Considered one of the most interesting Quebec writers, Aude released a collection
of short stories entitled Cet imperceptible mouvement in 1997. What comes to the fore in that collection is the austerity of style intertwined with a unique emotional load, a combination which has raised critics’ eyebrows even if it is typical of Aude’s prose. One of the pivots of her stories is the notion of loss, looked at from various angles. The protagonists typically lose their dearest ones, be it because the latter leave, die or because they drown in mourning. Maimed with the loss, the protagonist reassesses his/her life, faces new challenges, makes constant choices. Excelling in the short story structure, Aude records the depth of loneliness and raises existential queries by means of what might at first sight seem simple gestures, common objects and insignificant situations.

Key words: Aude, short story, transformation, loss, death.

The article analyzes two short stories – “Madame Bovary”  by Monique Proulx and “L’Apparition” by Roland Bourneuf. The author compares and contrasts the two texts, referring, at the same time, to their common “model” – Gustave Flaubert’s novel “Madame Bovary”.

Key-words : Quebec; Monique Proulx; Roland Bourneuf; Flaubert; Emma Bovary; Salomé; Hérodias; short story; rewriting; hypertext; hypotext; literary myths

Two inhabitants of Lorraine, named Emile Erckmann (1822–1899) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826–1890) – authors of numerous short stories inspired from local and Rhineland’s folklore – wrote fantastic stories in which fear and anxiety are given pride of place. All the ingredients of fear are present – ghosts, apparitions, magnetism, lycanthropia, murders, violent deaths, miscarriages of justice. Would this subtle mixture of folklore and fantastic have a didactic, even
metaphysical aim?

Key words : fear, fantastic, ghost, short story, didactics, metaphysics

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.

The article examines the ways in which Monique Bosco, in her  « Les lamentations de la vieille en ce jour du Kippour », combines the main features of the lamentation - an ancient genre which was employed in the Bible - with elements typical for the short story. The clear presence of biblical roots makes the modern setting and theme of the text unusual and, not infrequently, unsettling for the reader. 

Key words: Short Story; Lamentations; Bible; Psalms

The present paper describes some orientalist stereotypes concerning women and manifesting themselves in Le Harem entr’ouvert (1919), a short story collection by Aline Réveillaud de Lens (1881–1925), a French painter and writer, whose works are devoted mainly to North Africa. The paper focuses on three, most common, stereotypical representations of the Oriental woman according to which she is, firstly, a beautiful odalisque serving the man; secondly, extremely sensual and thus unfaithful and, finally, jealous and, sometimes, very cruel. The author attempts to explain the origins of those representations and to answer the question why A.-R. de Lens used them in her writings

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.