L'objet des réflexions que je vais mener est le récit dans sa variante canonique, que notre civilisation a héritée de l'antiquité grecque, ainsi que les variantes modernes de cette catégorie narrative. L'article ne porte pas sur le récit en tant que genre ou sous-genre épique, même s'il existe d'importants points communs entre la catégorie en question et le (sous-)genre dans ses diverses manifestations. En s'appuyant sur plusieurs sources, d'Aristote à Benveniste, Meschonnic, Genette et Gefen, cet article met en relation ces notions, les conceptions et leurs mises en œuvre, et conclut par quelques exemples pertinents.
MOTS-CLÉS
histoire, conte, tradition, modernité, concepts de l'histoire, réalisations

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.

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.

Annie’s Ernaux’ A Man’s Place and Assia Djebar’s Nowhere in My Father’s House can be described as accounts of what separates fathers from daughters in the context of generational and class divisions. Ernaux connects the story of her father’s life and death with the one of herself. Djebar returns to the late colonial period and gives a description of complex transcultural experiences. In both books, the authors employ a special literary form which is referred to as récit de filiation by D. Viart. The reconstruction of the Father is directly linked with the reflection on the processes of writing, the sense of literature, and the necessity of rejection of the fathers’ heritage.

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

This paper is concerned with the relationship between different texts dealing with misanthropy; more precisely, it examines the manifestations of rewritten forms of the story of Molière’s Alceste, by revealing the moral ambiguities inscribed in this character. The selected prose — Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Gide’s L’Immoraliste, Huysmans’s A rebours, Maupassant’s Un cas de divorce, Kafka’s Le terrier and Le départ — is the focus of this (inter)textual analysis concentrating on text-formatting tools that exhibit special narrative features in the structure of the discussed texts. It is argued that different manifestations of misanthropy — represented by the Natural Man, the Artificial Man and the Absurd Man — are closely connected with textual characteristics.

Key words: Intertextuality, misanthropy, the Natural Man, the Artificial Man, the Absurd Man.

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.

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.

The Crime of Count Neville is primarily a story of a complex father–daughter relationship, culminating in the attempted murder of the count’s daughter by her own father. Infanticide is inevitable for Sérieuse, which parallels the mythological story of Iphigenia. But Nothomb also develops on an extra-diegetic level, as the meta-narrative of the genesis of the Freudian Family Romance or the Novel itself. Between the concepts of “bastard” and “foundling,” this novel contains many autobiographical elements and borrows from other literary works, most noticeably from Oscar Wilde’s collection Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.

This article is devoted to the novel Les yeux baissés (1991) by Tahar Ben Jelloun and it analyses the literary games that are to question the ontological status of this piece of art. The analysis focuses on the hypertextual strategies (parody, pastiche), intertextual strategies (literary allusion and self-quotation), and narrative strategies (mise en abyme, metalepse), which lead to destabilization of the two genre components of Les yeux baissés, an epic story and a novel. Having appealed to the two literary traditions, the North African and the European one, Tahar Ben Jelloun strives to transgress, or, to go even further, to defy those two traditions. At the same time, he creates the dialogic and open form of the novel. Les yeux baissés, as a spectrum of irony and self-defiance, becomes the place of inter-cultural and intro-cultural dialogue, practicing polyphony, so typical of each culture that it goes beyond its limits.

Key words: Eastern epic story, French novel, defiance of realistic aesthetics, parody, inter-cultural dialogue.

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

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.

Fiction that had Punic Carthage as subject was, until the beginning of the 19th century, exclusively based on the historic sources written by Greeks and Romans. Nevertheless, the first – rivals of Carthage, and second – their enemies, have necessarily proposed to their posterity a biased story, full of subjectivity, rivalry or even hate. The development of archeology as a field of research as well as an auxiliary science of history has allowed to confront the ancients texts with the material coming from the Punic civilization, and consequently questioned centuries old ingrained stereotypes about Carthage. The decolonization of two countries that were directly influenced by Punic Carthage – Tunisia and Lebanon – has then emerged new stakes: the ideology used historic information to support the national identity of these freshly born countries. In Salammbô the autor of the Dictionnaire des idées reçues paradoxically mentions the historic stereotype that nourished the existence of Moloch god. In Elegie à Carthage, Senghor use the Didon myth to support the Panafricanist ideology. Finally, the Tunisian Fawzi Mellah and the Libanese J-J Tabet both dispute Elyssa identity.

