The aim of this article is to show the evolution of contemporary fantastic literature in France. The article describes the reform of the genre carried out by the writers of the so-called first wave (like Alain Dorémieux, Jean-Pierre Andrevon) in the 1980s. Among their theoretical postulates, the following should be mentioned: rejection of traditional fantastic literature, banality of horror taking place in everyday life, transfers between popular genres, intermedia transfers, inspiration of contemporary philosophy and deep ecology. The article also shows the later stages of the reform continued by the second generation of fantastiqueurs (Pascal Malosse, Rémi Karnauch). Their fiction is determined by the absurd, the grotesque, and the surreal. The boundaries between the fantastic and mainstream are blurry as well.

Michel Foucault described 19th-century France as a period of intense sexual scrutiny as well as a watershed moment that gave birth to the formal recognition, evolution, and study of “deviant” sexual identities. While this may be true, modern French studies still idle in examining the epistemological effect of this operative change in French ideology, society, and more specifically literature. If studies into 19th- and 20th-century French gay and lesbian literatures and ideologies have begun to flourish in some academic francophone circles, trans-literature has been overlooked. Moreover, this critical oversight inadvertently highlights the all too often modern omission of the “T” in the LGBT community. This article will place the works of five French authors spanning the 19th and 20th centuries in communication with contemporary queer theory in an attempt to examine the nascent evolution of what today might be considered transgender identity, as well as analyse the meaning attached to queer identities during this period in French and francophone literatures.

Key words: transgender, queer theory, 19th century, 20th century, France, narrative.

Like in other French scientific disciplines, gender has a hard time establishing itself as a legitimate approach in French legal studies. Nevertheless, whereas one can observe some changes occurring in social sciences and the humanities, French legal academy has been particularly impenetrable to feminist legal theory and gendered approaches to legal analysis. This article will first explain why this is the case and then describe how a new project, entitled REGINE, intends to address and overcome some of the obstacles.

Key words: feminist legal theory, France, legal analysis, REGINE.

The narrator/writer of Gail Scott’s novel My Paris (1999) finds herself in an overdetermined urban space of contemporary Paris. The space, already multiply written and rich in cultural associations, is re-worked again in the fragmented “diary,” in which the narrator both echoes and contests her literary guides, primarily Gertrude Stein’s work and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Her Paris emerges as a re-citation of the Paris inscribed in those and other texts, reconfigured from a perspective marked by temporal remove, which is stressed in the novel. Scott explores multiple, criss-crossing spaces of the city: those of architecture, culture, race, gender, nationality. While the text’s concern is to move to and fro “across comma of difference,” and to avoid binary oppositions without obliterating the all-important comma, it politicises its postmodern concerns. The article explores the postcolonial dimension of Scott’s novel, which, though not necessarily foregrounded, provides an important conceptual thread of the text. The narrator, a bilingual Québécoise, considers spaces of alterity and otherness of Paris, explicitly relating them to Canadian national experience. From this perspective the enticement and impossibility of the unitary construct of a nation symbolised by the republics of France and the United States are explored. The postcolonial reflection is closely related to the notion of a non-unitary, nomad subject that emerges from the novel.

Key words: Quebec novel in English, Gail Scott, postcolonial urban space, Paris in literature, postcolonial Canadian literature, experimental writing in Quebec.

Our purpose is to study how the island is manifested in the relationship between the movement in space and identity in the Caribbean literary discourse. We took Chamoiseau for paradigmatic case of contemporary writer. Our idea is this: the question of the subject is a way to make a double social and literary attack in the intellectual universe. And subjectivity is only possible by a self‑inner journey to another. This approach remains partial in Elbadawi which itself is limited to the exploration of an ego that suffers. And the conditions of possibility of this approach are threefold and is measured in space possible.

Key words: Chamoiseau, Elbadawi, comparative literature, Island, francophone literature

Twice accused of plagiarism, Marie Darrieussecq repeats that for a writer, this kind of accusation is equal to a murder attempt. The case of Darrieussecq is a good example of how various media profit from quarrels between contemporary writers. In 1998, Marie NDiaye accused Darrieussecq of “monkeying” in her novel Naissance des fantômes. Later, in 2007, one of Darrieussecq’s colleagues from the P.O.L. Publishing House, Camille Laurens, referred to Tom est mort as ’psychological plagiarism’. This conflict was escalated by the media and followed a certain pattern: there was an accusation, an accuser and the victim.

Key words: Plagiarism, Darrieussecq, media.

