The present study argues that the French first-person novel, which came into fashion in the Enlightenment period through the adoption of epistolary, diary or memoir forms, or through their admixture in texts, lends itself particularly well to “reading pacts”. The sociopolitical context of the period favored romantic fictions of intimate literature that were attuned to the events of the day. In this paratextual discourse, novelists relied on contemporary events to initiate readers into questions such as the status and the goals of novelistic writing, while attempting to legitimize and to valorize the
latter.

Key words: Epistolary novel, memoir-novel, Enlightenment period, reading pact.

The aim of the present analysis is to discuss the francophony as a postcolonial concept, on the basis of the famous article “Pour une littérature-monde en français” whose authors consider the concept of the francophony as a form of colonial domination and are awaiting the birth of world literature in French. This paper explores these issues on the example of Raharimanana, a young writer from Madagascar.

Key words: The francophony, world literature in French, post colonialism, Raharimanana.

Adolphe Belot’s bestseller Mademoiselle Giraud, ma femme (1870) is a striking example of narratological tension between implied readers and the narrator. Adrien’s narrative, recounting the story of his unhappy marriage to a lesbian Paule Giraud, is significantly influenced by homosocial bonds with the male reading public — the implied readers of the text. Conscious of clear expectations towards a heterosexual man and a husband, the narrator reverts to hyperheterosexual narration in order to give legitimacy to his story and his desires. However, his narrative strategies backfire on him and, in consequence, undermine his credibility. The paper shows how tension in the choice of narrative tools subverts the blatantly anti-lesbian message of the text. By using René Girard’s theory of triangular desire and mimesis, the article also proves that the narrator is a male lesbian who had to subscribe to 19th-century convention of a husband.

Key words: 19th-century literature, French literature, queer studies, male lesbianism, lesbian, narratology, René Girard, mimesis, triangular desire, Adolphe Belot, implied reader, homosocial bonds, manipulation.

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.

This comparative essay focuses on an ancient, multi-faceted process of rewriting, that the author tries to explore through his personal experience as a writer. Bourneuf begins with by writing about his scholarly research dealing with the influence of one author on another (especially the French-Canadian poet Saint-Denys Garneau) and proceeds to raise the question whether literature is indeed a continuous process of rewriting the same stories, characters, themes and myths. As a professor of literature and a writer, the author muses over the impact that French and foreign literatures had on his own literary career as the author of essays, short stories and novels.

Key words: rewriting; comparatism; essay writing; story writing; myths

The character of the father in French literature, especially in the works of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and Simone de Beauvoir, is significant. He may be perfect or not without faults, withdrawn or authoritative, fascinating or disgusting, but invariably – even if he is overshadowed by the mother – the father inspires his daughter. The latter treats him as a kind of spiritual guide, a confidant who gives her life energy, is an example to follow, and passes on his value system and the need to write on his daughter. Love for the father or the lack thereof allows an adolescent daughter to find her own identity and define herself, and in the case of a mature woman it allows her to revisit her own childhood and youth through writing, so as to resurrect the image of the father and reflect on her own life and the writer’s vocation.

Francis Poictevin was a French author of decadent and symbolist inspiration. His poetic prose
is diaristic and impressionistic, and draws richly on the natural world, which finds its particular realisation in Paysages (1888). Based on the guidelines of an ecologically engaged literary text as defined by Lawrence Buell, the current research aims to present the author’s vision of the environment and to answer the question of the autonomy of the nature depicted. The human-environmental relationship, the motive of the passage of time and the changeability of the seasons, as well as the eco-sensitivity of the author are taken into account. Poictevin, by giving his work the form of a collage, presents a natural world full of active actors, weighing up the ecosystem full of dependencies.

Mauritius is a small island in the Indian Ocean, whose population approximates to that of Warsaw. Since its discovery, the island was ruled by several governments: Dutch, French, and English, before it finally became independent in 1968. On this piece of land of about 2,000 m2 live direct descendants of the inhabitants of three continents: Europe, Africa and Asia. The history of the island and the Mauritian people create its specificity.

Undoubtedly, the fact that Mauritius is an island largely influences the Mauritian society. In my article, I will study how this impacts on the society, including its writers. I will seek to define the nature of their relationships. I will try to describe the various representations of the island in Franco‑Mauritian literary fiction at the turn of the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries. Since this topos is in dichotomy of good and evil, I will consider the island as a synonym of a half‑paradise and a half‑prison. Subsequently, I will analyse it as a character of its own. Finally, I will argue that Mauritius can be seen as a reflection of the world, a miniature model. In summary, after
examining the various images of Mauritius, I will try to demonstrate its special status in the Mauritian society, especially in literature.

Key words: Mauritian society, insularity, Franco‑Mauritian literary fiction

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

Over the years Annie Ernaux has been trying to deal with the theme of her father’s death. And yet she could not find the appropriate form to express a specific distance that emerged
at some point when her father was still alive. By experimenting with various novel literary forms she came to a realization that only the departure from fiction would allow her to convey a kind of “truth” about her father and this unique distance (supposedly attributable to her leaving the social class she had been born and raised in). Consequently, Ernaux decides to reject “literature” and to write an autobiographical piece in the first person, which is somehow flat because it is stripped of all rhetoric layers. In this article I endeavour to show that a deeply engraved thirst for telling the truth about one’s father simultaneously becomes a story about one’s ambitions and about seeking one’s identity. Primarily, however, A Man’s Place is a story about searching for one’s own form of expression and growing up to writing.

