The aim of this article is to examine the stereotypy in Balzac’s novel Cousin Bette, by relying on the scene of a famous confrontation between Célestin Crevel and his metaphysical opposite – Baroness Hulot d’Ervy. José-Luis Diaz underlines that the Balzacian stereotype imposes itself as the imitation of the social norm and all kinds of linguistic, sartorial, behavioral automatisms etc. His research justifies the use of the concept of stereotype in relation to Balzac’s creation, especially because the nineteenth century only knows its meaning in printing. Thanks to the notion of stereotype, we can question on its influence on the behavior of the protagonists. We are also able to identify the character of the social norm of the time and its regulatory mechanisms. On the one hand, the excessively fixed language, like the cliché, allows the writer to imitate the material preoccupations of the bourgeoisie under the July Monarchy by forging, in the reader’s mind, his negative image. On the other hand, this analysis shows that the protagonist’s expression goes beyond linguistic mimicry. The stereotype allows a certain stylistic originality by which the protagonists give the reader a look into their belief systems. In this sense, the stereotype is a mechanism of regulation : it complicates the characters, creates an impression of reality. Finally, this stylistic enity capture the reader’s attention with logically permissible ideas that are morally unacceptable.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the extraliterary function of the rites performed on Speranza Island by Robinson Crusoe — a colonizer — and by Friday who represents the Third World. Such investigation is relevant because Michel Tournier’s Friday, or, The Other Island is a postcolonial transvalorization of the classic Robinsonade, in which the author inverts the classic story first published in 1719. In Tournier’s case, owing to the repetitiveness and cyclicity of everyday activities, it is possible to read the rites as an allegoric image of crucial processes — such as language teaching or getting married — taking place in the colonial and postcolonial world of Algeria. The rites in Tournier’s novel are also considered to be a symbolic attempt to establish new relationships between French colonizers and African colonized society, who both witnessed the process of decolonization in the twentieth century.

Key words: Robinson Crusoe, Friday, colonialism, postcolonialism, rite, Algeria, decolonization

Postcolonial literature, which did not appear in Italy until the 1980s, started to flourish in that country in the early 1990s. Although it originated there and draws on Italian historic colonial experiences, it can be understood as a way of emphasising the linguistic and cultural separateness of Italian-speaking authors originating from former Italian colonies in Africa (i.e. Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia). It appears that a country like Italy, which has been deprived of its homogeneity and linguistic and cultural cohesion, is particularly susceptible to the absorption of traditions and languages from outside. Postcolonial literature, which at its very basic level is a hybrid, cannot be pushed into the framework of one convention or tradition. On the contrary, it fits well into the mainstream of non-canonical, avant-garde and expressionistic literature that has been present since Dante. Igiaba Scego, the author of Oltre Babilonia, published in 2008, belongs to the generation of young Italian writers of African origin. The article aims to analyse the novel in terms of writing techniques defined as expressionistic at the level of surface, typology of characters and linguistic and stylistic features.

Key words: Postcolonial literature, expressionism, episodic structure, neologism, language hybridism.

The present article offers an analysis of Cristina Ali Farah’s novel, Madre piccola. Even though it is generally believed that postcolonial novels have only been written in English, Farah’s book can definitely be classified as such, as it examines the specificity of the Italian post-colonial period, as well as the situation of women and other minority groups. Madre piccola portrays the lives of four women living on the border of two cultures. The nomadic society presented in the text-marked by temporariness, moving from one place to another-is not perceived as “local” anymore, but is presented in a more global context. The title Madre piccola means “mother’s aunt” in the Somalian language, and is an example of a word-for-word translation. Importantly, the world of women and immigrants as depicted by Farah has not been known in Europe so far. That world is far more emancipated and modern than one could expect. Ali Farah’s writing tackles not only the nature-and preservation-of what is local, but also the development of the global culture.

Key words: Post-colonial Italian women’s literature, immigrants, nomadic society.