The present article discusses a motif of horror fiction, the “Evil transfer”, that remained unnoticed until now. The key idea of this motif is that, because evil is eternal and indestructible, it cannot be annihilated but only transferred. Four books and movies of the second half of the 20th c. have retained our attention: Thinner by Stephen King, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, It Follows by David R. Mitchell and the Ring trilogy by Kôji Suzuki. However, these rather recent examples must not hide the diachronic depth of such a motif: Renaissance humanists or biblical texts also present a similar idea.

Key words: motif (narrative), curse, horror fiction, horror films

Women and French-speaking Writers. Move Beyond Marginalities in Gendered Constructions

Writing, for female authors, and above all for French-speaking writers, is a transgressive act. The double marginalization provided by these peripheral statuses, when compared to the emblematic figure of the “French writer”, leads to the question of the construction of “decentered” identities. By focusing exclusively on works from (the) Francophone literature (those by Assia Djebar, Anne Hébert and Alice Rivaz), this study of feminine identities and women’s literary constructions analyzes parallel themes inherent to literary female characters: they are simultaneously the reflection of social realities and an ideological deconstruction. The paper also examines linguistic and stylistic features involved in the delineation of feminine writing. French-speaking works generally propose the destruction of frozen identities, reflecting the phenomena more or less marked by transculturation, (such as the deconstruction of literary genres, and the subversion of the cultural heritage of the “dominant”). There are numerous similarities between the situation of the colonized and of women, namely, the stereotypes that transform them into a subculture in which they are seen as objects rather than subjects.

Key words: Gender Studies, francophone literatures, woman’s writing, 20th century literature, norm, transgression.

Enlighted elites were imperatively struggling against fear, perceived as the source of tensions and social conflicts. This struggle incited a number of very different initiatives, such as the articles from Encyclopédie [Encyclopaedia] by Diderot / d’Alembert or from Dictionnaire philosophique [Philosophical Dictionary] by Voltaire, philosophical tales by the latter and, finally, the philosophical novel by Jan Potocki, in its two versions from 1804 and 1810, recently discovered by François Rosset and Dominique Triaire. The fear of supernatural and, especially, of death is being tamed thanks to well-known literary proceedings (irony or the comic), which may be described using the theory of games by Roger Caillois or by Colas Duflo. Hereafter, we are putting forward the ambivalence appearing in the first case and particularly noticeable in Potocki’s writings.

Key words: Voltaire, Jan Potocki, philosophical tale, philosophical novel, theory of games, fear, irony, the comic

Literary texts written in French-speaking areas out of France very often represent real challenges for translators, because they have to deal with a diatopically marked language and with a large number of realia which require the implementation of specific strategies for translate in the target language. In this article, we will try to understand the strategies used by Italian translators when translating the linguistic specificities of Quebec literary works in Italian. The practice of translation can orient the vision (or reception) of a Quebec literature in Italy which appears at first sight to be hermetic because of its linguistic regionalisms. Do Italian translations of Quebec literature require revisions?

The article investigates into the conflict of virtue and ‘pleasure principle’ in Italo Svevo’s novel La coscienza di Zeno (1923). Throughout his life, the main character of this novel, Zeno Cosini, sees himself confronted with the demand of leading a virtuous life corresponding to the definition given by his social environment. Engaging himself into this project with resolutions which are equally categorical, firm and ready to be turned round to their opposite, more pleasant side, Zeno Cosini denies his inevitable progression on the slippery slope, his resolutions providing the promising basic condition for his various forbidden pleasures, which at the same time allow him to fathom out the borders and limits of good and evil. The more he digresses from his aim, the more he insists on increasingly exacerbated resolutions, for his emphatic obstinacy concerning his project of being “actively virtuous” allows him to indulge more and more in iteratively “last” deviations from his project which is obviously far beyond his possibilites. Nevertheless, Zeno Cosini manages to wash his hands off by making a virtue out of necessity. Thus, strokes of fate (for instance being diagnosed as having a mortal disease) appear to him as a relief or a blessing, and, looking back, he uses his entire life failure as a shelter from further demands of “reason”. In order to justify (also to himself) his recidivous existence, Zeno Cosini pleads the apparent powerlessness of the modern individual in the face of life which appears to him as per se contingent, ambivalent and full of imponderabilities. He thus delegates the moral responsibility to life itself which he judges to be “original”. From this point of view adapted cynically to his needs, Zeno Cosini realizes that what can be conceived as an “illness” is by no means his vice, his recidivism or his bad conscience, but life itself — which can be catered for with a great deal of good will, analyzed and fathomed out conscientiously via transgression — according to him, is nothing but a manifestation of illness — moreover, an incurable and mortal one — for which there is no remedy, but which can at least be truffled with transgressions.

