Résultats de recherche

Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Pouvoir et magie de la comédie dans L’Illusion comique de Corneille

Philippe P. Bonolas

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

Although Corneille drew fame from his tragedies, he launched his career by writing comedies. Considered for a long time as less worthy of attention, they have been reconsidered since the end of the nineteenth century and some of them like the Illusion comique have been regularly performed and praised as a good example of French baroque theatre.

In Corneille’s time, the success of a play was due to its freshness and modernity exploiting various themes favoured by the Age of Louis XIII. A play within a play was not entirely new, but mingling the intrigue of a tragedy within a more general one of a comedy was uncommon. Introducing the role of a magician, Alcandre, able to play with the dimensions of space and time when the three rules of unity began their magisterial reign, was an audacious expression of creative liberty. Besides, Corneille epitomized the baroque metaphorical vision of the world by insisting on the aspects of its instability, putting its personages in constant psychological and physical motion and metamorphosis, situations leading at times to uncertainty about moral values. But throughout the play, the theatre appears progressively as a metaphorical rationalisation of this instability through the adventurous life of the main hero, Clindor, allowing the author through Alcandre’s voice to advocate the cathartic power of comedy and assert the social importance and legitimate place of the theatre in the 17th century France. After the Illusion comique, the theatre could clearly be perceived as a school of humanism.

Key words: Corneille’s theatre, baroque, comedy, a play within a play.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Nouvelles sources de la peur dans le récit néofantastique de Jean-Pierre Andrevon

Katarzyna Gadomska

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

The purpose of this article is to present new sources of fear in short fantastic stories of Jean-Pierre Andrevon. First, it is necessary to underscore the anxiogenic role of the Uncanny – the malaise born out of rupture in everyday life which was once reassuring. The paper discusses the discourses of space and body – both origins of the Uncanny penetrate each other, become in the indubitable report, follow the reciprocate, often regressive dynamic. The familiar space metamorphoses into the space of a scary and distended geometry; the healthy, normal body transforms into a strange and alien one; the fragmentation of the body designates the disintegration of the familiar space. In brief, short fantastic stories of JeanPierre Andrevon emphasize particularly the isotopic acuity of the fragmentation of the body and the fragmentation of the space. The topic is analyzed using psychoanalysis and, especially, psychoanalytic terms like the Uncanny, the return of the repressed and the mirror stage.


Key words: fear, Uncanny, psychoanalysis, space, body, fantastic literature, Jean-Pierre Andrevon




Revue: Romanica Silesiana

“Impossible to break into nice free stroll” Canadian Re-citations of Paris in Gail Scott’s My Paris

Agnieszka Rzepa

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

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.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Le rôle de l’espace dans la littérature acadienne contemporaine Chacal, mon frère (2010) et L’Ombre de Chacal (2016) de Gracia Couturier

Anna Żurawska

Langue: FR | Date de publication: 28-12-2020 | Résumé | p. 98-107

The aim of deportation and expulsion of the Acadians during the so-called Grand Dérangement, also known as the Great Upheaval, was to deprive them of their land, which is presented in their history and literature. The idea of space is in this case closely connected with the question of identity in Acadian literature. Not referring directly to the above-mentioned historical events, Garcia Couturier explores in her novelistic diptych the relation between identity and space. Although Couturier’s writing is largely based on categories which characterise Acadian literature, she is able to go beyond them in order to concentrate on individual identity and liberty. She also investigates metaphorical expulsion, which shows her desire for autonomy from tradition and underlines modern aspects of the two novels.
The aim of the article is therefore to examine the narrative representation of the space, its symbolic function and its role in shaping both individual and collective identity in Couturier’s novels.

2020-12-28



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

L’espace anxiogène dans Les Misérables de Victor Hugo

Aleksandra Bogusławska

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

The topic of this article is an analysis of space presented in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. The specific emphasis is put on the novel’s attributes which provoke fear in the reader. Apart from characteristic features of other subgenres of popular novel Les Misérables includes a significant number of gothic novel’s elements and consequently fits squarely in literary horror fiction. The majority of these characteristics is related to a presentation of anxiogenic space which is an embelmatic example of gothic genre. It manifests itself thorough an existence in a novel of gloomy, terrifying, death- related places namely, Waterloo battlefield, old Vaugirard cemetary, the areas of Chelles forest. Several buildings depicted by Victor Hugo for instance the ruins of Gorbeau and Petit-Picpus-Saint-Antoine monastery resemble black dwellings (demeures noires) – due to their image and their narrative functions in the text – which are currently demonstarted in Gothic fiction novels.


