The labyrinth motif appears regularly in Christian Grenier's novels. In diegesis, it is always linked to myth and the fates of Daedalus, Theseus and Ariadne. It is also a diegetic motif that structures the setting, organizes the characters' quest and generates suspense. But this motif is above all a metadiscursive metaphor that theorizes the author's writing. In particular, he evokes the meandering construction of police intrigues. It also represents the referential games developed by Christian Grenier: By mixing the words of other writers with his own, offers his readers the opportunity to enter a kind of intertextual labyrinth.

This article focuses on the modern image of the labyrinth-rhizome in Maylis de Kerangal’s novels. Basing on the analyses of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (introduction to Mille plateaux), we explain the characteristics of this strange labyrinth, always in recomposition, and show how it fascinates the novelist. In a second step, we take the example of the labyrinth model which appears in Réparer les vivants : we formulate the hypothesis that it could represent the operation of the Cristal computer application used by health professionals for the organ transplantation procedure. Thus, the labyrinth ceases to be a place of perdition, it can save lifes.

In ideal Topography for a characterized aggression, Rachid Boudjedra represents an illiterate emigrant lost in the maze of the Parisian subway. The reader follows the errance of this emigrant in search of his drop point writing on a bit of paper. At the end of long odyssée, it is found mortally attacked by a group of racists in exit of the subway. Our analysis based on works of Gilbert Durand, Umberto Eco, Deleuze and Guattari, Ethnocritic and urban semiotics, wants to be a description of this allegory of the modern world represented by the Parisian subway. An allegory that the writing that us of labyrinthian practised by the author also represents at the scriptural level.

This Research paper examines how Tolkien's novels, "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings," incorporate labyrinthine elements into their fictional worlds. In these literary works, events primarily unfold in open landscapes, but there are elements that evoke complex and dangerous mazes, where certain heroes assume roles similar to that of Theseus. Thus, this analysis explores the representations of the Labyrinth myth through Tolkien's writing, highlighting both the similarities and differences between these structures in the two contexts, while emphasizing the symbolism of the subterranean world, akin to a cave, as a site of transformation where heroes emerge metamorphosed, invoking both death and rebirth. The paper suggests the use of mythocriticism to analyze the reiterations and variations of Labyrinth mythemes in these novels.

The current article aims to present the woman’s destiny, which was expressed by the poets of French symbolism in the symbols that create the aquatic universe of 19th century, consisting of both female mythological characters and water itself as an element, which has been endowed with characteristics appropriate for mothers. The historical-literary and comparative method permit to present the figure of the mother as a woman’s destiny glorified in the epoch. Its main elements that emerge from the poems are fertility, providing nutrition, peace and safety. In addition, it can be concluded that the poetic image corresponds to the social vision, responding to the needs of the contemporary society.

In this paper we show that the conversion of Durtal appears in its epistemological dimension. For the hero, this dimension can be observed in his almost haunting attempt to understand his spiritual journey in the face of the unfathomable will of God. The analysis of his monologues explicitly demonstrates that, despite his conversion, Durtal sank into spiritual stagnation. Consequently, even spiritual accompaniment becomes for him only a palliative. For the Huysmansian hero, conversion has another dimension – this is a spiritual emancipation which is realized only in the contemplation of divine perfection to the detriment of all community rules imposed by the Church or by contemporary society.

The aim of this article is to draw analogies between the Prisons by Piranesi and The Castle by Franz Kafka in the light of the figure of the labyrinth. In these specific cases, the architectonics (as a pseudo- arrangement of perspective planes) and the plot (as a factitious connection between action sequences) enclose the illusion of depth and the impression of duration in the vicious circles of the lines of rupture and of the missed events, respectively. The Piranesian atopic topic (from atopos, « out of place ») and the Kafkaesque apraxic practice (from apraktos, « inconclusive ») are both based on unsurpassable antinomies and, in this particular respect, seem to revive Zeno of Elea’s paradoxes of motion and Diodorus Cronus’ aporia of becoming, which Gottfried W. Leibniz considers to be two labyrinths.

This paper examines how the figure of the labyrinth helps us to grasp the particular writing of Henri Michaux. Based on a reading of Déplacements, dégagements, it will show how the aesthetic experience of wandering arises from compositional processes of the multiple. This double perspective, both poetic and aesthetic, allows us to grasp the specificity of labyrinthine wandering, which suggests the infinite within a structure that is however finite. It is not the absence of any signification, but the multiplication and proliferation of significant data, that produces wandering. Confronted with this multiplicity, the reader is not confined to a passive state of reception, but actively projects a trajectory in order to give meaning on all his perceptual details, even if this meaning remains unstable.

In Journal sexuel d’un garçon d’aujourd'hui, Arthur Dreyfus records his sexual experiences over several years. But he doesn’t limit himself to recounting his sexual intimacy; he also writes down some of his thoughts on other areas, such as relationships, writing and psychoanalysis. He generally proceeds in short narratives that can take different forms (anecdotes, poems, letters...) and are brought together to form a work of over 2000 pages. The reader is thus led into the author’s systems of thought. The aim of this article is to highlight the labyrinthine construction of this work: first, we’ll see how the Journal is the result of a search for identity. Next, we’ll look at how this work proposes a new form of intertextuality. Finally, we look at the form of the Journal and its impact on the reader. In this way, we offer the first keys to reading a complex but powerful work.

The aim of the paper is to analyze Enfants du lichen, a book of poems by Maya Cousineau Mollen, an Innu poet born in 1975, in order to see if the labyrinth can be considered as a figure of the postcolonial Native American experience. Although the word « labyrinth » does not make its explicit emergence in the poems, their lexical field evokes a whole imagination which makes it emerge implicitly and allows us to believe that the figure of the labyrinth corresponds to the situation of the former colonized. Our contribution is divided into three parts. The first characterizes the postcolonial Native American experience, as described in the poems, and explains why it may be seen as a labyrinth. The second shows the exploration of the paths of possible escape and the last focuses on the exit, the « passage from darkness to light », which can be read as a new era in the life of Canadian Native Americans.

Contemporary narrative features a number of investigative authors who are part of a dynamic of inquiry : investigations in archives, both genealogical and judicial, field research, testimony gathering, trial chronicles. The labyrinth motif not only blurs the lines of enquiry, demonstrating how difficult it is to grasp reality, but also renews the territories of fiction and non-fiction. In this article, we show how contemporary authors engaged in a quest for missing persons or the unveiling of a truth, use the labyrinth motif in their investigative narratives. The labyrinth motif expresses the complexity of the investigations carried out by the authors in their role as investigators. In this way, the labyrinth becomes a metaphor for the authors' creative work, in contact with past and present time.

The article deals with Jean-Luc Godard's interventions in the multimedia arts, known as « fraternal arts », and ut pictura poesis to reconsider the audiovisual juxtaposition of fiction and documentary in the late sixties and « cinema effects » in contemporary art installations. It retraces some of the main elements of the film One plus One directed by Jean-Luc Godard and addresses its role and importance in the clandestine nature of artistic creation by revealing the interconnections between « musical history in the making » and the aesthetics of graffiti, Brechtian quote, and distancing (Verfremdungseffekt). In the second part, the essay draws on Burgin and Dubois to examine how so-called « Godardesques » emerges in the context of contemporary museum installations. By approaching artistic works, our wish is to reveal the forms of reconstitution of the Godardian One plus One. These works loosely linked to classical cinema can be considered, following Burgin, as cinematic heterotopias.

From the publication of À Rebours, Huysmans’ books feature a solitary protagonist, dreaming of a situation outside society, time and space, and even the body and sex. To this desire corresponds the increasing modification of the novel formula: a reflection of life in anomaly, the novel is transformed, to become a reverse novel, sick, deformed, bizarre. The refusal of regularity hides another refusal, that of conforming to a reality that does not correspond to the depth of personal experience. The work of Huysmans, especially in its postnaturalist part, brings a constant questioning of the norm under its various aspects, and constitutes an attempt to create a universe made to measure, necessarily a universe in anomaly. The journey that leads, in the field of novel, from À Rebours to L’Oblat, allows us to trace the stages of this evolution.

The notion of anomaly encompasses a multitude of systemic, physical or psychic deviations and it can have a wide range of possible interpretations. Octave Mirbeau manages to capture all its nuances by presenting, in his novel Sébastien Roch, a vision of reality filled with anomalies. In our contribution, we will show the abundance of defects in the novelistic universe of Sébastien Roch, analyse their essence and then move on to the influence they have on the eponymous character. We will look at the corruption of the education system run by the clerics who denigrate the protagonist's rights in order to preserve their own power; at mental disorders caused by painful experiences as well as at psychological dysfunctions; finally at physical deformities that often reflect the character vices of those affected. Our contribution shall depict a corrupted world where the “normal” is no longer considered as such.

When we think of classic comedic novels, the names of male authors such as Rabelais, Cervantes, or Scarron often come to mind. However, the contributions of women writers to this genre have been overlooked as literary anomalies. Hélène du Taillis (1873-1961), a French journalist and writer, is a literary anomaly in the history of early 20th-century French literature. She wrote not one but two successful and critically acclaimed comedic novels, "Enterrons l’adultère" (1923) and "La Nouvelle Bovary" (1927), at a time when this genre was largely dominated by male writers and considered marginal literature (and still is today). This article aims to examine Taillis's two novels from the perspectives of Hamon and Saint-Gelais on irony and transfictionality. By doing so, highlighting the unique aspects of Taillis's comedic writing, demonstrating that a comical heritage also exists among women writers.

The concept of “constraint” is central to Oulipo’s work, yet the group has introduced this term into modern literary criticism without providing a consistent definition. The resulting ambiguities create challenges for researchers studying Oulipian constraints. This paper reviews Oulipo’s attempts to theorize constraint and legitimize its literature, examining these efforts through the lens of the group’s struggle for literary legitimacy. Indeed, the concept of constraint represents not only Oulipo’s poetic uniqueness, but also an important tool for the group to legitimize itself and gain power within the literary field. This paper argues that “constraint” has served as both an expression of Oulipo’s aesthetic singularity and a strategic lever in its bid for legitimacy.

Édouard Louis has published five novels since 2014, somewhere between autofiction and autosociobiography. In this work, the writer recounts his process of construction as a young gay intellectual. To achieve this, he has to confront the systems of norms he encounters as he traverses different social milieus: the poverty of his family in the countryside, the bourgeoisie of his friends in the provinces, the power of his lovers in Paris. Against this backdrop, this article aims to explore the forms of the sense of abnormality felt by É. Louis during these experiences. We'll see how renewed confrontation with a norm foreign to himself (a cleaved habitus) led the author to develop an original approach to literature: through an aesthetic of confrontation, the author pursues a political objective, namely to invite the reader to join a new form of class struggle.

The present study analyzes the representation of the anomaly in Oscar de profundis by Catherine Mavrikakis. This inexplicable event is paradoxically ever-present and completely absent in end of world literature. In particular, we will examine the role of ruins in the portrayal of the post-catastrophe scenario. This paper argues that the anomaly invites the reader to investigate further. However, they will only find ruins which are a constant reminder of what was lost and not an explanation of how these memories were erased from the collective conscience. The concept of depicting the anomaly through ruins will allow us to better understand how end of world literature may propose a critique of contemporary society.

This article looks at the representation of anomaly in Nicolas Diat's Ce qui manque à un clochard. We examine the character of Marcel Bascoulard, a marginal figure inspired by a real person with the same name. More specifically, we highlight his anomaly and the stances he takes towards those around him. Our work leads us to the idea that anomaly and literary and artistic creation go hand in hand in Bascoulard's case.

Charles Malato has gone down in posterity as the author of novels, memoirs and especially plays in which he castigates the excesses of power. Two events are at the origin of the birth of Malato’s vocation as an anarchist writer: the condemnation of his parents to banishment in New Caledonia and the meeting of the young Charles with Louise Michel. It is in this context that this article proposes to study the autobiographical text of the French author From the Commune to Anarchy which allows us to understand the inner evolution of the somewhat carefree adolescent towards destiny of a revolutionary able to use his pen as a formidable weapon. From then on, the analysis of the text accounts for Malato’s political awareness and his subsequent involvement in social issues, as well as highlighting the style of his language, as cruel as it is grotesque, which will upset the fragile minds of the bourgeois. In short, the exploration of the work constitutes a kind of propaedeutic to the subversive work of Malato whose universality attests to its undeniable topicality.

