating "narratives of the aftermath" (2) as they convey the chaos of our current world. These authors also favor an experimental approach against the hegemony of linear storytelling. For each instance of necrofiction, Panaïté relies on precise close reading to analyze the textual installation and its effects on time, space, memory, and narrative, thus resisting reading as a monolithic gesture. Drawing its interdisciplinary approach from narratology, trauma studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary French thought, the author defines necrofiction as an ensemble of narratives emphasizing memorialization as the search for an ethical account of the past that weaves together the personal and the political (29-30). Through a "thematized, ritualized, enunciative, and meta-narrative engagement with the event of death," (30) necrofiction reassesses the meaning of finitude and memory, going beyond the dichotomy of life and death. Inhabiting this "duality" (178) and focusing on the metanarrative level of her corpus, Panaïté challenges the notion that literature's representational power is its center of gravity, and addresses the failures of literature by exploring what lies at the threshold, at the intersection of genres, and embracing hybridity. Embracing the diversity of francophone cultures and territories, the author analyzes spectres, ghosts, zombies, and other forms of haunting in the craft of literature: the plastic nature of "the dead as a collective entity" in Linda Lê (36), the "literary cenotaph" (54) that unfolds "literal duplications and mirror images" in Patrick Modiano (74), the polyphonic artificial crypt favoring hesitation over blind faith in Assia Djebar (106), the narrative zombification endowed with negative poetics in Patrick Chamoiseau (130), and the aesthetics of local and global crisis in Maylis de Kerangal's migration-inspired text, which calls for a form of "attentional activism" (172). The conclusion of each chapter replaces the examined novel in the overall corpus, thereby advancing the author's reflection on the genre of necrofiction. This book could be a valuable addition to a survey course on genres of storytelling in twentieth-century and contemporary literature, and could be included in seminars on narration and trauma. [End Page 197] Kaliane Ung University of Pittsburgh (PA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French

Concepts of BLINDNESS, LOVE, VIRTUE in the Artistic World of A. Zhid (Based on the Material of A. Gide's Novels "The Narrow Gate" and "Pastoral Symphony"

The subject of the research is the novels of the French writer Andre Gide "The Narrow Gate" and "The Pastoral Symphony". The specificity of the expression of the author's thought in these stories through conceptual antinomies is noted, as a result of which the study of the concepts of BLINDNESS, LOVE, VIRTUE is actualized. The semantic content of the stated concepts is analyzed, which is carried out on the basis of their definitions in dictionaries and biblical texts. Their representatives are observed, creating a semantic field of the concepts of BLINDNESS, LOVE, VIRTUE, introduced by the author into the composition and plot of works and representing the author's interpretation. On the basis of the revealed meanings and antinomy of these basic concepts for every Christian, their function in the stories is revealed. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the work of A. Zhid from the point of view of the use of concepts is insufficiently studied. The main conclusions of the study are the following. The concepts of BLINDNESS, LOVE, and VIRTUE have a traditional semantic fullness that has developed in centuries-old Christian discourse, but the writer demonstrates the displacement of their evangelical content due to the emergence of new interpretations associated with the spiritual crisis of society. With the help of the introduction of these antinomic concepts into the story, the writer organizes the artistic space of works: they determine the choice of confessional genre, saturation of stories with allusions, reminiscences and intertexts from biblical texts, the use of these concepts to organize the implicitness and explicitness of the narrative. Concepts perform the functions of characterization of heroes, epochs and expression of the author's position.

Le musée: une histoire mondiale, 3 vols., i: Du trésor au musée; ii: L’ancrage européen; iii: À la conquête du monde

Interest in museum studies, or ‘museology’ as it came to be called, reached a peak in the English-speaking world around the year 2000. This journal began publication in 1989, and Peter Vergo’s edited collection The New Museology appeared that same year. By 2005 the American historian Randolph Starns required thirty pages for all the listings in his article ‘A Historian’s Brief Guide to New Museum Studies’. Yet, although French writers and social theorists such as Malraux, Foucault and Bourdieu were frequently invoked in approaching the subject, there was relatively little new writing by French cultural historians, Dominic Poulot’s Musée nation patrimoine, 1789–1815 (1997) being a notable exception. One collection of essays, however, stood out as offering a perceptive trans-national view of the historical phenomenon of collecting in Europe, and placed the practice in a broadly anthropological framework. This was Krzysztof Pomian’s Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux: Paris, Venise, xvie–xviiie siècle, which was published in France in 1987, and appeared in an English translation, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, in 1990.