Finding new forms for a literary representation of the father is a challenge, as family relations constitute one of the most popular literary motifs. Éric Chevillard’s innovative presentation of this subject takes the form of an unconventional blog, which is more literary than personal, and which exists in electronic and print formats. This peculiar – half-fictional, halfautobiographical – diary tells the story of a “housewriter,” combining creative pursuits with everyday fatherly duties, and thus invites the reader to reflect on the father–daughter relation and the changes it is undergoing in our times.

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.

In Mazurka For Two Dead Men, Camilo José Cela creates a world heavily populated with vivid types of men and seemingly only one type of woman. Female characters in the story are primarily sexual (and promiscuous) beings, depicted mostly in the context of erotic encounters deprived of sensuality or tenderness. Easily accessible female bodies serve to present the various kinds of masculinity through the nature and quality of men’s interactions with women. Credited with the popularization of the so-called tremendismo, a specifically Spanish literary technique related to realism and naturalism, Cela does not shun explicit depictions of phenomena such as violence, deviation, prostitution, deformity, or bestiality. The purpose of the following article is to demonstrate how Cela constructs masculinity and femininity in his novel, and what particular gender roles he assigns to his characters.

Key words: masculinity, femininity, realism, naturalism, tremendismo, Camilo José Cela.

Transgression is everywhere in Les Âmes fortes. It is present in the form of the narrative in which two opposite versions of events question the very notion of truth and well-established moral norms of judgement. As the novel of the impossible truth, Les Âmes fortes highlights the power of fiction, of lies, and of manipulation. Moral virtues are inverted in two opposite versions of the events: when generosity is increasingly showed, does it become a mark of ferocity and pride, a means of domination, or an aspect of the superior art of loosing? The Biblical values are constantly profaned in this complex novel: numerous Biblical references are quoted only to be perverted immediately afterwards. For example, in one of the two versions of her own story, one of the protagonists, Therese, manages to reach sanctity in evil, which enables her to assert her absolute domination — the main feature of the strong souls, the “âmes fortes”.

Key words: Transgression, profanation, manipulation, perversion, illusion.

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 second half of the 19th century was a period of great transformations: science and painting entered the novel, the novel itself evolved to the point of breaking up, authors were looking for new forms of expressions. The representatives of naturalism took the novel away from its traditional role. After all, naturalism marked the novels’ death, but it was in the novel that this movement was obliged to realize its objectives. Naturalists assigned a new target to the novel, which was no longer aesthetic, but scientific. The novel was not a simple fictive story, but aimed at becoming a serious study. The novelists’ purpose was to “dissect” their characters, their passions and emotions, based on profound determinism. Zola wanted to make an “exact and meticulous copy of life”; Huysmans intended to “dissect love” and presented himself as a “beast exhibitor”; Goncourt chose a model based on history. Zola was most involved in his scientific theories, wishing to follow Claude Bernard to the point of replacing, in his book, the word “doctor” by the word “novelist,” in order to obtain a model of literary creation. Zola seemed convinced that objectivity is possible in this type of work, but his experiments took place in an imaginary world. He did not realize his program entirely though, and remained relatively faithful to the traditional rules of novel writing. He proclaimed his hunger for a revival in literature and he moved away from the naturalist principles. Other writers, like Huysmans or the signatories of the famous “Manifest of the Five,” criticized the naturalist errors and insufficiencies. This kind of criticism was heard everywhere: henceforth, it was clear that naturalism was soon to be replaced by something else. The interest in the Russian novel and Wagner’s music can be listed among the signs of this renewal. They suggest a profound need for another, irrational way of thinking. Music and painting contributed to the transformation of the novel, too, and witnessed a need for an opening, experienced by naturalists. One may conclude that degeneration of this movement was slow and progressive, and partially resulted from the principles of the movement itself.

Key words: Science, roman, modification, art.

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.