Key words: gothic novel, black novel, literary horror fiction, anxiogenic space, fear, teror, fright, black dwelling




Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Lo smarrimento come inizio in alcuni testi di Giuseppe Culicchia

Małgorzata Puto

Langue: IT | Date de publication: 29-06-2020 | Résumé | p. 81-93

The aim of the present article is to analyze the relationship between the city and the protagonists of Giuseppe Culicchia’s texts. The methodological perspective is that of cultural anthropology, in particular the concept of mente locale, discussed by Franco La Cecla. Mente locale, as a relationship between space and human mind, is vital in the act of getting lost in space (perdersi), which leads to getting to know it (orientarsi) and finally initiating the profound relationship based on emotivity. Culicchia’s texts are set in Turin, and the study points out the different ways of perception of the city. The analyzed texts represents the gradual acquisition of knowledge about the city that corresponds to the theoretical thesis that is how the anthropology of space and place illustrates the conceptual and material dimensions of space which is central to the production of social life, bringing classics of cultural anthropology together with new theoretical approaches.

2020-06-29



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

L’Atlantide ou la quête de l’absence. D’un pays sans amour de Gilles Rozier

Anna Żurawska

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

The novel D’un pays sans amour (2011) by Gilles Rozier features two narrators who try to recapture the past and to reconstruct with letters the Yiddishland annihilated after World War II. This vanished state, with its cultural capital situated in Warsaw, is called Atlantis in the novel and presented as a paradise in the yiddish literature and language. The choice of this metaphor encourages the reflection on the ambivalence between reality and fiction, as well as on the oppositions between presence and absence or memory and oblivion. What is more, this metaphor refers to the categories of time and space.

The aim of this article is to examine the function of the Atlantis metaphor on which the novel is based and to analyze the mechanisms of narrative as memorial (on the basis of Paul Ricœur’s concept) which allow the narrator to rebuild the annihilated world of the mythical island and to bring the non‑existent back into existence.


Key words: Atlantis, mythical island, the yiddish literature and language, presence / absence, memory / oblivion, time and space



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Subjectivité îlienne et cheminement : De Patrick Chamoiseau à Soeuf Elbadawi

Buata B. Malela

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

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



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

La Cuba secreta: la insularidad / cubanidad en Cristina García

Mariola Pietrak

Langue: ES | Date de publication: | Résumé

The article aims to analyze the literary work of the Cuban‑American novelist Cristina García from the viewpoint of the theory of insularity, proposed by her countrymate J. Lezama Lima («Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez», 1938), paying attention to the references to the enchanted / sacred space evoked in the esseistic work of María Zambrano (“La Cuba secreta”, 1948). Starting with these two fundamental notions, it aims to deal with the very idea of cubanity in the writings of the so‑called Generation 1’5, to whom Zambrano belongs. As the author was born in Cuba, but raised in the United States, her perception of the island is necessarily ambiguous, typical for the sensibility of Cuban exiles, of those people who find themselves in a land between, living between two cultures.

Key words: insularity, cubanity, Generation 1’5, Cuban diaspora



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

« La triste Touggourt endormie sous son suaire de sel » .L’écriture autobiogéographique dans les Premier et Deuxième Journaliers d’Isabelle Eberhardt

Małgorzata Sokołowicz

Langue: FR | Date de publication: 31-12-2024 | Résumé | p. 1-13

The paper argues that the first and second Journaliers, a sort of diary kept by Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904), a Suisse writer and traveler of Russian origins, may be considered as autobiogeographical. The term autobiogeography has been coined at the beginning of the 21st century and describes the interactions between the autobiographical self and geography, or space. The autobiogeographical character of two first Journaliers is presented in three parts. The first focuses on the specificity of the text and its relationship with geography. The second talks about the links between particular cities and the Eberhardtian self. The third depicts the relationships between the self and the landscape: not only does it show how geography influences the self, but also what the impact of the self is on the way we look at the space.