Poe in Cyberspace: The Pleasure Principle Revisited

Poe in Cyberspace: The Pleasure Principle Revisited

1908 Tabriz Uprising through French Writings

Abstract As one of the crucial moments of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the siege of Tabriz is logically one of the most commented episodes of the period both in Iranian and foreign historiographies. Among these, the French perception of this episode of the late Qajar era is less known than the British and Russian ones, and of course than Iranian sources. This article puts in comparison two testimonies: one from the French Consul in Tabriz, Alphonse Nicolas, and the other one from a French military officer in travel through Central Asia, Fernand Anginieur. Although Nicolas had a great experience of Iran that Anginieur did not have, their visions are quite similar when it comes to close the roots of the revolution in Tabriz. However, because of the gap between their experiences of the region and their own personalities, their writings about Tabriz in 1908–1909 diverge greatly about the appreciation of the events. Nonetheless, the main value of their writings, for us, remains the factual information they gave.

Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

Unbecoming Language by Annabel L. Kim is a detailed study of three French writers: Nathalie Sarraute, Monique Wittig and Anne Garréta. Through extensive and careful analysis of each of these writers’ works and personal backgrounds, Kim traces a direct chain of influence between them. Furthermore, she proposes to consider their works as a common corpus—a coherent theoretical project of anti-difference writing: an innovative project that presents us with ways in which language can become a means of societal and political potential to undo identity. In the first of four chapters, Kim examines Sarraute’s work and proposes a new, surprising rereading of her corpus. Even though Sarraute is most often situated within the categories of New Novel and “woman writer,” Kim argues that both categories rob us of some important aspects of her works and instead offers a political reading of Sarraute’s writing. In her study of Sarraute, Kim pays special attention to Tropismes, in which language becomes a powerful force with the ability to shape reality. For Kim, Sarraute’s tropisms place the reader in an indeterminate space where they can experience language as Sarraute’s anonymous subjectivities, and, through an encounter with unbecoming language, have their own identity erased. In this sense, Kim concludes that Sarraute’s writing is revolutionary.

La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature by Antoine Compagnon

Reviewed by: La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature by Antoine Compagnon Ian Ellison La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature. By Antoine Compagnon. Paris: Éditions des Équateurs. 2021. 384 pp. €23. ISBN 978–2–382–84184–6. In Proust's La Prisonnière, as the narrator's favourite author Bergotte approaches the end of his life, he is perturbed to have no recollection of a brilliantly painted yellow wall in Vermeer's View of Delft that has been highly praised by an art critic. Spurning his doctors' advice to remain in bed, Bergotte insists upon seeing the painting once more and, as he gazes at the canvas, he remarks, 'c'est ainsi que j'aurais dû écrire' before collapsing. How does a writing life come to a close? With his retirement in sight and still deeply affected by the recent death of a close friend, this question plagued Antoine Compagnon in his final year of teaching at the Collège de France, in 2020. It subsequently provides the impetus for his final series of lectures, handsomely published a year later as a beautifully illustrated collection of thirteen essays under the title La Vie derrière soi: fins de la littérature. Literature, Compagnon declares, has an essential link with melancholy, mourning, and death. Indeed, paraphrasing and inverting Montaigne, Compagnon remarks towards the beginning of this collection that in what follows it is less the case that 'la mort n'est pas le but mais le bout de la vie', but rather that 'la fin n'est pas le bout mais le but de la littérature' (p. 7). This is not new territory for Compagnon (moreover, his essais could be conceived of as an hommage to Roland Barthes's provocation in his own final lecture series at the Collège de France that 'je pourrais décider de ne plus écrire', p. 19). Nor is it particularly ground-breaking as a point of departure. Yet these lectures do shed new light on the well-tilled fields of lateness and late style. Across the vastness of European culture it is not necessarily the case that, as Compagnon claims, the late works of writers have aroused less curiosity than the old-age style of painters and musicians, who may be more clearly afflicted by the failures of their body, hand, eye, or ear (in his second essay Compagnon recalls Gian Lorenzo Bernini's waspish pronouncement upon observing Nicolas Poussin's last paintings in Paris in 1665 that 'People should stop working at a certain age; for [End Page 238] all men end up declining', p. 50). Nevertheless, it is true that the notions of Spätstil and Altersstil are typically exemplified and theorized with far greater frequency in the Germanic—and, latterly, Anglophone—sphere than in the field of French letters: Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, and Rembrandt are notably invoked, for example, by Adorno, Benn, Broch, and Neumann. It is also, overwhelmingly, a man's game. While Compagnon's essays still focus predominantly on male canonical writers and the theoretical scaffolding of the book is notably Anglo-German, his application of the discourse of late style to French writers is illuminating. In his fifth essay, for instance, Compagnon draws on the work of Georg Simmel to clarify 'pourquoi il n'y a pas ou peu d'artistes français dans le canon habituel des stylistes tardives' (p. 110). Pointing to Victor Hugo in the 1830s and Rimbaud in the 1870s, he observes how many French writers remain youthful in cultural memory: 'Conformément au mythe de la revolution politique et esthétique, ce sont en France des jeunes rebelles qui font l'art en mettant à bas les idoles' (p. 110). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the French Revolution is the elephant in the room that does not forget: if ageing and late style connote a certain bourgeois conservatism, it is worth remembering that 'En France, depuis le romantisme, le bourgeois est un salaud; en Allemagne, il est un héros' (p. 110). La Vie derrière soi runs the gamut of canonical Western European literature, is pithily and personably written, and is a pleasure to read. It...