This article analyses the novel “La vieille dame du riad” (2011) by Fouad Laroui, a Moroccan-Dutch writer of French expression. We examine the strategies (generic and intertextual) used by the novelist to ridicule the Orientalist prejudices which persist in the current time. Generic hybridity (the presence of some elements of the detective story, fantasy novel and oriental tale) is used to develop the satirical dimension of the novel.

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 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

Gothic fiction in Argentina, represented by such famous authors as Borges, Cortazar, Bioy Casares or Silvina Ocampo has its followers in the 21st century. In our paper, we present one of the contemporary authors, Pablo De Santis, born in Buenos Aires in 1963. His novel Los Anticuarios (The Antiquarian) is about vampirism in the Buenos Aires of the 1950s. Following the tradition of Gothic literature, the main character is involved in the lugubrious story of vampires known as the antiquarians. Although these long-lived creatures have adapted to living in our times, they must still feed on blood. However, they prefer a substitute in the form of an elixir which allows them to dominate their victims’ minds. Besides, being victims of unrequited love themselves, just like classic vampires, they have a predilection for female blood.

Key words: De Santis, Gothic fiction, antiquarians, vampires, Peronism, Buenos Aires

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

Giuseppe Culicchia’s novel is an example of a literary polemic between the society and the individual who is, at least to a certain extent, a rebel. On the one hand, in Culicchia’s story, this might denote a person who stands up for their own personal opinions regardless of what anyone else says. On the other hand, however, a rebel may actually stand up against what is right, and may lose himself in drug and alcohol abuse. All in all, the novel focuses on being an individual and refusing to follow the crowd that forces you to think the same way they do even if it means becoming an outcast to the society. The novel is also a polemic, and polemics are not only a vehicle for the exchange of opinions, cultures, knowledge and ideas, but they also are the most significant sign of our times.

Key words: Literary polemics, society vs. individual, rebel, culture.

While trying to comment on Quemar las naves of Alejandro Cuevas, it is impossible not to notice the intricate net of tropes and means which makes it one of the most noteworthy examples of contemporary Spanish narratives. Written with great attention to details, structured with astonishing precision and based on multiple contrasts, the novel does not desist from surprising its reader. It seems, for example, paradoxical that a postmodernist story about the disintegration of a traditional poet’s life can be so perfectly coherent in its form, diligently organized, and divided into chapters and subchapters arranged alphabetically.
Furthermore, the novel falls outside any unequivocal interpretation due to the author’s incessant trifling with mythological allusions, the wittiness and sharpness of his obliquely slipped insights concerning today’s culture and the status of literature, the introduction of playful ambiguity, and the unspecified space-time textual frame. Apart from that, Quemar las naves constitutes a kind of genealogical guessing game, as it contains elements of various genres and, thus, it cannot be analysed only within the constricting traditional genre classifications. All in all, Quemar las naves may be perceived as a kind of never-ending toying with literary conventions and with the readers’ expectations.

Key words: Alejandro Cuevas, contemporary Spanish novel, 21st century Spanish narrative.

Flaubert undeniably represents a fascinating case with regard to stereotyping, especially if one considers not only his masterpiece, Madame Bovary, but also his last volume, left unfinished in perhaps a symbolic way, Bouvard et Pécuchet, and the collections of clichés included in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues and Le Sottisier. What is prosaic is important for the novelist. Moreover, in his Correspondence we find a real and fascinating interest in the topic of the cliché. A key sentence concerning what is commonplace suggestively describes Charles Bovary’s conversation: “Charles’ conversation was as flat as a pavement, and people’s ideas paraded on it in their ordinary outfit, without vibrating with emotion, with laughter or with daydreaming” (my translation). Essentially, our aim is to dwell on language and gesture stereotypes as presented in some of Flaubert’s novels as well as in the short story Un cœur simple (A Simple Heart) and even in his travel notes. Furthermore, through the agency of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ample work L’Idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot), it is our aim to look into the language mechanisms which lead to mal du siècle in Flaubert’s view, namely the stupidity of wanting a conclusion and the circulation of received ideas.

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.