Published in 2006, Comment peut-on être français ? by Chahdortt Djavann, a partly epistolary novel, evokes the figure of Montesquieu’s Roxane. This article proposes an analysis of the representation of exile inscribed in three symbolic spaces: that of language, that of the female body and that of text. It is around these three concepts that this work is organized to study the alienation of the female subject in a Franco-Iranian intercultural position.

A cabin boy arrives with his crew to the territory of the Rio de la Plata. Saer was inspired by the story of Francisco del Puerto, a ship’s boy who travelled with the expedition of Juan Diaz de Solís that allegedly ended up eaten by a cannibalistic tribe of one of the islands of Parana’s delta. The hero is bound to learn from the new territory two times; but it is the search for identity, the narration to preserve memory, the construction of the general history, and the limits of one’s self that this article deals with.

Key words: Island, tribe, language, identity, memory, otherness

The aim of this article is to analyze Francophony as a myth which is, according to Roland Barthes, “depoliticized speech” turning “the complexity of human acts” into “the simplicity of essences.” In Barthes’ way of approaching myth, I will try to demystify (demythologize) deep ideological structures of the Francophone discourse of universal and humanist values which seem to have never been reexamined in the francophone world so far. Now, if these values are similar to those preached by La République, which keeps believing that it has a monopoly on them, one can say that Francophony, whether we like it or not, is a political act. And that is not only in the sense of polis, as a community speaking the same language and recognizing the same values, but also in the sense of realpolitik, which needs to be understood as the continuation of an imperialistic gesture overshadowed by the neo-republican discourse of equality.

Key words:  Francophony, Myth, Mythologies, French Republic, Multiculturalism, French Theory.

In the present work, I wish to concentrate on two examples of detective fiction in Spain, that is on Arturo Pérez Reverte’s The Flanders Panel and Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Serpientes en el paraíso. Both novels are centred on a character of a female detective. After a closer look, we can see that both detectives have found themselves in a similar situation. Julia, the amateur, and Petra, the professional, exist and work in a typically masculine world of detectives and police officers, struggling with the gender issues and roles. By analysing their situations, I wish to present a case study of two female detectives and their reactions, responses and attitudes towards the masculine world of sleuths, thus providing a complete picture of both protagonists.

Key words: female detective fiction, machismo, Arturo Pérez Reverte, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Petra Delicado.

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

The first-person narrative novels, Mes parents by Hervé Guibert and Biographie I, II by Yves Navarre, are part of the characters’ crisis writing where the reason of evil is always the father’s presence. Without hiding behind fictitious names, both writers reveal personal stories centered on the inevitable conflict between father and son. The family theme brings them together while their behavior makes them different. The first part of our study, “The Rejected Father,” focuses on Hervé Guibert’s violent language and attitude towards his father he will never accept. The second part, “The Rejecting Father,” is an analysis of Yves Navarre’s struggle of reconciliation with his father disappointed by his sexual preferences.

In 1947, Julio Cortázar writes “Teoría del túnel,” an essay in which he expresses his desire to overhaul literature, emphasizing the need for the writer, whom he refers to as a “rebel,” to distance himself from certain literary models which he considers fossilised. The essay comes through as an invitation to change one’s writing habits and, at the same time, strive to develop a language capable of depicting man in all his complexity. The following paper demonstrates that El Examen (1950) and Diario de Andrés Fava — a diary initially meant to be part of the novel — are experimental fields that enable the author to explore the possibilities of transgressing the traditional literary codes and implement the proposals he had put forward a few years before in “Teoría del túnel.”

Key words: Cortázar, novel, transgression, literary codes.

At the beginning of a creative process, a literary text needs always to pass the step that ancient writers called ‘inventio’. In the ‘inventio’, of course, human mind looks more for visual images than for abstract ideas. Fantasy and imagination, by this way, are non very far from the world of dreams, made basically by images and sensations. During this first step, some writers can use words and language just to ‘describe’ images and visions. Among modern italian witers, we could assume the important witness of Italo Calvino, in Lezioni americane. But other interesting examples are to be found also in texts by Iacopone da Todi, Dante, Petrarca, Leonardo da Vinci and Dino Campana. What is important (Calvino says in Lezioni americane), it is to continue to recognize to the literature a significant role in the education of imagination. Imagination is foundation to thinking, and could be menaced today by modern media-society.