L’Ère des non-témoins: la littérature des ‘petits-enfants de la Shoah’. Par Aurélie Barjonet

In 2010, writer-survivor Jorge Semprún expressed his joy at the fact that new novelists were writing about the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews, even if five years earlier he had implored the same novelists not to neglect the memory of political deportees such as himself. Semprún’s two statements capture the phenomenon that is the subject of Aurélie Barjonet’s study: a recent surge in literary works about the Holocaust by French writers belonging to the generation of the grandchildren of those targeted by wartime antisemitism. The book takes stock of texts written between 2006, when Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes was published, and 2012, when, as Barjonet notes, the phenomenon was well established in terms of both themes and narrative strategies. Barjonet’s corpus consists of narratives by the ‘descendants’, as she labels those with a familial link to the Holocaust (Ivan Jablonka, Alexandre Jardin), and by the ‘héritiers’, as she calls those without it (Littell, Yannick Haenel, Laurent Binet). The twenty-two texts she studies, which include those affected by — to use Marianne Hirsch’s terminology — ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ postmemory, fall into additional three categories: ‘enquêtes archéologiques’ (historical narratives marked by self-reflexivity), ‘fictions de témoignage’ (historical novels stamped by anachronism), and ‘histoires croisées’, where an enquiry into the life (and death) of a Holocaust victim intersects with other stories (for example, Binet’s HHhH). By focusing on recent French Holocaust novels, Barjonet fills a lacuna in literary criticism. Despite its steady growth, illustrated by the studies by Catherine Coquio, Yannick Malgouzou, and Fransiska Louwagie, scholarship of French Holocaust literature continues to prioritize canonical narratives by first- and second-generation writers. Taxonomically minded and aiming to be comprehensive, Barjonet’s study nevertheless leaves out francophone authors whose writings approach the Shoah from a non-European perspective and invite its reframing within French colonial history (for example, Michèle Maillet, Nathacha Appanah, and Louis-Philippe Dalembert). Barjonet’s book is divided into an Introduction and four chapters. Chapter 1 (‘Distinctions’) tackles the terminology and categories operational in criticism of Holocaust literature, such as ‘1.5 generation’, ‘2.5 generation’, and ‘génération d’après’. Chapter 2 (‘Description’) addresses the thematic and formal characteristics of the corpus, and the representational and ethical difficulties attached to third-generation Holocaust literature. Chapter 3 (‘Opinions’) revisits the heated debates provoked by some of the novels examined here, emblematized by Les Bienveillantes and Haenel’s Jan Karski. Chapter 4 (‘Confusions’) confronts what Barjonet perceives as misconceptions regarding Holocaust literature, which have emerged in the anglophone world and are exemplified by the terms ‘second-generation survivor’ and ‘prosthetic witness’. Barjonet’s mistrust of these labels is a symptom of her wider ambition to demarcate French criticism of Holocaust literature as a field that is less dependent on anglophone theorizations. While the author demonstrates awareness of the writings of Hirsch, Dominick LaCapra, and Michael Rothberg, her study makes only scant references to them, instead relying on French scholarship and elaborating its own categorizations, such as the titular ‘petits-enfants de la Shoah’.