Paul Willems, 20th-century Belgian playwright, did not shy away from showing many female figures in his plays, and he did so with great attention to detail. Through a thorough analysis, of the following plays : Il pleut dans ma maison and Off et la lune, it is possible to draw analogies between the heroines he created, which might allow to identify the topoi most often used by the Belgian playwright. We used the historical method, notably the selection, fusion, interpretation and ordering of facts. In addition, the method of literature analysis with particular emphasis on the analysis of source texts and the comparative method were used. Based on the analysis carried out, we established that the following topoi of women appear in the two Willems’ plays selected for analysis: a woman as an incomprehensible being, a romantic woman, a traditional woman and a liberated woman.

Traduction de Pour un oui pour un non pour la création de la pièce en version anglaise par Simone Benmussa le 29 mai 1985 à New York. Nathalie Sarraute's theater is part of the attitude of suspicion towards language which marked her era, being part of a drama of speech which leaves a large part to the negative notions of silence, of doubt carried on the instance of speech, emptiness, even worry. However, there is some dramatic action in Le Silence and Pour un oui pour un non. Between her first and last piece, the characters weigh themselves down with flesh and develop a poetics of vertigo, which expresses the dissolution of the self, the presence-absence in the world, the enigma of otherness

The present paper aims to explore the topic of the vocation of a courtesan in the 19th-century France, by analyzing memoirs of tree demi-mondaines of the time: Céleste Mogador, Cora Pearl and Rigolboche. Does such a vocation exist ? If yes, how can we define this notion ? The first part tries to show that prostitution isn’t chosen by women because of the their inclination to debauchery, but is the result of the failed education and parental abandonment. The second part focuses on the importance of independence in the courtesan’s life, as a part of their vocation, and the manner to gain it.

It would be difficult to imagine a Realistic or Naturalistic novel without the character of a servant, the most frequently a female one. Actually, in the 19th century, the servant becomes much more visible and important, raising sometimes into the position of the main character. The Goncourt’s Herminie Lacerteux, Zola’s The Kill and Maupassants’s A Woman’s Life depict three servants whose destiny is strictly connected to their mistress’ life ; they all have a huge influence on what becomes of the three ladies. The paper aims to examine the three models of interaction of servants and their mistresses so as to prove the importance of the servant in the « human document » created by the writers.

The present paper focuses on the diary of the French painter Félix Ziem (1821-1911) and inquires the destiny of the painter emerging from his writings. Basing on the theories of diary writing (B. Didier, A. Girard, J. Lis), it shows how the artist represents his profession. The analyses convey that three elements are necessary for Félix Ziem to fulfill the destiny of the painter: hard work, dreamy contemplation of nature and travels. Those elements are described in detail in the three consecutive parts of the paper. The conclusions display a self-confident artist, influenced by Romantic aesthetics, who consciously constructs in his diary a testimony of his life as an example of painter’s destiny.

The translation of La Bible d’Amiens and Sesame et les Lys was a way for Proust to take an interest in religious art, but also to cultivate his own vision of art. Ruskin was for Proust a guide who participated in the support of his artistic self by transfering a certain number of aesthetic conceptions to which his mind would never have been able to access on its own. Proust succeeds in recognizing the decisive dimension of the Christian religion and its implications for Ruskin's aesthetics. Transcending the religious dimension, Proust realizes that Christian architecture, as understood by Ruskin, acquires a meaning other than religious, namely that of a past sublimated by the powers of art. Thus the historical dimension is annihilated in favor of an aesthetic perception of works from the past. Our article therefore aims to show how this experience of translation allowed Proust to deconstruct the aesthetic vision of the author of the translated text, while constructing a vision of art that is his own.

The aim of this paper is to comment the links between the work of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever The Was One, and narrative utopia model. The Mercier’s work is often considered as inventive fiction which presents a new type of utopia focused on the future, but a large number of traditional narrative strategies is used by the author to show Paris in 25th century. The future civilization is built on the Enlightenment ideas but it remains still attached by its culture to the 18th century. The Mercier’s work is inspired by the utopism but in this fiction the reader finds more a fictional realization of dreams and philosophical thinking about human nature.

Focusing on the major intellectual debates surrounding the Black and African Renaissance, the interview with Sarah Frioux-Salgas, head of archives and collections’ resources at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac media library, covers topics such as the role of Black writers’ and artists’ congresses and art festivals in the cultural reaffirmation of Black people during the decolonization era of the 1950s-60s, the place of literature in the shaping of Black pan-African and transcontinental solidarity, the figure of the Black intellectual, particularly that of Léopold Sédar Senghor, and the networks of ideological affinities and antagonisms formed by Black writers, artists and activists. The interview aims to highlight the complexity of the socio-political and aesthetic issues at stake, all too often summed up in simplified definitions of projects such as negritude or Pan-Africanism.

The article aims at suggesting the role of the Napoleonic supernatural in Balzac’s youth novel Le Centenaire (1822) as a counter-discourse to – and thus a locus of negotiation for – his later poetics of Realism. The investigation is held through a socio-poetical, close-reading based analysis of the revenant theme in both Le Centenaire and Le Colonel Chabert (1832-1844). First, the well-known political nature of Chabert as a revenant is associated to Bérigheld as his binary opposite: if Chabert embodies the uncanny persistence of the Empire during the Restauration, the centuries-old sorcerer who haunts Tullius, a young Napoleonic general, symbolizes Tullius’ monarchist temptation during the Empire. Nevertheless, the supernatural powers Tullius receives from Béringheld can be associated with the mythological features the Napoleonic soldiers accorded to their Emperor. If Chabert represent a counter-discourse to Tullius’ supernatural abilities, Balzac’s realism in the Comédie humaine can thus be considered as a reversal of the Napoleonic myth, so rooted in the authors early years.

For Edmond Rostand, dramatic writing is a medium ensuring communion between the author and the spectator, a bond questioned by Plato. This article studies how Edmond Rostand’s poetic plays illustrate the quest for the public’s understanding of the poet and how the characters thrive for their lost social recognition. His works shed light on the poet at work, each of the characters being an accomplished or budding versifier to reveal that poetry is legitimate work, which requires skills. Edmond Rostand’s poetic style deconstructs literary and social norms that have led to his contemporaries’ loss of authenticity. Misunderstood by theater goers and critics, disappointment led the playwright to improvisation and to pantomime, in which gestures could not alter the fragile and fleeting idea, making poetry easier to comprehend and bridging the gap between the author and his audience, establishing the poet as a worthy citizen again.

Our society’s utilitarian premises imply that only that which can be possessed, mastered and quantified can be said to lead to pleasure and contentment. This article contends that an alternative to this stance, which according to a number of philosophers can lead to ennui and despair, can be found in Albert Samain’s poetical and prose works. Samain’s writings suggest that things acquire more depth and aura once they are lost and poeticised through nostalgia and longing, and thus that absence can make a moment or an experience more present than it was when it was actually happening. And so, in spite of the melancholy which is almost inevitably attached to poetical reveries, the latter are more likely to lead to a certain form of quietude than the mere possession of the thing itself.

This article focuses on the figure of the poet in Apollinaire’s « Le Poète assassiné ». We try to show the connections that are established between loss and poetic glory. In the tale, the hero, Croniamantal, becomes successively Apollo and Orpheus. As in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he is going to lost his beloved (story of Apollo and Daphne) before being slaughtered (the death of Orpheus). To reach glory, the poet has to sacrifice everything including himself.

The article demonstrates the connections between motherhood and the feeling of loss experienced by a woman and a mother in Marie Petitcuénot's autobiographical novel, Ce qui gronde (2021). Based on a feminist critical approach, on care theory and on psychoanalytic theories, the study presents how motherhood affects the feminine and maternal identity and examines how Marie Petitcuénot manages to find herself through writing. The impact of motherhood on her life and her feminine/maternal identity is analyzed through her experience of childbirth, the postpartum period and her family daily routine, which affects her the most.

The author was able to transform the story of the disappearance of Amandine Moulin, which embodyed the loss of the meaning of life, in a work of analysis and a thoughtful prospecting. In fact, working on the reconstruction of meaning leads her to boldly explain the mechanism of destruction following the influence of manipulation and narcissistic perversion. We will there fore try to demonstrate that the motif of loss in this novel outlines the path of an individuation of the self, considering that Amandine will eventually be mature and will recover her missing part of soul. We will first highlight the great moments of this plural loss experienced by the narrator and the other characters. Then, we will deepen the different dimensions of this loss of meaning and trace the course of individuation as explained by the C.G. Jung.

Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1786-1864) was the author of numerous novels belonging to different genres. However, if he wasn’t completely forgotten by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th c., it was thanks to a long list of apocryphal memoirs attributed to famous people which in fact he wrote himself. At first, this paper shows reactions from the press in 1829 after the publication of Mémoires d’une femme de qualité sur Louis XVIII and Mémoires de la comtesse Du Barri. Although some journalists chose to perpetuate the fiction that the memoirs were authentic, others denounced them as false and heavily criticized this kind of literary enterprise. Thereafter, the article focuses on Lamothe-Langon’s response to his critics and on his vision of apocryphal memoirs in his preface to Les Après-diners de S. A. S. Cambacérès (1837).

In the poem Les Fossiles (1854), Louis Bouilhet tells the story of the evolution of life. Inspired by various naturalists, he imagines the emergence of life on Earth, the birth of species, and their extinction followed by the emergence of new forms of life. The destiny of humankind is subordinate to this law of nature: humans will be supplanted by more perfect beings. The purpose of this article is to consider the influence of Charles Bonnet's palingenetic philosophy on Bouilhet from the perspective of epistemocritical methodology, allowing the identification of epistemological transfers between the work of the naturalist and that of the poet.

In his short novel published before À Rebours, entitled À vau-l’eau, Huysmans tells a story of a protagonist unable to find good food. His quest for a passable restaurant remains unfulfilled, and joins other unfulfilled needs linked to his social life. It becomes clear that behind this quest, told with numerous details and a significant emphasis, there are other, more profound needs that Huysmans will name, more and more directly, in his post-naturalist novels. At the deepest level, the quest comes down to the impossibility to accept life’s difficulties, its duality, and to the wound of an unhappy childhood and a lost mother, so little named and therefore so present in Huysmans’ works.

What is Rachilde’s vocation? Could her life have taken another course rather than the literary way? According to what she declares in her autobiographical or semi-autobiographical texts, it turns out that this profession, chosen consciously in her early years, had saved her from madness. Drawing inspiration from the psychoanalytical observations contained in Catherine Millot’s book La Vocation de l’écrivain, the present study attempts to establish the sources of the literary career chosen by Rachilde, her own ways of exercising it and the point of achievement that she could reach by accomplishing certain choices. For Rachilde, there is no enjoyment outside of writing.

The author of the paper propounds a hollistic outlook on how French writers of the 19th century perceived the fate of Poland in the most dramatic moment of its history, when it was fighting a fierce, and almost hopeless battle for its independence, having disappeared from the map of Europe. In textes of many poets, publicists and men of letters in France one can find a unique set of motifs that not only reveal a highly consistent way of thinking with respect to the situation Poland was in at the time, but also build a parallel vision of its future, and even hold a belief that Poland was to play a special role among European countries. In this paper the author identifies and discusses six such motifs.

This paper aims to highlight the resemblances existing between the poetic art by Isidor Ducasse (Lautréamont) and the poetic and aesthetic realisations of some expressionist authors. We have mainly analysed the concept of antagonism which seems to be a cardinal component of both the Lautréamont’s poetics and most expressionist works. Another part of our analysis is dedicated to the hypertrophy of the author’s I instance, emblematic in the Lautréamont’s work, reminding the expressionist principle of irradiation of the author’s I. Furthermore, we have analysed the principle of exaggeration, so much visible in Chants de Maldoror. It aims an antinaturalistic derealisation of the poetic universe as well as a caricatured painting of the political and sociological reality. All those aspects enable some sociocritical participation of the literary work in a changing world.

The author evokes some hypotheses on the question of the negative way as a structural data in relation to the process of Beckettian writing (the critical position with respect to language; the practice of dispossession; disfigurement) by taking up elements of his books published by Classiques Garnier in 2019: La parole trouée. Beckett, Tardieu, Novarina, and Les Voies négatives de l’écriture dans le théâtre moderne et contemporain.

