FAQ
Faculté des Lettres Université de Gdansk

Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment

2017 Next

Publication date: 29.06.2017

Licence: None

Editorial team

Orcid Ewa M. Wierzbowska

Issue content

études

Patrick Imbert

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 9 - 28

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.001.6895

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.

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Maja Pawłowska

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 29 - 45

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.002.6896

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.

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Julie Racine

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 47 - 64

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.003.6897

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.

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Sylwia Kucharuk

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 65 - 79

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.004.6898

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.

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Michał Krzykawski

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 81 - 103

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.005.6899

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.

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Naciera Belfar Boubaaya

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 105 - 122

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.006.6900

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.

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Adina Balint

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 123 - 143

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.007.6901

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.

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Fayçal Bouiche

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 145 - 160

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.008.6902

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.

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Renata Jakubczuk

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 161 - 175

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.009.6903

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.

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Zuzana Malinovská

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 177 - 191

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.010.6904

The novel Pas pleurer (2014, No crying) by Lydie Salvayre, working as a psychoanalyst for a long time, can be read as a novel on shame. Textual analysis shows that shame – depicted in accordance with the theses of a psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik – is the main topic of the narrative portrazing the effects of historical events on the lives of the individuals. The author uses shame as a means of constructing the novel, the shame being the glue that holds the structure together, determining the space and time, shaping the protagonists and their stories. Shame also functions as the starter and the engine of the narrative. The narrators‐protagonists, who speaking about the “shameful events”, are those who overcome their own feelings of shame by telling their stories. Timely and universal, the novel points to the therapeutic function of literature, thus leaving it open for scientists from other areas of research.

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Julio Zárate

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 193 - 209

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.011.6905

Los sinsabores del verdadero policía (2011) is a posthumous and unfinished novel where Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño, reflects on evil, sickness and death. Distress and restlessness run throughout this novel; Bolaño once again makes Santa Teresa a symbolic space that represents the wickedness of the contemporary world. This article considers the fragile and permeable nature of fiction that, at the same time, is both inspired by and reflects violence at the frontier between Mexico and the United States of America. The unspoken presence of evil (sickness, violence to women, murder) in Santa Teresa prevents characters from finding joy. However, this evil presence also provides the strength to continue living. Intertextuality, characteristic of Bolaño’s work, is also analyzed in this article, particularly the references to The savage detectives (1998) and 2666 (2004).

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Diana Mistreanu

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 211 - 229

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.012.6906

Albeit symptomatic of both Saramago’s writing style and philosophical outlook on life, his Manuel de peinture et de calligraphie (1977), which is the private diary of a fictional painter whose gradual process of getting to know himself changes his life for the better, has not gained critical attention until recent years. Our paper discusses the psychology of the narrator and aims to unveil the mechanisms at work in his initial state of evolution, mechanisms that make him lead a frustrating intimate and professional life. The text is explored through the prism of Eric Berne’s transactional analysis theory, and it pinpoints the character’s states of the Ego, his place in Stephan Karpman’s drama triangle, as well as various elements of his life script.

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Lucie Bertrand‐Luthereau

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 231 - 246

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.013.6907

Shame is definitely a key notion in Primo Levi's work. In his last book, entitled The drowned and the saved, Primo Levi tries to analyze the difference between the shame he felt as a prisoner in Auschwitz, and another type of shame, which he experienced back in the free world. His attempt is way less clear than first meets the eye: it reveals the bitter struggle taking place in the depth of his identity, and leads to what could be called a destructive metaphysic of shame. This raises the question: how to read Primo Levi's masterpieces knowing they are infected by the “Auschwitz poison” which was lethal for the writer himself?

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Éric Boulanger

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 247 - 267

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.014.6908

In this era, where technical, scientific and technological advances have transformed the face of the armed conflicts, it is legitimate to ask if the realities of modern warfare and the military ethos are still compatible. Since the Great War, the experience of combat seems to be expressed only through negative feelings. Many veterans, for example, have privileged the feeling of shame when it comes to telling their experience. It seems to us that the discursive ethos contained in the American novels
on the Vietnam War are designed to modulate and reorient the preconceived ethos that define American combatants within social discourse. That is why we will try to observe how – by attacking the stereotypes and preconceived ideas of the doxas of the time, by invalidating the traditional image of the warrior and by portraying their moral qualities – the veteran‐authors seek to transform the representations of the combatant who nourish the popular imagination.