Сведения о Крымском ханстве в трактате Адриана де Верди дю Вернуа

Research objectives: The aim of this article is to explore a lesser-known source that provides information about the Crimean Khanate – a treatise called “Essays on the Geography, Politics, and History of the Turkish Empire in Europe,” written by the French “armchair” scholar Adrian-Marie-François de Verdy du Vernois, who collected and summarized various materials on the history of the region in his work. Research materials: The article is based on an extract dedicated to the Crimea from the aforementioned treatise, which was published twice, in 1784 and 1785. This text has not yet been studied in Russian historiography. Results and novelty of the research: The study sheds light on the biography of de Verdy du Vernois, demonstrating the diversity of his scholarly interests. It is shown that during his work on the analyzed treatise, the Frenchman used a wide variety of sources, including books written by French diplomats and writers, encyclopedic works of “armchair” researchers, maps of the Northern Black Sea region, and state documents. The article reveals the information potential of the French treatise, which describes the geographical location and history of the Crimean Khanate, its relations with the Ottoman Sultan and the circumstances under which the Crimea accepted the Turkish protectorate, the ethnic structure of the state, the urban centres subordinated to the khan, the cities under Turkish power, the Russian interests in the Black Sea Area, and the Russo-Ottoman war of 1768–1774. Additionally, the article shows the place of the analyzed book among contemporary Western intellectuals’ perceptions of the Crimea and reveals erroneous and stereotypical views.

Pioneers in Dermatology and Venereology: An Interview with Professor Alain Taieb.

Among the research conducted, those that had the most impact concern: I was hesitant about choosing between pathology (I graduated in pathology too) and dermatology, but seeing just dead bodies or biopsies was less fun than the clinic with living children and adults. I made my decision after my first semester in dermatology when I had the chance to see the masters of the discipline coming to Bordeaux for a clinical meeting organized by my chief, Prof Texier. I remember Prof Robert Degos came and was presented with a case of his disease (malignant atrophic papulosis) and agreed upon the diagnosis (not very reassuring for the patient, however!). I was very enthusiastic after my rotation in paediatric dermatology under Prof Maleville, and this was the second landmark that defined the focus of my career. Retrospectively, I think of my chefs de Clinique Jean Pierre Méraud in Prof Texier's department for dermatology, and Pascal Massicot for paediatrics and paediatric dermatology in Prof Maleville's department when I was a beginner. The teachings of the professors were probably more important relative to overall clinical judgement and decision-making. I purchased the book of Fitzpatrick (red one), and I found it very complementary with the Degos, which was the French authoritative dermatology textbook. The Fitzpatrick and the Harrison for internal medicine were overall good guides for me, and I learnt a lot from my readings, and I feel myself a bit as an autodidact. Yes, formerly president of the Société de Recherche Dermatologique (SRD), of the Société Française de Dermatologie Pédiatrique (SFDP), and currently of the International Society of Atopic Dermatitis since 2018. Probably to have built a very good team in the clinic and the lab and to have created with other colleagues international task forces on atopic dermatitis and vitiligo. Not to be able to promote gifted young individuals to the level they would deserve. I think having fun is essential in your life, especially in your professional milieu where you spend most of your time, and joking was important daily. Probably, I remember the more tragic events more easily, such as the loss of a young patient you are caring for since a long time. On the funny side, I laughed a lot at the movies made by my teams for my retirement; one on a grand round caricature, another one depicting me in the rare diseases unit and the last one on melanocyte research. From the pioneers of the modern times—since the second half of the XIXth century—I know based on my own historical work and senior contemporaries, I would mention Louis-Anne-Jean Brocq, Ferdinand-Jean Darier and William Dubreuilh from the French-speaking side; Moritz Kaposi, Josef Jadassohn and Otto Braun Falco on the German-speaking side; and also Stefania Jablonska (Poland), Albert Kligman, Thomas Fitzpatrick (USA) and Hiroshi Shimizu (Japan). Jean Hilaire Saurat, Peter Elias, Martin Röcken, Rudi Happle, Johannes Ring, John McGrath, Eli Sprecher, Amy Paller and Thomas Kupper. Not only taking care of my family especially my grandchildren but also reading, travelling and enjoying football matches. Writer: Among contemporaries, I like Michel Houellebecq, our most original French writer, but I am very eclectic. Composer: Varies according to periods of life but I prefer classical music. I was rather Wagner-Bruckner when younger, now surprisingly more Puccini, who I could hardly tolerate before. Bach and Mozart are steadier in my appreciation. Painter: I have difficulties selecting one among classical painters Velasquez, Rembrandt, Goya and Manet to name a few. To adapt modern technology, including AI, to the needs of primary care. Access to basic knowledge limiting skin aging and translating it into practice. Take your time to decide what you want to do, and then work hard to achieve your goals. Follow your own ideas, and do not remain mainstream. *Note: The Pioneers in Dermatology and Venereology interview was conceived and conducted by Johannes Ring.