Key words: Italo Calvino, literature, fantasy, imagination.

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

The Adversary, a narrative by Emmanuel Carrère, based on a sordid and disconcerting true story, revolves around an act of transgression — that of Jean-Claude Romand who, after deceiving his relatives for 18 years into thinking that he was a renowned doctor, killed all his family when the truth about his life was about to come out into the open. Carrère, in identifying Romand with the “Adversary” (i.e. with Satan) proposes a metaphysical, moral, social, as well as literary reading of transgression. The combination of deception with murder not only causes the irruption of evil in apparently peaceful lives, but it also challenges language itself, as well as writing which has to deal with a man both monstrously other and monstrously familiar. So, looking at it more closely, it seems that the explosion of transgression in The Adversary is to be read more as an anxious consciousness of the flimsiness of the boundaries than as the latter being called into question.

Key words: Emmanuel Carrère, transgression, evil, identity.

This paper aims at the interpretation of the father as an empty figure of authority in Samuel Beckett’s radio play entitled Embers. Through the close-reading of this play and the analysis of the relations between the protagonist and the two feminine characters, Ada and Addie, it demonstrates how the father figure coincides with the classical impasse of Beckett’s oeuvre: the subject unable to manifest itself. Due to that fact, the father is presented in the constant process of wearing his authorial space out. It is eventually demonstrated that in Embers the subject is coerced to balance between its self-deconstruction and the paternal violence: its focus on its own materiality results in the collapse of language, whereas overt attention on the linguistic cognition puts forward the logic of remnants resisting father’s orders, be it in the form of sound collage, or material element immune to symbolisation.

Until recent times, the representation of desire and erotics in Spanish poetry was quite scanty. Even now, there are few poets who explicitly deal with sex in their poetry. In this article, I analyse the work of three poets with different outlooks on desire: a homosexual male (Rafael-José Díaz), a heterosexual female poet (Ada Salas), and a heterosexual male poet (Eduardo Moga). Taking into account, among others, the theories of Roland Barthes (A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments) and Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet), I attempt to emphasise the originality of the language treatment of bodies in love.

Colette et Louis Pergaud représentent des styles très différents, ils varient aussi par la thématique de leurs ouvrages. Il est pourtant un point qui les rapproche. Ils s’unissent dans leur amour pour les animaux et la volonté de les peindre d’une manière véridique. Ce désir en cache très certainement un autre, celui d’éduquer le public à une plus grande compréhension du monde animal. Pour ce faire, ils mettent sur scène des humains dont le comportement face aux animaux diffère radicalement. En effet, tandis que les uns montrent une profonde empathie pour les animaux, les autres s’en méfient voire leur vouent de la haine. La jalousie y tient également une place importante. La présente étude se concentre sur tous les éléments susmentionnés, afin de cerner les manières dont Colette et Pergaud se saisissent de la thématique animale pour la lier à des sujets de portée universelle et profondément humaniste. Le rapport de l’humain au non-humain est, chez ces précurseurs de l’écosensibilité, une mesure de leur valeur, et ils atteignent de la sorte deux objectifs : éveiller les consciences de leurs contemporains et jeter une nouvelle lumière sur les relations entre les espèces.

Nowadays self-translation remains a frequent practice in the literary field in Canada. A close reading of the self-translations done by Canadian writers such as Nancy Houston, Marco Micone or Patrice Desbiens allows to discover each author’s own vision of self-translation as a creative process. The aim of the paper is to determine, through a comparative analysis of excerpts from the two language versions of the play La Maculée/sTain (2012) and the latest bilingual novel La voix de mon père / My Father’s Voice (2015) by Fransaskois playwright Madeleine Blais-Dahlem, to what extent her self-translating practice guides the reading of the text. Examining
the back and forth between the two versions of the same work will allow to delve deeper into the subject of the identity and privileged status of the translator (Tanqueiro 2009: 109, Saint 2018: 120), but also into the role and skills of the receiver of Madeleine Blais-Dahlem’s bilingual writings.

