Résultats de recherche

Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Transgressive Shame / Transgressing Shame Reflections on Lorna Crozier’s Poetic Revision of the Christian Myth of the Fall

Zuzanna Szatanik

Date de publication: | Résumé

The general aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the concept of “transgression” loses its negative connotations in queer and feminist interpretations of the Biblical narrative of the Original Sin. In the course of this analysis, “transgression” ceases to be the indication of evil and sin, and starts to represent the possibility of transformation, redefinition, and rebellion. The theoretical part of the article focuses on the feminist reading of the Biblical Creation Myth and ponders the meaning of shame experienced by Adam and Eve in the aftermath of their sin. It also indicates the parallels between the concepts of “shame” and “queerness,” which comparison, in turn, allows for a redefinition of the notion of “transgression.” The subsequent part of the text constitutes an interpretation of Lorna Crozier’s poem titled “Original Sin.” In her revision Crozier subverts the binary logic of the Garden by means of evoking the character of Lilith as well as Aristophanes’ myth of the origins of human kind. The purpose of the proposed reading is to show that through queering the Biblical story, Crozier de-shames the Biblical Eve, and undermines the Biblical depiction of her sin. The last part of the paper focuses on an analysis of Crozier’s poem “What I Gave You Truly” in which Eve’s confession becomes the narrative of transgression.


Key words: Transgression, shame, feminist theory, queer theory, Lorna Crozier.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Pertinences et apories d’une lecture féministe de La Princesse de Clèves au regard de la théorie queer

François-Ronan Dubois

Date de publication: | Résumé

Insights and Limitations of a Feminist Reading of La Princesse de Clèves According to Queer Theory


Often interpreted from the feminist perspective, La Princesse de Clèves has come to represent a tale of feminine oppression and feminine heroism. As enlightening as such a reading may be, this paper seeks to further explore the gendered identities at stake in the novel, with the help of a Nietzschean queer theory. Underlining the role of Madame de Clèves in the economy of desire that constructs space and power in the world of the text is an important step toward a more subtle understanding of the narrative.

Key words: Clèves, Lafayette, queer, feminism, 17th century.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

L’esthétique de la lettre dans le roman et dans la peinture du XVIIIe siècle ou la représentation de la scène de lecture et d’écriture

Andrzej Rabsztyn

Date de publication: | Résumé

One cannot question the fact that a motif of a letter occupies a very significant position in the eighteenth century French paintings and literature. Although the motif of a woman reading a letter was used much earlier by the Dutch painters such as Vermeer, there are also many eighteenth century French painters (Raoux, Fragonard, Chardin or Pierre), who show women devoted to this particular activity. Thus, the popularity of letters in literature and art results from an important role correspondence played at that time. This paper emphasizes the description of a process of writing letters by a protagonist and its further influence on the receiver’s emotional and physical state of mind and body. Letters comprise a source of pleasure for both — a writer and a reader. In painting, a letter serves as the key to the interpretation of a painting, though its content is neither revealed nor comprehensible. The way of presenting characters and space, and a central position of a letter in the considered paintings may determine the interpretation — it can be treated as a signal of a relationship between lovers or its reminiscence. Considering the intimacy of the presented scene and a confidential character of a love letter, the canvas can differently predispose the receivers and make them think about sentimental intrigues.


Key words: Epistolary esthetics, reading scene, writing scene, Enlightenment’s paintings, Enlightenment’s novels.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Cheminer vers la littérature patrimoniale grâce aux oeuvres « mythographiantes »

Thierry Poyet

Date de publication: 29-06-2021 | Résumé | p. 17-31

How are the two literatures – the classic, the heritage, the scholarly versus the children’s literature, the overly easy editorial productions – much less opposed in reality than one might think? How can a real complementarity exist between literatures which will perhaps never be patrimonial but which can become school and the “great” literature? We will show how the reading of mythographic works seeks to design a teaching which makes the encounter with the book a triple opportunity for enrichment: to be moved, to escape, to learn. We will show how the reading of mythographic works seeks to design a teaching which makes the encounter with the book a triple opportunity for enrichment: to be moved, to escape, to learn. By taking into account the requirements of the time and the need for the school not to operate apart from opinions and practices, by a literature and a reading which accept to be useful for something, the French course must make sense by offering a new culture which is first and foremost a culture of oneself. It is first of all to show a living classical literature.