The Mark of the Detail: Universalism, Type, Difference

AbstractDeparting from the premise that novelistic details particularize and locate characters in a sociocultural matrix, this essay examines what happens to the detail in texts that refuse certain norms of specification. The essay focuses on the French writer Anne F. Garréta’s novel Sphinx (1986), which avoids all linguistic markers of gender for its central pair of lovers, and Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” (1983), which never reveals the racial identities of its two protagonists, one of whom is white and one Black. Drawing on Georg Lukács’s discussion of realism and typicality, the essay considers how these unmarked texts mediate between individual and type, as well as their approaches to the representation of difference.

THE HOLOCAUST IN TATIANA DE ROSNAY’S SARAH’S KEY (2007)

The article offers an analysis of the Holocaust theme in the novel by a contemporary French writer Tatiana de Rosnay, whose writings incorporate patterns of mass literature as related to relevant concepts of modern culture. The novel Sarah’s Key (2007), the first literary text in English later translated in French, reveals a dark episode in the life of French society within the Nazi occupation in 1940-s, namely one of the biggest crimes committed by Nazis against Jewish people — the raid of Vel’ d’Iv (July 1942) that was witnessed and partially supported by a number of population in Paris. The paper provides an analysis of the events described in the novel as a significant sample of writings on Holocaust in the corpus of the modern French literature in the lights of trauma studies and the concept of transgenerational memory and based on historical approach, as well as comparative and narrative methodology. In particular, the circumstances and consequences of the raid are viewed from historical and cultural aspects, the comparative aspect is incorporated through the analysis of the concept of memory in the novel by de Rosnay and in Patrick Modiano’s writings, whereas fondamental metaphors and symbols in the novel are classified and interpreted in their relation to the theory of ‘lieux de mémoire’ by Pierre Nora. Such a complex approach in the research is to reveal several distinct interpretative levels of the Holocaust theme in the novel; it also helps to reinforce the writer’s dialogue with her predecessors and contemporaries in modern European literature against the background of the current war in Ukraine.

The Overemphasized Legacy of the Napoleonic Code

When we discuss the legacies of Napoleon, it is inevitable to disregard his contribution to global jurisprudence: the French Civil Code of 1804. As Emperor, Napoleon proposed to enhance his military achievements with a comprehensive codification. Although he was not the precedent in doing so, it was him who created the paradigm of all codes that we now consider “modern.” For decades, historians investigating the course of Napoleon’s codification have developed a plausible explanation of its unparalleled significance in the world; that is, it extensively embodies the ideas of the radical French Revolution, which undermined feudal regimes and shaped modern society. However, this argument reflects a common tendency of glossing the Code by adding personal interpretations through modern lenses; it is neither objective nor inaccurate. The first part of this study is largely based on James Gordley’s essay (1994) on the myths of Napoleon’s codification. We will see that ideas expressed in the Code were not as novel to people in the nineteenth century as principles of the Revolution were, because many concepts were proposed by early French writers and framers of Roman law. In the second part of the study, we will investigate the relation between codification and the modern world. We will use Latin America as an instance to illustrate the limitations of the Code due to its relative antiquity. When we combine the conclusions of the two parts, it is plain that the legacy of Napoleon’s Code is often overemphasized in the modern world.