Key words: Transgression, contingency, ambivalence, irony.

In his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755) Jean‑Jacques Rousseau argued that man, in a state of nature, was inherently good, but became depraved the moment he decided to live in societies. In 18th century European literature, Rousseau’s idea assumed shape in the description of the original inhabitants of Tahiti. For the first time, Louis Antoine de Bougainville described them as the embodiment of Rousseau’s natural man. At this very moment, Tahiti became, in the European imagination, the epitome of paradise on earth. Beside the account of Bougainville’s journey, the following paper is focussed on literary texts of James Cook, Georg Forster and Denis Diderot.

Key words: Tahiti, the Enlightenment, bon sauvage, utopian thought

Gilles de Rais, the Marshal of France — who in 1429 fought beside Joan of Arc in some crucial campaigns during the Hundred Years War (such as the siege of Orléans) — after her burning at the stake in 1431, and after his maternal grand-father’s death the next year, became one of the most cruel and perverted serial murderers, pedophiles and necrophiles in the history of humanity. The paper describes this astonishing transformation that led him from the glorious military achievements to the stake after the controversial trial in Nantes in 1440. The article tries to answer the question if this transgressor (in the common sense of the word), who continues to fascinate people almost six centuries after his death, can also be considered a transgressor according to the criteria proposed by Józef Kozielecki, a Polish psychologist, and the father of psychotransgressionism.

Key words: Transgression, Kozielecki’s psychotransgressionism, Gilles de Rais.

The aim of my article is to explore the representation of the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues in The Prospector (1985) by French writer Jean‑Marie Gustave Le Clézio and of the Solomon Islands in the Regeneration trilogy (1991—1995) by a British writer Pat Barker. Both Le Clézio and Barker use and challenge the pastoral recourses belonging to the tradition of Great War writing and the convention of idealising remote Arcadian lands. Several insular myths are thus undermined by the two writers, who thus resituate remote islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans as integral parts of European modernity.

Key words:  island, Mauritius, Rodrigues, Solomon Islands, Eddystone Island, Great War, pastoral, modernity

Our article talk (once again) about the literary history; it calls into question the relationship, not very good, between the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and the French writer Madame de Staël in the early nineteenth century. Devoid of all civic and political rights, like all women at that time, Madame de Staël has established herself before the most important statesman of Europe by her intelligence and by the great power of her writings.

Key words : Madame de Staël, Napoleon Bonaparte, French romanticism, fear, woman’s civic and political rights

Albert Memmi, one of the forerunners of the postcolonial thought, perceived the Jewish condition as an emblem, even an archetype, of any dominated, oppressed, dispossessed condition. The highly specific consciousness of the colonised condition which the Jewish writer manifests seems to be shaped by the centuries-long communal experience, which exceeds the historical and political frames of postcolonialism sensu stricto, as the Jewish identity is stigmatised from its beginnings (conceived of as a narrative conveyed by the biblical tradition) by the experience of oppression and the threat of extermination or assimilation. These transhistorical factors determine to a large extent linguistic strategies typical for Jewish literature written in European (non-Jewish) languages. It is from this perspective that the present article discusses the role of the linguistic superconsciousness of Albert Cohen and Piotr Rawicz, two francophone Jewish writers, whose works — precursory to the postmodern condition — reveal identitarian, ethical and esthetic challenges related to the use of the language of the other in the creative process.

Key words: Jewish literature, linguistic superconsciousness, oppression, postmodern condition.

Nomadism and hybridity (métissage) are two keys words when it comes to Creole island societies. J.M.G. Le Clézio, Édouard Maunick and Ananda Devi of Mauritius all explore memory and language to erase (often constructed) boundaries between past and present, reality and the imaginary, land and sea, French and Creole. It is a way to transgress literary canons. Their poetics favour liminal spaces, a plurality of voices and meanings and an openness to the Other that may offer a new way of reading works written in the in‑between space of exile — a condition becoming more and more common in today’s globalised world.