Marie José Thériault (1945), from Quebec, and Nadine Monfils (1953), from Belgium, began their narrative writing career almost at the same time – the first one in 1978, with La Cérémonie, and the second one in 1981, with Laura Colombe, contes pour petites filles perverses. In their tales, they both show a predilection for the fantastic as well as for the marvelous, and they explore dark inspiration which can arouse anguish, fear or even horror. They both express this inspiration through real aesthetics of cruelty, and by expanding an inner world in which morbid eroticism figures prominently. These are some aspects studied in this paper.

Key words: short story, cruelty, eroticism, Francophone literature

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

The present paper focuses on La Morte amoureuse [Clarimonde] by Théophile Gautier telling the story of a young priest who just before his ordination falls in love with a beautiful and mysterious courtesan. Nevertheless, he neglects his love and sets off to the parish entrusted to him. One day he is asked to visit a dying woman who turns out to be his beloved. Unable to restrain his desire, the priest kisses the dead Clarimonde, who comes back to live. Afterwards, she pays him a visit every night and takes him to Venice where they live a voluptuous life. Unable to stand the double existence of a priest and a young lord, the protagonist accepts to destroy the corpse of his beloved, which ends their relationship. Alternative to God’s love, mysterious Clarimonde, evil or vampire, becomes an interesting concept reflecting the Romantic dreams and
anxieties.

Key words : Gautier, Clarimonde, vampire, Romanticism, God, love, death

In the rich history of Icelandic literature, the most famous literary genres are undoubtedly the medieval sagas and the contemporary criminal novels. However, those genres are as not as far from each other as one may think, since masterpieces of Icelandic medieval literature are sometimes summoned by contemporary authors, as is shown in The Flatey Enigma (Icelandic: Flateyjargáta), a criminal novel by Viktor Arnar Ingólfsson which is built around the story and the contents of the Book of Flatey, a famous fourteenth Icelandic manuscript. The present article provides an analysis of the place and function of the manuscripts and the medieval texts it contains: the results obtained show that their main function is to help the development of the plot, although some intertextual references also have a didactic dimension, whereas others provide information about the relations between the characters and the Book of Flatey.

The study concerns the analysis of the works of Giovanni Testori contained in the volume La Gilda del Mac Mahon (1959). From the chronological, epistemological and aesthetic point of view, Testori’s debut works are characteristic for two different literary tendencies of writing: neorealist and expressionistic. The neorealist traditions coming into play in Testori’s works include themes (difficult situation of the people living in Milan’s suburbs), and forms of expression (low point of view, spoken style-popular). Testori in a very personal and original way weaves together the narrative neorealist elements with those of the new aesthetics, the expressionistic vanguard which is present to the maximum extent in his theatrical works. The expressionism of Testori is represented by the subjective and partial representation of the story and most of all by the typology of the protagonist (a young protagonist who is naked, that is presented in his most intimate actions: oppression and solitude, alienation, anti-bourgeois revolt, desperate search of the better life). The expressionistic power of the stories is amplified by their episodic structure, responsible for the effect of fragmentariness and discontinuity of the representation of the world that is restless and frenetic.

Key words: Giovanni Testori, neorealism, expressionism.

The article examines the instance of triple intertextuality in Jacques Ferron's Le “Saint-Elias”. It focuses on representations of women and studies Ferron’s references to the Faust myth, to the biblical story of Mary Magdalene, to Pierre Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos’ “Les Liaisons dangereuses”, as well as to Jean Rotrou's “Saint Genest”.

Keywords : Jacques Ferron; intertextuality; irony in literature; Faust myth; Mary Magdalene biblical episod; Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses'; Jean Rotrou's Saint Genest

The focus of this analysis is a representation of girlhood in Erin Bow’s 2010 novel Plain Kate. The novel has been categorized as “Young Adult Literature” which has come to indicate subversive and a transformative potential in that it often evokes traditional narrative models only to de- and re- construct them. The eponymous Plain Kate, therefore, is a prototypical Other: an ugly, orphaned and homeless girl who has to flee her hometown under the accusations of being
a witch. She is a transitional character and a boundary-crosser; as such she does not belong anywhere. Importantly, the story makes it clear that what transforms Kate into an outsider is, among other things, her gender, which is why the protagonist’s evolution from a child into an adult is shown through metaphors of the fluid female body. This paper aims to discuss the topography of girlhood on the example of Bow’s novel, focusing specifically on the questions of marginality, otherness, liminality, and transgression, inscribed in the category of Young Adult Literature.