French Perceptions of Macau as Place and Space in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract Using eyewitness accounts by some French writers who sojourned in Macau during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article investigates Macanese history from French perspectives. Attention is given to history, culture, and literature within writers’ interpretations. A distinct feature of Macanese history in this period is a story of the conflict between changed and unchanged, glory and decline, temporariness and timelessness. Imbued with admiration, reminiscence, and critique, the observations made by the French writers form a unique panoramic view over Macau. Such observations illustrate how Western culture examined itself, here represented as Portuguese culture, and the manifestations of this particular culture after being transplanted into another country far from the homeland. Integration of French perspectives can enhance the writing of Macanese history by providing particular insights and literary discernment.

Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal

Reviewed by: Eastbound by Maylis De Kerangal Kevin Canfield MAYLIS DE KERANGAL Eastbound Trans. Jessica Moore. New York. Archipelago. 2023. 137 pages. MAYLIS DE KERANGAL'S Eastbound is an antiwar story in which no bullets are fired and not a single battle is fought. The French writer's protagonists, strangers who do not share a language, are passengers on a train cutting across the Russian steppes. Both are on the run—but for very different reasons. Happenstance will make them righteous conspirators. De Kerangal's potent novella was first published in Paris in 2012. The new English translation, by an insightful poet named Jessica Moore, would be worthwhile in any geopolitical climate. But in one shaped by Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it's tragically timely. The book begins with Aliocha, part of a large group of Russian military draftees, boarding a Trans-Siberian railroad car. Almost immediately, the skinny twenty-year-old is roughed up by fellow conscripts. Worried that worse hazing awaits him, he resolves to abandon the armed forces—hopefully for good—at a busy station on the way to eastern Russia. Hélène, a Frenchwoman in her thirties, boards soon after, fleeing a fraught relationship with a Russian government official. Aliocha and Hélène end up standing near the same window. Though she's not flashy like the women "who dazzle him, Lady Gaga for example," the sneakily funny author writes, Aliocha thinks Hélène will understand his plight. He "takes his military papers out of his back pocket and pretends to tear them up." Hélène offers to hide him in her compartment, forging a short-term partnership that will be tested by indignant Russian authorities. The specifics of Aliocha's pending military assignment are never explained, but this lack of specificity doesn't hamper de Kerangal's narrative. It's enough for us to see him battered on the train by supposed compatriots and, later, so pale with foreboding that, Hélène wonders, "where has his blood gone?" Just beyond boyhood, "his torso only as thick as a playing card," his fear is palpable. The Russian countryside, spotted several times through the train's windows, plays an important supporting role. In these sections, de Kerangal sometimes uses multiple adjectives where one might be enough. But several of her landscape passages are nonetheless memorable. As he anxiously ponders the "woolly mauve wilderness," in translator Moore's inspired phrasing, it's evident that Aliocha is a casualty of the militaristic posture that has such a warping effect on people and nations. Kevin Canfield New York Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Переводные практики Ивана Бунина (рассказ «Волхвы»)

The paper is devoted to the analysis of Ivan Bunin’s translated short story “The Magi” (1931), which was included in the cycle “Provençal Tales Retold”. The research aims to comprehend the role of Russian folklore in the formation of the poetic world of the Bunin text created as a translation (more precisely, a “retelling”) of a novella by the French writer Frederic Mistral (1830-1914), Nobel laureate (1904). The authors of the paper identify the main motives that prompted Bunin to turn to foreign folklore, to the regional epic of Provence, determine the hidden intentions that influenced the writer when creating the translated text. In particular, the authors pay attention to the tendency of “straightening” the plot outline of F. Mistral’s memoirs, state that I. Bunin gave the translated text poetic imagery through motifs and speech-stylistic formulas of Russian folklore. The study is novel in that it is the first to analyse the short story “The Magi”, which has not previously attracted critics’ attention, and to interpret the strategies of Bunin’s “translation” activities. As a result, it has been proved that the motive for Bunin’s turn to the folklore of southern France, which was foreign to him, was not the semantic layer of F. Mistral’s folk records and memoirs, but the nostalgic feelings that the folklore of Provence awakened in the prose writer’s soul, which conjured up the memories of the Christmas festivities of the abandoned Russia. It has been shown that Bunin’s knowledge of the basics and principles of Russian folklore helped the writer, on the one hand, to preserve the identity of Mistral’s memoirs, on the other hand, to bring additional nostalgic intentions mediated by the techniques and principles of Russian folklore into the “foreign” translated text.