The novel by Aude (Claudette Charbonneau‑Tissot), a Quebec writer, spotlights a woman who is swept into the shackles of madness which she then consciously leaves behind only to commit suicide. Her rejection of the inertia and the roles imposed on her raises the fundamental questions about life and death, conscience and freedom.
The difficulty with living a life becomes a philosophical problem, superficially devoid of a religious dimension as the protagonist is an atheist. The novel can thereby be read as a possible illustration of the secularization of Quebec, whose culture once deeply marked with Catholic traits is now showing its religionless face. At the same time, the sacred continues to be a crucial factor in that it passes its message in the language interspersed with Biblical images and liturgical rituals. The opposition between the rationalist view which underlies the protagonist’s decisions and the Catholic heritage which spills unconsciously into her thoughts is the focal point of this study.

Key words: ritual, death, religion, Aude, Claudette Charbonneau‑Tissot

Pitcairn is inhabited by 56 people, largely the descendants of the mutineers aboard HMS Bounty. Despite being a British territory, the island never had a tight relationship with the Crown until 2004, when the British Empire had to settle a child molestation case that shook the whole island. In that case, 7 out of 14 men were accused of having sexual relations with minors during a timespan of almost 40 years. After the trial the island became divided into three camps — the Islanders, the Others, and the Enemies. Maciej Wasilewski’s book is a (literary) reportage of the author’s visit on Pitcairn after the trials of 2004. This article aims at analysing the three groups of islanders. By studying Wasilewski’s interviews with them, we try to examine the dynamics of this small and remote island and elaborate on the problematic division into “us” and “them” (the Islanders vs. Strangers and Others) that emerged in times of conflict and remains to this day.

Key words: Pitcairn, Other/Otherness, Maciej Wasilewski, trichotomy, social division

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.

From the moment of his literary debut in 1989, Michele Mari is considered to be the representative of classic tendencies in contemporary Italian literature. One of the most noticeable characteristics of his writing is the presence of autobiographic elements which appear in all his works with different intensity, but also the archaization of style and language, literary references and metaliterary reflexions. This article aims at showing how the 1992 novel La stiva e l’abisso connects two of those aspects of Mari’s writing: intertextuality and literary references to adventure novel genre, as well as it reflects on the role and value of the literature for the contemporary people. It analyses basic narrative instances, that is the narrator, narrative structure, place and time of events, in order to show how they result in metaliterary reflexion.

L'œuvre de Boualem Sansal se distingue par une exploration profonde et multifacette de la liberté, envisageant celle-ci non comme un état acquis, mais comme une quête incessante face aux totalitarismes contemporains. À travers l'hybridation des genres, une satire féroce et l'interrogation du rôle de la langue dans l'aliénation, Sansal déconstruit les mécanismes du pouvoir. Ses personnages incarnent une révolte intellectuelle et une recherche de vérité, notamment face aux passés traumatiques et aux falsifications mémorielles. L'usage paradoxal du français, langue de l'ancien colonisateur, devient un puissant vecteur d'émancipation et de réappropriation identitaire, permettant à l'auteur de briser les tabous et d'affirmer une souveraineté narrative et critique essentielle à la liberté individuelle et collective.

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.

Silvia Baron Supervielle’s work brings an original voice to contemporary French and Francophone literature. The work of this writer, born in Argentina but living in France and writing in French, is that of a nomad who has never been uprooted. Her work not only constructs dialogues between two languages, between two continents, but also between poets and painters, between words and photographs, between prose and poetry. Indeed, it is part of the exploration for new forms of poetic novels, autobiographical texts and essay collections. Finally, this work is a great humanist endeavour which, built on the absence of the mother, celebrates fidelity and love.