In Novarina’s work, the word establishes a “lyrical gesture” : it calls. Since the appearance of what is called constitutes the drama itself, we can consider the lyricism as communication between the subject and the object as the process of creation. This creative gesture is doubly negative. First of all, the writer does not exist anymore in the creation process accomplished with the spectators. Secondly, Novarinian fiction is defined by its negative qualities : informal and timeless, it develops a negative view that opens behind the language.

Antonin Artaud’s « Théâtre de la cruauté » consists in the extreme display of the conflictive nature of the world. The Catalan poet Josep Palau i Fabre highlighted the poetic and negative dimensions of Artaud’s project and insisted on its failure, addressing its impossible objectivation and its similarity with alchemy. The article aims to identify the central elements of Palau’s interpretation, annihilation and debirth, and to assess their inscription in an experimental poetics proposal inspired by alchemy.

The Ultimate Paintings, a series of abstractions made by Ad Reinhardt during the 1960s, are coupled with writings with obvious affinities to the apophatic formulas of the commentaries of the Upanishads (the philosophical conclusions of the Vedas) known as the “nondual Vedānta” (Advaita Vedānta). The abstractions themselves refer to the model of the yantra, the geometrical diagram into which Brahmanic iconography is supposed to subside. In this instance, the apophasis defeats the attempt to signify through painting and language what constitutes itself in painting and language.

From the series Event of the Night in 1972 to Neige in 2003, via Gouttes d'eau (1979-2013), the painter Kim Tschang Yeul has developed a poetics of formlessness in which negation, emptiness and absence direct the creative process. The Korean plastic artist offers through the materiality of the work a meditation on the fluence of worlds and forms. The drop of water expresses the precariousness of things, but also evokes a beyond of representation whose richness is as great as its restraint. Water is the metaphor of the void without which the full cannot unfold; it introduces the practice of non-action, which does not consist in doing nothing but in letting the supporting factors at work in the form happen. The creative process abstains from any intentional action, to let the invisible power of the tao act.

Klossowski, who had originally started as a religious seeker of truth in his younger years, will – after his « reversal » – feel himself invested with the role of a « heretic » struggling with the libidinous search for truth. Even as the creator of a perverted metaphysics, he remains a seeker of the revelation of being, now in the role of the divine « adversary » who, thrown back on himself, tends to imitate a religious mystic. The divine is replaced by the whispers of the demon, which Klossowski experiences as « la complicité d'une force "démonique" » in the creation of his artworks. The Diana myth becomes a parable for the act of artistic creation. Sexuality, understood as the primordial ground of creative force that shapes the signe unique, the phantasm, shifts metaphysics to « phantasmaphysics » (Foucault), in which the mystery of the divine is exposed as a delusion (Wahnbild).

Written on the sidelines of a new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah into Polish, the article evokes the problem that the translator had in finding the equivalent of the term inverti. This problem serves as a pretext to speak, on the one hand, of homosexuality in Proust, on the other, of language as the subject of the novel. In this context, the role of Albertine and the etymological tirades of professor Brichot are studied in particular. The author also highlights the testamentary character of this part of the Proustian cycle.

The present paper analyses Carnets du voyage en Égypte by a French painter and writer, Eugène Fromentin (1820-1876), using the concept of autobiogeography. The concept allows to examine how the author of a geographical description may be seen throughout this description and how s/he is influenced by the space. The paper argues that the personality of Fromentin emerges from his travel notes even though they are focused mainly on the description of the Egyptian space and the forms “I” or “we” appear there rarely. Three aspects of Fromentin’s personality may be seen through the analyses of his geographical descriptions of Egypt: the Orientalist painter enthusiastic towards the space; the traveler marked by his previous travels to Algeria who in Egyptian spaces sees Algerian ones; and the man who feels old and tired, refuses to discover the Egyptian space and who just wants to come back home.

A roman à clef, where the presence of fictional and nonfictional elements is obvious, is a powerful framework for literary portraits of the author’s contemporaries. The degree of deformation, be it glamorizing or devaluing, depends on several factors, among which the pleasure of playing hide and seek is not the least. Each reference, even a demeaning one, brings out of the shadow of the past both prominent and background characters, as well as important events, all from the author’s point of view. Through this display, an image of a very complex environment emerges, where the worst rubs shoulders with the best, and where the constraints of daily life or loyalty to ideals impose difficult choices with very serious consequences. The author observes the sociological phenomena that affect her environment and, while making sharp criticisms, seeks to find a remedy for the wound that destroys Art and the Artist.

Taking up Antoine Compagnon’s thesis, according to which Sodom and Gomorrah constitutes a privileged place to look at the whole Proustian cycle, the article focuses on the social dimension of the novel, as well as on cruelty. In this context, the image of Jews and servants, and the role of the baron de Charlus are studied in particular. For the author also discusses the vision of love, especially homosexual, to show how Proust’s approach stems from sadism and masochism.

We will examine the largely ethical vocation of Romain Gary's memorial writing project, which leads it to metamorphose itself into a literary tomb of the forgotten dead. We will then discuss, from a more narratological point of view, how this memory emerges untimely in the narrative and sometimes frees itself from it to signify the transcendent character of the name and the face. Finally, we will show that Gary goes beyond the somewhat naive vision of the memory as a mere recorder of events or images by associating it with the imagination to give it a poetic and counter-historical use.

In his historical novel Le Chevalier des Touches (1864), Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly paints a sombre picture of the former counterrevolutionary Chouan heroes of Normandy : over the first decades following the French Revolution, the aristocrats lose their ancestral castle and end up living in an anachronistic salon while slowly falling into collective oblivion. Therefore, this article argues that Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel is concerned with a pressing memory crisis (in the sense of the term coined by Richard Terdiman) which manifests itself in the material sphere. For this purpose, the gradual decay of the nobles’ abodes will be analyzed, from the transformation of their castle to the asylum where the protagonist spends his last days. The examination of these intérieurs allows us to gain extensive insight into Barbey d’Aurevilly’s attachment to the Ancien Régime and his fundamental repudiation of the social changes occasioned by the political developments in 19th-century France.

L'Affaire Furtif (2010) by Sylvain Prudhomme and L'Empreinte à Crusoé (2012) by Patrick Chamoiseau invest the ‘robinsonade’ genre with a renewed thought on memory and forgetfulness. These stories have the particularity of enriching the thematic and philosophical treatment of forgetfulness with a literary approach, in the light of the mythical legacy in which they are involved. Forgetfulness constitutes an initiatory threshold, desired in Prudhomme's case or endured in Chamoiseau's, thanks to which the main characters discover or rediscover themselves. Above all, the two stories have a strong specular dimension used to think on the weight of literary legacy in scriptural work.

This is a study of the novel Loin d'eux by Laurent Mauvignier (1999) and Thésée, sa vie nouvelle by Camille de Toledo (2020). Through these two works, this article examines how the modalities of a survival of memory and of the traumatic memorial image are inscribed in the body and mind and how the narrative and scriptural forms resonate with them. I will first analyze how Mauvignier's writing of the wound meets inhibited speech and silence, suggesting in solitary subjects the failure for a shared language. I will then question in de Toledo's text how the relationship to a painful bodymemory proceeds from an inscription in the present, an awareness of a memorial corporality and a desire to “survive with”. Both these texts respectively give us pause to reflect on how the memory trace is apprehended through the power of speaking and listening.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the use of some expressionist motifs and patterns in The Madwoman of Chaillot [La Folle de Chaillot] by Giraudoux. In the analysed drama we can see realisation of such expressionist process as antinaturalistic desobjectivization of the world, developed monologism, social middle-class revolt, rehabilitation of a marginal protagonist, abstraction, antinaturalism, or subjectivism inducing the “irradiation” of the author’s I.

This article demonstrates the importance of the Sea in the life and the works of Henri Michaux. The representation of the Sea is subject to the “dictatorship of the Imagination”. According to his will, Michaux changes seascapes, personifies fishes and oisters, allows the soul to swim. The sea also inspires a lot of metaphors, particularly developed in the mescalinian texts. Drug becomes Ocean; the poet becomes a castaway, a drowned, then resurrected man sailing on a purified water.

Artaud’s work includes a large volume of correspondence, which should be given a special status. Neither a work of art, nor an appendix to the work, the letter becomes an object and a body that makes it possible to read Artaud’s corpus, insofar as it provides us with interpretative keys and forces the reader to go back and forth between letters and other writings. It is a sign of the author’s real presence, and demonstrate the idea of a suffering, dispersed and fragmented body. Paradoxically, it symbolizes the very project of the author: collecting the traces of oneself, inscribing oneself in the pure duration, and supplanting the pain of the spatial environment. The letter is the very movement of writing, conceived then as sheer speed.

According to Paul Ricœur, « The text is the medium through which one understands oneself ». Claude Vigée (1921-2020), as a Jewish writer, tries to receive, embrace and perpetuate the identity conveyed by the Holy Scriptures into his own writing, while also relating it to his life. Asserting oneself as part of a vaster destiny or History; developing a better self-knowledge in the light of a shared relation to the world; finding one’s reflection in Biblical figures, but also relinquishing one’s Self for a better understanding of one’s belonging: these are the paths taken by Vigée for this identity quest which implies the pursuit of the father – or, rather, of the Biblical Fathers – in a fully assumed filiation.

The reader attentive to the novels of Malika Mokeddem cannot fail to spot the impressive link between humans and nature. The author’s fiction creates its own laws and invents a universe where language is no longer used as a means of description but as a tool to symbolically say a fusion between its different elements. The space of the dune amply brushed in the novels has captured our attention since it metamorphoses and changes status: sometimes affective/ maternal, sometimes seductive. As for the symbolically painted sea, has an emotional dimension since it has often been synonymous with substitute for the absent mother.

We will try, in this article, to highlight a writing in metamorphosis and to understand its different manifestations through the analysis of the explicit and implicit words of the author in her stories. The use of Bachelard’s work will therefore be of great support to explore the proposed avenues.

Basing mainly on concepts introduced by Gérard Genette and Richard Saint-Gelais, the article offers a hypertextual and transfictional lecture of the character of Pauliska that appears in Michel Dieudonné’s play La Comtesse polonaise. The author focuses on the relations between this text and his hypotextual model, namely the novel Pauliska ou la Perversité moderne by Jacques-Antoine Révéroni Saint-Cyr. He tries to show how Michel Dieudonné exploits the generic scheme of gothic novel in a theatrical text, introducing also in his play a more historical perspective and a utopian one. He analyses both similarities and dissimilarities between the two versions of Pauliska, the latter being generated mostly by the mechanisms of intermodal transmodalization. The author sees Michel Dieudonné’s Pauliska as a postmodern, metatextual and critical version of the character imagined by Révéroni Saint-Cyr.

The term “circulation of worlds” was used by Achille Mbembe in her essay Sortir de la grande nuit (2013) to expose her Afropolitan thought. Evoking on the one hand the phenomenon of “dispersion”, that is to say the dissemination of Africans and Africa in the world illustrated in Un Océan, deux mers, trois continents (2018) by Wilfried N'Sondé, Tels des astres éteints (2008) and Crépuscule du tourment, I. Melancholy (2016) by Léonora Miano. And on the other hand the phenomenon of “immersion”, namely the migration of the world in Africa represented in Blues pour Élise (2010) by Léonora Miano, L’Africain (2004) by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Mathématiques congolaises (2008) by In Koli Jean Bofane, Une Blanche dans le Noir (2001) by Jean-Roger Essomba and Ténèbres à midi (2010) by Theo Ananissoh ; among other things, he raises the limits of ancestral “African citizenship” based on the African = Black equation.

In 1811, the poetic academy of Toulouse awarded an epistle about hope in medical practice, by Jean-Marie Caillau, a now unknown physician who combined medicine and writing. This article provides contextualizing and close reading. It presents Caillau’s works and reputation, and highlights how he defined himself as a doctor-writer. Then it focuses on the didactic epistle, in which hope is regarded as a moral palliative, or a soothing and comforting illusion that the empathetic clinician prescribes to incurable, moribund and suffering people. The study of the text reveals the significant use of the peritext, the strong connection between medical discourse and poetical devices, and the praise of an eloquent physician at the patient’s bedside. By correlating hope and eloquence, Caillau embodies and promotes the dual figure of the doctorpoet. This article thus explores the fruitful and sometimes challenging interplay between medicine and poetry during the early 19th century.