Jewish–Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France. Edited by Samuel Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince

‘How to admit and transmit the unity of that which was blown apart?’, asks Valérie Zenatti, a French writer of Algerian-Jewish descent, in her afterword. The volume’s contributors answer by examining facets of ‘Jewish–Muslim interactions’, defined by the editors as Maghribi, multilingual, and ‘encompassing creative practice, stimulus, and collaboration between Jewish and Muslim artists and performers’ (p. 5). The first section, focused on relationality, illuminates the contributions of Jewish artists: Tunisian filmmaker Albert Samama, who filmed North African populations during the Italo-Turkish War (Morgan Corriou); singers Habiba Messika, from Tunisia, and Lili Labassi and Salim Halali, from Algeria, whose records were distributed and fed nationalism in Morocco (Christopher Silver); Algerian singer Marie Soussan, who overcame gender barriers and became a pioneer in popular theatre (the late Hadj Miliani with Samuel Sami Everett); Tunisian singer-composer Cheikh El Afrit, who played a major role in collecting, rendering, and diffusing folksongs (Ruth F. Davis); the co-founders of L’École de Tunis in Tunisia, and Jean-Michel Atlan in Algeria, who promoted avant-garde art and aesthetic innovation (Fanny Gillet). From a broader anthropological perspective, Jonathan Glasser scrutinizes the main approaches, and their limitations, to studying Muslim–Jewish musical relationships and suggests an alternative model based on affinity. The second section, devoted to elision (as both omission and merging), starts with a study of the ‘pattern of neglecting’ Jewish communities’ presence and contributions in Algerian comics (Elizabeth Perego, p. 156). In Morocco, Cristina Moreno Almeida argues that the ‘narrative of coexistence’ developed in traditional rap music serves official discourses of unity and discourages criticism (p. 162), while Aomar Boum contends that Jewish sounds, promoted on radio and in festivals, ‘are increasingly becoming integral to the state project of Jewish cultural revival’ (p. 183). Turning to Moroccan cinema, Vanessa Paloma Elbaz probes the role of diegetic music in offering ‘alternate patterns of coexistence’ (p. 219). Jamal Bahmad and Miléna Kartowski-Aïach discuss the work of Moroccan filmmaker Kamal Hachkar; the former analyses his ‘affective use of silence’ to address trauma (p. 224), while the latter explores his position as an ‘orphan of otherness’ mobilizing music to connect with and resuscitate Jewish presence (p. 240). The deconstruction of stereotypes is then explored in the work of Paris-based street artist Combo, who subverts normative models through hybridity and irony (Nadia Kiwan), and in the dialogic performance of Younes and Bambi, a Jewish–Muslim stand-up comedy duo who ‘neutralize the divisive power of these stereotypes’ and promote a model of ‘rire ensemble’ in France (Adi Saleem Bharat, pp. 282, 287). The volume features numerous illustrations, including splendid plates by graphic artist Iris Miské. The editors’ choice to focus on non-conflictual interactions is refreshing, but sometimes generates depoliticized readings. Some aspects could have been incorporated (literary interactions, Amazigh connections), fleshed out (Muslim artists, interactions in France), addressed more directly (the question of Palestine and Israel), or nuanced (Moroccan rap is diverse and not all narratives of coexistence are politically manipulated). Despite these ­reservations, the book is an erudite and much-needed account of often-neglected individual ­trajectories and broader dialogues (re)connecting Jews and Muslims, with an invigorating interdisciplinary focus on idioms and concepts.