2021-06-29



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Madeleine Blais-Dahlem et sa vision de l’autotraduction

Małgorzata Czubińska

Date de publication: 28-12-2020 | Résumé | p. 46-60

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.

2020-12-28



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Doctor doctor, please, oh, the mess I’m in : la figure paternelle et le père figurant en tant que signe identificateur du fils nazi dans Les Bienveillantes de Jonathan Littell

Magdalena Łachacz

Date de publication: | Résumé

The article proposes a critical reading of the father figure in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones. While taking into account various interpretative contributions to the analysis of the
theme, formerly neglected and subjected to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abject mother, this article explores an alternative, esthetic, culturally oriented approach to the phenomenon. By grouping together father and a man who, in the absence of the former, takes power over the son, the story’s protagonist, the figure of the father can be understood as a key-symbol of a Nazi perpetrator’s identity. However, the article aims to show that this image can stem from the specific cultural context of contemporary representations of Nazism and influence today’s perception of the perpetrators.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

I riti quotidiani connessi al caffè nel romanzo di Widad Tamimi Il caffè delle donne

Wiesława Kłosek

Date de publication: | Résumé

Martine Segalen, French ethnologist, pondering over rituals in lives of individuals and societies which are technology oriented, points not to the de‑ritualization but to change of the plane on which rituals occur (a shift from center to margin). Repeated everyday actions always become rituals when they carry symbolic meanings.

According to Stewart Lee Allen, drinking coffee together is one of the most prevalent social rituals. For ages coffee was called a ‘devilish beverage’; on the other hand, it was used in religious rituals as a means of contact with God.

For Qamar, the protagonist of Widad Tamimi’s novel Il caffè delle donne, drinking coffee becomes a ritual which was analyzed on the three levels: collective, individual and intimate relationship. The main point of the novel is coffee taseography, a mantic technique; it can be traced to the beginnings of Arabic traditions. For Qamar, of Arab origin, coffee not only becomes a ritual of initiation, but also is a stimulus for her new identity to emerge. An everyday cup of coffee shows a process of changes she undergoes, and helps her in solving her identity crisis.

It appears that one of the keys to reading Widad Tamimi’s novel is a meaning of rituals for immigrants who must find themselves in the new social environment and determine their new identity.


Key words: daily rituals, Italian migration literature, coffee tasseography, meaning of a ritual in the migration context, identity crisis



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Woman as a Subaltern in Canadian Literature

Ewa Bodal

Date de publication: | Résumé

The article takes as its subject the possibility of perceiving women as constituting a distinct subgroup of the subaltern. Following a theoretical introduction to this concept, the article focuses on the practical application of the notion in Canadian literature, discussing the two major female-authored Canadian novels published in the 1970s, that is Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. Although Atwood’s and Laurence’s novels highlight the influences of the opposite colonial centres, the postcolonial situations and reflections of the main female characters appear quite similar. Indeed, both Atwood’s narrator and Laurence’s Morag Gunn seem to be depicted as doubly colonised: as women, and as Canadians. However, there exists a possibility of reading the protagonists as occasionally acting from a position of superiority towards those subaltern to them, namely the Native population.


Key words: Canadian literature, feminism, postcolonialism, subalternity.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Le Combat d’hiver de Jean-Claude Mourlevat : les stéréotypes dans le processus de lecture du récit dystopique pour adolescents

Aleksandra Komandera

Date de publication: 16-02-2021 | Résumé | p. 147-157

Adolescent dystopian literature has been in vogue recently. Its popularity reflects in fact several aspects, from readers’ preferences, through marketing rules, to writers’ choices. The predominance and reiteration of dystopian fiction suggests that they can involve stereotypes. Taking into consideration the fact that the stereotype is a reading construction, we analyse in this paper the role of stereotypes in perceiving and decoding a dystopian universe, with its elements, such as prison environment, oppressive authorities, tentative of revolt, and final victory or defeat, with respect of his young readers, in Jean-Claude Mourlevat’s novel Le Combat d’hiver.

2021-02-16



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

L’écriture « contractuelle » du roman français à la première personne au tournant des Lumières

Andrzej Rabsztyn

Date de publication: | Résumé

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.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Le carnaval fantastique : Monstrueuse mascarade et (p)acte de lecture

Dennis Moreau

Date de publication: | Résumé

The aim of the present work is to consider the articulation between the carnival and the literary fantastic, perceived as a dynamic subversion of reality able to arouse fear. Carnival’s imagery and fantastic strategies as metamorphoses can be considered like deviation from consensus reality, and allow to understand more specifically how the fantasy literature works and  its differences from mimetic fiction.