The article focuses on ironic references to the traditions of rural literature in Jean Hamelin’s The Rage. The author explores the concept of the “writing of excess,” and claims that whereas actual country is an evanescent category, the territory that one can possess is that of language.

Key-words: Intertextuality, rural novel (roman de la terre), irony , writing of excess.

The article discusses selected short stories from Michele Mari’s latest collection, Le maestose rovine di Sferopoli [The Majestic Ruins of Sferopolis], published in 2021. This fourth anthology in Mari’s oeuvre includes both new narratives as well as those previously published in newspapers or other short story collections. A unifying theme across these diverse stories – varied in form, language, and subject matter – is the exploration of imagination and linguistic creativity. The short stories invite a deeper, meta-literary reflection on the mechanisms of narration and expression through artistic text, on challenging established literary canons, on expressionistic compositional oxymoronization, and on influencing how the work is received by drawing on the cultural traditions shared with the recipient.

The aim of the article is to analyse the literary games in Raymond Queneau’s Les fleurs bleues (1965), where a double story is told: that of the duke of Auge and of Cidrolin, the two characters dreaming about each other. The narratives constitute a meditation on History and on human condition. The author plays with the ludic carnivalesque by employing “neo-French”. He plays both with the language, by modifying the ordinary usage, and with single words, which is even more creative. Furthermore, Queneau’s literary games include intertextuality and hypertextuality.

Key words: Double-story, ludic, carnivalesque, inter- and hypertextuality.

Unlike Hitchcock, in Bataille there are no seagulls whose unusual behaviour would epitomize the inexplicable. And yet one may find countless birds in his texts. The aim of this article is to investigate what I call the “avian metaphor” in order to show that bird images are meant to convey fear originating from Bataille’s fantasized world and refer to the primal scene (Urszene) which represents his father with “huge, ever-gaping eyes that flanked an eagle nose.” I also endeavour to reveal the autobiographical background of what Bataille defines, in a more philosophical language, as angoisse (anguish/anxiety).

Key words: autobiography, fantasy, trauma, horror, death

This article compares the functions of rituals in the novels of Abdelkebir Khatibi and Tahar Ben Jelloun (La mémoire tatouée, Harrouda, L’Enfant de sable, La Nuit sacrée). The aim of the study is to show that Abdelkebir Khatibi and Tahar Ben Jelloun represent the traditional rituals of the body as elements of a hybrid language (corpslangue). This “language tattooed on the body” expresses the plurality of the North African culture and the contradictions of Moroccan society. It shows the Moroccan individual torn between the loyalty to tradition and the need for transgression.

Key words: Moroccan culture, rituals, tradition, transgression

Le roman de Fauconnier -  La Malaisie, le Goncourt 1930 - tombé dans l'oubli ces derniers temps, était en avance sur son temps. Écrit à l'époque coloniale et mettant en scène un propriétaire de plantation d'hévéa français, ce texte fournit un exemple sans pareil de communication interculturelle parfaite, voire d'anéantissement de sa propre individualité au profit de la fusion avec le pays d'accueil, la Malaisie. Le roman exerce une profonde influence par divers moyens : le cadre (plus que l'intrigue, qui est presque inexistante), une langue riche et élégante, la présence d'éléments culturels.

Cet article interroge la possibilité même de la liberté dans la pensée d’Emil Cioran, en s’appuyant notamment sur De l’inconvénient d’être né. Loin d’envisager la liberté comme une conquête ou un espace d’accomplissement, Cioran la pense comme un idéal négatif, inséparable du non-être. La naissance est comprise comme une faute ontologique, un point d’irruption de l’absurde, tandis que la conscience, loin de libérer, accable l’individu d’une lucidité paralysante. Refusant tout système, toute complétude, Cioran adopte une écriture fragmentaire qui épouse le mouvement discontinu de la pensée et affirme une forme paradoxale de libération par le retrait, le doute et la négation. Ainsi, l’écriture devient chez lui le lieu d’une liberté tragique, qui se refuse à toute adhésion, mais persiste dans l’acte même de refuser.