Key words: Mauritian Francophone Literature; nomadism; hybridity; poetics of liminality

If literature never could ignore visual arts, its « substantial allies » as René Char calls them, literary modernity wovens particularly close, varied and complex bonds with all kinds of picture. In this way, « couples » are often formed, for example, by a novelist and a painter (Pierre Michon and Van Gogh, François Bon and Edward Hopper, Philippe Delerm and Tiepolo…). The « substantial ally » inspires then a tale, or a sort of a literary inquiry, while other ones prefer a more brief form for this pictural theme. Now, specialists agree to emphasize that it’s a short story, Balzac’s Chef-d’œuvre inconnu, which, in France initiated, in 1831, this fertile connection between narrative fictions and visual arts. We attempted to surround this illustrious ancestor’s salient features in order to compare with it an other brief narrative fiction : Comment Wang-fô fut sauvé, a fairy tale written a century later by Marguerite Yourcenar.

Key words: Balzac, Marguerite Yourcenar, narrative fictions, brief forms, shorts stories, fairy tales, visual arts.

What Woman for the Republic? Revolutionary Theatre and Representations of Femininity

The aim of this article is to show the way women were represented in the revolutionary theatre of the times of Great Terror (1793—1794). After three years of social and political changes brought by the Revolution women are no longer shown as possessions of their families or husbands. Although marriage remains the focus of their existence, they all fight to have a good life and a good marriage with a respectful partner, rather than with an all-mighty master who despises them. Many of female characters we meet are very independent and self-conscious — especially the younger generation who are well aware of the possibility of divorce. Men change too; fathers no longer decide for their daughters, while unfaithful husbands improve their behaviour, as they all know that the basis of general and personal happiness is a happy marriage.

Key words: family, French Revolution, theatre, women.

The incentive for this essay was “Le retour de Sade” (“The Return of de Sade”), a play by Bernard Noël put on in Paris and Nancy in 2005. The play shows Marquis resurrected by Madame d’Avilla, in the orders of a woman pope who ascends St. Peter’s Throne. De Sade is highly convinced that his descent on the Earth results from his perfectibility in evil and is the proof of his post-mortem triumph. The pope, however, wants to engage him as a court jester because his books are no longer believed to be monstrosities that de Sade thinks they still are. The analysis of De Sade’s resurrection leads to a discussion of Bataille’s concept of eroticism seen as a transgressive act which dispels prohibitions without suppressing them. Referring to Bataille’s essay “The Use of Value of D.A.F de Sade” from 1930, this paper also tries to determine the position of Bataille — a classic French writer whose œuvre was published in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, which is considered to be a major sign of recognition for an author in France — in contemporary western culture. The questions that this study attempts to answer are whether Bataille still plays the role of a transgressor and to what extent the transgressive value of Bataille’s eroticism is still attainable in the light of the Foucauldian concept of Power/Knowledge which is inherent in the discourse of sexuality.

Key words: Pornography, eroticism, sexuality, transgression.

The series Harry Potter, proposed by Mrs J.K. Rowling, is a good case in order to understand and analyse the emergence of the fear. Harry Potter, traumatized, orphan and mistreated baby is confronted with the dread when he meets “Dementors”.

Who are Dementors? How does Harry discover their existence ? Why is Harry more sensitive to the confrontation with the dementor than the other children ? 

To answer to this question, we shall study the link between the trauma and some kind of depression in early mourning. Those are the “white” depression and the “cryptophorie”. On the other hand, Mrs. Rowling proposed a therapeutic solution to the despair : the production of a “Patronus” and the reference to the paternal function.

Key words : Harry Potter, Dementors, fear, depression, early mourning, therapeutic, paternal function

Transgression is everywhere in Les Âmes fortes. It is present in the form of the narrative in which two opposite versions of events question the very notion of truth and well-established moral norms of judgement. As the novel of the impossible truth, Les Âmes fortes highlights the power of fiction, of lies, and of manipulation. Moral virtues are inverted in two opposite versions of the events: when generosity is increasingly showed, does it become a mark of ferocity and pride, a means of domination, or an aspect of the superior art of loosing? The Biblical values are constantly profaned in this complex novel: numerous Biblical references are quoted only to be perverted immediately afterwards. For example, in one of the two versions of her own story, one of the protagonists, Therese, manages to reach sanctity in evil, which enables her to assert her absolute domination — the main feature of the strong souls, the “âmes fortes”.

Key words: Transgression, profanation, manipulation, perversion, illusion.

This article uses Mauritian fiction in French language to analyse the relationship between the slave descendants, the Creoles, and those of the Indian community. Slaves were brought in Mauritius by the French between 1715 and 1810 and the Indians by the British between 1810 and 1925. The interaction (or the absence of interaction) between these two ethnic groups provides fresh insight into the social history of Mauritius and how these two groups (Creoles and Indians) did not mingle with each other. In fact, such interaction could bring a change in the mindset of the people and chaos in society. Colonial novelists’ display of both the Creoles and the Indo‑Mauritians justifies the colonial ideology, whereas that of the postcolonial writers questions this ideology in their writings.