Often considered depressive, Michel Houellebecq’s writing seems to be at the antipodes of hope, even if fragile. In this article, we will attempt to explore the three levels of hope in the author’s work. Hope in Houellebecq’s writing is first presented in a derisory way as a variant of an illusion. It constitutes an evil associated with sexual desires in contemporary hyper-liberalist society. Then, the author stages a positivist utopia, that of immortal neo-humans. But hope does not exist in this post-human society. Finally, by freeing himself from all illusory hopes, the author intends to seek hope in the present, in the manner of Schopenhauerian contemplation. He uses an approach that is both clinical and pathetic and gives a new form to hope that hopes for the unhoped-for.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the topic of hope in Carmen Boustani’s La guerre m’a surprise à Beyrouth [The war surprised me in Beirut]. The narrative structure of Greimas shows that hope exists even in a catastrophic situation and pushes the characters to act. The ending is happy not only for the country but also for the various women who lived through the war. The narrator Yasmina and her friends show that hope can arise even in a destroyed space and that life is found even in the throes of death. The act of writing itself becomes a sign of hope which proves that from black, light is born.

Victoire, a student at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art, committed suicide when she was only twenty-four years old. This death, inspired by Greek tragedies, reveals a gesture that is both heroic and symptomatic of an era. In his play, Wajdi Mouawad questions the depth of the deadly gesture of suicide as well as fate of death. By analyzing the funeral rites evoked in the play, we will see how Victoire's friends engage in a process of idealizing death, making Victoire a modern heroine. The gesture of death transforms into that of a gesture of hope, leading them towards a surge of life itself.

The aim of this paper is to describe the beginnings, rather unknown, of the CRICOT theatre and to demonstrate the evolution which took place between the first show of CRICOT1 and the last piece performed in 1938. Focusing on the manners of treating the scenic object, the scenography, the costumes and the masks, the paper analyses the transformation of the amateur theatre: artistic, satirical, visual and comic into quasi-professional theatre, carrying an existential message. Message to be developed afterward by the world-famous collective, reformer of the European stages: Tadeusz Kantor’s CRICOT2.

This paper aims to highlight the exploitation of some expressionist motifs in two plays by the French playwright Armand Salacrou (1899-1989), L’Archipel Lenoir and Histoire de rire throughout the painting of a metaphysical anxiety. In those pieces we can see realisation of such expressionist concepts as the war of brains (bataille des cerveaux), irradiation of the author’s I which conditions an antinaturalistic and caricatured expression of anxiety in an axiologically misstructured world. We can also appreciate elaboration of the expressionist motif of psychological murder which is an illustration of empoisoned relations between man and woman who do seek to destruct and moulder each other.

The pandemic affecting our world in 2020 leads us to question a centuries-old socio-cultural practice, namely the wearing of masks, and to rethink their use in light of the current context. Depending on the civilizations and eras, masks have had various functions: religious, social and artistic. None of these functions corresponds, however, to the recent use of masks. Henri Michaux, Jean Starobinski, Michel Butor and Yves Bonnefoy will help us to answer these questions: How the wearing of masks does change our relation to identity? our relationship with others? Does not seeing the whole face make it possible to see others better?

The aim of this study is to question the links between Mask, Cinema and Europe. The five films selected are Three Colours: Blue from Kieślowski, Crazy Pierrot from Godard, Strada from Fellini, Death in Venice from Visconti, Wings of Desire from Wenders. These movies exhibit a particular type of mask: the mask without mask. Mask obtained by light or make-up, it seems to express the character’s aspiration for an elsewhere.

The masks in Documents should be read in a broad context, which goes beyond the columns of the journal to also embrace the birth of ethnology in France, the surrealist neighborhood but also the years to come, which will hardly see the development of ideas sketched in the magazine. At the same time, the presence of the masks highlights the disparate character of the journal itself, where the more or less ethnological texts devoted to the masks of traditional societies respond to much less academic articles in which the mask slips in the direction of the strange and monstrous. This allows to deconstruct Western aesthetics and, first and foremost, the human figure as its most codified and, therefore, most untouchable expression. The mask can even be considered as the embodiment of the concept of disparity which seems to govern the counter-aesthetic of the journal. Finally, the mask is emblematic of the internal gap in the journal, that between ethnologists and poets, or between academicism and subversion.

In Krysinska’s novel, La Force du Désir, which I consider a roman à clef, rich referentiality is a guarantee of authenticity. Spatial and cultural references build a world familiar to the reader who can easily decipher the prototypes of the presented characters. Moreover, Krysinska’s novel contains the philosophy of the mask, both explicitly and implicitly, within the characters’ behavior. This, however, does not exhaust the issue of the mask, because a roman à clef, on the generic level, is a mask of an esoteric novel.

In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is not the writer, and we can find out several models behind one character. In other words, Proust created a mask he put on reality to avoid criticism and problems with his family, but also to look for the essence of beings and things by focusing the truth. Pseudonyms are not a game but a real poetic of the Name. The recent publication of his Soixante-quinze Feuillets (Gallimard, 2021) shows how Proust transformed his autobiography into a fictional world. That preliminary version exposes the methods he used to hide himself and the way he was experimenting the powers of the imagination and composition. It is the writer’s laboratory, an important source for genetic study of Proust’s masterpiece.

In this paper we confront the issue of masquerade in chosen works of contemporary artists Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle. Referring to Joan Riviere's (1929) statement that femininity is a masquerade, we examine the fictional embodiments of the mentioned artists in which the mask not only conceals but also reveals reality. The artistic and literary corpus is composed as follows: Cindy Sherman (Untilted Film Stills 1977, Society portraits (2008) and Flappers (2016-18)); Sophie Calle (La filature (1981), Les histoires vraies (2002) and Prenez soin de vous (2007)). Following the analysis of the artists' projects and their autobiographical or semiautobiographical approaches, we come to reveal the reversal of the techniques used by the artists. It means that Sherman, like the film stills, captures a moment and immobilizes it; Calle, for her part, gives life to the events that she provokes. However, in both cases the masks they wear, the fictitious identities that the artists embody, contribute to revisit the codes of the time we live in.

The greatest star of the Parisian Tannhäuser’s performances in 1895 was Ernest Van Dyck in the title role. According to the Parisian press this production of Wagner’s work owed its success mainly to this Belgian tenor. However after his departure from Paris, and after some other changes of the cast that took place rather rapidly (still in the summer 1895), the performances’ artistic level hasn’t decreased in a significant way, and the work, played continuously until December 15th, 1913, was always highly appreciated by the French audience. Were the enthusiastic reactions of the Parisian public at the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries to Wagner’s Tannhäuser and his other operas and musical dramas sincere and spontaneous? What was the part of the snobbery in Wagner’s reception in France during La Belle Époque? That was the question asked by some French journalists (Heugel, Maret, Doumic, Coppée and others). The author of the article recalls Georges Rodenbach’s Solomonic answer to this question presented in his text Tannhäuser et le snobisme.

How the Journal d’un curé de campagne is written is intimately linked to the night because of the narrator’s insomnia. We will demonstrate that this night is the expression of an inner night, through the carmelite mysticism of John of the Cross. The writing is purified by the silence and anguish of the priest's mystical night: we will see that his writing becomes a prayer, that is to say, the hosting of divine and human voices in silence, based on Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenological approach of prayer. This idea of writing will allow us to understand the relationship of Bernanos himself to his own writing: this nightly writing listens and gives voice to those who have none.

Night-time, the favorite time of awakening for Marguerite Duras, has an ambivalent status. In a colorful game, the sleepless night changes from white to black, from bright to dark. Rather than a standstill or loss of time, the night without sleep offers a spectacular acceleration and intensification. Since the night acts as a catalyst, insomnia confronts the characters to their inescapable fate. Staying awake becomes an act of resistance, for both, characters and author. Therefore, insomnia emphasizes emptiness and inaction, and transforms loss into creation and fulfillment. Which means that insomnia is more than a physical phenomenon: it acquires a metaphysical dimension in Marguerite Duras’s work.

La Nuit Épuisée (2018), project on the initiative of Antoine d’Agata and Lea Bismuth, comes from a collective writing experience which tooks place during a sleepless night; consequently, it allows us to see the visual and textual marks left by the night on this photoliteracy silkscreened book. By analysing this work and each of his twelve leporelli, we can, like its authors, see what it’s only perceptible into the night. As much as poietic is, according to René Passeron, the science of the dynamic relationship between an artist and its artwork while he is struggling with it, this article analyses the context of creation of this book (a collective insomnia in a nightclub) and how it affects the plasticity and the writing of a book which intends to propose us a reading experience.

The fifth part of the cycle is devoted to the presentation of the main Parisian musical critics’ opinions on the Tannhäuser’s performance at Palais Garnier on May 13th, 1895, conducted by Paul Taffanel and directed by Alexander Lapissida. If these journalists – such as Jacques Weber of Le Temps, Catulle Mendès of La Revue de Paris, Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert of Journal des débats, Paul Dukas of La Revue hebdomadaire, Ferdinand Le Borne of Le Monde artiste, Henry Gauthier-Villars of L’Écho de Paris, Alfred Bruneau of Gil Blas, and some others that are recalled in the article, were not unanimous on various aspects of this production, all of them considered Ernest Van Dyck, interpreting the title role, as the principle triumphator of the evening.

The book of poetry Une petite fille silencieuse, published by James Sacré to collect the texts he wrote after the death of his young daughter, is a deep interrogation about the silence of death. The poet establishes complicated links between silence and time, inventing a subjective and singular temporality, departing from the law of chronology ; furthermore, he avoids asserting the existence of the next world while hoping to hear the voice of his dead daughter. This is why he tries to hear the silence in the words themselves, defining language as the very place of a vain pursuit of a meaningful silence.

In A. Ernaux’s steps, É. Louis writes to account for truth, to bear witness for the real. They experience sounds, noises and silences as particularly meaningful signs of the social classes that they live in. Their original, popular environment is made of constant noise, whether coming from inside the body or the surrounding working-place. Later as they rise socially, they realise that more privileged classes live in a filtered, muffled world. But being loud may also be a move toward freedom, an expression of the lived experience. The theatre stage is a particularly apt media for the telling of É. Louis’s stories as it enables the varied experiences to be heard and felt through their vibrations, and all noises on stage make sense.

By exploring Deleuze’s theory of the creative act, I suggest in the first part of this article that all art forms can achieve a generalized musicality. This musicality denotes a region of perception that goes beyond ordinary senses, with which we can come into contact either by creating or by witnessing art. In the second part, I illustrate the possibility that this doctrine opens for a musical literature, i.e. a literature able to achieve the generalized musicality, with some fragments of surrealist literature. I conclude with the idea that the doctrine at hand could constitute an evolution and a radicalization of surrealist aesthetics.

Music is a keystone in the entire work of Marie Krysinska, who was first and foremost a musician. Guided by the rule of universal harmony, the perfect realisations of which are musical compositions, she applies it in her poems as well as in her narrative texts. Krysinska's novel, La Force du désir [The Force of Desire], was read in its time primarily as a roman à clef. Behind the literary characters are real people: poets, writers, actresses, singers, journalists, composers. One of the portraits is particularly touching, that of de Vivray whose real-life prototype was Charles-Erhardt de Sivry. A musician, conductor, poet and music theorist, de Sivry charmed listeners with his compositions. In the diegesis, all his professional activities are mentioned, more or less revealed. Thanks to Charles de Vivray's three concerts, the novelistic space transforms into a musical space.

The article is devoted to the presentation of various aspects of the Tannhäuser’s fourth performance on the Parisian stage on May 13th, 1895, conducted by Paul Taffanel and directed by Alexander Lapissida. The author, following the reviews that appeared in many Parisian journals after this performance, describes the most characteristic elements of the scenery made by Dauphin Amable Petit, known as Amable (the first tableau of the first act), Marcel Jambon (the second tableau of the first act and the third act) and Eugène Carpezat (the second act). All the reviewers underlined the enthusiastic reactions of the audience that were not only provoked by the brilliant interpretation of the Wagner’s opera by the artists in 1895 but first off all by its intention to efface the compromising recollections of the Parisian Tannhäuser’s premiere in 1861.

To respond to an order from his friend Grimm who publishes the Correspondance littéraire, Diderot writes, between 1759 and 1781, nine accounts of the painting and sculpture exhibitions taking place at the Louvre. In his art critic, Diderot often uses the vocabulary of music and noise. Sometimes he evokes the hubbub of colors, sometimes he evokes their harmony. Then, he questions the definition of painting as “silent poetry”. The use of this vocabulary is not only metaphorical. Diderot’s sensualist aesthetics and philosophy encourage him to use the vocabulary of the auditory to establish correspondences between the visual and auditory sensations. So, he developes synaesthesias that announce those of Baudelaire.