2024-12-31



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

La mort en ligne, le cimetière virtuel et l’architecture des rites funéraires postmodernes

Alina Ţenescu

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

This paper makes use of different disciplinary methodologies in order to analyze the issue of death and representation of funerary rites within the universe of the cyberspace, in order to propose a balanced integrative vision of the function and role of recurrent non‑places within the virtual space: the electronic cemeteries with their specific rituals. Starting from an anthropo‑semio‑semantic approach and using the comparatist method, the article analyzes the specificity of funerary rites (counter‑rituals) and ceremonies related to online memorials and electronic cemeteries pertaining to different cultural spaces (French, Romanian, Indian, English‑American and so on).

Key words: death, funerary rites, rituals, electronic cemeteries, online memorials, non‑places, postmodernism



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Pour une théorie littéraire illustrée

Magdalena Wandzioch

Langue: PL | Date de publication: | Résumé

The artists and the theorists have always been fascinated by and driven to discover the relationship between arts, like painting and literature. What may come out as a surpise for those who love books, as for those who admire painting, is the illustrated theory of literature by Roger Caillois, whose background is not in literature or in painting, but in sociology. His work entitled Au coeur du fantastique published by Gallimard in 1965 and illustrated with famous paintings as well as less known ones has brought together literary criticism and painting by focusing on the theory of the genre of fantastique in literature and in painting, pointing at the similarities rather than differences.
However from the 18th century, literature has beeen considered to have straight connection with time, what means being subject to chronosyntaxe (time syntax) while painting has been linked to space what signifies being subject to toposyntaxe (space syntax). The Caillois’s theory allows the public to guess what lies in the profoundity of fantastique, intangible but identified in art.


Key words: Fantastique, literature, painting, Roger Caillois.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Angosta: el miedo de todos los miedos

Adriana Sara Jastrzębska

Langue: ES | Date de publication: | Résumé

The crime novel, which in modern literature has become a kind of a new social novel dealing with topics such as different expressions of violence, crime or corrupt societies, is hardly ever separated from its true realistic and urban Aesthetics. However, in order to build a scenario of a noir novel and convey the air of terror and threat, some authors resort to a repertoire of narrative aspects typical for a horror story, thus transforming the reality into a thriller or giving it some fantasy touch.

The following article analyses the space configuration presented in Angosta, a novel by Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince and it proposes to interpret the story as a sort of universalistic thriller in which various human fears of an era of globalism and late capitalism get together.

Key words: Colombian fiction, violence, Héctor Abad Faciolince, crime fiction



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Verso l’abolizione dell’identità di genere ne Il corpo odiato di Nicola Lecca

Wiesława Kłosek

Langue: IT | Date de publication: | Résumé

Towards the Abolition of Gender Identity in Il corpo odiato by Nicola Lecca

Gabriele, the main character of the novel by Nicola Lecca, discovers within himself a homosexual inclination which doesn’t conform to a traditional masculinity. Thus, it causes identity crisis. The protagonist carries out an obsessive auto analysis. He tries to represent self-discipline. This should lead him to regain confidence and social assimilation. The Article shows three stages, which Gabriele goes through: the ideal type of masculinity, the protest period and the discovery of his real identity. All three describe a subordination, an attempt to get the autonomy back and the awareness of freedom. This process was analysed in a range of few components: the main character’s space, his social relations, his homosexual experience, judging his own body, the emotional conflict between trying to be perfect, low self-esteem and the act of writing. Nicola Lecca’s text may be read as a voice in discussion about stereotypical masculine pattern which in this case is questioned.