Key words: Mauritius, colonial literature, postcolonial literature, Creoles, Indian immigrants

In this short paper, we propose to analyze the Fear experienced by the Romanian intellectual when Secret Police could knock at his door at any time of night or day to imprison and torture him.

Inoculate Fear represented the main instrument of torture practiced by the communist Secret Police. Examples extracted from writings of two intellectuals subjected to communist terror (N. Steinhardt and C. Noica) will show us the states of mind man experiences from the moment the idea of Fear seeps into his head to different “strategies” imagined in order to live with it.

Keywords : exile, communism, prison, Fear, Nicolae Steinhardt, Constantin Noica

The purpose of this essay is to analyse a forgotten work by Sylvain Maréchal, a French political writer of the Enlightenment. Written on the eve of the French Revolution, his Apologues modernes heavily criticize the socio-political system of the French monarchy of Louis XVI. The analysis of his work proves that the author does not limit himself to criticising the situation before 1789, but he clearly predicts events of the forthcoming revolution and the resulting change. One could say that, like a true prophet, he foresees the end of the monarchy as such and proclaims the arrival of a new social and political order, a universal republic, not only in France, but in Europe in general.

The goal of this paper is to show how Édouard Glissant’s understanding of Antillean culture and literature evolve from the project of antillanité to the idea of creolization. The former (put forward in Le discours antillais published in 1981), bears the mark of an “insular” perception of the West Indies, but it simultaneously gives birth to some concepts stressing a relational character of the Antillean social and cultural reality. In a more detailed and elaborated form, this “archipelagic” perspective will be in the very center of Glissant’s aesthetic program presented in Poétique de la relation (1990) and Traité du Tout‑monde (1997), which extend the range of analyzed issues in order to encompass the globalization phenomenon.

Key words: creolization, postcolonial literature, Caribbean literature, Édouard Glissant, antillanité, cultural transfers, literature and globalization

On the example of two writers of the African diaspora in France, Alain Mabanckou and Léonora Miano, the following paper examines how the notion of the author can be manipulated by the media and become a generator of controversy. Moreover, it deals with the impact of their media coverage (limited to the Parisian press and Websites) of their recent productions: Black Bazar (2009) and Demain, j’aurai vingt ans (2010) by Alain Mabanckou and Les Aubes écarlates (2009) and Blues pour Elise (2010) by Léonora Miano. This impact is evaluated through the comparative analysis of the writers’ works and perspectives.

Key words: Francophone literature, African literature, French literature, contemporary novel, media device.

The aim of the present article is to address the notion of négritude in its variety of aspects, as expressed in poetry, essays and novels. The movement founded its principles on the belief in a common black identity and was aimed at the elevation of the traditional African culture and heritage. Despite its undeniable positive influence, the movement met with criticism from a number of black intellectuals and writers who tended to regard it as being insufficiently militant and who pointed out that its concepts were based excessively on the “white aesthetic” and “the white man’s vision of the world”.

Key words: Négritude, black culture, African traditions, glorification, negation.

In order to fully comprehend the vast extent of Régine Robin’s knowledge, one must engage with all of her works. Spanning across various genres including essays, critiques, history, linguistics, and sociology, her body of work is a blend of everyday-life experiences and historical events. However, her literary style enables readers to discern the intricacies of this complex figure. By examining her novel La Québécoite and the relationship Robin established with the literary institution in Québec, we can form hypotheses on why its reception was controversial and limited. The novel’s style serves as a significant introduction to literature and, as an author included in the category of “écritures migrantes”, Robin critiques the meaning of the concept, revealing its essentialism and exposing its underlying biases. This analysis then shifts focus to the Italian reception of Robin’s work, and the possibility for her novel to gain recognition in Italy.

In premodern literature, stereotype, called locus communis, had to play an important role inherited from Greek and Latin Antiquity’s rhetorics. In particular, it served as source of convincing arguments appropriate to discuss philosophical, theological or moral questions. The concept of common place has also found its use in short stories of 16th century. Firstly, in the realm of invention, when authors adapted narrative plots taken from written tradition; secondly, in the realm of elocution, when they employed topic images and sentences. The aim of this paper is to elucidate those two meanings of stereotype in French nouvelles published in that time.