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

Les Apparitions du château de Tarabel, ou Le Protecteur invisible [The Apparitions of Tarabel Castle, or the Invisible Protector], a novel published by Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon (1786–1864) in 1822, tells the story of Count Eugène de Melorenne who, in 1795, in the context of the War in the Vendée, faces not only many difficult political choices but also various complications as far as his love life is concerned. The aim of this article is to analyze the overwhelming influence of politics and history on nearly all the aspects of this novel and to examine whether or not the book fits well into the generic framework of the traditional Gothic novel.

The article aims to study the evolution of the genre of an epistolary novel in contemporary French-speaking literature (Senegalese, Moroccan and Belgian). It goes without saying that the transformation of the epistolary novel is socially determined. It arises from social changes and the hybrid nature of the genre: the letter as an authentic, even paraliterary form, can overlap with other discursive forms, for example the intimate journal. Indeed, the epistolary form adapts well to the resources of the first-person narration. This is why the article follows a historical-literary approach, which allows for the examination of the evolution of the form as well as recurring themes and motifs. The evolution of the epistolary novel in the 20th and 21st centuries clearly illustrates that so-called “civilizational” problems replace the exaltation of love. This concerns, for example, the problem of polygamy in certain regions of Africa, obesity and finally the war in Afghanistan. The Francophone epistolary novel is an untouched territory. While reconnecting with the European tradition of the 18th century, particularly French, it sets a new trend in the evolution of the genre, which can be defined as epistolary autofiction.

The article explores rewriting strategies in Anne Herbert’s work, focusing on ‘L’Ange de Dominique’, the story which explicitly refers to the aesthetics, style and imagination of the French Symbolists (Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Debussy and Nijinsky) through the character of the faun. Herbert’s novella is interpreted as a portrayal of the sensibility and poetry at the turn of the century.

Key words: Anne Herbert; Le Torrent; literature of the fin de siècle; Quebec; rewriting; faun; Symbolism; novella

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the fluid border that exists in French between la chair (flesh) and la viande (meat) as well as between la chair (flesh) and le corps (body). This blurry distinction spurs us to analyze the impact of the discovery of paintings in the Lascaux cave on our perception of art as connected to the realm of spirit. The uncanny character of the Lascaux cave paintings, a homage paid to animality, as well as an aspiration to the sacred, is identical with an irruption of the heterogeneous in the text. It turns art and literature into a space of excessive communication, which originates in flesh.

Key words: Meat, flesh, body, steak, cannibalism, omophagy, blood, blood drinker, slaughterhouse, heterogeneity, cave.

The gore is a modern supernatural where the blood is the most important element. This phenomenon of the pop culture is born in the cinema with wave of the slasher movies and, later, he’s coming in the literature of supernatural, named also the mainstream horror. The constituent elements of the gore there are:
— the mad serial killer in the mask,
— the space of a giant city,
— the blood and the terror,
— the extreme cruelty (the murders, the tortures etc.).
The present study is analysing of these elements in the movies and the French short stories gore.

Key words: Gore, mainstream horror, blood, mad serial killer, modern supernatural, urban legends, terror, slasher movie.

The present article focuses on the visual poetry of the Mexican poet José Juan Tablada who is one of the most important precursors of the avant-garde in the twentieth century. As numerous critics have remarked, José Juan Tablada made several major contributions to modern poetry in Mexico. Although Tablada is generally credited with having introduced Latin American poets to the Japanese haiku, he was also responsible for encouraging them to experiment with visual poetry. As a result of a visit to Japan in 1900, José Juan Tablada became interested in haiku tradition and in Japanese ideograms which inspirited him to create his own poetry in the style of oriental work but adopted to the Latin American perspective of his imagination and to the rules of the Spanish language. It appears that Tablada´s attention was focused mainly on the experiments of the modern French Imagist poets and was influenced by Apollinaire´s Calligrammes, a problem that we partially intend to explain in the present article spotlighting some occurrences, but finally we conclude that both poets must have been inspired by the previous form of visual poetry, known to the ancient Greeks as technopaigneia and to the Romans as carmina figurata, or by the pre-Hispanic ideographic forms; in this subject we consider a long list of possible inspirations. The principal idea of this paper is to analyse the visual poetry of Tablada from the perspective of its interdisciplinary character, where images and words situate his poems in a spatial configuration. Therefore we have concentrated our attention on two books of poems published in Caracas, the first one entitled Un día… Poemas sintéticos edited in 1919, and the second one, Li-Po y otros poemas, published in 1920, as an example of the so called visual poetry or ideographic poems, a denomination more appropriate for the second collection. To sum up, Tablada was an innovator, though he did borrow ideas like most writers do. His haikus are original, accompanied with his self-made drawings, and have a distinct Mexican flavor containing local references to flora, fauna o Mexican culture — characteristics that we underline in this paper while also providing a general overview of some theoretical aspects related to Literature and Art.

Key words: Visual poetry, ideographic poems, haiku, José Juan Tablada, Mexican poetry.

In this paper, our analysis will focus on the concept of stereotype based on the notion of “bêtise” (stupidity) that French essayist and novelist Belinda Cannone deplores. We will study how she rethinks the “bêtise”, after Flaubert who defined it as the art of wanting to conclude. In La bêtise s’améliore (2007) Cannone gives the example of Flaubert, making the “bêtise” the doxa that touches all areas of social life. The central element of “bêtise”, according to Belinda Cannone, remains in many respects conformism. It is a question of seeing how, in Cannone’s discourse, these two notions – “bêtise” and conformism – are articulated and allow her to redefine her ethos of the engaged intellectual in the public space.