Key words: gender identity, stereotypical masculine pattern, homosexuality, Italian modern literature.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

El privilegiado lenguaje del amor en al-Andalus

Maximiliano Salinas Campos

Langue: ES | Date de publication: | Résumé

It to not possible to understand the history of the love life in Spain without the oriental experience of al-Andalus. During those days the Baghdad’s way of living and loving illuminated Spain and Europe. Throughout the eight hundred years of the material and spiritual oriental influence of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula, the Peninsula became a space for learning and sharing for Christians and Moors; both perceived themselves as benevolent to and close to each other. It is impossible to negate the inevitable conflicts that affected the two civilizations. However, it is important to highlight the persistence of the mystic and poetic will to cross the limits in order to meet the other one’s wealth. The mystic, Ibn Arabi of Murcia (1165—1240), expressed this motivation in an extraordinary way. Illuminated by Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed at the same time, he affirmed that Allah’s mercy would save all human beings. The poet was everywhere in the Arabic world, until his death in Damascus. His spirit, filled with the al-Andalus love life, will travel later with the Moor emigrants to America, and particularly to Chile.

Key words: Love, history, women, Spain, al-Andalus.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Las estrategias de la angustia en Mientras duermes de Jaume Balagueró: una inmersión en el corazón del mal cotidiano

Diane Bracco

Langue: ES | Date de publication: | Résumé

After the excesses of his previous terror movies, the Spanish director Jaume Balagueró returns to a more sober narrative to explore the mechanisms of anguish in an oppressive thriller behind closed doors, Sleep Tight (Mientras duermes, 2011). Influenced by Hitchcock and Polański, he proposes a new variation on the spatial motif of a building which becomes the nest of daily evil embodied by César, an ominous concierge who intrudes into the residents’ intimacy and endeavors to ruin their existence. The present article aims at analyzing the principal filmic and narrative strategies of anguish deployed in this movie. The director elaborates a Manichean costumbrista tale where he probes the atavistic fear of a nocturnal monstrous presence that may perturb the reassuring normality of domestic space. Through the construction of a rigorous rhetoric of repetition, Balagueró places the viewer in a disconcerting narrative in-between and invites him to participate actively in the pernicious game orchestrated by his protagonist, depicted as a methodical agent of everyday terror.


Key words: terror cinema, Jaume Balagueró, anguish, space, costumbrismo



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

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

François-Ronan Dubois

Langue: FR | 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

Le chronotope de la peur dans les romans fantastiques d’Anne Duguël

Agnieszka Loska

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

Playing with reader’s fear is one of the objectives of fantastic literature. The present study, analysing two traditional fantastic motifs: of a ghost and of a dream, indicates the importance of time and space in Anne Duguël’s novels Gargouille and Le corridor. Particular attention was drawn to two space structures inextricably linked with time: the haunted house in Gargouille and the dream world in Le corridor. The aim of this analysis is to show how the author uses chronotope in order to arouse the reader’s fear.


Key words: fear, neofantastic, ghost, dream, Anne Duguël




Revue: Romanica Silesiana

Conflits et tension dramatique dans le roman d’amour. L’exemple d’Orgueil et préjugé de Jane Austen

Claude Filteau

Langue: FR | Date de publication: | Résumé

Since Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a conflict between protagonists appears to be the main event in a love novel. A crisis that such conflict results in is a source of narrative tension. Because the reader cannot anticipate the outcome of the crisis, it creates considerable suspense. The polemical confrontation, however, is mainly a dialogical component of the narrative. What Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson call “face threatening acts” can explain the verbal strategies and emotional reactions of the heroes during their confrontation. Nonetheless, the conflict also shows that emotions rely on a particular experience of space that generates anger or fear. Depending on the context, the expression of gratitude as a polite gesture or as a way of recognizing the merit of others seems the only ethical strategy capable of ending the conflict in Jane Austen’s novel.


Key words: Narrative conflict, face threatening acts, narrative tension, love novel, Jane Austen.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

“White World, Not a Sound.” Paternal Spaces in Samuel Beckett’s Embers

Michał Kisiel

Langue: EN | Date de publication: | Résumé

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.



Revue: Romanica Silesiana

« De la bêtise et du conformisme » comme forme de stéréotype dans la littérature de Belinda Cannone

Buata B. Malela

Langue: FR | Date de publication: 31-03-2021 | Résumé | p. 262-272

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.

2021-03-31



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

Langue: PL | 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

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

Richard J. Gray II

Langue: EN | 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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