The subject of this paper is an analysis of Jean Ott’s theater play Les Trois Aveugles de Compiègne. In his adaptation of a 13th-century famed “fabliau” Jean Ott (1878–1935), a lesser-known French author, offers its receiver an interesting intertextual play. In a manner that is both parodic and nostalgic he appeals to the courtly topoi, treating it as a signpost that defines the development of action and the semantic scope of his work.

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.

The present paper outlines the main characteristic of the topos “the good Homer sometimes nods”, introduced in Horace’s Epistle to the Pisones, and its French late 16th and 17th-century recurrences.

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

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.

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.

This study examines the role of topoi in the short story “Les Prisonniers” (The Prisoners) by Maupassant. For historical reasons, the notion of topos is preferred to that of the stereotype, as the latter indicates a manner of conceiving reality from a 20th century perspective (and thus posterior to Maupassant’s authorship). The analysis of the topoi shows that the author brings to play intertextual references linked to the tradition of the folktale and the short story. In foregrounding the story, Maupassant prepares two opposing scenarios. Following the transgressive plot, the initially dominant features of the story are overthrown. The functionality of the narrative elements, entering as units in an elaborated plot, leads to a view of the story primarily as a fictional construction playing with topoi, rather than as an expression of Maupassant’s stereotyped vision of reality.

In this essay I intend to show how Maupassant turned his short stories into a denouncement area of the ‘inherited ideas’, which mean commonly accepted ideas, such as those included by Flaubert in his Dictionary of inherited ideas. In this part of Maupassant’s literary work, the syntagm ‘inherited ideas’ acquires several different meanings, such as: some commonplace topics of the French bourgeoisie, the hasty taking up of fashionable words, attitudes, or cultural clichés, which one may come across in everyday life, the tendency of accepting as unchallenged some social, moral or religious prejudices, or foolish beliefs and unjust statements, authoritatively uttered by ordinary people. I’ll also emphasize the manner Maupassant treated the ‘inherited ideas’ by his ironical hints and the narrator’s affective implication, in spite of his seeming impassibility.

The article problematizes the form of the “para-dictionary” used by the authors of stereotypical collections in the 19th century (Flaubert, Rigaud, Bloy). The meaning of these numerous published collections, the outbreak of the nineteenth neo-encyclopedicism, is not limited to narrowly understood didacticism and bourgeois criticism of “bȇtise”. The form used in them is based on the paradox that determines its uniqueness. The starting point for studying this paradoxical form is the semantic tension between ossification, repetition, symbolized by the stereotype and literary character of these “para-dictionaries”, which through irony, humor, linguistic gloss, original selection are examples of creative transformation “ossified”, which is the opposite of originality and repeated. In the twentieth and twenty-first century, the use of the “para-dictionary” form leads to the redefinition of certain genres, as is the case with Genette’s innovative autobiography.

According to Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, the obligation of every dandy is to become a true master in the art of pleasing by displeasing. His words, his tricks, his intrigues will give birth to the stereotype of the dandy conveyed by his contemporaries throughout the 19th century. By referring to the critical texts of the time and modern critical texts, we will attempt to review the main roles of a dandy: a master of elegance, idle master, misogynist master, impassive master, and finally, insolent master. The paper aims to prove that hidden behind the mask of the original eccentric is a rebel protecting his individuality against the surrounding mediocrity.

August Strindberg is considered the herald of modern drama. His protean work, which goes from naturalism to mystical aesthetics, anticipating surrealism and the theater of the absurd, even today defies, as it did in his epoch, by its brutal or cruel aspects. Without any doubt, the origin of a certain mistrust towards the author of Inferno would be his declared misogyny. It could be criticized on this subject for disclosing prejudices against women, which in the form of stereotypes, survive to this day. Nevertheless, many French playwrights are inspired by the infernal conflict between man and woman that the Swede describes with a stripping frenzy. Indeed, by analyzing the plays of the French theater of the first half of the 20th century, we notice that some authors take up the motive of the “struggle of the sexes” that will be reworked or “modernized” in their own way. It is interesting in this regard to study the vehicular discourse of clichés on women, found in the works of writers such as Henri-René Lenormand (A Secret Life), Jean Anouilh (Waltz of the Toreadors) and Jean Vauthier (Captain Bada). While none of these playwrights has ever openly declared their hostility to the so-called weaker sex, their texts provide a valuable reservoir of common ground on male-female relationships, which in most cases have not lost their actuality.

The present article seeks to analyse the figure of the Wandering Jew in five 20thcentury French novels (Carnet de route du Juif errant by Alexandre Arnoux, Les Entretiens d’Ahasvérus by Louis de Launay, Marches du Juif errant by Henry-Jacques, Jésus raconté par le Juif errant by Edmond Fleg and Histoire du Juif errant by Jean d’Ormesson). Its main goal is to answer the question to what extent the original image of the Jew is reproduced in the abovementioned prose works. In order to carry out his plan, the author takes into account the crucial and stereotypical characteristics which constitute the very nature of the Jewish vagabond. He tries then to point out major differences between the five novels and the popular version of the Ahasverian legend. The study of those elements shows that contemporary texts related to the immortal man break off with the traditional version of the legend and thus bear testimony of the so-called “death of the myth”.

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.

This paper shows how the image of the uncanny Flanders, elaborated in the early nineteenth century by Madame de Staël as well as by French writers and voyagers contributed to the specificity of Belgian francophone literature and especially to the creation of the concept of the Belgian school of the bizarre. He examines the impact of the hetero-image on self-image and the role of literature in the formation and perpetuation of the stereotype of Belgium, land of strange. It reveals how Belgian writers used, petrified and propagated this image to build their difference and show their belgité in order to make it a specificity of Belgium.

