Figure out Discourse

In one of his major works, Discourse, figure, Jean-Francois Lyotard opens up the space of structured speech, the discourse, to the „figure” as narrative of its becoming that focuses on the endless transformation of formes. The figural space would be active in all coming to presence, int he becoming of any form of thought or object. Such a figural field opens up ontology to the arts. Thinking through the figural implies an artistic approach, that we can find in Jean-Luc Nancy’s fictionnal ontology – his philosophy can be read as representative of this figural approach to thinking, where thought as creation exceeds all created structure of human thinking.

Adventure fiction and event. Towards a (truly) popular literature

Questioning the place of the event in the fiction narrative through naturalism in turn led some writers – such as Stevenson, London, Conrad – to set it at the core of the plot itself. This pre-eminence might then well be used as a standard for a literature known as « popular ». Those writers – whose lineage is huge in comics, crime fiction and cinema – have the « hero » become the one to be faced with the very events he or she causes to happen, and which henceforth makes up the core of any narrative. The latest avatar of those seesaw movements can be found in the modern generalization of « storytelling », a trend which responds to the New French Fiction, for example. Couldn't this contemporary obsession for 'storytelling' then be the sign of what purports to be a reenchantment of the world, as if it was not possible to contemplate the world in any other way than rife with events through which alone it can make sense.

The stake of storytelling : mobilization and action

Storytelling is a way of communicating that incorporates narrative processes for political and commercial purposes, and reveals the growing performative dimension of these fields. The aim of this technique is to persuade the audience, and to spur the worker’s enthusiasm as well as his desire to act. For this purpose, a leader develops the ability to express his thoughts in stories because human beings build their identities through narrative processes. Using narration in speech is not new, but the systematization and the formalization of narrative storytelling and the expansion of its use is producing a mythology that shapes the collective imagination. Therefore, it is very important to create counter-narration strategies: an artistic layout of stories that reveal the narrative processes in order to defuse them.

A Textual Approach to the study of Absurd Narration

This paper will examine a set of linguistic parameters which contribute to explaining the absurd creation by focusing on some possibilities of textual organization. It will be shown that the absurd narration is inspired by the concepts of connexity, sequantility and cohesion, namely by discontinuous and incongruent language use, elliptical narrative structure or the lack of sufficient information. Our combined literary and linguistic analysis is outlined on absurdist fictions like Camus’s L’Étranger, Michaux’s prose poems (La jetée and Un homme perdu) and Ionesco’s micro-fictions taken out of La cantatrice chauve.

The diffraction of the trauma in the narration in W or the Memory of Childhood

This article intends to show how the narrative in W or the Memory of Childhood Georges Perec reflects the trauma experienced by the writer because of the disappearance of his parents during World War II. This specular work intersects with a personal narrative fiction and creates an unusual play of mirrors. Indeed, the trauma of Perec seems to be diffracted in a hidden place that is at the crossroads of the two stories. How the writer does he sets up the textual construction of his trauma? Why Perec’s trauma cannot be fixed in one place but remains suspended in writing?

Syncopated narration in Christian Gailly’s works

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 specificity of his works, which, by the construction of time, space, characters and narration, have become an example of the literary genre called „jazz novel”.

Mediating testimonial narratives in Jean Hatzfeld’s Dans le nu de la vie

Testimonies have a sociological function: in order to achieve their goal, they have to be heard and validated by the group, and to become part of a collective narrative about the past. Even though they tell a personal story, they always relate both with other narratives about the same historical event and with their envisioned public, thus engaging in a dialogue with the society for which the narrative is meant. The case of Jean Hatzfeld’s Dans le nu de la vie offers an example of a publication of testimonial texts where verbal exchanges were actually involved in the process of formulating, sharing and writing traumatic individual experiences. The object of this article is to analyse how the mediation of the author, who listens to the survivors’ stories and inserts them in his own work, gives rise to a shared narrative where different voices both combine and confront each other.

La narration et le corps dans Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes de Marie Darrieussecq

This paper aims at examining the paradox expressed by Marie Darrieussecq when she states that “even in [her] novels of absence, there is material” in Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes. The narrative takes shape around Solange, an actress, whose existence is threatened as her own physique decays, consumed by her passion for Kouhouesso which makes her a fading ghostly figure. The storytelling of the organic body has to be considered under three aspects : phenomenology, deterritorialization and representation.