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études II. destin / vocation

Anne‐Laure Andevert

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 269 - 289

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.015.6909

Julien Green immerses the reader in some oppressive boredom‐filled atmosphere, he also experienced. He was used to boredom, turning into acedia, taedium vitae, melancholy, nostalgia, overpowering neurasthenia, all this linked with his mother’s early death, the flesh/mind conflict or, even the exarcerbated awareness of a void existence. Acedia – a genuine individual experience – leaves the Greenian character facing an empty, pointless existence. Acedia spreads its invisible tentacles around the character who feels how empty life without God is. Apathetic, lazy, idle and weak, he flees all inner life, causing his immutable loneliness. This aridity is seen in an empty town and the immutable life he sinks into. The fatal row he witnessed, reveals his cowardice and creates a gap in his consciousness : the image of a strong, respectable man cracks turning acedia into an ordeal condemning him to painfully cohabitate with himself thus annihilating all ambition and selftranscendence.

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Lauralie Chatelet

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 291 - 307

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.016.6910

This article intends to show how Cioran uses his experience of acedia to forge a very specific form of fragment. Acedia, such as the Desert Fathers defined it, implies both illness of the mind and sin of the will, therefore, writing can shows signs of both. Signs that this article will analyse include fever, exaustion, obsession, etc. However, Cioran uses writing as both an illustration of and a way to combat acedia. In the end, the fragment appears to be both an illustration and the only way to overcome acedia.

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Jeanne Weeber

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 309 - 325

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.017.6911

The experiences of the medieval acedia and the modern schizophrenia present some resemblances in their symptoms. The literature of the twentieth century offers figures of schizophrenic whose representation includes traditional patterns of the acedia : isolation, boredom, detachment, visions... The study of the nature of the disorder of female characters in works of the sixties by Marguerite Duras (France), Janet Frame (New Zealand), Sylvia Plath (United States of America) or Jennifer Dawson (Great‐Britain) reveals the legacy of the acedia in the imagination of contemporary writers. Moreover, it questions the psychopathological conception of schizophrenia and reveals its moral, spiritual and social aspects.

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Šárka Novotná

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 327 - 350

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.018.6912

The acedia gained many meanings during its etymological and conceptual development: first it meant the privation of care of the death people, then the privation of mental care which implied the solitude, fumbling for own fantasmas and melancholy which caused shifts the subjective visions of the world. Catherine Mavrikakis actualizes those meanings in her novel Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques, adding the relation to the body. The body becomes actor in the plays of the society: the commonwealth of people satisfied with the superficial impressions. In the same time it is the reference to death because the characters are whether “devoured” by the AIDS disease or by the melancholy which push them to the suicide. The fatality of the death and recurrent motives referring to the death condense the narration into the anxious erratic circle expressing the acedia of the current society.

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varia

Ewa Małgorzata Wierzbowska

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 353 - 378

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.019.6913

The dispute over vers libre did not lose any of its ferocity after 1900. One would expect that with the passage of time, bringing in more and more evidence for women's intellectual capabilities, their innovations would be appreciated. And yet, it did not come to be. Men jealously guarded the domain which belonged to them for centuries, and where women were, proportionally, rare visitors. Krysinska proudly withstood criticism and never gave up on public presentation of her works. She was the only woman who took active part in turbulent debates of her time, publishing theoretical works and responses to scathing criticisms. During her lifetime, Krysinska found both readers and recognition, but after her death she was condemned to the same fate that met most female writers – oblivion.

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Keltoum Soualah

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 379 - 402

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.020.6914

Here we seek to demonstrate how pain, leading to shouts and delirium, becomes through the author's imagination in an empire of signs that describes with accuracy the conflicting relationship of the narrator with her parents. It is the language submitted to the imagination that is the core of this article. In other words, examining the different techniques that Laurens applies, in other words: deconstruction, a witty observation and different stylistic devices, in order to provide the reader with a codified view of the setbacks of her experiences.

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Katarzyna Gadomska

Cahiers ERTA, Numéro 11 Acédie / Honte, malaise, inquiétude, ressentiment, 2017, pp. 403 - 420

https://doi.org/10.4467/23538953CE.17.021.6915

According to common opinions, horror films are the art of monstration par excellence, whereas horror fiction is based on ambiguity and the unsaid. The purpose of this article is to show that this statement is false. In order to evoke the feeling of fear in the reader/viewer, horror films and fiction remain in a fruitful and permanent dialogue: this is reflected in many exchanges used in anxiety‐provoking techniques that are analysed in this article. The structure elements of scary texts and films are recurrent. My study aims to demonstrate that, on the one hand, both literary and cinematic gore are based on hyperrealism of massacre scenes/descriptions/close‐ups, preferably exteriorized parts, figurative narrative structures and visual hyperbolization. On the other hand, however, both horror films and fiction play with ambiguity and off‐screen scenes, building up the anxiety‐provoking structure. This ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue enriches the literature and the cinema – protean and ever‐changing.

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