The figure of the father is presented in a variety of ways in contemporary Latin American literature; one of the popular images, for instance, is that of a despotic patriarchal “macho”
in the drug trafficking literature. However, there is also a new image of paternity linked to “new masculinity,” presented as gender utopia in the short story “Alumbramiento” (“Birth”) by Andrés Neuman (2006). Here, a male narrator gives birth to a new man who is, at the same time, himself and his own son. In this article, I aim to explore the change from traditional images of paternity to the new, disruptive, utopian ones, inscribed within new ideas about gender equality.

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 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 article presents the story of the death of Carlo and Giovanni Carafa, leading figures at the papal court, condemned to death by Pius IV, in 1561. Article analyses three unpublished texts (from the 16th and 17th century) that reconstruct the facts, focusing on their different perspectives and functions.

The article is an attempt to classify the novel of Gabrielle Gourdeau entitled “Maria Chapdelaine ou le Paradis retrouvé”, which retells the story of the emblematic character of French-Canadian literature (formerly portrayed by Louis Hémon in his novel “Maria Chapdelaine”). With the use of the theory of “hypertext” by Gérard Genette, the author shows that Gourdeau does not merely “continue” Hémon’s narrative but re-visions and re-invents the character of Maria Chapdelaine, by means of such techniques as transposition, transtylization and transvalorization.

Key-words: intertextuality; hypertext; the Maria Chapdelaine myth; continuation; transposition 

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 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.

This paper analyses contemporary Spanish American novels whose plots are motivated by a private investigation into the mysteries that lead to collective memory. In the second half of the 20th Century many Latin American countries were being torn apart by civil wars, guerilla wars and dictatorships. The societies in these countries (Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Central American countries) have not yet come to terms with their personal and collective wounds and crimes. Recent history has not yet been totally restored. The official versions of history have been distorted and the heroes of the novels analyzed here begin their private investigation of facts, which leads them to uncover not only the mysteries in the recent histories of their countries, but also the political affiliations of members of their own families. As these heroes are always
somehow involved with writing, their para-detective search turns out to be a struggle about a discursively and textually formed identity, as well as a negotiation of values between the public and the private, between official historiography and the memory of individuals and their families, between the traditional and postmodern sense of patriotism. This process illustrates that in some contemporary Latin American societies, conflicts between the accepted version of history and marginalized private memory correspond to the postcolonial model of identity problems.

Key words: Contemporary Spanish American novel, detective story, identity, postcolonial studies.

The article is a study of intertextual strategies in Godbout’s philosophical novel “Salut Galarneau!” (1967) Claude Filteau which asserts that inter- and transtextuality belong to the democratic regime of writing. Intertextuality works primarily through literary genres. The paper concentrates on the figure of François Galarneau, the main character of the novel who, in his search for truth, is unable to overcome his own contradictions as a self-taught writer and a ‘Quebecois’ without money in a consumerist world. Through copies of letters, classified ads, cooking recipes, women’s advice columns and TV commercials the main hero relates his life story, while dreaming about being stripped off the book pages by his readers. It is Galarneau’s ‘wandering letter’, called by Jacques Ranciére the ‘orphan speech’,     

Key words: intertextuality; novel; philosophical tale; heteroglossia; low culture; Canadian literature

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an English-speaking writer who was born in India in 1956 and is currently living in the United States. In Queen of Dreams published in 2004 she depicts the conflicts between Rakhi, a young American in her thirties living in California, and her India-born parents. Rakhi reproaches them for refusing to initiate her to Indian culture, particularly blaming her father for not being able to communicate. However, the mother’s death is the trigger for the father’s story. The father becomes the one who tells his daughter about life in India, thus embodying the missing cultural link in Rakhi’s family tree. The aim of this article is to offer an analysis of the father-daughter relationship as presented in Queen of Dreams. It intends to put into light the part played by the father in helping his daughter understand the way transgenerational loyalties work, and create a new identity of her own.