To narrativize own phantasms and then live them: the love and the body in the theory of Roland Barthes

Since the 70's a specific theory of reading, writing and narrative perception originates in the thinking of Roland Barthes. Influenced by author’s reading of psychoanalytical and phenomenological writings now he turns to mental space of the reader - he cares about reader’s experience and, subsequently, his subjectivity and mainly phantasms, inner scenarios motivated by desire which in the Barthes’s work A Lover’s discourse: Fragments equal to figures. The notion of figure refers to another of important features of Barthes’s theory: we mean theatricality. The figures present the dramatic play within the text but also they challenge the reader to the game of codes: they aspire to become the projection space of identification. Our article then in its first part tries to present the epistemologic shift to the perception of narration and, in the second part, deals with the A Lover’s discourse: Fragments whose figures also represent the illustrated examples from the In search of lost time by Marcel Proust.

Testify into the body of aids

Touch, understand AIDS through the body is to figure out it as a biological space in and through which the virus grows. It's also admit the graphic qualities of exposure or testimony of the patient’s body, which in the AIDS crisis acquires a special status. It is take the body as a sensory or memorial bridge between self and environment. Testify of the disease through art is to speak about ourselves, our sexuality, our loves, our friends, our environment, our practices. It is make penetrate that other which is the viewer in our rawest intimacy. But the disease also affects the body as in these representations as a working tool, AIDS is therefore an object by which the artist demonstrates a physical condition whose symptoms are the tangible evidence of a pathological narration. The body-diseased tells a story, it is important for us to understand.

Alterity and imaginary’s metamorphose in Les Coréens and Les Huissiers of Michel Vinaver

The contemporary theater has many subversive dramatic forms. The concept of theatricality may cover many considerations of modern French drama. Anyway. We try to have evidence about otherness (alterity) and its line’s manifestation which we will focus. We have searched to read both conceptually and aesthetically by structure of imagination. The rise of dramatic theatre during the same scene that firmly established symbolic and daily life represented discourses.

Ni texte, ni image : la narration après le cinéma

This article reviews what remains of the text as narrative logic in the contemporary cultural context where visual media prevail. Considering the relation of French contemporary writers to the gaze, the traditional duality of the text as discursive chain and the image as sensible fragment is compromised. In order to conceive of a new form of text-image relationship, Jacques Rancière has introduced the concept of the sentence-image. In this article, I explore the limits of the sentence-image in order to think through the whys and wherefores of the reconfigurations within the central categories of the visible and the sayable. From this perspective, the dialogue between writing and cinema can no longer be conceived in terms of correspondence or influence. Rather, the synthetic dimension of the literary narrative is determined by its availability to incorporate the narrative devices updated by the art of film.

For another kind of narration : Beau travail by Claire Denis

Beau travail by Claire Denis (1999) is a free adaptation of Billy Budd by Hermann Melville. It deals with the story of a warrant officer who can’t stand the arrival of a new legionnaire. In order to direct certain scenes, the director worked with the choreographer Bernardo Montet. Through dance, the composition of the images of Beau Travail invites links with other forms of arts, in particular painting, because Claire Denis work relies on another kind of narration, a plastic one.

Pictorial narrativity in the francophone algerian comics

Our statement aims to see how it is possible to express oneself in images and the process used to build a dynamic intrigue in a narrative in order to ensure an easily comprehensible narrative line. For that, we will first try to expose the multiple techniques used by the cartoonists while illustrating our statement by excerpts extracted from the corpus in study. We will also discuss the type of narrative and also reveal the coexistence of comic and realistic narrative in most cartoon albums where the “dramatization” of the narrative has often resorted to dramatic turns, mystery or suspense. The reality is often trivialized or sublimated in the same objective, which is to go more or less beyond the real, thus competing with the traditional dramatic author, with the drawing in less.

Fruit of my loins… The embryo typology of « extrême contemporain »

The pregnancy considered as a physiological psychosis reveals the dichotomy of the unity and the duality. Therefore the relationship between the psychoanalytic concept of objet and subject is disturbed. The process is close to the mechanism of abjection defined in 1980 by Julia Kristeva. The possession and the separation are two perspectives for analyze the embryo typology in some examples of contemporary feminine literature (Dominique Mainard, Eliette Abécassis, Chloé Delaume, Valentine Goby, Annie Ernaux, Lorette Nobécourt, Nancy Houston).

Translating Cioran, a challenge to the translator: the Polish case

The article analyzes the Polish translation of the texts of the Franco-Romanian writer and philosopher Emil Cioran. The author presents different traditions that Cioran’s work follows in order to show the stylistic complexity of his oeuvre as well as that of his passage from Romanian into French. He analyzes various problems related to the translation of Cioran into Polish: fragmentation, archaisms, prophetic tone, playing with rhetoric.

Marie Krysinska, Poèmes choisis suivis d’Études critiques, Publication de l’Université de Saint-Étienne