Notre-Dame de Paris is a novel marked by the people’s clamor, the bells’ music and the sounds of battle. In an effort to understand how sounds play a crucial part in the creative process of Hugo’s work, we will analyze chapters of Notre-Dame de Paris relating to “la grand’salle”. During the play and the election of the Pope of Fools (taking place in “la grand’salle”), people originating from all social spheres are gathered in the same space, which is favorable for verbal exchanges that underline the struggles between them – established by the particulars of their speech. In this space, different sounds (rumors, shouts, noises) destroy and reinforce social distances at the same time, creating an evershifting space of boundaries, both physical and social.

This essay aims to analyze the poetics of the soundscape in Albert Camus’ work, based in the notions of happiness and unhappiness. Our purpose will be to define the characteristics of the symbolism of auditory perception, which are elaborated on the double configuration between happiness and unhappiness. The fact that the symbolic universe of Camus outlines a total sensory experience does no longer need to be demonstrated. Starting from his first lyrical writings to the Notebooks, his writing appeals arouses all the senses. Through a comparative study of examples relating to happiness and unhappiness and while underlining the predominant place of silence in Camus’ aesthetics, we will come off to the conclusion that Camus’s work constitutes a real kind of field recording.

In November and December 1894, a few months before the work’s reappearance on the Parisian stage, its very important selection (including especially the entire first and third acts) was presented by the count Eugène d’Harcourt, – by the way member of the elitist Jockey’s Club – during his “eclectic concerts” at the rue Rochechouart’s Salle de Concerts. The author of the article recalls juridical and artistic controversies provoked by these executions of Wagner’s opera. Tannhäuser’s fourth performance at Paris Opera’s stage was preceded, in the spring of 1895, by many publications, books and articles devoted to Wagner’s masterpiece. The most important, Étude sur « Tannhäuser » de Richard Wagner. Analyse et guide thématique, was written by Alfred Ernst and Élie Poirée who tried to show the value of Tannhäuser, considered already as a musical drama and an important stage of the composer’s evolution.

In order to re‐evaluate the constraints imposed by literary censorship to writers and painters after the Renaissance until the Restauration and Orleanist monarchy, we offer this comparative analysis of the treatment of hair, hair style, body hair in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine where Balzac has to restrain himself to reach success and in his Contes drôlatiques, which takes place in the medieval period and the Renaissance, and emulates the language and crudity of the time. Balzac’s point of view is particularly interesting first because he is quite knowledgeable of literary and artistic expressions during the medieval age and the Renaissance with Aretino and Rabelais, and second because he lived during the time when the daguerreotype appeared and made possible the representation of the body as it is, attempt that the anatomists of the Renaissance had also played with. However, with their droll stories, neither was Rabelais an anatomist nor was Balzac a common man.

Lisa Bresner (1971‐2007) is a novelist, translator, and sinologist, who has dedicated her entire life to literary creation around China and Asia. Ma tendre ennemie is her second novel, published in 1994 by Gallimard. The themes of Lisa Bresner’s work have to do with body and sensation. As for Ma tendre ennemie, this symbolic role returns to the hair – the support of sexual seduction, of power, of fertility, and more particularly of this novel, of artistic creation. This article aims to analyse, how the notion of hair in the novel goes hand in hand with the ambiguous political and social stake of the wearing of the queue during the first Sino‐Japanese war, the deconstruction of the castration, the aesthetic of cruelty, and the reinterpretation of Asian eroticism.

Prosper Mérimée (1803‐1870), writer and scholar, member of the French Academy, has often evoked in his correspondence, his fictional accounts and his historical studies, the political and cultural past of Poland as well as its conflicting relations with Russia during the 19th century. Unlike many of his romantic contemporaries, he was rather insensitive to the plight of the Poles and made no effort to understand them better. His fear of revolutionary convulsions, his anti‐Catholic prejudices, his too superficial knowledge of local realities and his growing love for Russia throughout his life, probably explain his views. However, we should not forget his friendship with some Poles in exile in France and his support for the Historical and literary library of Paris.

Tannhäuser’s reemergence at Paris Opera’s stage was preceded by the work’s productions in some French provincial theatres: in Lyons (première on April 4th, 1892), in Toulouse (première on April 13th, 1892), in Nice (première on March 14th, 1894) and in Nantes (première on March 27th, 1894). The author of the article discusses various aspects of these performances accentuating the fact that this time the main objects of controversies weren’t the composer and his Tannhäuser, but the soloists observed attentively by the musical critics and the spectators, as one can guess reading the reviews quoted in the article.

In this article, we will conduct a detailed review on the topic of hairiness in the prehistoric area during the late 19th century. We will endeavour to understand its way of self‐representation, or lack thereof, as a space where poetic, scientific and ontological matters are at stake. This will allow us to develop an epistemocritical point of view concerning this imagery, built both on scientific and popular productions. Based on a repertory of pictural and textual representations, originating from both pop culture as well as erudite and elitist sources, but also caricatures and teratological exhibitions referring more or less expressly to prehistoric times, we will study the potential concepts of humanity grasped by this issue, and we will analyze the poetical, aesthetical but also ideological and philosophical challenges raised in the process.

This paper discusses a man’s obsession with the memories of his dead wife as represented in Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges‐la‐Morte. More precisely, Rodenbach draws a haunting picture of the woman’s hair, which is personified and acquires the dimension of a full‐fledged character in the novel. The Belgian author places Hugues Viane dead wife’s hair at the center of his particular vision of fictional space, vacillating between tangible and intangible (Boraczek 1999) as well as between sacred and demoniac. The woman’s gold braid is preserved in a glass case: by worshipping it, the widower makes a religion of his sorrow. Furthermore, the woman’s hair generates a dense web of analogies between Bruges, in which Bachelard (1942) sees the Ophelization of an entire city, Viane’s dead wife compared in the novel to a Virgin, and the actress Jane Scott, a femme fatale who seems to have the same blond hair as the dead woman. By doing so, Rodenbach places the woman’s figure at the crossroads between literature and visual arts.

Novelist, storyteller, philosopher by training, Michel Tournier tackles in his novel The Golden droplet, published in 1985, the problem of racism towards people with different physique. Through the axial intrigue of the novel, that of Idriss, and especially those annexed to Barberousse and The Blond Queen, the author presents the stereotypes that confront otherness, the unlike (negro, redhead, blond, etc…) and calls for respect for physical differences and acceptance of the different Other. It is a whole philosophy of the representation of the other that he develops in his novel and that we propose to analyze in this study.

An emblem of heterology, hair causes horripilation and fascination: it is a part of the shapelessness that signals a rejection of rationality and philosophy, of metaphorisation and aesthetics, favouring instead ugliness, abjectness and material baseness. It verges on an unheimlich (uncanny) zone, which borders on the unrepresentable. Thus, this irreducible object unleashes the transgressive power of the sacred, that, no doubt, of eroticism, but even more so, that of the Dionysiac, which is the will for power and an increase in the feeling of being alive, against ascetic, hygienist or fascist ideals. Hair would be the fetish, attesting to the perverse structure of the forbidden and of civilization.

The subject of the article is the French reception of Tannhäuser after the failure of the three première performances in March 1861. From 1862 to 1894 the Parisian audience had to content itself with shorter or longer selections of this opera executed during Sunday concerts of Jules Pasdeloup’s, Edouard Colonne’s and Charles Lamoureux orchestras. In 1891 some French and foreign journalists, encouraged by the first Tannhäuser’s representations in Bayreuth, the Temple of Wagnerian art, began the discussions on the value of this work, some of them trying to prove that it’s a  m u s i c a l   d r a m a  as good as his later achievements, some other, on the contrary, pretending that Tannhäuser is an opera, marvelous, outstanding, extraordinary, but only an  o p e r a.

The goal of the article is to confront the texts of François Bon (Mécanique, 2001) and Marcin Wicha (Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem / Things I did not throw away, 2017) by relating objects and their losses in an autobiographical context. The place given to objects in the narratives in question is masterful and goes beyond simple cognitive functions in discourse. In order to highlight the complexity of their status, we progressed in this analysis by following three aspects: the structuring object of the narrative, the mnemonic support object and the "metonymic" object.

Suspension between life and death is not the only one that heroes of Gerorges Perec and Anne Godard, accompanied by a reader, have to undergo. The grammatical second person applied in order to represent the characters implies actually a particular plurality of voices which creates in a paradoxical way these two silent heroes. Moreover, devoid of anchor point unlike other grammatical persons, it makes them constantly suspended in time and space. Therethrough, A Man Asleep and L’Inconsolable cannot be treated just like rewritings of common myths: they represent a new quality in the history of literature, very dynamic and rich in interpretations.

The legend of Napoleon I, particularly vivid in France and Poland throughout the nineteenth century, begins to support, at the end of this period, the nationalist or independence propaganda, reflecting the political situation in each country. The portraits of Napoleonic soldiers, presented in Les Demi‐solde by Georges d'Esparbès and in a couple of novels written by Polish writers of the same time (Gąsiorowski, Przyborowski, Przerwa‐Tetmajer, Morawska), carry great similarities which this paper intends to analyse. Above all, one may observe nostalgia for the glorious past, dignity despite material difficulties, sense of courage, attachment to the notions of honour and duty going beyond death.

The article covers the analysis of the concept of space in Sylvain Maré ‐ chal's play Jugement dernier des rois [The Final Judgement over the Kings], written during the French Revolution. The action of the play takes place on an island which serves as a prison, first for the enemies of the monarchy, then for the enemies of the Revolution. The idea of the prison island, a place of punishment and evilness, breaks with an utopian concept of an island being a sanctuary and the source of happiness for a perfect society (Thomas More). It envisages the history of the XIXth century and the fortunes of Napoleon at Saint Helena as well as the story of Edmond Dantès presented in a famous novel The Count of Monte Cristo written by Dumas.

The history of mankind is the history of malaise. Melancholy, discomfort, anxiety or grief are just a few names and examples of this phenomenon. The heroes created by Georges Perec and Anne Godard experience the deep malaise of depression and grief disorder. However, this is not the only common feature of the characters – they are both described by the pronoun “you”. Due to its properties, the second‐person narration seems to be an effective tool of description of minor and major mental disorders. It helps to situate the heroes between life and death, and it is naturally associated with the concept of the Other, who plays a significant role in creation of a suffering Human being.

In the name of a certain theory of race inferiority, the imperialist powers have instituted the slave trade which will annihilate the countries of the Third World, and mainly those of the African continent. They will impose their vision of the world through the universalization of a Cartesian philosophy which has considerably encroached on the local histories of subordinate peoples. Even today, categories of people continue to suffer from the depreciative stereotypes constructed by the settler. For African novelists, the historical truth must be recognized. They therefore write with the aim of restoring the authentic values of these peoples. It is in this perspective that Seydou Badian inscribes his work entitled Sacred Weddings where he magnifies an African tradition which only asks to be recognized as an absolute and autonomous value, through a decolonial writing.

The work of Vera Feyder, a Wallo‐Serbo‐Polish‐Jewish author as she considers herself, has been developing, since its beginnings in 1961, in the feeling of abandonment. The poor childhood of the  author, due to the absence of the father, the poet Maurice Federman who disappeared in the concentration camps, and the mother, Elise who due to lack of resources, had to place her daughter in the sanatoriums or homes for disadvantaged children, exerts a certain influence on the author who during all her lifetime couldn’t recover from this lack, important for her and for her work. The Feyder’s récit de filiation appears at first as a barely disguised autobiography; it is then a projection of nostalgia and rancor, even of hate which is the part of the identity of the author; it is finally getting even with the past, including the historical past.

In his Réparer le monde. La littérature française face au XXIe siècle, published in 2017, Alexandre Gefen highlights writing practices that have some beneficial impact on the experience of disease. I situate in this perspective Caroline Gutmann’s novel Les Papillons Noirs (2018), which is a unique fusion of autopathography (Grisi) with a filiation narrative (Viart). Two dimensions of filiation are under analysis – the familial and the mythical and literary ones – which become for the “writing I” a therapeutic means of fighting with cancer, as well as intergenerational traumas liberated in the process of reading/writing from the family “crypt” (Törok). 