No one remembers today the achievements of the Grand-Guignol theatre, the French theatre of Horror, which scared the Parisians through the first decades of 19th century. The appearance of the slasher movie contributed to the collapse of the theatre which was unable to compete with the new means of expression. However, cinema adopted a lot of techniques, which aimed at raising fear and panic among the viewers. The Author undertook the task of analyzing three plays, nowadays forgotten, of the most fruitful writer André de Lorde who specialized in dramas concerning the pure themes of madness. In L’Homme mystérieux the playwright presents the story of a man suffering from persecution mania who strangles his saviour, while La Petite Roque, written on the basis of Guy de Maupassant’s novel, describes the case of a mayor of one town in Normandy who killed a young virgin out of lust. Invisibles, on the other hand, is devoted to the agony of an old lady who was kept in mental asylum for 20 years. In each of the plays the Author of the article analyzes the mechanism employed by the writer in order to create the gradation of fear which is brought with mastery to paroxysm.

Key words : André de Lorde, Grand-Guignol, The French theater of Horror, fear, madness

The article traces rewriting and auto-rewriting strategies in Jacques Godbout’s “Operation Rimbaud” (1999), which revisits places and people from his former novel “Aquarium” (1962). The paper shows how in his latest novel Godbout returns to revolutionary Harar, Ethiopia, which Rimbaud visited, once again creating the character of a corrupted priest. Godbout rewrites Rimbaud’s biography, revising at the same time the biblical story of the Decalogue Tablets, as well as reminisces about his stay in Ethiopia.

Key words: Godbout; “Operation Rimbaud”; “Aquarium”; Decalogue; rewriting; Ethiopia    

Both Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage are set in times of war, the Trojan War and the Iraq War, respectively, and both are associated with love on the one hand, and loss on the other. In fact, Carthage contains many echoes of the past, with the main characters of the novel, Juliet and Cressida Mayfield, bringing connotations with Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s works, their father compared to an old Roman general, and Corporal Brett Kincaid likened to the hero of chivalric romances. The aim of this article is to argue that Oates’s Carthage may be seen as a modern Troilus and Cressida story in that it presents aspects of medieval reality in a modern guise, with the most poignant and recurrent association being that between the “war on terror” and medieval crusades and the emotion dominating the characters’ reactions being rage, an emotion which occurs in relation to the fires of passion and war in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage.

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.

Małgorzata Puto, analysing the works by Davide Bregola, proves that authenticity and directness in expression of feelings guarantees his characters a successful life in the community they belong to.

Keywords: authenticity; directness in expressing one's emotions; short story; Italian literature; social life

La novela de Antonio Muñoz Molina En la noche de los tiempos se centra en un período de la vida de un arquitecto talentoso y exitoso que vive en Madrid en el período previo a la Guerra Civil española. La historia del personaje principal es solo un pretexto para mostrar el agitado ambiente de la capital y discutir los factores que llevaron al estallido del conflicto armado. Sin embargo, la novela presenta la política y la guerra como un dominio puramente masculino. El propósito del artículo es rastrear voces femeninas ocultas en la obra y analizarlas utilizando los planteamientos teóricos de la aracnología.

En la introducción del libro Desde la noche y la niebla, Juana Doña, la autora, define su obra como una novela-testimonio, no autobiográfica y no feminista. Este relato sobre su vida como militante en las filas comunistas, la Guerra Civil española y su paso por prisión marcan el devenir narrativo que transgrede cualquier tabú impuesto por la ley del silencio y la censura franquista. La autora se basa en su memoria individual y su autoconciencia presente para recordar y decidir, respectivamente, qué hechos son relatados y cuáles son silenciados, cómo se reafirman acciones y se omiten informaciones, y cómo cambia el pronombre narrativo según su vida propia o la lucha colectiva. De este modo, el texto literario es utilizado como una catarsis individual, tanto para la autora como para los lectores. En este ensayo propongo analizar el proceso de redacción de la citada obra como un arma de promoción de la justicia, siguiendo la teoría de Kimberly Nance sobre las decisiones éticas que toma el autor de un testimonio, e infiriendo así un nuevo papel en el lector como agente activo atemporal en la lucha social.