Landscapes, just like stereotypes, should be perceived as mental constructions. They appear in literature as indispensable tools in the development of identity, both collective and individual. The present paper traces the evolution of this construction and its different uses changing with time: from the emergence of the Belgian literature (and Belgium) to the present days. Literary examples used in the paper refer, among others, to the works by Gautier, Verhaeren, La Garde, Gevers, Masson, Rolin, Bertrand, Delaive and Gunzig.

The article discusses the stereotype of road novel in Québec in the 21st century, exemplified by François Blais’s sixth novel entitled Document 1 published in 2012. Blais’s novel appears different from the typical road novels by playing with the genre’s codes in order to create something altogether new. The aim of the article is to shed light on the character development, the representations of place and the journey itself presented in the novel.

Carrier’s novel was published in the same year as Nègres blancs d’Amérique by Pierre Vallières and it relies on the same dialectics between the colonizer and the colonized that was prevalent in Québécois narrative prose in the 1960s. While being grounded in this cultural context, Carrier transforms this dialectic by setting his narrative in a rural environment and against the background of World War II (the visitation of a fallen French-Canadian soldier whose remains are escorted to his native village by English-Canadian comrades). Such aesthetic reworking complexifies the ideological message of Carrier’s novel. I will study the interplay between national ideology and Carrier’s narratives strategies and particularly on the clash between ethnic stereotypes and the « carnavalesque » and the grotesque.

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

This paper deals with the linguistic representation of cultural stereotypes that greatly influence the interaction of French and Moroccan cultures in the novel A Year with the French (2010) by Fouad Laroui, a Moroccan-Dutch French-language writer, as the multicultural and autobiographical character of his work makes this text a particularly interesting and credible study material. We are going to put under analysis the linguistic means used to translate the stereotyped view of each culture by the other and the representation of autostereotypes and heterostereotypes. Finally, we will define the impact of these stereotypes on the communicative behaviour of the representatives of the two cultures in question, in particular their way of either becoming more enclosed in their own identity or, on the contrary, of overcoming differences and finding common ground.

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.

Being an author whose main struggle has been to track down relentlessly ready-for-use thought structures, the use of literary topoï is far from being self-evident for Boualem Sansal. That’s why the appearance of a topos in his novels is always the sign of a thoughtful aesthetic and ethic choice. Thus, great literary topoï of 17th and 18th centuries novels embodies, in his mind, the golden age of a fully potent fiction. Dealing with a harsh reality and expected to complete french readership expectations of documentary sources, Boualem Sansal’s work constantly intends to reassert the role of a fiction that has been too much tamed, for him, in modern literary aesthetics. That’s the way we can understand his occasional but meaningful use of topoï.

In this paper, the author analyzes the stereotypical representations of single woman from two French-language Algerian novels: Les Pierres dans ma poche by Kaouther Adimi and La fille de la Casbah by Leïla Marouane. By using different literary techniques, the chosen writers formulate a severe criticism of contemporary Algerian society which, despite the hard-won liberties of the second sex, maintains the status quo by enclosing women in stereotypical social
roles and by stigmatizing those who do not do not conform to societal standards.

In this contribution, we try to show how Maissa Bey tells, through stereotypical linguistic and narrative categories, the experience of emblematic characters carrying narrative identities contradictory, in an Algerian society in crisis. These identities reveal conflicts dealing with the underestimation of the female gender.

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.

After a short presentation of theatrical definitions of stereotypes, this article offers an hermeneutic study, focused on the elements of stereotypes and strategies of de-stereotyping in two contemporary African plays: Bintou (1997) by Koffi Kwahulé and Les Larmes du ciel d’août -Tears of the August sky (2010) by Aristide Tarnagda. The analysis aims to demonstrate how Koffi Kwahulé et Aristide Tarnagda indulge, possibly unknowingly, in a subtle play with a cliché.

Was the Commynes’s syntactic cohesion (a man “not literary”, father of the genre of memoirs and diplomat of the fifteenth century which syntax has been often described as paratactic or uncohesive) influenced, according to the received idea, by his habit of the diplomatic despatch and was she perceived as uncohesive by his contemporaries? To answer his questions, respectively, we compare the lack of cohesion of the Memoirs with those of his autograph letters and then we search the headlines of the publisher Sauvage (1552) who propose a version pointed as more cohesive than that of the manuscript which serve of base to his edition. The results will show that the letters seem more cohesive than the Memoirs and that its Mémoirs’ s syntax is not underlined as embarrassing by its editor.

The article aims to present the particularities of the English translation of Lise Gauvin’s novel Lettres d’une autre by a Canadian feminist translator, Suzanne de LotbinièreHarwood. The purpose of the translation was to make the Quebec culture closer to the English speaking Canadians. Moreover, de Lotbinière-Harwood intended to emphasize feminist issues. Indubitably, such a project goes beyond the stereotypical function of translation as the translator herself is clearly visible in the text. The specificity of the de Lotbinière-Harwood’s translation encourages the reflection on the problematic border between a translation sensu stricto and a translation being at the same time some kind of explanation. The article seeks to answer to the following questions: is a literary translator “only” a transmitter of meanings invented by the author or a guide in the unknown world? Is he also a full-fledged author? In addition, the article considers how far a translator is allowed to be visible in a text, in particular, if he aims to explain culture.