This paper is an attempt of analysis of a new filiation novel by J. M. G. Le Clézio entitled Alma, closing the series of Mauritian novels inspired by the family history of the writer. Blending the voices and histories of two narrators who come from the same Mauritian Felsen family, the author brings back their past. By puttng the characters in the correct social and geographical environment, such a rooted writing becomes the cure for evil, and a memorial tribute paid to various kinds of missing Mauritians, because the after effects touched not only the narrators’ family and other inhabitants of the island but island’s Eco systems too. I suggest to trace back, how looking for family roots do commingle with searching for social roots on Mauritius, where colonial crime went hand in hand with devastation of the nature.

Literature of Minuit, saturated with multiple intertextual references to the literary canon, explores the problem of filiation primarily on the level of novelistic aesthetics. And yet, apart from texts which in different ways refer to literary heritage and use its elements to create fictional discourse it includes works that take the form of filiative narrative. À la fin by Éric Laurrent is a case in point, as it is devoted to the author’s grandmother and his family’s response to her death. Drawing on theories of filiative narrative, this paper analyses the literary strategies whereby Laurrent presents family ties and their influence on the identity of an individual.

This article examines the structural features and ideological paradigms associated with the genre of filiation narrative by expanding the traditional body of works examined under this lens to a transnational corpus that includes Postcolonial Francophone texts. By using concepts such as di-genèse or dual legacy that characterizes the colonial condition and paracolonialism, which accounts for recent phenomena of relying on colonial representations and the postcolonial context (history, geography, culture) to find new sources of inspiration for Western or “white” writers, the article delves into the limits and contradictions of the genre of filiation narrative and contends that it should be envisioned as an anti‐genealogical genre.

This article is devoted to the book The Double Confidence (2000) by the Belgian novelist Françoise Mallet‐Joris, which is the fusion of the biography of Marceline Debordes‐Valmore and the autobiography of the author. The writing of the biography triggers the author's memory and awakens her memories (mainly her difficult relationship with her mother, Suzanne Lilar): she allows her to observe herself, to analyze herself, to ask questions she avoid, to re‐emerge repressed. I study the elements that link the work of Mallet‐Joris to "narrations of filiation", I examine the binary structure, the singularity of discursive strategies, as well as the therapeutic function of this self‐bio‐graphic project.

In his novel L’effacement, published in 2016, Samir Toumi presented the image of the generation born after Algeria’s independence on the ex‐ ample of the main character. It is a generation condemned to live in the shadow of the great parents who fought in the Algerian War against France. L’effacement is an interesting example of the development of the genre which is récit de filiation. The aim of the article is to describe the difficult filiation in the novel by Toumi: the relationship of children with parents disturbed by the unlimited appetite for power in the previous generation.

Christian Gailly, a contemporary French writer, former musician, admits he is deeply inspired by jazz and its literary representations. This essay aims to highlight the role of music – source of  dynamics and life’s motivation  – and its double influence on the protagonists of the Gally’s novel Be‐Bop.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the climatic plays by Henri‐René Lenormand (1882‐1951), and to show how difficult climatic conditions shown in his plays influence the behaviour and the attitude of the characters. In the paper different motifs are taken into consideration : fog (and, therefore, the humidity of the climate), the tropical climate in general and the tropical wind called lesimoun. In Lenormand’s plays climate is not just a secondary motif, devoid of significance, but an element which conditions the atmosphere of those plays, engenders a deep melancholy or awakens hidden and repressed instincts of the characters. The climate emphasises thus a deep existenTal pessimism and the tragic of an individual lost in a hostile and incomprehensible world.

This paper presents the literary form of "filiation narratives", establishes their generic definition by comparing this form with neighbouring literary genres, describes the main characteristics of their poetics, situates them in literary history and considers their evolution over the past four decades.

The paper discuss the concept of “filiation narratives”, proposed in 1999 by the French theorist Dominique Viart, from the point of view of the “spectacularization of the author” (V. Kaufmann) in the contemporary visual culture. On the one hand, in visual culture, the media visibility of the author seems much important that his work. On the other hand, the strictly narrative understanding of the filiation is no longer possible. The example of the non‐narrative filiation which connect a French writer Patrick Modiano and his daughter, singer et writer Marie Modiano, is proposed to show the resistance of the literature against the abuses of the media’s influence to the literary culture.

Written in French, but American in spirit, Quebec literature seems to have mostly resisted recent French literary patterns. Nevertheless, some im ‐ portant changes should be noticed since 2000, namely those concerning the roman familial (family novel) that underlies certain traditional genres such as the roman du terroir (novel of the soil) and the roman de la ville (novel of the town). Recent social and cultural developments, the irruption and integration of “migrant literature” into the Quebec literary canon have been transforming the long‐standing community characteristics of Quebec literature. This transformation generates a new imaginary, close to suchconcepts as enracinerrance (root‐roving) or pensée de la trace (thought of the trace) or spatiality of the in‐between. Those tendencies, resembling the characteristic features of the French récit de filiation (filiation narrative), are illustrated through two novels – La Fiancée américaine by Éric Dupont and Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner

The rise of filiation narratives, observed in France since the end of the 1970s and confirmed by the publication of Annie Ernaux's A Man´s Place (1983) and Pierre Michon's Small Lives (1984), is contemporary with the "symbolic birth" of French or English speaking Inuit literature in Canada. Through the analysis of certain "founding works" of the Inuit novel (namely Harpoon of the Hunter by Markoosie Patsauq and Sanaaq by Mitiarjuk Attasie Nappaaluk), the article expands on its thematic, generic and axiological similarities as well as its differences compared to the European model. It also outlines the subsequent evolution of the genre through new generations of Inuit writers (Alice Masak French, Mini Aodla Freeman, Norma Dunning, Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak or Aviaq Johnston).

This article aims at analyzing the hiatus between the physical return of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and the psychological bond they keep on feeling deep inside with the time and place of their detention.

The article is devoted to the recurrence of the same motifs in the creative oeuvre of Michel de Ghelderode over the whole period of his literary career. The analysis focuses on the recurrence and evolution of two characters in the dramatic works of the Belgian playwright. The first part of the article charts the evolution of the motif of the resurrection of a dead girl: the writer recollects a story, told by his mother in his childhood, to recreate his own stage version of the Biblical resurrection of Jair’s daughter. The second part deals with the motif of the battleaxe and her literary path in Ghelderode’s dramatic works, from a duplicitous gossip through a lecherous plain girl to a shrew, whose story is riddled with elements of the Belgian founding myth.

The “mandarin paradox” is a famous philosophical problem, mentioned in Balzac’s Père Goriot. It takes the form of a question: “what [would you] do if [you] could make a fortune by killing an old mandarin somewhere in China by mere force of wishing it, and without stirring from Paris ?” This paradox examines our conscience and the moral ability to bear an unpunished crime. Balzac, and other writers after him, wrongfully attributed this problem to Jean‐Jacques Rousseau. In our paper, we present the history of the “mandarin paradox”, showing the way Balzac reused and recreated this moral question to construct a new literary character: the arriviste. This young man, searching for a place in high society, dares to “kill the mandarin” and to build his career on this murder. Hence, his arrivisme relates to the “mandarin paradox”, notably in the Félicien Champsaur’s novel, L’Arriviste.

According to the critics, this novel by Aragon was a turning point in his works. While the novel series known as The Real World was allegedly defined as a form of (Socialist) realism, Aragon then went beyond the strict boundaries of the novel as a genre in his late period. In this novel, the rules of enunciation play a major part in the blurry building‐up of a semantic structure. The structure relies on internal monologue – even, to widen the scope, on free indirect speech or literary devices giving free course to subjectivity. The term “intersubjectivity” may even be used, as it is quite obvious the fictionalised biography of French painter Théodore Géricault is closely intertwined with Aragon’s own life. It relates the career of an artist struggling with the torments of History, as well as the awaken ing of his political and moral conscience.

Written in the context of the late 1970s, Samuel Beckett’s mirlitonnades poems evoke the possible return of the old ghosts of the past, which, if one is not careful, will once again affect and infect the present and compromise the future. Samuel Beckett’s quest for the worst has historical sources – to be found in the Second World War – as well as literary sources, namely Shakespeare’s King Lear, a play in which the destiny of Edgar both interested and moved him. According to philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to whom one of the poems of mirlitonnades is dedicated, certain outsiders and artists are bearers of ‘‘human qualities" that are "contrary to social requirements". Thus they may be able to prevent the worst from happening again.

The return of the theme of the Great War in literature imposes on the contemporary reader a double heritage: that of grief and guilt. The postmemory rediscovery of loss is therefore accompanied by a prise de conscience of forgetting or indifference, in family memory and History, in relatoon to war’s anonymous victims. In the fiction compared in this paper, Douze lettres au soldat inconnu by Olivier Barbarant and Visites aux vivants by Cathie Barreau, loss is thematized by deconstructing the specter of the Great War. The two authors attempt to libertate the specters from the aura of anxiety, on the one hand in the hope of taming the past, on the other to give voice, as well individual integrity, to the forgotten subjects of the Great War.

This article explores the motif of return as a poetics of the past René Char’s most famous collection of poems : Fureur et mystère. This  constant movement of return reveals the thematic importance of the past for Char.  If the presence of the past can first be seen through the themes and the formal structure of the poetic writing – verbal tenses, figures of speech, images – the originality of the return in Char’s poetry lies in his revolutionary conception of time. The poet deconstructs the chronological vision of time in order to make the past present. In other words, the motif of return appears to establish the past as a mobile temporal frame which calls celebration rather than nostalgia.

In this article, it will be a question of a detailed and analytical reading of the incest, written by Ch. Angot, in order to explore the stigmas of "scriptural incest" by which the author expresses the torments of the past by transgressing the canonical rules of writing. The titular camera will be questioned and invested to show the tangled form of the novel. Moreover, the intertextuality will serve as theoretical support in order to examine the contribution of inter‐intra‐textual clashes for a good interpretation of this "scriptural incest".

19th century literature makes the body one of the objects of interest treating it as a surface on which signs appear that are a trace of emotions swirling inside it. Zola is one of those writers who put the body centrally to their work, making it a starting point to deepen the mystery of a man. The presented study is an analysis of affects manifesting through the gesture and movements of the body. The main character’s body is, according to the biological model of the epoch, a hysterical type. However, it is not just a hysterical body, but it is also paroxystic which means, the penultimate moment before the end. It is this rift, externalized in the dynamic posture of the body, that is acting out, assigned to a man, which is the ambivalence of this seemingly obvious model of oversensitive femininity, common in discourses of the 19th century.

More than thirty years apart, two major figures of the Quebec theater scene – Marcel Dubé and Wajdi Mouawad – take up the mythical story of The King of Thebes, who killed his father and slept with his mother,  and propose its "Quebec versions". The two plays, Au retour des oies blanches (1969) and Incendies (2003), are well anchored in the contemporary reality of their respective authors: the Quiet Revolution for Dubé and the civil war in Lebanon for Mouawad. Both returns to the myth of Oedipus depict young people who, like the mythical character, pursue a quest for their roots and reach the end of their respective investigations. This article aims to take up the key elements of the myth and to study their dramaturgical functioning in modern texts.

In this paper, we study the topic of the return as a creative source of paratopic writing in the Disparition de la langue française by Assia Djebar. In this novel, the author creates many universes by swinging from one universe to another. She shifts from « je » to « il », from analepses to prolepses, from masculine to feminine, from space to time, from memory to history and vice versa in a continuous movement. These in‐between worlds are generated by the topic of the return. They enable us to shed light on the writer’s paratopic writing.

The play The Return Home by Matéi Visniec commemorates the First World War, but thanks to its universality it may refer to any war. The characters – the Dead of the Homeland – are all presented as alive and they claim their right to a dignified return to the Homeland. But how to return home with dignity in the state of decomposition in which they are? As it happens every day in a community life, ambitions take over. The Commission of Reconciliation solves the problem by proposing to return them “in cake”: all the soldiers pass through a food mill to become a smooth paste with which then a giant cake is made. This return to the past, presented through grotesque images, serves the  author to  denounce how people are manipulated by big ideas. He also poses questions about the meaning of war.