Literary techniques like autorepresentation or intertextual references highlight the text’s fictionality, and conduct a literary reflection on the poetics of fantastic prose fiction.


The fantastic is not trying to represent the world as we know it, and the pleasure of reading is here closely linked to the notions of willing suspension of disbelief or secondary belief.


Key words: fantastic fiction, carnival, fear, metafiction, autorepresentation, author-reader contract, willing suspension of disbelief




Revue: Romanica Silesiana

El bienestar de la cultura

Félix J. Ríos

Date de publication: | Résumé

This paper deals with the cultural conflict in Western societies throughout the past few decades. As Vargas Llosa says, present-day culture is reduced to a practice that tends to get rid of our concerns, and that makes us live a kind of fiction or game. We must denounce the complicity of the big names that represent the culture in the postmodern world. Many intellectuals refuse to discuss it, and prefer to live on the revenues generated by the industry. The market has become a cultural expression. The responsibility lies in senders and receivers. Consumption of these pseudo-cultural products no longer causes shame. This conflict is evident in the so-called digital literature (not to be confused with digitized literature) which creates a hybrid product that is based on superficiality, simulation and spectacular sign. Present-day literature responds to the force of the image with the misappropriation of the movie phenomenon. In the same way that the neo-classicists denounced the Baroque excess, today we can, with absolute legitimacy, express our astonishment at the abandonment of literary essence, which is the act of reading, and the empowerment of other elements (visual and auditory) in products which we continue to call “literary”. We must find a way out of the dilemma that occurs and answer the question of whether culture is an idea, a feeling, a brain mechanism for progress, or a new consumer item that serves to hide our grief, our doubts and our questions.


Key words: Culture, digital world, globalization, literature.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Itinérance et métissage : pour une littérature qui se réinvente

Eileen Lohka

Date de publication: | Résumé

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



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Sexual Politics: Mapping the Body in Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant

Richard J. Gray II

Date de publication: | Résumé

In L’Amant (1984), through the juxtaposition of traditional male/female sexual roles, Marguerite Duras painted a gynocentric portrait of sexual politics. By depicting a series of encounters in diverse parts of the Indochinese (Vietnam) landscape, Duras’s novel described the sexual “coming of age” story of her female protagonist’s. Each Vietnamese setting became a visual and sensory metaphor for the various developmental stages of the protagonist. In this essay, I contend that Duras’s use of contrasting settings serves to “flesh out” the sexual politics conveyed in the novel. Herein, I examine the geographic locations illustrating the sexual politics of the novel, including the Mekong River signifying the female protagonist’s rite of passage, Cholon, the city where the girl experiences sexual liberation and a struggle with the established authority, the lover’s apartment where the couple consummates their relationship, and finally, France representing the land of wealth to which the protagonist will eventually return.


Key words: autobiography, Judith Butler, Cholen (Cholon), colonisation, crossing, gender, juxtaposition, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, liberation, liminal space, mapping the body, Mekong, Kate Millett, Other, post-colonial, prostitution, sexploitation, sexuality, sexual politics.

In L’Amant (1984), through the juxtaposition of traditional male/female sexual roles, Marguerite Duras painted a gynocentric portrait of sexual politics. By depicting a series of encounters in diverse parts of the Indochinese (Vietnam) landscape, Duras’s novel described the sexual “coming of age” story of her female protagonist’s. Each Vietnamese setting became a visual and sensory metaphor for the various developmental stages of the protagonist. In this essay, I contend that Duras’s use of contrasting settings serves to “flesh out” the sexual politics conveyed in the novel. Herein, I examine the geographic locations illustrating the sexual politics of the novel, including the Mekong River signifying the female protagonist’s rite of passage, Cholon, the city where the girl experiences sexual liberation and a struggle with the established authority, the lover’s apartment where the couple consummates their relationship, and finally, France representing the land of wealth to which the protagonist will eventually return.


Key words: autobiography, Judith Butler, Cholen (Cholon), colonisation, crossing, gender, juxtaposition, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, liberation, liminal space, mapping the body, Mekong, Kate Millett, Other, post-colonial, prostitution, sexploitation, sexuality, sexual politics.

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