In his last novel, Un homme de passage (2011), Serge Doubrovsky evokes the main points of his life in seven parts which lead him from New York to Paris. Meditation on the many eras and areas crossed by a declining man, the novel is built on two antithetical modes of return. The first, literal and spatial, is triggered by his retirement which forces him to go back to his Parisian home. The second, temporal, is a resurgence of his past throughout reminiscences that thwart the linearity of his trip. This double movement creates a dialectic between fiction and history. While his journey back to his native land is staged like an Odyssey, it also constitutes a tragic backwards path for the narrator who associates the fatal issue of his final trip to the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust, from which he had barely escaped.

The idea of return in its multiple forms and manifestations is central to Tanguy Viel’s oeuvre. His novels explore this phenomenon in terms of literary aesthetics as well as thematic, narrative and discursive concerns by forging peculiar analogies between form and content. Drawing on selected aesthetic, philosophical and stylistic theories of return, the present paper seeks to discuss its forms in Viel’s texts and analyses how he uses them to create a literary reflection on the sense of returns in human life.

This article intends to examine the question of return in literature by using the tools of stylistics. It also seeks to question the relevance of those tools for this very object, in which individual and collective issues overlap. We chose to look at two 'past‐styled authors', Richard Millet and Baudouin de Bodinat. Their writtngs allow us to grasp the connection between style and ideology, but also to compare different stylistic methods (mainly a rhetorical approach or a figurative conception of style) pointing to different conclusions.

The novel of Joëlle Wintrebert talks about a society where cloning is used to build champions. The father of the modern cloning, Bior Malard, is struck by a drama: the death of his woman. But he takes cells and clones her. A child born: Maël. She is a baby, and Bior brings up her. A question appears: who is Maël? His wife? His daughter?
This paper deals with some issues like identity, ownership of the body and abilities of the body in a complicated and entangled paradox of the time.  If a character comes from the past, or if a part of their own body comes from the past, can he build the future, or even be a part of it?

The aim of the article is to show that some motifs and concepts which can be found in the expressionist dramas – emerged in the early part of the XXth century – have already been explored by Gérard de Nerval (1808‐1855) during the last years of his life. The paper analyses in particular the last – and unfinished – Nerval’s récit entitled Aurélia in which analogies with some techniques used by expressionist authors such as the exploration of the universe of dreams and soul or the research of the true identity of man are more than surprising.

In the chapter entitled “Des différentes manières de se servir de l’éventail”, included in hisLivre des quatre couleurs, Caraccioli explains the Oriental origins of the fan. Such interest in the fan on the part of one of the leading analysts of French customs reflects the increasing fascination amongst French women and men in the eighteenth century with such sartorial gadget. Addison in a “satire of the coquettes”, published by The Spectator, describes it as the main weapon of high society women. From its primary use as a flyswatter, he will draw further purposes. But mostly, to encourage love affairs, for the fan aids the lady who is not allowed to engage in a conversation with a stranger but who, thanks to such object, will explore a body language enriched with a myriad of gallant significations. The pictorial and literary imagination that translates this social phenomenon in thus unveiled.

The purpose of this article is to examine the different variations of the mask as well as its limits in George Sand's Uscoque, a novel very rich in events that take place between Morea and Venice at the thme of the Turkish‐Venetian wars.

By the 1920s, the surrealists had claimed Fantômas as one of their literary ancestor because his mask makes him an icon of ambiguity. Masks give the surrealist characters the means to  overcome the contradictions of the conscious and unconscious minds. The surrealists incorporate masks into art and fiction not only to disguise secret identities but also to explore other identities. In this way, the masked character becomes an “anti‐Narcisse”, as André Breton said. From the standpoint of the imagination, mask is inestimably rich by its full poetic effect.

Wajdi Mouawad’s works focus mainly on the characters’ identity quest. The writing’s hardness shows the cruelty of war, which is a leitmotiv in Mouawad’s works, due to the Lebanese civil war that the author has knew in his childhood. In his first novel, Visage retrouvé, published in 2002, Mouawad exorcises the memory of the past by his telling of  Wahab’s story. This teenager found out, at his 14th birthday, that he couldn’t recognize his mother’s face anymore. This terrible loss will lead him to a dreamlike quest of the true face of his mother, which symbolizes the land of origins, the childhood and the lost tenderness. We have chosen to analyze this quest, in the light of the obsessive recurrence of images and words.

Nietzsche is one of those philosophers and thinkers – or even the philosopher, the thinker – who had the most inspiring influence upon Georges Bataille’s way of thinking as well as his existential choices. Among many Nietzschean concepts that are tenaciously present in Bataille’s work one – namely the Death of God – seems to be particularly persistent. This article aims to analyze some of representations of the dead God, the divine cadaver, in both religious and ideological sense in two of Bataille’s novels written before World War II: Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon.

The article proposes a comparative study of the religious ideas of Pierre‐Simon Ballanche and Edgar Quinet, focusing on the relations that in their context the two authors establish between the notions of evolution and revolution. Both admit the existence of a divine revelation at once eternal and progressive that unfolds in history, in both also French Revolution and the rupture it has operated occupies a central place in the reflection on religion. But while Ballanche’s universal religion is closer to traditionalist and theosophical conceptions, Quinet’s one, taking the form of modern millenarianism, is representative of the current of secular humanitarianism.

Long before the first translations of Charles Darwin’s works, evolutionary thought had been developing in France thanks to such authors as Georges‐Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Charles Bonnet and Jean‐Baptiste de Lamarck. Although Georges Cuvier’s fixism and creationism remained the dominant scientific paradigm throughout the 19th century, writers drew their inspiration from evolutionary thought, subjecting it to lyrical and often parareligious interpretations. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Charles Nodier in his essay “De la palingénésie humaine et de la résurrection” and Camille Flammarion in his short stories “Clairs de lune” reinterpret different theories of evolution.

The motif of mirror often appears in the 19th century fantastic tales. It performs there various functions, such as a possessor of knowledge, a malicious object, a place where living being meets revenant, the threshold of the real world and the beyond. The manner in which the motif of mirror is presented reflects how the 19th century fantastic tales evolve.

In “classical” gothic stories, following the patierns established by E. T. A. Hoffmann or E. A. Poe, death is the starting point of the storyline which is imagined in relation to a central extraordinary event, like the appearance of a ghost, a phantom or any other supernatural being. In the 19th century, the fascination with achievements of human mind is completed by the study of mental diseases. Hence, the central event of most of the gothic stories of this time is the imaginary appearance of a double, an invisible persecutor or any other manifestation of the ideas hidden in a sick brain. Zola and Maupassant have created a number of stories following this pattern, where death is no more a starting point, but the last stage of a long process leading a man to madness. Thus, the dialectic of life and death is completely inversed.

Darwin has become the face of a scientific revolution, initiating what T. Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift”. Darwin’s theory undermined the intellectual foundations on which the understanding of the world was based: stability and unchangeability. Darwin replaces them with the idea of a continuous but imperceptible change – evolution – which takes place in the world of living beings. Literature and culture in the 2nd half of the XIXth century succumbs to the power of this theory, which affects the imagination of the creators. Among them is Zola, in whose cycle Les Rougon‐Macquart we find “evolutionary poetics”, which models the way of presenting the characters (social evolution) and their corporality, which is the purpose of the article to demonstrate (an evolutionary portrait of especially Gervaise Macquart). A fictional body becomes a place of constant transformation, (de/re) materialization, which proves the fluid plasticity of life. After Darwin, dynamism replaces the ontology.

This article focuses on the evolutionary character of the literary work of Joris‐Karl Huysmans which expresses itself in the mutual penetration of naturalism, symbolism and decadence. The abandonment of the moralizing epithet and its ipseity seems to be the most important proof of the permeation of these tendencies. Therefore the writer’s heroes are able to find the integrity of their identity only in this heterogeneity.

The paper aims to show a dandy as a performer who acts as if he was guided by a kind of a revolutionary manifesto, which we attempt to recreate by referring to essays of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire, Jules Lemaître or Oscar Wilde. The dandy’s rebellion against the outside world consists in the creation of his own personality, as well as in the rejection of the rudimentary uniformity and the duty of utility. He seeks to give his life an exceptional character, his unique goal is to serve the highest value: the Beauty. His responsibility is to impress his audience and not to let himself be amazed, as he cannot disclose his feelings and he has to adopt an impenetrable attitude, guided by the constant urge of staging his life, as a form of protection against the surrounding world, malevolent and rude.

This article shows two opposite reactions to the revolutionary events of 1848‐1849. For George Sand June Days meant the end of dreams of the social revolution whereas for Richard Wagner, who was a participant of the Dresden Revolution of 1849, they became the direct inspiration to outline the utopian project of the art revolution. The rejection of the idea of revolution inclines George Sand to the concept of evolution which would lead to the social republic in the future. Richard Wagner, by contrast, in his essay ‘Art and Revolution’ supports the idea of the revolution based on art. This turnaround, which in fact is evolutionary, shall lead to the political and esthetic development as well as to the inception of the ‘artistic humanity’.

The objective of this study is to analyze the transition from one period of Rachilde’s creation to another, which is represented by her novel Le Mordu (1889). While saying goodbye to a form of expression that seems obsolete, the novelist indicates directions to take. She also presents the dilemma of artistic compromise versus pure art. Thus the terms of revolution and evolution find their meaning: in relation to the intransigence of the artistic principles which, during the course of life, switch to morally dubious mercantilism. The meaning of these two terms is examined not only in the context of Rachilde’s novel, but also in relation to her own choices.

The aim of the present paper is to answer the question whether the Oriental travelogue by Gustave Flaubert, notorious for the bawdy descriptions of various sexual experience the author gains during his trip, represents a revolution or an evolution in the literary approach toward the Middle East. The paper is divided into three parts. The first describes briefly the history of the Oriental dream and the 19th‐century predilection for the voluptuous odalisques. The second discusses a few Oriental travelogues and the meeting of the dream with the reality while the last one analyses the sexualisation of the Oriental experience becoming increasingly important during the 19th century.

In her two novels, La Force du désir and Folle de son corps, Krysinska tackled stereotypes concerning the portrayal of sexuality. The writer rejects the image of the woman that places her in the frame of feminine romanticism, of the "eternal femininity". She creates women, heterosexual and bisexual, all conscious of their sexuality; men whose inclinations are strictly homosexual, children discovering their bodies and their emerging desires. And since her observation concerns both women and men, I dare to say that Krysinska goes far beyond what was accepted by the nineteenth century doxa and what was presented by the other authors. It is tempting to say that Krysinska announced the end of the phallocratic society, since clitoris is equal to phallus, both of which are never literally mentioned. The conclusions derived from the analysis of Krysinska's two novels betray the more revoluyionary than evolutionary character, the latter resulting from the omnipresence of sex equal to its omni‐absence.

In the context of Franco‐Canadian literature, women writers are doubly marginalized by their status as women and by their belonging to a French‐speaking community. This status encloses them in a space of exiguity, which women try to free themselves with displacement writing. In Rues étrangères, Acadian poet Sarah Marylou Brideau describes a character‐poet who walks between two real spaces: Moncton and Fredericton. These two cities, in the Acadian popular imagination, refer to two distinct communities: francophones and anglophones. Thus, in these geographic displacements, one also observes an internal transition in the character, since she changes denomination. By appropriating the space of Other, this character‐poet reconstructs her surrounding space, which becomes "hers". This article aims to explore the role of geographical space, especially its displacements, in Rues étrangères. In this context of double minorization, it becomes necessary to define the role played by space in the construction of the feminine self.

This article aims at analyzing the territorial reconfiguration of Africa within the novel of contemporary diaspora. In fact, this diaspora hold a fictional speech that is off‐centre to the homeland. This one is thus considered on haw it opens gates to further spaces making thence an endless area or space with moving frontiers in a writing of traverse. This representation of Africa appears, in addition, in the kinds of dialectics of here and there. It reflects the living manners of these writers negotiating ways with the universal environment. The special referents portray no cases to answer and hence belong to the global world including all geographies. Fictionalizing this transnational space shows a kind of writing in the quest for the universal picture excluding but any accuracy about territorial membership in short.

Ada is a 12 year‐old girl who has been impregnated by her teacher in a Middle School where corruption and debauchery are normalized. Mintsa’s esthetics condenses a social criticism of phallocentric discourse through Ada’s grandfather, Afane Obame, a high priest of the Ancestor’s rite called Melan, whose primary focus is to further establish his power. He normalizes Ada’s pregnancy, as tradition dictates, and serves as a receptacle through which Mintsa’s narrative displays a shocking picture of discarded and decomposing placentae along outside walls of the Maternity Ward like graffiti. An allegorical reading of Plato’s Chora, as it relates to Ada’s parturition, opens up a narrative that actualizes the fluidity of a symbiosis between traditional and modern cultural practices. The overlapping imagery of the repulsive wall of decomposing placentae and the symbiotic cultural practices end in a mirror within a mirror graphism with colorful disjunctive syntheses.

The paper aims at describing and interpreting works of polish‐french poet Bruno Kamiński‐Durocher demonstrating how strongly it is anchored in the author’s biography, space and the places he inhabits and tames. This analysis is structured with the notion of territory and what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. They are used to mark the Territory sought in vain by narrators and lyrical subjects of Durocher’s works. I follow the authors of What Is Philosophy in believing that “thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth” in making this relation and how it reflects in works by Bronisław Kamiński, a focal point of my interest in this paper.

From the point of view of ecocriticism, living nature under the pen of Giono and Le Clézio reveals a profusion that integrates mineral dimensions, wildlife and plants. Living nature, in the writings of these authors, expresses a direct contact with the organic and establishes a new approach to living creatures. Moreover, this approach reveals man's responsibility in the preservation of nature.

This article proposes a reflection onto Geocriticism and its analysis tools, in order to highlight the importance of the literary text when creating the sense of space. The three concepts of territory, space and place will also be useful as analysis to reflect on the different ways of space representation in French literature and, in a small portion, European literature. Several authors have been considered, such as Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Jules Verne, René Barjavel, but also Miguel de Cervantes and Italo Calvino.

As a method of interdisciplinary analysis, Geocriticism allows the diversification of perspectives in literature: a “multi-focalisation” of places, a poly-sensuous approach to places, a stratigraphic vision of places, and an intertextuality of places. This is why it does not gravitate around only one author or novel, but it concentrates in the referential dimension of fictional spaces. 

The Saints of the personal pantheon of Maurice Barrès, notably Joan of Arc, Saint Bernadette and the Sibyl of Auxerre, are important in his religious vision: they represent naivety and force, they also represent the link between the visible world and the Invisible world, between the primordial world and the Christian world. Time and space seem transparent for the Saints of Barrès: the past and the present unite in them, the pagan space and the Christian space open for them. The author tries to mix the two spaces in one, so that the forces of the different worlds form a new power, which is stronger than ever before. His writings on these feminine figures show one of the main axes of his religious thought: the coexistence of two spiritual powers.

The study of representations of habitat, land and territories in La carte et le Territoire from Michel Houellebecq reveals aesthetic and political patterns that inform us about worldviews conforming or resisting the smoothing that men impose on the spaces they live in. Through an interdisciplinary framework based on Ecocritical Theory, this critical investigation analyzes the imbrication of men and the territories they occupy in order to observe emerging environmental issues in contemporary literature. In addition, a geocritical framework, a literary cartography of sorts, allows me to study spaces seeped in geography and society. In Houellebecq’s novel, dwelling, habitat, architecture, urban planning and modes of living are interconnected. This article is a part of a dissertation which subject is to study the tremors that shake the walls and the territories that humans try to establish as solid and definitive.

The aim of this paper is to bring into discussion the work of Hervé Bazin, a great novelist of the XX^stcentury, drawing on the concept of travelling in his novels. Preferring the telluric universe instead of the river, Hervé Bazin transforms the scene of his novel into a privileged space for writing. And as the writing is original, it demands a continuous resumption and a wide area of each published novel: in this way, the Bazinian character is defined by a spirit of wanderling, being fascinated by Ether, this empty space that he fills in with his creative mind and with the dynamism of his self.

The history of Russia still attracts a lot of interest and excitement. Often Western people’s perception of this country seems contentious to us, in Poland. The aim of my paper is to familiarise the reader with its depiction of the eminent Savoyard conservative philosopher Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821). De Maistre spent 14 years in St. Petersburg (1803-1817), during which period the Napoleonic wars, and then the final defeat of the French Emperor, thoroughly demolished the geopolitical and ideological aspects of the Old Continent.  I have engaged myself in reconstruction, based on a number of dispersed sources (archives, correspondence, texts, studies), of some political and religious paradoxes and utopias which result of  Joseph de Maistre’s overall vision of the Russian state.

Two criteria have been combined when studying the Polish presence in the novels of the Jeanne Cappe collection, namely the presence of maps including Poland and the narrative content about the aforesaid country. Two books, published between 1940 and 1970, have been selected. Because children’s literature contributes to the historical, geographical and cultural education of its readers, we will see what kind of information these two novels provide regarding Poland. Through the textual references to the Second World War, questions will be raised on the link between history and fiction. To conclude, we will examine the development of Polish representation in children’s literature.

Unfolding during the Second World War Achtung Zelig! adopts a mode of narration that is both fantastic and absurd. The comic not only reflects the issues surrounding the representation of the unimaginable and real horrors of the Holocaust but it also exemplifies the presence and functioning of ‘media memories’ or memories of specific cultural productions as well as media and the performing arts (circus, theatre). This article examines the functioning, particularly the generation of connotations, of the key media memories of the carnivalesque, Art Spiegelman's Maus, Horst Rosenthal's Mickey au camp de Gurs and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator in Achtung Zelig!

Grzegorz Rosiński’s comic strips are characteristic of a really transnational popular literature, because they are situated at the intersection of cultural influences from Poland and Belgium. This double identity, which can be perceived on various levels in Grzegorz Rosiński’s works (theme, stylistics, etc.), contributes to the singularity of his works and gives the creativity of the illustrator free rein, allowing him to deeply renew the ninth art. In our view, Rosiński applies a vital and disinhibiting poetics of movement in his works.

The article offers a selective comparison of some objects of the Silesian and Walloon designers and suggests their possible interpretations. In both regions, Silesia in Poland and Wallonia in Belgium, which are bound by the similar industrial heritage, considerable efforts were made, at a certain moment in their recent history, in the field of design to modify or even reinvent the image of the region. Silesian designers seem to be still anchored in the past, often concentrated on overcoming the stereotype that weighs on their homeland. The Walloon design, however, is more keen to comment on the present and to criticize the galloping consumption, often warning about the risks of being caught by the flow of the "liquid modernity".

For twelve years, the autobiographic figure of Marzi has been undertaking her paper journey through a web of works written by Polish author Marzena Sowa and drawn by French cartoonist Sylvain Savoia. Just for its French‐language versions, Marzi has known all sorts of formats within the same medium, i.e. comics. This paper explores the forms and formats of this web of autobiographical comics in the francophone sphere.

Advertisement isn’t very popular object of analysis in the field of literary studies, based on the constitutive and self‐determined dynamics of selfless query of formal perfection. Advertisement, dedicated to the economy, is not easily exonerate there. However, if we keep this idealistic and elitist doxa suspended, therefore we will see that the discourse of publicity is activating – as every discourse is – the spectacular axiological function which makes understand our motivations to act in the social reality. Are they relevant in transcultural context? This article tries to respond to this question, comparing contemporary publicities from west (Belgium, France) and central (Poland) Europe, advertising anti‐age cosmetics.

The article analyzes the Polish edition of The Widow by Georges Simenon in the context of the reception of this author in Poland and in that of a “new literary canon”. The study also proposes a commentary on the translation of the novel, which also contributes to the legitimization of the Belgian writer.

The following interview aims at examining the role of an independent Parisian publishing house on the French book market. Economic and institutional circumstances surrounding smaller French publishing houses are illustrated by the example of Caractères publishing house, which specializes in poetry. At the same time, the interview raises the issue of francophone writing in the publishing strategy of Caractères in the light of a debate on the diversity of francophone literatures and littérature monde concept.

This article draws on various theories and representations of resentment. On the one hand, resentment leads to holding back feelings and impeding change, and on the other hand, it fosters important social, cultural and scientific developments. Let’s take the example of resentment stemming from racism against certain minorities (immigrants, Natives Peoples, French‐Canadians, etc.), and how it contributed to an essential change in the literary canon leading to the creation of new interdisciplinary fields, such as minority studies or Afro‐American studies. These new fields of research explore identity as no longer limited to national territory but linked to the migration of people, to their creativity and integration to dynamic societies in the Americas.

In the Lettres de la Marquise de M*** Crébillon shows, through the Marquise’s reflections of shame, the opposition between the galant and the tender conceptions of love. Galant love is represented as a game and false feeling, but it has a primary importance in mondain’s way of life. Failure to fulfil a galant love rules is accompanied by true or false feelings of shame. The Marquise de M*** wants conform to the galant tone demanded by society, but she is also seeking for true, tender love, which is opposed to behavior of a milieu. Accordingly, her sensitivity and a system of values brings her to elaborate her personal, secret conception of shame.

This paper aims to demystify the way in which the mechanics of the Kafka Trial reproduces the Freudian topography of id, ego and superego, within which shame acts as a warning signal, as well as to highlight the hostile representation of psychoanalysis in The Trial. Thus, in an allegorical form, justice, through its representatives, would personify the inquisitive gaze of the analyst, whose theory resembles a law he himself enacted. It is also a question of how this criticism of psychoanalysis could emerge from the study of Talmudic writings undertaken by Kafka around 1911, impregnating in the author a conception of the law and its transgression incompatible with the Freudian doctrine.

Arrestation by Jean Anouilh is a peculiar study of feelings such as hatred, anxiety, regret and shame. The feelings originating from his humble upbringing, have a negative impact on relations with loved ones. The author has chosen a quite interesting way to portray those complicated relations by means of retrospection, which at the same time is the introspection of the protagonist. It helps him to finally understand and tame his negative emotions, which according to him, were the reason for his life’s misfortune. Some critics have discerned the author’s incarnation in the protagonist. Through this creation the author can express on stage his own feelings, which seemed to be too difficult for him to express in real life. However, knowing the author’s unpredictability and his inclination for provocation, there is a suspicion that it might only be a sort of game played with the critics and the audience.

The aim of this article is to discuss the autobiographical inscription that dwells in Jacques Derrida’s writing. Derrida’s « overmemory », that blocks autobiography as a récit, seems to be the trigger for the singular and somehow emotional style of his writing through which he saves himself inside his own philosophy based, among others, on the principle of dissemination. Circumfession, that I read through what I call « penile thread » [f i l p é n i e n], shows different strategies to preserve some traces of Derrida’s proper name.

Assia Djebar expresses the reasons for some ill‐being that she exposes in Nulle part dans la maison de mon père, published in 2007. The novelist uses literary expressions to project cultural dimensions through her female narrator, an adult, who remembers her childhood. At the age of four or five, the protagonist got stamped for ever with her father’s rejection of her trial to learn to ride a bicycle. This article explores the dimensions of fear, shame and ill‐being that the protagonist went through from biographical, historical and psychological theoretical backgrounds. Special attention is devoted to the therapy that the narrator goes through as she tries to understand her father’s reaction; she shares her visions of the child she was and narrates her experience. The focus on the father, who seems to have changed into a different human being, is approached through paradoxical dimensions of love and dislike.

This article draws on the psychoanalytic theories of shame by Boris Cyrulnik to explore various literary representations of shame in Canadian francophone literature today. By comparing Annie Ernaux’s discourse on shame with excerpts from Kim Thúy and Pascal Janovjak (À toi), Sergio Kokis (Le Pavillon des miroirs) and Régine Robin (La Québécoite), I study the dynamics of interculturalism (G. Bouchard, P. Imbert, P. Ouellet) in contemporary francophone Canadian literature. Thus, I emphasise the irreductible impact of mobility, transformation and life experiences in the cultivation of shared cultural values.

We suggest to show through La Place (Gallimard, 1983) of Annie Ernaux that the feelings of shame and faintness constitute the contemporary « récit de filiation ». Our subject consists to examine how the emergence of these feelings try to worsen this contemporary assumption that today's writer write from an « illegitimacy » (this one can be of family, social or professional order, etc.). Besides, it is a question of coming up, with supporting illustrations, the way which feelings of faintness and shame come over the text while being interested in the advent of the ernausian discomfort related to the language, complicity and complexity with the father's figure.

This article intends to confront the literary and stage functioning of Lui, the protagonist of the Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger (1890) and of the play of the same name created by Téo Spychalski within the theatre company, Groupe de la Veillée, in Montreal, in 1996. Using the terminological concepts developed by David Le Breton, professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg, I explore various aspects of the notion of pain present in the novel and its stage adaptation. What is particularly interesting for me in both texts is the influence of pain on the existence of a human being, on the life of an individual.